Tuesday, October 9, 2007

The Tin Drum and Midnight’s Children

Grass and Rushdie: A Comparative Study of The Tin Drum and Midnight’s Children

In his ‘Introduction’ to Gunter Grass’s On Writing and Politics, Salman Rushdie talks about some of the books which influenced his career as a writer. He means the kind of books ‘that open doors for their readers, doors in the head, doors whose existence they had not previously suspected’. He continues: “ A passport is a kind of book. And my passports, the works that gave me the permits I needed, were The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein, the Crow poems of Ted Hughes, Borges’s Fictions, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros – and, that summer of 1967, The Tin Drum”. Rushdie admits: “ I have tried to learn the lessons of the midget drummer”[i]. Thus the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1980, followed by its German translation, Mitternachtskinder, by Karin Graf in 1983, and the warm reception it was accorded by the German reading public, make it obvious that there are clear parallels between the two books. Some critics even go to the extent of hailing Saleem Sinai as an ‘Indian Tin Drummer’. This paper proposes to analyze the textual similarities between the two books.

In an illuminating essay entitled “ The Reception of Midnight’s Children in West Germany”, Klaus Borner talks about the correspondence between the two novels:

It is above all the narrator’s – Saleem Sinai’s – perspective that immediately reminds German readers of the gnome Oskar Matzerath in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Both these fictional characters and narrators, because of their abnormal, outsider position, provide the author with the only possibility to create a fictional world which is highly symbolic of historical reality. The central theme with Grass and Rushdie is not social criticism but the presentation of certain phases of history in the course of which the world and human nature have undergone radical and irrevocable changes. . . . The dried up gnome who in the end spends his days preserving chutneys and his stories on history, is symbolic of India’s dried up hopes. But Saleem Sinai is basically much more of a compassionate moralist than Oskar Matzerath. The bitterness, however, remains in both.[ii]

Both novels begin with the story of the respective grandparents of the protagonists. Oskar begins his narration with the story of the first meeting between Joseph Koljaiczek and Anna Bronsky. Late one October afternoon in 1899, while Anna is sitting in a potato field, pushing potatoes beneath the hot ashes with a hazel branch, she sees her prospective husband fleeing from the police, and she gives him shelter under her skirts. Saleem narrates how his grandfather Adam Aziz returns from Germany after five years, and how he happens to meet Naseem. The courting lasts one full year, with the doctor-groom viewing the patient-bride through a perforated sheet. The narrative plan seems to be identical in both novels.

Both Oskar and Saleem are unusual characters. Oskar is born with his eyes open; Saleem never blinks. It is a moth which announces symbolically the destiny Oskar is born to serve; “the moth chattered away as if in haste to unburden itself of its knowledge, as though it had no time for future colloquies with sources of light, as though this dialogue were its last confession; and as though, after the kind of absolution that light bulbs confer, there would be no further occasion for sin or folly” (T.D- 43). The exact date and time of Saleem’s birth makes him a symbol in a more obvious way, somewhat like the birth of Draupadi on 26th January in The Great Indian Novel. In addition to his drum, Oskar has a glass shattering voice. Saleem is gifted with the ability to read other people’s thoughts; he has telepathic powers which enable him to communicate with the other Children of Midnight. He acquires his unusual traits at the age of nine after the curious accident in the washing chest. Oskar ceases to grow after the carefully planned accident in the cellar, and later he resumes his growth after being hit by a stone thrown at him by Kurt. At the age of three Oskar refuses to grow any further, and he remains a dwarf until he begins to grow, and then he turns into a distorted figure with a hump. In the case of Saleem, his growth is actually a gradual process of disintegration, and he turns into a gnome. If Oskar loses his powerful voice at one stage, Saleem loses his memory altogether for quite some time.

The parenthood of both heroes is uncertain. Oskar has two fathers, a German one and a Polish one, a uniformed father and a civilian one. While Alfred Matzerath is his legal father, Jan Bronsky seems to be his biological father. Similarly, Saleem has a snow white father and an ebony mother, and in addition, the narrative mentions certain other possible fathers also for Saleem, like Wee Willie Winkie, William Methwold, and so on.

There are really several points of similarity between the two novels. During the Russian occupation of Germany, the Matzerath family had to take shelter in their cellar, and not knowing what to do with his party badge, Alfred Matzerath throws it finally on the floor in desperation. Oskar takes it and palms it over to Matzerath while Russian soldiers had them at gunpoint. Matzerath tries to swallow it, and is choked on his own party, his own badge. In Midnight’s Children, there is one Dr. Dubash who dies choking on an orange from which his wife had forgotten to remove the pips. Despite the differences in tone, and the importance attached to the scenes, some similarity, more likely to be unconscious than deliberate, is clearly discernible here. It is a curious fact that even differences often point to an underlying similarity of thinking. For example, while Saleem has a sister, Oskar is an only child. Grass has stated that “ his attempt to give Oskar the loner a vicious little sister was thwarted by Oskar’s objection”.[iii] But Rushdie has opted for the inclusion of the sister. However, this kind of a difference seems rather to reinforce than to undermine the fundamental similarity between the two plans.

Oskar arranges several thefts using the power of his voice. He uses long distance screaming in order to break shop windows so that Herbert can steal objects; he breaks the windows of party offices and the dusters loot the place. Similarly, Saleem is supposed to have fixed his mother’s winnings at the racecourse from his crib. Oskar plays the voyeur from under the table and from cupboards, watching Jan’s feet disappearing under his mother’s skirt, or the lovemaking of Jan with Agnes or that of Matzerath with Marie. Saleem also plays the voyeur to Lila Sabarmati; once in a restaurant, he spies on his mother and Nadir Khan.

Joseph Koljaiczek is a compulsive pyromaniac. He had set fire to several sawmills and is wanted by the police for arson. Saleem’s sister, the Brass Monkey, is also a firebug whose speciality is setting fire to shoes. There is even a character named Oskar in Midnight’s Children. Somewhat corresponding to Oskar’s breaking glass in The Tin Drum, during the scene of Mian Abdullah’s murder in Midnight’s Children, Abdullah’s humming breaks the glasses of the windows through which hundreds of dogs enter and cut the murderers to pieces.

Both Oskar and Saleem are thirty years old. While Oskar is writing down his story watched by Bruno, Saleem is narrating his story to Padma. In both novels, the narrative often fluctuates between the first person and the third person, perhaps to suggest the roles of the protagonists as both participants and spectators. Grass has admitted that he used to argue with Oskar Matzerath, among other things, “about Oskar’s right to tell his story in the first or the third person”.[iv] There is a rich blending of the persons when Grass writes like this, as for example in: “ Did the little gentleman down there have a mind and a will of his own? Who was doing all this: Oskar, he, or I?” (TD-273)

Both Oskar and Saleem are highly unreliable as narrators. “ If you are a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a little uncertainty is no bad thing”, writes Rushdie in Midnight’s Children (254). Oskar as the inmate of a lunatic asylum recalls things which happened long ago, and his own confession that he delights in prevaricating makes him extremely unreliable. According to Rushdie, Grass is ‘quintessentially the artist of uncertainty’.[v]

If Oskar grows into a distorted figure with a hump, Saleem disintegrates gradually, losing his finger, hair, sense of smell, and memory. Perhaps he too has been inside a lunatic asylum at some time. Oskar’s refusal to grow into adulthood has its counterpart in Saleem’s regression into childhood. The theme of guilt is an important element in both novels. One way of looking at The Tin Drum is as an attempt to force the Germans to face rather than evade their guilt-ridden past. Saleem also manifests strong feelings of guilt often. He feels responsible for the violence which led up to Bombay becoming the capital of Maharashtra. Oskar’s acknowledgement of guilt, real or imaginary, regarding the murder of his mother, his two fathers, and his fiancée, is suggestive of the collective guilt of the Germans.

Both Saleem and Oskar are highly self-conscious narrators. The Tin Drum begins with Oskar wondering how he must begin his story:

You can begin a story in the middle and create confusion by striking out boldly, backward and forward. You can be modern, put aside all mention of time and distance and, when the whole thing is done, proclaim, or let someone else proclaim, that you have finally, at the last moment, solved the space-time problem. Or you can declare at the very start that it’s impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your own back so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels. (TD-13)

In Midnight’s Children, Saleem keeps on reminding the reader of the way he is manipulating the narration. For example, when he writes that he must keep on interrupting his own narration, “ because Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings” (MC-72), he is virtually reproducing the exact definition of a self-conscious novel. Suffice it to say, both novels exhibit a genuine concern with the art of story telling.

The destruction of Danzig pained Grass in much the same way as the changes in Bombay affected Rushdie. The acute sense of loss at the destruction of his native Danzig is perhaps more emphasized in Schlondorf’s film version than in the novel. In his ‘introduction’, Rushdie admits a small ‘affinity’ in this regard: “ I grew up on Warden Road, Bombay; now it is Bhulabhai Desai Road. I went to school near Flora Fountain; now the school is near Hutatma Chowk. Of course the new, decolonized names tell of a confident, assertive spirit in the independent state; but the loss of past attachments remains a loss”.[vi]

The vision underlying the writings of both is what may be called a migrant’s vision. It is equally true of Rushdie when he writes of Grass:

This is what the triple dislocation of reality teaches migrants: that reality is an artifact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that, like any other artifact, it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, of course, be unmade. What Grass learned on his journey across the frontiers of history was Doubt. Now he distrusts all those who claim to possess absolute forms of knowledge; he suspects all total explanations, all systems of thought which purport to be complete.[vii]

Rushdie and Grass have succeeded in gaining an international audience for their respective countries. Both start with historical facts and events and then transform them into fantasies or fairy tales. Politics is treated as an inextricable part of human existence. Oskar and Saleem are individuals who have every right to exist on their own, but they can never be divorced from the historical context or their symbolic significance. Both share an immense gusto for linguistic extravagances. Though bewildering at times, they manage to blend their diverse narratives into a coherent whole. The tone is carefully made playful, teasing and taunting. Both parody the bildungsroman: growth is deliberately resisted by Oskar; disintegration seems to be the destiny of Saleem.

Both novels use the protagonists as the media through which the whole panorama of a historical nightmare is revealed. The focus is not on the attitude or the psychology of the speaker but on the nature and significance of the events narrated. Blasphemy and pornography form a natural part of the spontaneous narrative outburst. Even the oblique references to sex organs follow the same pattern: Oskar grows a ‘third drumstick’ at the hour of his need, while Padma refers to Saleem’s ‘other pencil’.

Both novels delineate a hero whose survival is problematized by a profound sense of displacement. His identity stems from multiple heritages and there are conflicting forces pulling him from within and without cultural contexts. This results in a wide spectrum of contradictory impressions, often leaving us to wonder whether he is man or animal or god. The act of story telling is his desperate attempt to face, if not to solve, the enigmatic nature of this puzzle called existence.

Terms like ‘surrealism’, ‘magic realism’ etc. have been frequently used in criticism to describe the writings of both Grass and Rushdie. Irrespective of the terms used, one finds in both a blending of the realistic elements with the magical or the fantastic. They create their ‘reality’ with a fusion of history and fiction. According to Subhadra Bhaskaran:

The mode of magic realism adopted by Rushdie, like Brecht’s epic theatre, breaks the hold of mimetic forms and their accompanying imperatives of a well-structured plot and life-like characters demanding spectator empathy. Through reporting, commentary, mimicry, exaggeration, parody, allegory etc., Rushdie attempts to instill in the minds of the readers a sense of alienation instead of empathy, as was accomplished by Brecht.[viii]

The impossibility of empathizing with the hero is a trait applicable to Oskar too. As Noel Thomas observes:

Oskar does not grant us any real insight into his personality and we have more or less no understanding of his motivation, apart from the fact that he refuses to assume responsibility, opting out of any moral obligations towards others. Oskar’s unreliability as a purveyor of information is an indication of the fact that he is estranged from himself, and this is reinforced in a number of ways: his craving to return to the prenatal state is a sign of his alienation from the present whilst at the same time being a comment on the state of the world and his attitude to it. His attachment to his drum is also indicative of his fractured relationship to reality; . . . So fragmented is Oskar’s personality that he does not emerge as a character. . . . He is a ‘persona’ and not a personality.[ix]

Thus it is clear that both Oskar and Saleem are primarily narrative devices and the alienation the reader feels from the character is the natural result of this particular device.

From the foregoing account, it is not to be assumed that the only influence on Rushdie was that of Grass. The sprawling narrative, with its rich allusions, clever parodies and its characteristic style, seems the genuine offshoot of a rich literary heritage. Nor is it to be assumed that the list of correspondences is presented here so as to belittle the artistic achievement of Rushdie. The central motive in attempting this comparison is the modest belief that an awareness of its interconnectedness will lead to a richer reading experience.

Note:

The page numbers refer to the following editions:

Grass, Gunter. trans. Ralph Manheim. The Tin Drum. London: Penguin/Secker & Warburg, 1986.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. New York: Bard/Avon Books, 1982.



[i] ‘Introduction by Salman Rushdie’ in Gunter Grass, trans. Ralph Manheim, On Writing and Politics, 1967 – 1983 (London: Penguin, 1987).

[ii] Klaus Borner, “ The Reception of Midnight’s Children in West Germany”, in The Novels of Salman Rushdie, ed. G.R.Taneja and R.K.Dhawan (New Delhi: Indian Society for Commonwealth Studies,1992), p. 17.

[iii] Gunter Grass, “ The Tin Drum in Retrospect or The Author as Dubious Witness” in On Writing and Politics, p. 27.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] ‘Introduction by Salman Rushdie.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Subhadra Bhaskaran, “ Magic Realism: A Response to Post-colonial Situation”, in Post-coloniality: Reading Literature, ed. C.T.Indira and Meenakshi Shivaram (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1999), p. 148.

[ix] Noel Thomas, The Narrative Works of Gunter Grass: A Critical Interpretation, German Language and Literature Monographs Series, (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company,1982), pp. 14-15.

1 comment:

inktrail said...

I just finished reading The Tin Drum. Right from the start, I was struck by how much Rushdie borrows from Grass. But since I read Midnight's Children over six years ago, I couldn't spot all the clues. I waited until I finished to find my answers on the interweb. Needless to say, your post covers it all!

Thanks.