PARTISAN REVIEW
579
a rather dim-witted political argument rehearsed. For if all the good
things of life belong to other . . . novelists, time alone is left to Grass
with which to tell his stories: hence the ceaseless shunting of sequences
(frequently projected on the television screen by which the "dentist" be–
guiles his locally-anaesthetized patients), the provision of surrogate ver–
sions of past and future, interventions (not merely surgical but verbal,
telephonic even) by the physician to correct the narrator when he probes
too
far into fantasy for his own good; history itself is brought into the
act and into the action. In an endless effort
to
mine out guilt ("Enemy
Number One is tartar.
It
forms a deposit that ensnares the tongue. Your
tartar is your calcified hate."), Eberhard adduces the efforts of various
Hitler resisters when he himself was the leader (if he is not lying again)
of an anarchist youth gang in 1944; he goes back as far as the eighteenth
century
in
Danzig, a city in which all Grass's readers are at home, and
even the seventeenth in the instance of one Moller, a Boschlike painter
of The Last Judgment who
around the silly-pretty face of his betrothed placed a reflecting bell–
jar which to this day asks a riddle: What is this delicate little face,
rather goatlike in its narrowness and mystically blurred behind glass,
doing on all that lusciously rounded flesh? (Just look at the reflec–
tions that bell-jar can give off; it mirrors everything, everything–
the world and its contradictions .. .)
Again the novelist reminds us he is there, happily twitching away the
iridescent tapestry and showing us the seamy side, the knots, the transi–
tions, the broken threads. Only two writers come to mind who insist with
a similar confidence on the supremacy of the aesthetic claim in their
work
in their work:
Nabokov and Gadda, analogous masters of the
grotesque, outrageous old men patching up their lover's quarrel with
the world by language and myth. Grass, though, is a young man still,
very much committed to political solutions, to bridging the generation
gap he leaves, in
Local Anaesthetic,
quite unfilled. Between the desperate
remedies of his argument, and the wise, the stoic submissions to helpless–
ness of his form, there
is
a grotesque opposition - it makes him alive
to pain, and the most indispensable witness to the truth which Nietzsche
said we could not have without art.
* *
*
I have not spoken of the three translators of these novels because I
wish
to
pay them a compliment, the only compliment a translator can
receive professionally: their work is imperceptible. Though I suspect
that Seidensticker's job was the most exasperating, there is no question
that Rabassa and Manheim, as so often before, have performed vir–
tuoso feats of vivacity and persistence.
Richard Howard
