Bruce Chatwin, W.G. Sebald and the Red-Brown Skin

Abstract

This essay examines the question of perpetrator postmemory in the work of Bruce Chatwin and W.G. Sebald. The essay compares the narratorial strategies that both writers employ in order to present the dynamism of cultural and memorial change. This is discussed through the motifs of travel and repetition, which both writers employ to describe interconnectedness between the individual narrator, the stories he tells, and wider social and cultural movements. This structure is read as a way in which both writers integrate autobiographical elements into their literary travel narratives and situate themselves in relation to past perpetration; Chatwin in relation to British colonialism and Sebald with regard to Nazi perpetration. This essay compares the two writers in order to recognise convergent themes and relative merits, with particular emphasis on the way in which Chatwin’s use of repetition adeptly portrays memory in migration while opening his narrator to the critical problems of travel writing.