Vonnegut and Sebald
could not sustain this tone, arguing humour is the last resort when ‘no relief is imaginable’. 12 Sebald maintains this tone by dissolving specific catastrophes into a general theme, displaced onto the landscape. Nevertheless, the gap between the authors is clear at the linguistic level. Vonnegut insists on using colloquial language and syntactical simplicity (‘He had a tremendous wang’). 13 Sebald’s solitary walk fits the conventions of Romantic literature, 14 while Vonnegut’s alien abduction belongs to popular science-fiction. This gulf illustrates the difficulty of responding to devastation without prior experience. The challenge posed by destruction to narrativization is articulated through both writers’ use of metatextuality. As both struggle to create coherence, narrativization, normally occulted, becomes apparent within the text. From the outset, Sebald establishes the struggle of writing: ‘I set off . . . in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work’. 15 Writing about destruction is painful but the compulsion so strong that he ironically even composes his thoughts from this writing break. This is clear in the closing chapter as he compares a writer’s plight to the debilitating strain placed on weavers by their looms and their ‘depth[s] of despair’. 16 The weaver experiences excruciation yet creating beautiful patterns is his raison d’être. Sebald portrays writing not as pleasurable but as his duty and purpose. The silk motif is one of scarce unifying strands, indicating that narrativization alone can thread beauty from disorder. Vonnegut’s introduction, in his own voice, explores this difficulty b y discussing the text’s iterations. Vonnegut furthers this in the radio debate on ‘the novel in modern society’. 17 The critics’ risibly specific pseudo - intellectual responses highlight the mind’s feebleness. Although Sebald is obsessed with entropy, his approach to the past is ambivalent: he mythologizes it but forgoes the seductions of golden age narratives that often arise when ruminations on nature and past combine. 18 Similarly, Vonnegut notes that he never wrote a villain, 19 highlighting a rejection of simplifications. He himself argued that masterpieces are marked by ambiguity about ‘what the good news is and what the bad news is’. 20 Thus, both demonstrate that the complexity of calamity has reshaped their personal poetics. Both have a complicated relationship with reality. Sebald is bizarrely keen to validate his fiction with images. 21 When he mentions a Rembrandt, it is reproduced. 22 His focus on niche minutiae compounds the impression of an obsession with accuracy. This shows the personal burden he feels to capture destruction’s’ [?] reality. He himself argued sensational narratives are not suitable for this endeavour. 23 Vonnegut too has a thorny relationship with reality, asserting that ‘All this happened more or less’.
12 Vonnegut 2005: 5. 13 Vonnegut 1969: 108. 14 Sontag 2000. 15 Sebald 1995: 3. 16 Sebald 1995: 283. 17 Vonnegut 1969: 170. 18 Carr 1980 . 19 Vonnegut 1969: 7. 20 Vonnegut 2005: 37. 21 Sontag 2000. 22 Sebald 1995: 14-15. 23 Sebald 1999: 50.
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