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Modern Classics

Sunday, August 30, 1998

He remains a writer of uncertainty

By Ashok Chopra

WHILE it is true that "no single story is ever to day as though it's the only one," every writer has a ruling passion that gives to a shelf of books the unity of a system. Much of this passion comes out of a sense of injustice which expresses itself through a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. For Gunter Grass, it has arisen from being a forced 'migrant' which is perhaps the central and defining feature of this century. Like many exiles — Milan Kundera's Prague, James Joyce's Dublin, and a host of others — Grass was a migrant from Danzig, pushed out by the rise of Nazi Germany which shaped the central consciousness of all his writings — novels, plays and poems — as it now diversifies to attack mass consumerism and the attendant destruction of the environment under the garb of modernisation.
What migration taught Grass was the meaning (or disruption) of reality: that reality was an artifact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that like any other artifact it can be made well or otherwise. In his journey across World War II and its aftermath what Grass "learned most of all was Doubt, or the uncertainty of it all. Gunter Grass distrusts all those who claim to possess all forms of knowledge; he suspects all total explanations, all systems of thought which purport to be complete. Among the world's contemporary writers, he is the writer of uncertainty — everything was in a flux, in metamorphosis, in transition. Like all migrants, Grass is much more interested in images than places; he sees the world through ideas, through metaphors which makes some sense of a senseless world."
Many of these ideas were first propounded in the Danzig trilogy - The Tin Drum Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. The three books have to be read as a sequence (one leads to the other) because they are descriptions of Nazi Germany which is taken as a metaphor for a totalitarian state. It is not merely Nazi Germany that is described in detail or the "banality of evil" but the inability to live with the mundane demands of ordinary life.

Gunter Grass

GERMAN novelist, poet, sculptor, graphic artist, essayist and playwright Gunter Wilhelm Grass is recognised as the literary spokesman for his generation. Born and educated in Danzig (now Gdansk, in Poland), he was drafted into the army from the Hitler Youth Movement, at the age of 16. He was wounded, became a prisoner of war and was released by the Americans in 1946. After trying various manual jobs, he studied sculpture in Frankfurt. He then spent four years in Paris, where he started writing. He is best known for the novels of the Danzig trilogy: The Tin Drum (1959; Eng trans. 1962) — a picturesque tale of a dwarf whose experiences reflect Grass's own as a youth (filmed in 1979); Cat and Mouse ( 1961; Eng. trans. 1963) — a short novel that was filmed in 1967; and the epic Dog Years (1963; Eng. trans. 1965). Brilliantly inventive and graphic, they represent a panorama of German society during the Nazi era and post-World War II period and represented a scathing attack on the refusal of Germans to accept responsibility for Nazi crimes.
An active member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), he produced works, including the novel Local Anaesthetic (1969 Eng. trans. 1969) and the play The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising (1966; Eng. trans. 1969), that reflected his non-revolutionary socialist views. It is a searching critique of Brechtian artistic detachment set against the background of the Berlin rising of July 1953. Then came Four Plays and Speak Out!, followed by Max: A Play, Inmary Praise. His other well-known works include From the Diary of a Snail (1972), The Flounder (1977; Eng; trans. 1978), The Meeting at Telgate (1979; Eng. trans. 1981) and The Rat (1987). His non fiction works comprise Headbirths; or The Germans are Dying Out (1980; Eng. trans. 1983), On Writing and Politics: 1967-1983 (Eng. trans. 1985) — a collection of essays and speeches, and Drawings and Words 1954-1977. He also published collections of poetry, In the Egg and other Poems (1977), much of which has been translated and Show Your Tongue (1989) — a collection of illustrated poems on Calcutta. Grass's moral concern is not confined to his writings, as his involvement in politics proved, and he has gained a considerable reputation as a crusader for causes that interest him.

More importantly these are monstrous deformations of language and betrayals of meanings which is perhaps what helped the ordinary man to get through the dailiness of daily life. According to academician Robert Boyers, "Grass has never issued an uninteresting book and he is never far from politics no matter in what direction he turns, but it would seem at present that his fame and his stature are likely to rest chiefly on the Danzig trilogy....
The three volumes comprising the trilogy have commanded international attention for more than 30 years because, more than any other novels of our time, they pose questions for which the inevitable solutions recommended seem as much a part of the problem as an alternative to it. At first it was not clear that the three novels were to be thought of as political novels. It was not clear either that they were to be studied together. But in the early 80s Grass's decision to have them issued as The Danzig Trilogy, it has seemed useful to try to put them together. This procedure seems relatively easy to follow so long as one thinks of them primarily as enquiries into the Nazi period and its consequences."
Before going on to a brief description of the trilogy it is important to bear in mind that it is a critique of ordiariness as also a critique of language that subverts any ordinary apprehension of reality. Linguistic virtuosity seems as much to obscure as to penetrate reality. "Literary virtuoso or shopkeeper, the speaker in Grass is more likely to reveal the reality of his time by demonstrating the breakdown of language, its obscenely promiscuous elasticity" which helps the great dictator to get his way.
All the three novels mentioned above have something to do with Danzig and they collectively ask what is entailed in an attempt to record what the mind can never hope to fathom. Together they argue on the inextricable relationship between art and politics. They also ask embarrassing questions on the complacency of the German middle classes (or the middle classes everywhere) and its willing submission to Authority for the sake of security and the little crumbs of life.
The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years are, first and last, political novels. They revolve around a small boy growing up in Danzig which stood on the frontier between Germany and Poland and became the flashpoint for the start of World War II. For both, the port was important as a gateway to the world outside and became a bone of contention between both countries. Germany wanted it at all costs and Poland wanted to retain it because any concession to Germany would have meant the dismemberment of Poland. (Poland has gone through three partitions in modern history). Grass grew up in this menacing environment and saw the rise of militarism and what uncontrolled power was capable of doing to the lives of ordinary people. "absolute power corrupted absolutely."
Though the main issues are political, the paradigms usually direct us beyond politics or to a dimension that is decidedly prepolitical. It teaches us that human behaviour had best be evaluated by standards that have nothing to do with political systems or ideologies. A fellow like Oscar's father Alfred Matzerth, may decide that it is expedient to wear a Nazi party pin and to attend Nazi rallies, but he is to be understood not as a victim of ideology but of bourgeois conformism that has only an incidental political component. Or so we feel as we go through