From the opening pages of The Tin Drum the narrator, Oskar
is aware of the different approaches to, and kinds of, storytelling. Thus,
Oskar begins his first-person narrative by wondering what exactly is the best
way to start: “I found my fountain pen by my photo album in the drawer: it’s
full, it won’t fail for lack of ink; how shall I begin?” (5). It seems
symbolically important that the pen and the photo album should reside in the
same drawer, for they are both lenses, biases of storytelling. Oskar is
involved and intrigued by many kinds of stories: told through music, his photo
album, his writing and through fairytales.
Grass seems to warn the reader
through this comparison between the photograph and the written detail, which
are equally malleable, that authors borrow, steal, they imagine, they invent,
they play God and manipulate what others can and cannot see by choosing their
lens. Whether the characters (maybe they were once real people) really did
these things or not doesn’t seem to matter. For Oskar can tell us that he fell
down the stairs on purpose, or that he shattered glass to create temptation for
others, that Jesus refused to play the drum, but in all of these cases it is
through the mouth of Oskar, and how can we know how reliable he really is?
For
example, Oskar and his friend Klepp have their passport photos taken regularly,
not because they plan to go anywhere, but rather “we immersed ourselves…in our
own strained features” (40). This self-obsession comes back to the way in which
authors can manipulate the facts of reality and make stories and pictures say
whatever they want them to. This is what Oskar and Klepp do as Oskar says they,
“bent and folded those little pictures, cut them up with the scissors we always
carried for just this purpose. We pieced old and new likenesses together, gave
ourselves one eye or three, ears for noses, let our right ears speak to stay
silent, browbeat our chins…Klepp borrowed details from me, I took traits from
him: we were creating new, and we hoped, happier creatures” (41).
And Oskar
often does just this: explaining his grandfather’s death he refers to the
multiple stories—maybe he ended up dead under the boat, maybe he escaped to
Greece because he was a strong swimmer or because he was saved, or perhaps he
made it to Buffalo, NY (24-25). The end result is the same in all of these
stories—he is never seen again—but difference lies in the outlook, some of
these stories are cynical, others hopeful.
Oskar’s grandfather, himself, was a
persona, living in the guise of another human being. Oskar admires this and
does so with himself: saying that he consciously chose to be what he is, that he
was more Jesus than Jesus. Through the self-projection of importance and
amalgamation between himself and other figures—Jesus, Tom Thumb—Oskar is able
to turn himself into what he says that he and his keeper Bruno are: “we are
both heroes, quite different heroes, he behind his peephole, I in front of it;
and that when he opens the door, the two of us, for all our friendship and
loneliness, are still far from being some nameless mass devoid of heroes” (5).
But for all of this Grass keeps hinting at how the facts of Oskar’s family
history could change on the page from what they were in reality, images can
fall out of context, photographs can be manipulated, can only show us the
window of the camera, and therefore we must deduct for ourselves what is going
on and happening to either side of Oskar’s world view.
No comments:
Post a Comment