‘On every new thing lies already the shadow of annihilation. ’ Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn .
Daniel Kamaluddin
Narrativization is the mental process that orders random information, maintaining experience and self. Neuroscience indicates narrative is built on simplified ‘best guesses’ giving the appearance of clear causation underlying events. My garden is wet, my neighbour’s is not, therefore, my sprinklers were on. 1 Both Vonnegut and Sebald express a double narrativization: first, the initial experiences are narrativized, then writing, a highly ordered form of comprehension, organizes disparate thoughts into expansive narratives. Although both writers express the challenge of destruction to narrativization, both create frameworks that seem to provide the requisite coherence to unwind tragedy. However, this cohesion is undermined through unreliable narration, the use of metatextuality and the subversion of structural expectations. Both speakers simultaneously avoid and fixate on the root of their restlessness. Vonnegut grapples with witnessing the Dresden firestorm; the darkness of European history haunts Sebald. Both depict the mind narrativizing to manage chaos. The rich psychological portraiture in both texts indicates that the processes governing comprehension become most apparent at the brink. Both writers illustrate the constraints tragedy places on comprehension. The past overwhelms both Sebald’s speaker and Vonnegut’s protagonist Billy Pilgrim. Sebald’s speaker is consumed by history’s brutal entropy. This is illustrated by the array of historical tangents that form the texts’ loose structural units. The length of sentences emphasize the speaker’s inability to comprehen d the past. Pilgrim is more gravely overwhelmed by the past, believing he is ‘unstuck in time’, 2 experiencing past traumas as if they were still happening. In both, the past unreconciled leaks into and engulfs the present. Sebald noted that witnesses of t he German firestorms spoke in ‘stereotypical phrases’. 3 This is because perception relies on familiarity (unfamiliar occurrences are illuminated solely by comparison to knowns). 4 The devastation which killed 600,000 civilians defies comparison. 5 It can only be through familiar cliché. The need for familiarity is highlighted by the outlandish simile ‘Dresden was like the moon now’; no earthly comparison illuminates this horror. Vonnegut’s hyper -vague language in the crucial Dresden sequence ‘The one flame ate everything organic’ 6 further highlights the lack of coherence. 7
1 Seth 2021: 98-100. 2 Vonnegut 1969: 19. 3 Sebald 1999: 25. 4 Nagel 1974: 435-450. 5 Sebald 1999: 3. 6 Vonnegut 1969: 146. 7 Green 2014.
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