Sterne, Sebald, and Siege Architecture
Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt University
Volume 19, no. 1&2, Fall 2006
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
I want to begin with some typical reactions to calamity and ruin. First of all, or at least what is first noticeable to readers of scenes of unparalleled horror and destruction, is the failure of language adequately to express what has happened or what it is like to experience an incomprehensible event. Here for instance is H.F., alleged historian of the Plague Year of 1665: “It is impossible to say any thing that is able to give a true idea of it to those who did not see it, other than this: that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no tongue can express.” The same embarrassment of language in the face of an immeasurable phenomenon occurs frequently in voyage literature and in the utopias that derive from it, often as a sidelong invitation to the reader to engage with the sublime. But in respect of pestilence, war, starvation, and death, the drumbeat never alters and words seem to attest only to their own futility. The anonymous woman, whose memoir of the first eight weeks of the fall and occupation of Berlin was recently republished, pauses in her account of being raped again and again, to say simply, “Poor words, you do not suffice.” When Robinson Crusoe sees his one chance of human company lost in the wreck of the Spanish ship on the reef near his island, not even memory can supplement his inarticulate grief: “I cannot explain by any possible energy of words, what a strange longing or hankering of desires I felt in my soul upon this sight.”
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Architecture Design” include:
Toying with China: Cosmopolitanism and Chinoiserie in Russian Garden Design and Building Projects under Catherine the Great
by JENNIFER MILAM (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)
The Architectural Design of Beckford’s Vathek
by SANDRO JUNG (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
The Literary History of the Sash Window
by RACHEL RAMSEY (ECF 22.2, Winter 2010)
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