Politics and literature are
intertwined in his work
By Ashok Chopra

TODAY it has become a commonplace of literary discourse to remind readers that novels are made of words. In this respect there is no difference between a political novel and any other novel. But to consider the linguistic matrix in Grass is to think about words in a rather special sense. In fact, the most ordinary words may be put to extraordinary uses and that nullity is the place where no centre holds, where all meanings are possible and nothing true, where words are routinely violated not in the spirit of play, but on behalf of deception and terror.

In Gunter Grass's Danzig there is a possibility to say one thing and mean another without knowing that any meaning or intention has been subverted. There it is usual to turn guilt into an opportunity for the arousal and gratification of collective desire. And there it is possible to adopt as many father figures or brother figures as one likes, with no thought of betrayal as a possibility to which one's several attachments might lead. Language here permits one to deny the significance of the experience in which one is enwombed, and politics is the submission of fantasies of power without thought of achievable objects or consequences.

To immerse us in language is, for Grass, to demonstrate the way in which thought itself is subverted by its own means... The focus is not on the language as such, but on the telling of tales, remembering, misremembering. But it is the language that now and again completes our attention and reminds us that it is involved in all that Grass wishes to examine."

Politics has always meant a lot to Grass, though he clearly maintains that politics and politicking is not a legitimate aim of literature. "I have always had to differentiate clearly in my choice of means between novels, stories, novellas and poetry on the one hand and speech making on the other. A speech because it's a direct form of address, is also a literary form. Treatise, essays and polemics are also possible means of political expression."

Answering as to what is the link between politics and literature and if great politics leads to great literature, Grass says: "I don't know. I can't judge that. It's certainly time that the writers of my generation have achieved something that's been more difficult for the following generation... Perhaps it's because of the thematic burden of German history and the impossibility of escaping from their situation. They had to face up to it, they were surrounded by their subject matter."

Exploring the difference between national literature and world literature and if such concepts are meaningful Grass says, "they're justifiable and they do serve a purpose. For a long time I used to hope that in midst of the problems we Germans have in defining ourselves as a nation we might be wise enough to go back to Herder's concept for the Kalturnation, a modified version of this concept. Modified in the sense that we would make room in it for other cultures, the Turkish culture with which we've become familiar through immigration, or the culture of Yugoslavia, for instance, or of Bangladesh which is now coming our way. In other words we have to define the concept of culture in a broader scene, in politics as well. And we have to reject the purely political concept of nation or the purely political interpretation of the concept of nation. For us this has always led to nothing but failure."

For any writer views, ideas, concepts change over the years. When asked if writing has the same significance, today as it had over three decades ago when he was busy writing the Danzig Trilogy, Grass had replied: "Well, let's say the focus of the pleasure I derive from it has shifted. When I was writing The Tin Drum or Dog Years I felt as if I was under continual pressure to get it finished in case I died prematurely. A feeling of panic would set in over the long years of writing or I'd get the feeling of missing out on life during the writing process... The characters I had invented were forcing me to my desk, forcing their lives on me. And then there was also the curiosity about how the book would be received when it was published. Now it is just the reverse — thanks to the fact that literary criticism has got itself bogged down in many respects. Reaction to my books is not that it could arouse my curiosity anymore. On the other hand I have discovered that the best thing about writing is the writing itself. And it remains that way even when I am working or the third or fourth version, rearranging, doing something new, with everything in a state of flux, illustrations emerging and the whole thing developing into a test of all my talents."

These views were expressed by Gunter Grass way back in 1992 during the course of an interview in Berlin, where he now lives partly, and partly in a North German landscape which reminds him of the wide, diked vistas of his writing and his youth. That was the year of his book The Cries of the Toad which was again set in Danzig. Talking about it Grass said: "It's quite true that with this book I've returned to that area. But apart from this, I've also, for the first time, written a book which isn't principally concerned with Danzig, with Gdansk playing a minor role, but one which is set in modern-day Gdansk. It's now without reason that the two main characters, both aged 60, first got to the cemetery, they meet on All Soul's Day, visiting graves. In a cleared German graveyard they stand before the grave of the Polish woman's parents, though she actually belongs to a refugee family from Vilnius in present-day Lithunia. And here they conceive this very humane and, one hopes plausible idea of a German-Lithunian graveyard society, though this later becomes a German-Polish society because it doesn't work out with Lithunia. I describe the failure of this idea and the comedy of how it fails. But the relationship between the two main characters, a German man and a Polish woman continues: this is not a failure."

Between the Danzig Trilogy and The Cries of a Toad, Grass embroiled himself more directly in political actualities with Local Anaesthetic and From the Diary of a Snail. The former employs a course of dental treatment as a metaphor for political activism and protest. The cover illustration suggests that a small pain (a figure held in a candle flame) may act as an anaesthetic, or as a distraction from more serious surgery; the question is raised whether one is justified in burning a dog alive in Berlin as a protest against the Vietnam war. The private and public spheres, the contemporary and the historical, are neatly interwoven in such a way as to relativise the act of protest, yet the moralising tone suggests a refusal to take direct political action seriously.

In From the Diary of a Snail, Grass again mixed the personal with the public, intercutting an account of his travels around Germany to support the SPD (Social Democratic Party) on the hustings with domestic debates within the Grass family. It is all about the 1969 election campaign in West Germany, which for the first time after World War II brought the SPD to power and Wily Brand to the chancellorship. It forms the background to this book. In almost 100 election speeches, Grass campaigned for the SPD against the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and the incumbent Chancellor of the West German Federal Republic, Kurt Georg Kiesinger. The narrative is further interpersed with an account of the experiences both of Danzig Jews in general, and of a single Jewish character who is saved from the Holocaust by being hidden in a cellar.

In many ways it is the most autobiographical of his novels. It balances the astonishing history of the persecuted Danzig Jews with the author's political campaigning with Brandt. Underlying all is the snail, the central symbol that is both a model and a parody of social progress, and a mysterious metaphor for political reform.

According to Rushdie a writer who understands the artificial nature of reality is more or less obliged to enter the process of making it. This is why Grass has so determinedly sought a public role, why he has used his great fame as a novelist as a platform from which to speak on the many issues which concerned him. And since to argue about reality is to be at once creative and political, it is not surprising that when Grass writes about literature he finds himself writing about politics, and when he discusses political issues, the quirky perspectives of literature have a habit of creeping in.

According to a literary critic: "Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age and perhaps its supreme dramatist of metaphor... Actual-factual elements are fused with imagined, created things, curt yet marvellously explosive observations: the result is a difficult, dynamic book, like no other novel, possibly not a novel at all, certainly an event in the reader's life and possible in literature's history."

Yes, Grass's extraordinary imagination, combined with a master craftsman's eye for language and literary form, has repeatedly moulded stunningly memorable works. Whether the dwarf drummer of The Tin Drum, or a primeval talking fish in The Flounder, or the thoughts of the female rat who teaches us the history of the world from the rat perspective, the results are fabulously inventive works of fiction.

According to Salman Rushdie, "there are books that open doors for their readers, doors in the head, doors whose existence they had not previously suspected. And then there are readers who dream of becoming writers; they are searching for the strangest door of all, scheming up ways to travel through the page, to end up inside and also behind the writing, to lurk between the lines while other readers, in their turn, pick up books and begin to dream. For these Alices, these would be migrants from the World of the Book, there are (if they are lucky) books which give them permission to travel, so to speak, permission to become the sort of writers they have it in themselves to be. A passport is a kind of a book. And my passports, the works that gave me the permits I needed, (include) The Tin Drum. This is what Grass's great novel said to me in drumbeats: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things — childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves — that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers. I have tried to learn the lessons of the midget drummer. And one more, which I got from that other immense work, Dog Years: when you've done it once, start all over again and do it better."

Yes, Grass is undoubtedly one of the most significant writers of our time.

(To be concluded)