Wednesday, October 10, 2007

THE TIN DRUM – GUNTER GRASS.

THE TIN DRUM – GUNTER GRASS.

The novel, and the film by Schlondorff:

  1. Change in narrative perspective: in the novel, Oskar writes his memoirs in the years from 1952 to 1954, covers his life from 24 to 54. Oskar pretends to view the world through the eyes of a three year old child. The perspective acquires a further complication by the fact that he writes his story as an inmate of a lunatic asylum. In the film, the situation of the narrator does not exist. Here everything is viewed through the eyes of the child, as though he were experiencing the events at the time. In the novel, an apparent madman recapitulates the past from the perspective of a child. The alienation effect thus produced makes it impossible for the reader to identify himself with Oskar or any of the characters. In the film, orientation is much easier: the viewer can identify himself with Oskar. This is made easier by the fact that Oskar is portrayed as a child, not as a gnome. Further, David Bennent, the child chosen by Schlondorff to act the role of Oskar, is an attractive-looking person, in no way to be considered as a repulsive individual. Hence his credibility is not in doubt in the film, unlike the unreliable narrator of the novel.
  2. child: Oskar is a person through whose eyes we view a period of German history. By his very childishness, he cannot sit in judgment on that period. He perceives an amoral world in the amoral and egocentric terms of a child. In the film, we share his grief at the destruction and loss of his native city – Danzig. The film covers only the first two books and ends with the train departing for the West with its load of refugees. The child who yearns to remain a child loses the place in which his childhood was spent. Many critics ignore the historical fact which forms the core of the novel – and of the film – the expulsion of the Germans from Danzig. The film emerges as a lament – it ends with a painful sense of loss and deprivation – partly because we share his sorrow.
  3. the nature of the German guilt: Why was Oskar forced to leave his place of birth? The film shows how the community of Danzig was systematically destroyed from within by the Germans. Eg. Evicting Markus at the funeral of Agnes, attacking the Polish post office, setting fire to the Jewish shops and synagogues leading to the suicide of Markus. The Germans shatter the community of Danzig. What happens here happens elsewhere in Europe and Germany. The Germans burden themselves with guilt. Oskar feels the need to be guilty, so he indulges in these fantasies of having murdered mother, uncle, girl friend and father. The cinema audiences cannot take these extravaganzas seriously. The episodes in the film achieve a greater visual impact than those in the novel, but the film cannot attain the subtlety and complexity which only the medium of language can reach. The film appears more realistic while the novel draws on elements of fantasy. The novel achieves a greater degree of stimulation by the intermingling of fantasy and reality. The film is also forced to dispense with the imagery which makes such a major contribution to the total impact of the novel. Above all, the sacrifice of the narrator’s position produces a simplified view point, less ambivalence and ambiguity, and allows some identification between Oskar and the viewer.

The narrative perspective:

The narrator views human affairs from an unusual angle; events are described in a way in which adults would not perceive them. Oskar stops growing at the age of three; from his birth he had the intelligence of an adult; he is always treated by others, not as an adult but as a childish dwarf, the urchin who cannot belong to the adult world. From his eccentric point of view, he plays the role of observer and narrator. He is described as ‘seeing’ the world – never judging or criticizing, something not expected of a child.

The narrative perspective is further complicated by the fact that what we are reading is not actually happening but is being recalled and put together for our benefit by a sentient human being. Here the past is being conjured up, structured and restructured. Here it is being recalled by a much flawed person, by one who admits that he is the inmate of a mental asylum. This indicates that an unreliable narrator is at work. We never know whether a given statement is valid, for Oskar might be a mad man, though he never describes himself as being insane.

A second qualification: As Oskar is describing his own life after the passage of a considerable amount of time, as his narration is not a recounting of the immediate past as in a diary, the passage of time may have blurred some of the details, and even have allowed imagination to reconstruct the past. We have to be satisfied with Oskar’s pious hope that he has an accurate memory.

In the novel, ambiguity and ambivalence and disorientation reign supreme. An apparent or real mad man recounts the events of his life through the eyes of a child. Again, Oskar does not grant us any insight into his personality or his motivation. He refuses to assume responsibility and opts out of any moral obligation towards others. His unreliability as a purveyor of information shows that he is estranged from himself. His craving to return to the prenatal state is a sign of his alienation from the present; it is also a comment on the state of the world and his attitude to it. His attachment to his drum indicates his fractured relationship to reality. The division within him, the Oskar who acts and the Oskar who observes, shows his schizophrenia. His attachment to the mask of a child, his assumed pose of innocence, his delight in prevarication, all suggest that he has not broken away from the world of childish inwardness. He fails to emerge from infantile subjectivism, in moving from childhood to adulthood; at the same time, he exploits the possibilities of feigned innocence in order to prevent his transition from inwardness to maturity. So fragmented is his personality that he does not emerge as a character. He is a ‘persona’ and not a personality.

As a ‘persona’, he is inscrutable. Often he acts solely as an observer without participating in the events, as he often does from under the table or hidden corners, and brings an unprejudiced eye to the scenes he describes. His descriptive powers are not inhibited by any form of censorship. The religious or sexual taboos of the adult are totally absent. He is thus able to enjoy a freedom of expression which the adult observer could not enjoy at all.

Much of the humour, often black and grotesque, arises from this. He is not afraid to survey the totality of human experience, including obnoxious smells, disagreeable sexual practices, blasphemy etc. As a child, or a madman assuming the guise of a child, he takes up a completely neutral attitude. He is absolved of the requirement which is automatically imposed upon a thirty year old, that of assessing the past in terms of an adult. Such assessment involves a moral evaluation. He dispenses with such encrumbances.

Oskar’s pronouncements may be interpreted on three levels: 1. they stem from the naturalness and simplicity of the child who is baffled by the nominally adult affairs; 2. from the deranged mind of an adult who has successfully projected himself into the mentality of a child; or 3. they may be based on the playfulness and tongue-in-cheek attitude of the person who is acting the role of the child, often stating the opposite of what he believes. Such an ironical view allows the author to describe the events in a detached manner.

The reader scarcely knows when to take Oskar seriously. The narrator’s humour, irony and impishness form a barrier behind which Oskar conceals himself. The superficially humorous tone conceals an underlying bitterness and despair, which is more the expression of the mind of an adult than that of a child. Even in scenes in which Oskar actively participates, he preserves his role as the ironic observer. ‘Madonna 49’ says as much about the guilt ridden complexes of the students and their teacher as it does about Oskar. In the ‘Onion Cellar’ and his later tours of West Germany where he plays an active role, it is the tearful breast beating of the guests which claims our attention and which is exposed to ridicule. And we are further told that they are meant to represent West German society. The figure of Oskar is the device which enables West German society to be held up to our gaze.

Oskar is a thoroughly untrustworthy observer. He emphasizes that he indulges in telling lies in the process of his narration. He delights in falsehood. The desire to pretend, the child’s inclination to lose itself in the inner world of imagination and to ignore the dividing line between the real and the fictional, or the momentary wish to pull someone’s leg – Bruno’s or the reader’s – all this manifests in his life. Even on the day of his birth, he would have us believe that he plays at being a baby. Playing a role becomes a permanent feature of his behaviour. He has a constant need to maintain a façade of pretence and deceit between himself and grown ups. A person who has elevated make-believe into an essential principle of his life cannot be considered as a reliable narrator. He is to be regarded rather as a narrative device rather than as a person whose character can be understood in psychological terms.

A fundamental element of irony is that it is meant to be seen through. Grass allows Oskar to be only partly successful in his attempts to disguise. The reader is permitted to see through the narrator’s camouflage. We learn that Oskar intermingles fact and fiction, but we are not made aware of those objective criteria by which we could gain an insight into the nature of the reality which Oskar is attempting to conceal. Admittedly the framework of historical and political references constitutes a stabilizing factor within the novel, provides, along with the reader’s knowledge of the period of history concerned, a set of verifiable external relationships and hence forms a link with the reality of the time. As would be expected, the irony is meant to be detected. As D.C. Muecke asserts, “ the half concealment is part of the ironist’s artistic purpose and the detection and appreciation of the camouflage is a large part of the reader’s pleasure”.

In approaching the novel the reader is thrust back upon himself, is dependent on his own resources, must provide his own criteria, for there are no guide lines within the novel, so he must formulate his own response and come to his own conclusions. Still one can mention four elements which serve as counterweight to the ambivalence and ambiguity created by the unreliability of Oskar as a narrator. They are the narrative zest of the author, his attachment to the world of sensual detail, the imagery, and the framework of historical and political events.

The drum as a symbol:

The novel is called ‘ Die Blechtrommel’ and not ‘Die Blechtrommler’. The cover shows a drum along with the drummer. The drummer is drawn in black and white apart from his eyes which are bright blue. The drum is coloured red and white. Black is a sign of mourning and of evil, it has a menacing quality. Blue recalls the fact that the typical German during the Nazi period was supposed to be blue-eyed and blond-haired; it is the favourite colour of the romantics and is suggestive of physical and spiritual intoxication. Red and white are the national colours of Poland. In isolation, red is reminiscent of blood and rebelliousness; white is traditionally the colour of innocence.

The drum has at least two associations: it is emblematic of war, for it can produce the rhythm which, as Oskar says, all men had to obey in 1914. Yet it also conjures up the atmosphere of lamentation and mourning. For example, at the funeral of his mother, Oskar wants to express his grief by drumming on her coffin. The student of history will recall that Hitler was proud to be referred to as a drummer and regarded this activity as his highest aspiration, though no link of this kind is established in the novel between Oskar and Hitler.

Oskar uses his drum as a means by which he can preserve his status as a three year old. The drum enables him to erect a barrier between himself and the adults who surround him, prevent their intrusion into his own world of childish fantasy and in this way he can evade any responsibility. By means of the drum he can beat the retreat from reality. The drum epitomizes Oskar’s fundamental attitude of withdrawal from the world of reality and is employed at the same time as a narrative device by means of which a period of history may be surveyed.

Oskar would have us believe that the drum is his mode of expression, and that it is, as it were, part of his flesh and blood. The drum is his constant companion, and apart from a brief respite during the post war period, it witnesses all the major events of his life. The drum is indicative of an attitude of mind, serves, according to Oskar, as a narrative device and draws the strands of the narrative together: in this sense it fulfils a recapitulatory function.

A symbol such as the drum achieves a cohesive effect within the novel and in conjunction with Grass’s narrative skill act as a counterweight to the ambivalence and ambiguity which are characteristic of Oskar’s narrative perspective.

Other major symbols are Rasputin and Goethe, the eels and horse’s head, the unicorn, the roundabout, etc. The imagery of head and tail conjures up the idea that the values of western civilization and those of Christianity have been corrupted and perverted: Goethe has been undermined by Rasputin.

Oskar mirrors in his relations with women the tendency to indulge in emotional and by implication political escapism and in so doing to evade responsibility for one’s actions.

‘kopf’ (head) is developed as an allusive pointer to the values of reason and moderation which have been undermined by lustful passion and physical and political intoxication, as represented by the word, ‘schwanz’ (tail), with its sexual suggestiveness. Agnes, Matzerath and Jan observe eels devouring a horse’s head – an objectivisation of the affair between Jan and Agnes. The picture of the eels eating the horse’s head is a re-enactment of Agnes’s personal predicament. The imagery of head and tail adumbrates the triumph of passion and lust over reason and moderation which has implications on the personal and the political level. The same confrontation between reason and unreason can be found in the juxtaposition of Goethe and Rasputin.

The ‘unicorn’ is a fabulous animal with a horse’s body and a single horn. All the women with whom Oskar comes into contact are allusively linked with the Virgin Mary. They are all ‘ladies on carpets who educate unicorns’. In a perverted fashion, Oskar fulfils all the conditions demanded of a unicorn. He takes flight into the womb of a succession of virgins and is trapped. Oskar embodies his needs in the image of a woman. She flatters his irresponsibility and gratifies his desire for retreat, support and centre. She serves as a symbol of his evasion of responsibility and of his attempt to rid himself of feelings of guilt. In this sense Oskar may be mirroring a basic attitude of his own time.

Roundabout: In a dream Oskar imagines himself seated as a child upon a roundabout which is kept in dizzy, perpetual motion by the figures of Goethe and Rasputin. Goethe and Rasputin suggest the idea of a malevolent God who has made possible the inversion of all Christian principles. Oskar as the mirror of his times is subject to the perverted values of Goethe and Rasputin. The fantasies of Oskar have the quality of a nightmare, of a merry-go-round from which no escape seems possible.

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