Vocal An' Aesthetic

Gunter Grass, the German writer and active supporter of Willy Brandt, has described himself as a snail. His latest book, From the Diary of a Snail, has as its organizing motif metaphors about snails. When he is pressed by an interviewer's question Grass often answers with a disarming "ah yes but my party is a party of snails." Collecting snails--this is the hobby of the fictional personification of Doubt in Nazi Germany, a character, also called Hermann Ott, in Grass's book. Melancholia and the achievement of political "stasis in progress" are two of the themes which dignify the image of the snail into high symbolism. What better emblem could a writer offer for the Jew reluctantly leaving his homeland in the Germany of the thirties than that of the humble snail, bearing his house on his back? You get the idea.

--It does not seem a likely theme for a book about campaigning with Willy Brandt and fictional events in Danzig during the Third Reich--all wrapped up under the pretext of being an explanation to the author's children. But then the author does not look like at first a likely candidate for greatness either. There is a little bit of shaggy dog about his longish brown hair and moustache, and his burly build reminds one of his days as a stone cutter--he made grave stones, like little Oskar in The Tin Drum--and as a sculptor, before he began to write. He deliberately rolls a cigarette while answering questions, and his time on the campaign trail for Brandt's socialists has taught him not exactly to dodge difficult questions but to slip almost unnoticeable away from them--like maybe a snail?

It is hard to reconcile this man with the bright, tangible, often hilarious images that play out their variations in the visual and verbal puns of Grass snovels. The adventures of little Oskar with his drum were told from the caricaturing perspectives of memory and the madhouse. They are rendered as sharply as the figure of Oskar which Grass himself drew for the book's cover. Oskar has a style and a perspective that delicately guide the telling of his adventures through the psychological minefield which the war had left. Lingering guilt--for Grass as for most post-war German writers--infects the language itself. George Steiner has credited Grass with beginning the reclamation of the German language from the "corruptions" of the Third Reich. The author himself today claims that he was able to do so by using the tainted words "right," but it was not so easy as that: to use them "right" meant first supplying the irony and satire of voices like Oskar's to speak them.

The Grass that visited Harvard this week has lost that protective distance. He speaks the rhetoric of democratic socialism now, and speaks in the new book in the dual role of reminiscing campaigner, in the documentary sections, and of creator, in the fictional sections. Grass claims that his books are to be kept separate from his political pronouncements, but he is vague and contradictory on the limits of his two identities as "citizen" and as "writer." The same ambiguity weakens his book, and forms the snail motif to work itself out almost into absurdity trying to hold the pieces together. Grass claims that he writes first of all for himself, to work out his own needs and that any writer who says he is writing primarily "for society" is simply not telling the truth. It is instructive that Grass highly admires Norman Mailer, who, Grass says, is always writing about himself when he claims to be writing about social or political problems, and yet because the problems of society are inside him, succeeds anyway. Grass has had a career somewhat similar to Mailer's, finding himself famous at a fairly young age, exhausting his material by repetition in later books, turning to political involvement under the joint burden of fame and the responsibility to produce once again at his original level of quality.

Grass's political task, however, is perhaps the most difficult one he could have chosen. It is no longer the easier job of coming to terms with his own guilt, but of making the politics of compromise and reform--the politics of the snail--attractive. Grass is subtle enough to realize that "snails" are not intrinsically attractive, and that there is little that can be merely argued to justify his position beyond the kind of statements about the extremes of right and left being similar in their tyranny which he made in Lowell Lect. on Tuesday.

What he tries to do, with only limited success, is to open up a nonpolitical space in the emptiness of those political generalities, where he can produce the art that is, he constantly claims, separate from his statements on the socialist soapbox, and yet justifies his views aesthetically. He insists very stubbornly on the distinction, saying that he would "never write a poem about the Social Democratic Party," but finds no contradiction in claiming that a book like The Tin Drum helps explain why Hitler came to power. The line between explanation and instruction is very fine and discovering where the two meet is likely to reveal the real focus of Grass's work, which is perhaps more than anything a kind of explanation to himself.

From the Diary of a Snail concludes with a lecture on Durer's engraving Melancholia I, describing the modern predicament in terms of various types of melancholy. Grass criticizes the melancholy of the utopians and ideologues. He praises the melancholy of the snail, working his way along the progressive path, and that of the writer brooding over his work. In the end it all sounds suspiciously like the voice of a snail who, having left his artistic shell, is not sure just where to go next.