A Mythic Journey

Gunter Grass's Tin Drum

Edward Diller

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813186061
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria tedesca

Although The Tin Drum has often been called one of the great novels of the 20th century, most critics have been baffled in attempting to draw its apparent chaos into a single literary framework. Here is the full-length study to penetrate the brilliance of Gunter Grass's style and uncover the novel's mythopoetic core.In A Mythic Journey: Gunter Grass's Tin Drum, author Edward Diller convincingly demonstrates the still valid relationship between modern and classical literary criticism. By reading The Tin Drum as both modern myth and historical epic, he provides a profound and sensitive interpretation of one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature.

Notes

Chapter 1

¹ Cf. Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic; W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance; and Gero von Wilpert, Sachwörterbuch der Literatur.

² The most convincing proponents of this interpretation are Willy Schumann, “Wiederkehr der Schelme,” pp. 467-74; Horace Gregory, “The Ancient Follies are Still in the Ascendency”; Wilfried Van der Will, Pikaro heute; Mable Blanch, “Variations on a Picaresque Theme”; Henri Plard, “Verteidigung der Blechtrommeln.” Convincingly opposing this interpretation is the article by Hans Mayer, “Felix Krull und Oskar Matzerath-Aspekte des Romans,” pp. 35-67.

³ Alan McGlashan, “Daily Paper Pantheon,” Lancet, p. 238.

⁴ Notable exceptions are Henry Hatfield, “Günter Grass: The Artist as Satirist”; Erhard M. Friedrichsmeyer, “Aspects of Myth, Parody, and Obscenity in Grass’ Die Blechtrommel and Katz und Maus”; Karl August Horst, “Günter Grass” in Kleines Handbuch der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur, pp. 181-87; and Kurt Lothar Tank, Günter Grass, who, without analysis or further elaboration however, makes frequent reference to the mythos in The Tin Drum. John Simon, in “The Drummer of Danzig,” declares the actual presence of a Günter Grass mythology but gives only the brief example of nuns and nurses in testimony of the fluid interrelation of forms and the mythopoesis of Grass’s literary creation (pp. 151-52).

⁵ “Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn’t God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coat-hanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe, can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts” (Grass, Die Blechtrommel, p. 223). Cf. Alexander Gelley’s accurate description of the resultant style of the mythopoeic phenomenon: Objects “become alive with an inexplicable potency, giving rise to feelings all the more insistent because they are freed of any subjective sentiment. . . . An illogical network is established amongst the inanimate objects and we sense an operative power on the physical plane which we know to be linked in some mysterious kinship with the animate world and the life of the psyche” (“Art and Reality in Die Blechtrommel,” p. 118). Cf. also Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, part 2: “Der Mythos als Anschauungsform,” pp. 95-107.

⁶ Although one of the first writers to praise The Tin Drum as a great novel, Hans Magnus Enzensberger (in “Wilhelm Meister auf Blech getrommelt”) fails to identify any underlying coherence in the work and concludes in fact that “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Cf. also Karl August Horst, “Wut ohne Pathos”; Walter Jens, “Das Pandemonium des Günter Grass”; A. F. Bance, “The Enigma of Oskar in Grass’ Blechtrommel”; Günter Blocker, “Günter Grass: Die Blechtrommel”; Karl Migner, “Der getrommelte Protest gegen unsere Welt”; Larry P. Vonalt, “Barbaric, Mystical, Bored”; Richard Plant, “Rhythms of Pandemonium”; and, of major importance, W. Gordon Cunliffe, Günter Grass. Strangely enough, however, history and politics are only the mise en scène in this novel, merely of secondary significance as a formal backdrop. In only one incident does Oskar drum against Nazidom. Otherwise he is involved only twice in a situation that vaguely resembles political engagement.

⁷ Walter Jehs complains in no uncertain terms about the length of the novel and prescribes the number of pages it should be cut. Malcolm Bradbury, Neal Ascherson, R. C. Andrews, and others criticize also, in vaguer fashion, the unnecessary digressions and effusive formlessness of the work.

⁸ Philip Rahv, The Myth and the Powerhouse, p. 6.

⁹ René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, p. 180.

¹⁰ “Campbell divides these general stages into subcategories, most of which we shall allude to at some point in our study. In the first major stage, departure, he includes “The Call to Adventure,” “Refusal of the Call,” “Supernatural Aid,” “The Crossing of the First Threshold,” and “The Belly of the Whale.” The second stage, initiation, includes “The Road of Trials,” “The Meeting with the Goddess,” “Woman as the Temptress,” “Atonement with the Father,” “Apotheosis,” and “The Ultimate Boon.” The categories of the third stage, return, are “Refusal of the Return,” “The Magic Flight,” “Rescue from Without,” “The Crossing of the Return Threshold,” “Master of the Two Worlds,” and “The Freedom to Live.” For a more detailed, but still general, outline, see Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 36-37. Oskar Matzerath, as we shall see, experiences this whole spectrum of adventures with only few exceptions.

¹¹ We shall have recourse to both applications of the concept of archetypes in this study–as abstracted archetypes in the Jungian sense and/or by virtue of their frequent recurrences in historical myths. The two are not necessarily identical: whereas myths may be archetypal, archetypes are not myths. However, and with some reluctance, let me point out some impressive parallelism of themes of The Tin Drum and C. G. Jung’s Symbole der Wandlung (translated as Symbols of Transformation, New York, 1956). Both works emphasize the motifs of cosmogonic creation, artistic fantasy and creativity, the symbol of the moth and its central relationship to the light, the diverse adventures and transformations of the mythic hero, the dominance of the Mother Earth and the Black Goddess figure (the Dual Mothers), and the final descent and sacrifice. One may speculate that Günter Grass had this lengthy study by Jung in hand as he searched for ideas and their development for The Tin Drum, considering alone the chapter headings of Jung’s book (“Two Kinds of Thinking,” “The Hymn of Creation,” “The Song of the Moth,” “The Origin of the Hero,” “Symbols of Mother and Rebirth,” “The Dual Mother,” etc.) This study of The Tin Drum that follows is, however, not based on Jungian psychology, although it does occasionally draw support from its vast wealth of material in the area of myth and psychology. Insofar as Symbole der Wandlung is concerned, it remains the secret of the author as to whether the similarities between it and The Tin Drum are coincidental or not.

¹² These and additional manifestations of mythic elements in literature (with the exception of etymologies) are fully discussed by E. W. Herd, “Myth Criticism: Limitations and Possibilities,” pp. 69-77.

¹³ “Wie sind Sie auf den Blechtrommler gekommen?” Frankfurter Neue Presse, 14 Nov. 1959. Also in K. L. Tank, Günter Grass, p. 57.

¹⁴ Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 2:12, and cf. Ch. 1 regarding mythic consciousness of objects (“mythisches Gegenstandsbewusstsein”).

¹⁵ Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, p. 97.

¹⁶ Cf. esp. René Breugelmans, “Alienation, the Destiny of Modern Literature.” See also Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 121-22, and Philip Wheelwright, “Notes on Mythopeia,” in Myth and Literature, ed. John B. Vickery, pp. 59-67.

Chapter 2

¹ Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, p. 16.

² Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 71.

³ “The road leading to the center is a ‘difficult road’ . . . arduous, fraught with perils, because it is, in fact, a rite of the passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man to the divinity” (Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, p. 18).

⁴ Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, p. 98.

⁵ Helton Godwin Baynes, Mythology of the Soul, pp. 625-26.

⁶ “Marriage rites too have a divine model, and human marriage reproduces the hierogamy, more especially the union of heaven and earth. . . . Even in Vedic times, husband and bride are assimilated to heaven and earth. . . . In the procreation ritual transmitted by the Brhadāranyaka Upanisad, the generative act becomes a hierogamy of cosmic proportions. . . . Dido celebrates her marriage with Aeneas in the midst of a violent storm (Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 160); their union coincides with that of the elements; heave...