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JOHN SIMON
InsIstent striving backward into the womb:
~
a boy, he keeps trying
to hide under his grandmother's skirts; as a young adult, he still shuts
himself into the clothes cupboard of the nurse he covets; at thirty, he
finds the insane asylum's bed insufficiently crib-like. But there is also
life moving forward and pushing Oskar before it: out of every asylum,
lunatic or otherwise, and, ultimately, into death.
It is here that the couple, Nurse and Nun, becomes relevant. The
Nurse stands for the return to the womb: Oskar cherishes a youthful
picture of his mother as an auxiliary nurse; throughout the various
maladies of his later life, nurses take care of him; often they hover
over him while he enters a coma that is like the dark of the womb.
At the other extreme stands the Nun, the black sister who succors the
dying and prays for the dead. Oskar, significantly, craves both the
Nurse who stands for earthiness (she is presumed to be of loose morality),
and the Nun, immaculate Bride of Christ who points to the Beyond.
Our tragedy is that we fail in both directions: life can neither
retreat into the embryo nor pass on through death. The main nurse
in
the novel cannot be possessed by an Oskar suddenly struck with im–
potence ; the principal nun is, with Oskar's help, raped by someone else.
The nurse is subsequently murdered; the nun, apparently, commits
suicide. Fulfillment is not to be had. Oskar's friend, Herbert Truczinski,
tries to copulate with a wooden figurehead in the shape of a naked
girl, which would bridge the gap between transient flesh and enduring
wood. He dies in the attempt. Oskar interfoliates his Rasputin with
his Goethe, but the resulting mixture is a trick and delusion: life knows
no idyll
in
which "Ottilie docilely strolls on Rasputin's arm through
the gardem of Central Germany, while Goethe sits in a sleigh by the
side of some dissolutely aristocratic Olga, as they glide along through
wintry St. Petersburg." Indeed, in the end, even Goethe becomes
a bogey for Oskar and merges with "the Black Cook": in death, to be
sure, there is fusion, but what avails fusion then?
It is
to
be deplored that
The Tin Drum
comes to English readers
diminished by Ralph Manheim's translation: in length, by well over
a hundred pages; in quality, inestimably. Much that was either too
difficult, or seemed too elaborate or obscene, has been flattened out,
abridged, or omitted. On almost every page constructions, jokes, mean–
ings are weakened, disregarded, or missed. None of which, however, has
kept the translation from being extolled by literary and academic
reviewers alike.
This is profoundly regrettable, because
The Tin Drum,
with its
linguistic superabundance, its mythopoeic nature, its uncannily loving
