Vonnegut and Sebald
Vonnegut thus signposts his attempt to capture psychological reality in the text’s more figurative passages.
So far, we have seen that the mental chaos of destruction hampers narrativization. Nevertheless, both speakers strive to order the horrors of experience by establishing frameworks of coherence. For Sebald, the Suffolk landscape is the specific vector organizing the speaker’s chaotic thoughts, as the histories haunting him are pinned loosely onto the landscape. The stimulus deprivation of solitary walking facilitates a focus on mental events. The landscape lends itself well to Sebald’s mission. Suffolk embodies decline: from its rugged landscapes and rapid coastal erosion 24 to the decline of its seaside resorts and prosperous wool industry. Sebald implicitly links natural and human decline in his stirring lament for storm- struck trees: ‘Where a short while ago the dawn chorus at times reached such a pitch that we had to close the bedroom windows . . . there was now not a living sound’. 25 Destruction is processed figuratively through nature as the direct emotional impact is too raw. Humanity is both a part of and apart from nature; we instinctively empathize with its devastation, yet it is sufficiently removed not to overwhelm. While Sebald describes Suffolk landscapes sublimely, his persistent drifting into historical tangents highlights the speaker’s restlessness. The linear walk further structures the speaker’s chaotic non -linear thoughts. Readers are familiar with the framework of a journey as it gives the sense of causation and regularity to experience. As terminal beings our feeling of progress depends on abstracting life’s trajectory. Progress profoundly colours our sense of purpose. 26 Similarly, Pilgrim’s experience is rendered recogni zable through the schema of journeys. Pilgrim is on a journey like any other, but with time as the landscape. Vonnegut anchors his text by focusing on the image of the Dresden firestorm, about which all Pilgrim’s experiences are inextricably tangled. Both writers show that desolation demands the remoulding of established frameworks of understanding. As we have seen, Billy is in some ways on a conventional epic journey. We expect a grand hero to undertake such a journey yet Pilgrim lacks distinguishing characterization, bearing an ordinary name. When events already feel fictional, narrative conventions must be reinvented to convey the emotional shock. A year after Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut rejected conventional heroism in his Odyssey retelling, Happy Birthday, Wanda June 27 by lampooning heroes’ destructive egoism. Billy must be ordinary to be Vonnegut’s hero of internal war. Non -chronological storytelling warps structural conventions. We would expect a man named Pilgrim to be on an established journey, yet Billy travels a path unploughed, experiencing events through the chaos of disorganized thought. To some extent Billy’s storytelling mirrors the eternalist storytelling of the Tralfamadorians where the mechanisms governing narrativization are suspended ‘There is no beginnin g, no middle, no end . . . no causes, no effects’, 28 a metatextual comment on the changes that destruction forces literature to undergo. Similarly, Sebald defies conventions in his search for a poetics of devastation; this lends his texts their distinctly ‘Sebaldian’ quality. He does this especially by mixing genres, carrying variously the force of history, autobiography, novel, travel writing, et cetera. By denying the reader the chance to categorize
24 Blaxland 2021: 3. 25 Sebald 1995: 268. 26 Frankl 1946: 144. 27 Vonnegut 1970. 28 Vonnegut 1969: 72.
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