BOO KS
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"exactly as she might have carried a drunken man; but her man
WM
no longer living." And thus Oskar wonders upon seeing the toy soldiers
abandoned in Danzig
by
a little Polish escapee, "Perhaps he had
stuffed a few uhlans into his trouser pocket that they might later, during
the battle for the fortress of Modlin, reinforce the Polish cavalry."
Thus, too, Oskar notes that at his father's funeral "it decidedly smelled
of dead Matzerath."
The salient feature is irony, but an irony which, for all that it is
immense, is not savage. It is indifferent rather than angry, and the
reader's own indignation must rush in to fill the moral vacuum left by
the protagonist's nonchalance. Grass is a master of all ironies: simple,
complex, multilateral. Simple: "... films in which Maria Schell, as a
nurse, wept, and Borsche, as a chief surgeon close upon a most difficult
operation, played Beethoven sonatas through the French windows and
displayed his sense of responsibility."
Complex~because
it can do
double duty, as when it not only lets the absurdity of a situation dawn on
us slowly, but also affords a gruesome insight into Oskar's non-human
reaction to a severed ring finger which he picks up with a collector's
zeal: "Oskar . . . realized that the inside of the finger was marked
high up to the third joint with lines attesting to its diligence, deter–
mination, and ambitious perseverance." (The translation completely
misses the horrible, matter-of-fact disregard of reality, couched in a
syntactical construction that treats the dead finger as a living being;
Manheim translates: "this had been a hard-working finger with a
relentless sense of duty.") And multilateral irony-when Oskar's tiny
son, already somewhat taller than his father, strikes Oskar down and
makes him muse : "Could he, too, express childlike affection such as
is supposedly worth striving for between fathers and sons, only in
homicide?" Note that the homicidal scene takes place at Matzerath
Senior's funeral, caused by Oskar, hence the "too," i.e., filial hatred
as something basic and inherited, viewed by Oskar as "affection" but
of a "childlike" sort, a term suited to "sons" but here, as a zeugma,
referring also to the feelings of "fathers." Yet in the face of all this,
love is still supposed to be "worth striving for."
In a perceptive essay, Hans Magnus Enzensberger has examined
Grass's style and found in it everything from syntactic ballets to imita–
tions of the Litany, from rondos and fugatos to the language of case
histories, from legal jargon to underworld slang, from dialect to
gibberish. To this list should be added the technique of film montage,
with
all
kinds of superimposition and cross-cutting, and certain devices
of parody (e.g., the history of Danzig told as a cabaret monologue) also
