BOOKS
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shake, is "die Schwarze Kochin," a black female cook, whom Manheim
foolishly turns into "the Black Witch," just so as to rhyme with "pitch"!
From the garb of cooks it is not far to that of nurses and nuns.
Grass has publicly stated that nuns fascinate him; his private obsession
with them is manifest in his fantasy world.
As
a painter, he has exhibited
whole series of paintings of nuns, which is exactly what the painter
Lankes does in
The Tin Drum.
Compulsively, almost all of Oskar's
passions are for nuns---or nurses. The nurse is the secular replica of
the nun, and her uniform is the photographic positive of the nun's
negative. She, too, wears a cross, albeit a red one, and, in German,
she, too, is called "Schwester." Nuns are the subject of a poem sequence
in
Triangle of Rails
that reiterates, almost verbatim, certain passages of
The Tin Drum.
In the novel, nuns and nurses are repeatedly adored,
longed for, made love to unsuccessfully, assaulted, raped, shot, deferred
to,
exalted.
Other obsessive motifs include the firebug, doves and seagulls,
physical malformation. Now various commentators-including the blurb
writer-have perceived Oskar as a symbol of the alienated artist, of
guilty Germany, of corrupt mankind, to say nothing of diverse religious
allegories. Some of these identifications may be in order, but they beg
the underlying issue: Grass's unrelenting need to write the biography of
his unconscious. Which is, of course, both the most and the least
respectable reason for writing: it accounts for the best of Goethe, and
for all of Sade.
This is not the time or place for an analysis of Grass's personal
mythology, even if I were competent
to
undertake it. But something
can be cautiously hinted at, something to which the polarity nun-nurse
points, and which brings us back to the problem of duality with which
we began. For
The Tin Drum
is fundamentally about duality. Its very
narration shuttles, at the drop of a comma, between present and past,
even as the narrator, sometimes within the same sentence, shifts from
"I" to "he, Oskar." Oskar has two presumptive fathers: the solid
burgher and amateur cook, Matzerath, who could "express sentiments
only in soups," and the dreamy, dandified, sentimental Bronski-Ger–
many and Poland, West and East, action and idea. Oskar's mother is
hopelessly partitioned between two men; Matzerath is caught
in
the
cross fire of scowls exchanged by the two pictures in his bedroom:
Beethoven and Hitler, genius and madman. Oskar's two favorite books
-almost his only ones-are the Dionysianly orgiastic memoirs of Ras–
putin, and Goethe's Apollonianly transfigured
Elective Affinities.
And,
above all, the plot thrashes abo\.ft between two poles. There is Oskar's
