Dont Tread on Grass
In this fictionalised memoir by Gunter Grass,he is tried by his eight children. Frustratingly,he does all the talking.
Life always beats art. In the end,the lived life eludes or outpaces the written words that capture or re-create it. Yet the writer must continue to work through it. This seems to be the trite moral of the second volume of Gunter Grasss memoirs,The Box: Tales from the Darkroom originally published in German as Die Box in 2008,carefully translated by Krishna Winston. But The Box is neither fiction nor fact. A fictionalised autobiography,billed as a novel,the book inhabits the twilight zone of magic and metaphor that Grass has built his battered,enchanting and enduring literary career on,with the 1999 Nobel to crown it.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a confounding German compound which refers to the struggle to come to terms with the past. Specifically,it applies to post-World War II Germans in their effort to understand and atone for their nations criminal history. Life in Germany,political and personal,for a half-century was a constant coming to terms with the past. It applies to Grass equally,the tallest no irony intended writer of post-war Germany. From The Tin Drum 1959,his fiction,like his left-wing politics,has been a Vergangenheitsbewältigung,although hes kept that politics out of his fiction. The tongue-tripper assumes pertinence for The Box too,which picks up the story of Grasss life where he left it in Peeling the Onion 2006. The admission in that book of his Waffen-SS membership caused him enough grief. That dust of outrage has settled,and the critical and moral world has opined that for a 17-year-old near the end of the Third Reich,Grasss secret wasnt exceptional. But that storm makes him steer clear of anything close now. This book is a judgment by his children on Grass the father,as distinguished from Grass the writer.
Or so it would be if the children kept their real-life names. And if the father,whos not named,were the real Grass. The Box begins mock-biblically: Once upon a time there was a father,who,having grown old in years,called together his sons and daughters four,five,six,eight in all to gather round a table and record their recollections of life with him. They have different mothers,and in speaking all at once,bickering,consoling each other and,of course,recounting because for the father,as for the past-obsessed Grass,all that counts… is what can be recounted they evoke and merge personal and family history with German history. Their tales are teasingly similar in parts to the extended Grass family and describe books very much like the ones Grass actually wrote. The narrative,which reads mostly like a prolonged dialogue wherein names and sequence may be mixed up in the readers meandering mind,assesses the writer as father and examines his writers calling. The children,however,refer to the books casually,anecdotally,even dismissively more to illustrate or situate a moment or incident in their lives. The Box is a moral introspection,chastising the father for the life he missed,and an exercise in literary self-critiquing.
But the protagonist of the story,or stories,is the Box of the title an Agfa Box No. 54,the German clone of the Kodak Brownie that brought photography to the people in the same decade the Nazis captured power. It was an ordinary and cheap camera,used here by Marie in real life the late Maria Rama,photographer and Grass family friend to whom this book is dedicated who shadows the father snapping pictures of everything for him,pictures to inspire his writing. He would say Snap away Marie!,and snap-away-Marie would photograph the children,the fathers cigarette ash,the broken toilet bowl,war-damaged apartments…. But her Box is a magic box. It doesnt just stash away memories the children now retrieve. Like the eye of God,it can capture the past and foresee the future,it can grant wishes and offer possibilities that the future will not,unfortunately,bear out. Out of Maries darkroom,hidden desires also come to light. Like Oskars tin drum,the Box is an object that survived a catastrophe the war and its screws came loose,making it crazy. Its an objective correlative of emotions and wishes,just as Marie,who may or may not have been one of the fathers lovers,is his muse,a substitute for his imagination and conscience. The Box as inspirational replacement was necessitated by his fading powers as a writer,when the words would no longer come by whistling for them; and as conscience,it ends up exposing how the novels he kept working through distanced him from his many children.
Grass,or the father,is more humble about himself as writer although theres little of it than he is honest about his conduct as father. Ultimately,the children spare his feelings,and their pliant sympathy betrays the strings the narrator-father is pulling. The Box is rendered hackneyed and perhaps also futile,given the great pains the narrator takes in giving agency to the children and then negating the same to show that hes the one doing it all. Is this the last laugh of art at the expense of life? Everything is conjured up; even the children are all products of their fathers whimsy,using words he has put in their mouths….
Unsurprisingly,even Maries magic pictures are all lost. Perhaps its the adult offspring,some in their 50s,talking like adolescents that gives the lie to the demonstrative attempt at toying with the reader-critic. Look,it was me making them talk all this time! Sure you were,and we knew it all along. Whats the big deal? Better wait for the third and last volume of the fictionalised memoirs,Grimms Worter Grimms words,literally,already published in the German,where Grass invokes his heroes,the Grimm brothers,and their attempt at a lexicon of the Germanic languages. It promises to be a more intellectually honest,if more challenging,engagement with his life of writing.
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