* Gunter Grass's 'The Tin Drum' - writing continual reminders of what you've already read. And how does he attempt to gel it all together so that a reader, at the end of the final page, might leave with a fair memory of all, not just fragments, that he's just read? Grass uses that periodic reminding device. He reminds a reader of what's happened so far. He does it perhaps more than thirty times; sometimes it's a reminder of just a couple of previous episodes, sometimes it's a whole précis of the novel so far; in just one edited example, anyone who has already read the novel will easily be reminded of all of the following episodes that Grass ticks off.
'I let one stick fall on the drum as though at random, and ah, the drum responded to Oskar, and Oskar brought the second stick into play. I began to drum, relating everything in order: in the beginning was the beginning. The moth between the light bulbs drummed in the hour of my birth; I drummed the cellar stairs with their sixteen steps and my fall from those same stairs during the celebration of my legendary third birthday; (-) the Stockturm (-) political rostrums (-) eels and gulls (-) carpet-beating on Good Friday (-) the coffin, tapered at the foot end, of my poor mama (-) the saga of Herbert Truczinski's scarry back (-) the defence of the Polish Post Office (-) the fizz powder of my first love (-) the jungles of Mrs Lina Greff (-) Bebra's Theatre at the front (-) made Jesus speak (-) the cemetery in Saspe where I threw my drum into the grave after Matzerath (-) my main, never-ending theme: Kashubian potato fields in the October rain, there sits my grandmother in her four skirts . . . '
Gunter Grass in fact seems to force a memory of his narrative on the reader. Or has the device some other purpose?
*Gunter Grass's 'The Tin Drum'- original ideas. Surely an example of an original idea set down eloquently cannot be passed over, an idea also that flows with mischievous humour -
'From that day on I was tempted, possessed, overwhelmed by the mystery of the trained nurse. My feeling for nurses is a kind of sickness. Perhaps it is incurable, for even today, with all that far behind me, I contradict Bruno my keeper when he says that only men can be proper nurses, that a patient's desire to be cared for by lady nurses is just one more symptom of his disease. Whereas, still according to Bruno, your male nurse takes conscientious care of his patient and sometimes cures him, his female counterpart, woman that she is, beguiles the patient, sometimes into recovery, sometimes into a death pleasantly seasoned with eroticism.'
And then - the idea of The Onion Cellar. Never mind the current (beginning of the 21st century) over-enthusiasm for the effect of smiling, far, far, more interesting is the effect of communal crying that Grass writes about -
'. . . for it is not true that when the heart is full the eyes necessarily overflow, some people can never manage it, especially in our century, which in spite of all the suffering and sorrow will surely be known to posterity as the tearless century. It was this drought, this tearlessness that brought those who could afford it to Schmuh's Onion Cellar, where the host handed them a little chopping board - pig or fish - a paring knife for eighty pfennigs, and for twelve marks an ordinary field-, garden-, and kitchen-variety onion, and induced them to cut their onions smaller and smaller until the juice - what did the the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. (-) After this cataclysm at twelve marks eighty, human beings who have had a good cry open their mouths to speak. Still hesitant, startled by the nakedness of their own words, the weepers poured out their hearts to their neighbours on the uncomfortable, burlap-covered crates, submitted to questioning, let themselves be turned inside-out like overcoats. (-) . . . they had tried to save the six marks forty; they had tried doing it by themselves in her room with a cheap onion, but it wasn't the same. You needed an audience. It was so much easier to cry in company. It gave you a real sense of brotherhood in sorrow when to the right and left of you and in the gallery overhead your fellow students were all crying their hearts out.'
And finally, something in the same vein as the above: 'Oscar guessed his intention, picked up the little board with the chopped parsley on it, and handed it to him; to this day, I am convinced that long after I had left the kitchen Matzerath must have stood there surprised and bewildered with his parsley board; for never before had Oskar handed Matzerath anything.'
Exactly. There are people, only a few perhaps, to whom you never pass anything. The question is 'why?'.
The Tin Drum, for some readers, is an astounding achievement.
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