|
|
fictional/imaginative forms would—an issue that I also briefly address in the Holocaust chapter. While Oskar Matzerath and Paul Berlin, as imperfect mirrors of their authors, remain unreliable narrators who desperately try to remodel their pasts and subconsciously re-cover their traumata, the authors, Grass and O’Brien, are both acting out and working through their own unresolved traumata and feelings of guilt. Their common message may be summed up in the question “what if?” What if there are several angles from which events may be viewed before they can be turned into facts and made part of a coherent narrative? What if things had happened differently? What if they can happen differently? Compelled to learn how to live with trauma in order to survive, both authors and main characters manage to prompt readers—as opposed to telling them by ostentatious moralizing—to ponder on valuable lessons about human violence and injustice, guilt, complacency, and most importantly, the impossibility of innocence. Standing by and passively contemplating horror can only amount to guilt by association.
Similar to Rushdie’s blending of magic and reality, Grass’s style is imbued with maybe less varied but undoubtedly more obsessively recurring magical realist elements, such as the effects of the main character’s drumming and those of his screaming. The object after which the novel is entitled stands, on the one hand, for Oskar’s means of expressing his anger and of gathering knowledge, and on the other hand, for his way of recovering (i.e., ordering and understanding) memories. In Schmuh’s Onion Cellar, in one of the late chapters of the novel, Oskar picks up his drum and plays with his heart: “It was a three-year-old Oskar who picked up those drumsticks. I drummed my way back, I drummed up the world as a three-year-old sees it” (533), that is, a world in which people know guilt and can still cry. Oskar’s screaming, audibly or inaudibly, causes a number of magical effects, such as the unbuttoning of Auntie Kauer’s black silk dress (74), the scraping of his first schoolmistress-Miss Spollenhauer’s glasses (83), the shattering of all the windows and doors of the Stadt Theater (105), of Christmas tree decorations (260), and more. Oskar’s universe is one in which one has to stop growing and stay a gnome in order to circumvent any sense of responsibility and