He Said That? 4/14/15

Gunter Grass, the Noble Prize-winning German writer, died Monday at the age of 87. The Swedish Academy, when it bestowed the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, said he wrote: “frolicsome black fables” that “portray for forgotten face of history.” SLL went online and picked one of a number of sites featuring quotes from The Tin Drum, Grass’s masterpiece. Here are the first five, from a long list, at bookrags.com:

Quote 1: “This is the time for the people who want to save me, whom it amuses to love me, who try to esteem and respect themselves, to get to know themselves, through me. How blind, how nervous and ill-bred they are! They scratch the white enamel of my bedstead with their fingernail scissors, they scribble obscene little men on it with their ballpoint pens and blue pencils.” Chapter 1, pg. 16

Quote 2: “If I didn’t have my drum, which, when handled adroitly and patiently, remembers all the incidentals that I need to get the essential down on paper, and if I didn’t have the permission of the management [of the mental institution] to drum on it three or four hours a day, I’d be a poor bastard with nothing to say for my grandparents.” Chapter 2, pg. 25

Quote 3: “But he has to dive on account of the launches and he has to stay under on account of the launches, and the raft passes over him and it won’t stop, one raft engenders another: raft of thy raft, for all eternity: raft.” Chapter 2, pg. 36

Quote 4: “[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost, even missing grandfathers.” Chapter 3, pg. 39

Quote 5: “Today Oskar says simply: The moth drummed. I have heard rabbits, foxes and dormice drumming. Frogs can drum up a storm. Woodpeckers are said to drum worms out of their hiding places. And men beat on basins, tin pans, bass drums, and kettledrums. We speak of drumfire, drumhead courts; we drum up, drum out, drum into. There are drummer boys and drum majors. There are composers who write concerti for strings and percussion. I might even mention Oskar’s own efforts on the drum; but all this is nothing beside the orgy of drumming carried on by that moth in the hour of my birth, with no other instrument than two ordinary sixty-watt bulbs. Perhaps there are Negroes in darkest Africa and others in America who have not yet forgotten Africa who, with their well-known gift of rhythm, might succeed, in imitation of African moths – which are known to be larger and more beautiful than those of Eastern Europe – in drumming with such disciplined passion; I can only go by my Eastern European standards and praise that medium-sized powdery-brown moth of the hour of my birth; that moth was Oskar’s master.” Chapter 3, pg.48

SLL’s question: who the hell reads this stuff? The book is probably on a lot of bookcases, showing off people’s familiarity with modern “literature,” but who could plow their way through 592 pages (according to Amazon) of this, and why? Literature used to be read for pleasure. If this is the best of modern literature, then such “literature” is now being read for masochistic torture, if it is being read at all.