A tribute to social critic Gunter Grass  

What you need to know:

  • Clearly, the most obvious point of convergence between the two novels, is the magic realism mode that characterises the ebb and flow of the narrative.

  • According to one school of thought, magic realism was a term coined in 1925 by Franz Roh in Germany to refer to paintings that merged reality and fantasy.

  • But the term came to be associated with literary works that also fused the natural and the supernatural, with Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude evolving into the touchstone for the sub-genre. 

Günter Wilhelm Grass, the author of The Tin Drum, died on Monday, at the age of 87. Born in Danzig — now the Polish city of Gdansk — in 1927, Grass was also a painter and a sculptor.

Moreover, he was an old school public intellectual, who never shied away from commenting on burning issues of the day. I first encountered the German novelist and short story writer while in graduate school at The Ohio State University, in the United States.

No, I never met him personally, but I met his literary works for the first time then. As it turned out, my world literature professor Nina Berman, who has German ancestry, had included Grass on the reading list.

The list was a cocktail of some of the best works of world literature I had ever sampled. What a delight it was to read Grass’s unflinching depiction of a blood-thirsty and blood-soaked Nazi Germany in his Danzig Trilogy! 

WORLD WAR II

The trilogy aptly captures the tumultuous Second World War that Germany was not particularly keen to remember. The Danzig Trilogy consists of three novels originally written in German namely: The Tin Drum, 1959; Cat and Mouse, 1961); and Dog Years, 1963.

The Tin Drum is particularly outstanding as a literary text. It bears striking resemblance to Gabriel Garcia Marques’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, to my mind the best novel ever written in any language. 

The 1982 Literature Nobel Prize winner Marquez died last year. Now that the German 1999 Nobel laureate has followed the Colombian Marquez in death, let me hasten to say, Grass was a fine writer but not a great writer as such.

These are the same words with which my teacher at the University of Nairobi, Prof Henry Indangasi, described the departed Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, often touted as the “father of modern African literature.” That is not to say I concur with Prof Indangasi on whether or not Achebe was a great writer.

I dare say, Marquez is, in a sense, the “father of magical realism,” despite the fact that others like Günter Grass preceded him in deploying this narrative strategy. 

Although Grass’s The Tin Drum was published in 1959, eight years before One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, Marquez’s captivating and authentic manipulation of this protocol of representation is unparalleled.

Clearly, the most obvious point of convergence between the two novels, is the magic realism mode that characterises the ebb and flow of the narrative.

According to one school of thought, magic realism was a term coined in 1925 by Franz Roh in Germany to refer to paintings that merged reality and fantasy.  But the term came to be associated with literary works that also fused the natural and the supernatural, with Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude evolving into the touchstone for the sub-genre. 

Basically, this mode of representation bears modernist characteristics such as excessive repetition, digressions, copious instances of inter-textuality, subversion of character stability and refraction of factual and historical realities.

Indeed, it must be said Grass’s mastery of magical realism is quite remarkable.

His fictional character Oskar Matzerath, a clairvoyant who wills himself into stopping to grow at the age of three, and breaks windows merely by screaming, is one of the most memorable figures in world literature.

At the same time, Grass’s ability to let the reader live vicariously through the vagaries of war is quite moving. 

For his temerity to offer a fictional narration of war experience that compelled Germany to recall its unsettling past, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy described The Tin Drum as “one of the enduring literary works of the 20th century”.

Grass goes down in history as one of the most influential proponents of the magical realist mode whose manifestation even in Kiswahili literature is now self-evident.

His works will continue to live after him. Writing in phantasmagorical fashion, Grass has left his footprints on the sands of world literature.

 

Prof Walibora is the Nation’s Kiswahili quality manager.