SUSAN SONTAG
philosophy, all abstract thought
is
about : an intense, and not very
sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.
It
is a
rather good description, anyway, of Sartre's own phenomenology of
consciousness. And, certainly, it is a perfectly fair description of what
Genet is about.
Susan Sontag
THE DRUMMER OF DANZIG
THE TIN DRUM .
By
Gunter Grass. Translated
by
Ralph Manheim.
Panthe,on. $6.95.
From time to time we must re-examine the meaning of the
concepts "classical" and "romantic," which, like the works of Homer or
Dante, need to be retranslated or,
in
this case, redefined for every age.
As
we look at twentieth-century fiction, we see one kind of writing
whose ideal is omission, whose unit is the vignette which yearns to
compress itself into an aphorism. This is our classicism. And there is
another writing whose aim is inclusion, whose basic form is the catalogue
striving to heighten itself into a prose poem. This is our romanticism.
To draw examples from France, where they have a way of being more
exemplary, there is the classicism of Gide, Radiguet, Camus confronting
the romanticism of, say, Proust, Montherlant, and Genet. The greater
writers try to bridge the gap: Gide had to write
The Counterfeiters;
the
work of Proust is shot through with maxims.
In
The Tin Drum,
Gunter Grass has written a novel without equal
so far in post-war Germany-let no one mention in the same breath
the lucubrations of an Uwe Johnson. Grass's book is a major romantic
novel which, in its carefully designed structure and economical use of
a welter of incidents, approaches classicism.
Duality runs through the book. Even the provenance of
The Tin
Drum
is dual, just as its hero, Oskar Matzerath, has two putative fathers.
For the novel derives, first, from a French tradition--Grass lived for a
long time in Paris- represented by writers like Jarry, Apollinaire
(particularly the Apollinaire of
L es Onze mille verges),
and Celine,
writers in whom furibund sexuality and Rabelaisian humor, sadism and
stylistic experimentation and innovation, proceeded
pari passu.
There
