578
RICHARD HOWARD
the accuracy with which they chart the downward path to acceptance,
that final act which enables us to see things clearly.
"Nothing lasts. There will always be pain." With these stoic words
- dispensed, in the novel, by the narrator's dentist, who is in fact his
psychoanalyst - the author dismisses his reader, benumbed by art and
grateful for surcease, to the world (whatever is left of it) which is not
within the novels of Gunter Grass. Astonishingly gifted, as everyone
knows or has been told, encyclopedic in his appetites and aspirations,
here is a novelist who takes great pains indeed to incorporate as much
of that world as he can manage, by all the glamour of his bizarrerie,
to
make into one flesh. For it is a somatic process that Grass intends, a
bodily making over that he envisions, and in this latest contraption of
his, Dr. Frankenstein has invented a bigger and better monster than
ever -largely because it is smaller, neater, the gears confined to a
moderate thorax area, the flesh stitched together with more of a care for
shapeliness than has characterized earlier productions from the wizard's
lab.
The rhythm of Grass's novels is now discernible: The big block–
buster
(The Tin Drum ),
then the satyr play
(Cat and Mouse);
the
sprawling fresco
(Dog Years),
then the grotesquely carved netsuke
(Local Anaesthetic).
Though it is bulked out by the publisher, it is not
a long book, this clutch of alternative recitatives by a forty-year-old
teacher of German and history, "the inseparable subjects," but it is so
ingeniously traced and tooled, and so cunningly beveled and doweled,
that the dazed reader acknowledges it to be a better mousetrap than any
this pyrotechnician of
the form
has yet built. Nor can one avoid the
verbs of praxis in accounting for it - no natural accretion, no sedimen–
tation of observed detail, the book is an object lesson in the meaning
of "fiction": a making, a shaping, a doing. And because he demands
that we recognize his hand at work ("leaf back and find ..." he bursts
in), because we are to concede at every moment that we are in that
hand
("I
insisted on the pain: a cry, a lament that is never adjourned"),
Grass has made the mind flesh, turned the analyst into an orthodontist,
and strewn his book with quotations (real and imaginary) from Seneca,
the stoic pedagogue whose concern, specifically, was with pain, the
ir–
reducible.
"I happen to believe in stories," says Eberhard, our romancing hero
at the end of his, and if we couple his arrogant confession with his
dentist's astonishing quotation from Nero's preceptor: "all the good
things of life belong to others - time alone is ours," we have a rationale
of these perverse energies which cease their buzzing and humming only
in a center section of the book where the polyphony is switched off and
