The culminating moment in the novel is not Humbert Humbert’s first night of love — that is kept to a minimum and is almost a hidden detail — but the delayed and choreographed killing of Clare Quilty. In this extraordinarily intense, virtuoso description, which is a mixture of humour, drama, strange details and enigmatic allusions, every certainty that we had built around the fictive reality of those pages begins to teeter, suddenly riddled by doubt. What is happening here? Are we witnessing the conversation between the killer and his victim or rather the nightmarish doubling of the narrator? It is a possibility that is implied in the text: that, at the end of this process of psychic and moral disintegration, defeated by nostalgia and remorse, Humbert Humbert breaks, stricto sensu, into two halves, the lucid and recriminatory consciousness that observed and judged his own actions, and his defeated, abject body, the seat of that passion that he surrendered to without, however, surrendering to pleasure and indulgence. Is it not himself, that part that he detests about himself, that Humbert Humbert kills in this phantasmagoric scene, in which the novel, in a dialectical leap, seems to desert the conventional realism of its previous setting in favour of the fantastic?
In all Nabokov’s novels — but, above all, in Pale Fire — the structure is so clever and subtle that it ends up carrying everything else before it. In Lolita this intelligence and deftness of construction are also strong enough to deplete the story of life and liberty. But in this novel, the content stands up for itself and resists the assault of the form, because what it talks about is deeply rooted in the most important of human experiences: desire, fantasy obeying instinct. And his characters manage to live provisionally without becoming, as in other novels — or like Borges’s characters — the shadows of a superior intellect.
Yes, thirty years on, Dolores Haze, Dolly, Lo, Lolita, is still fresh, ambiguous, prohibited, tempting, moistening the lips and quickening the pulse of men who, like Humbert Humbert, love with their head and dream with their heart.
London, January 1987
The Tin Drum
The Drumroll
I read The Tin Drum for the first time, in English, in the sixties, in a neighbourhood in the suburbs of London where I lived among quiet shopkeepers who turned off the lights in their houses at ten at night. In this state of limbo tranquillity, Grass’s novel was an exciting adventure, whose pages reminded me, as soon as I plunged into them, that life was also disorder, uproar, guffaws, absurdity.
I have reread it now in very different conditions, at a time when, in an unpremeditated and accidental way, I have found myself caught up in a whirlwind of political activities, at a particularly difficult moment in my country’s history. In between a debate and a street rally, after a demoralising meeting where the world was changed by words, and nothing happened, or at the end of dangerous days, when stones were hurled and shots were fired. In these circumstances as well, the Rabelaisian odyssey of Oskar Matzerath with his drum and glass-shattering voice was a compensation and a refuge. Life was also this: fantasy, words, animated dreams, literature.
When The Tin Drum came out in Germany in 1959, its immediate success was attributed to different reasons. George Steiner wrote that, for the first time since the lethal experience of Nazism, a German writer dared face up, resolutely and clearly, to the sinister past of his country and submit it to an implacable critical dissection. It was also said that this novel, with its uninhibited, frenetic language, sparkling with invention, dialect and barbarisms, revived a vitality and a freedom that German language had lost after twenty years of totalitarian contamination.
Both explanations are probably correct. But from our current perspective, as the novel approaches the age at which, figuratively, its extraordinary protagonist begins to write — thirty years old — another reason appears as fundamental for understanding the impact that the book has continued to make on its readers: its enormous ambition, the voracity with which it looks to swallow up the world, history past and present, the most disparate experiences of the human zoo, and transmute them into literature. This colossal appetite to tell everything, to embrace the whole of life in a fiction, which can be found in all the major achievements of the genre and which, above all, defined the writing of literature in the century of the novel, the nineteenth century, can be found only infrequently in our age, which is full of temperate, timid novelists for whom the idea of writing with the ambition of Balzac or Stendhal seems naïve: don’t movies do all that, and much better?
No, they do not do it better; they do it differently. Even in the century of the great cinematographic narratives, the novel can be a deicide, can propose such a minute and vast reconstruction of reality that it seems to compete with the Creator, breaking up and re-forming — correcting — what He created. In an emotional essay, Grass names Alfred Döblin as his master and model. Döblin, somewhat belatedly, is beginning to be recognised as the great writer that indeed he was. And without doubt Berlin Alexanderplatz has some of the tumultuous, fresh effervescence that makes The Tin Drum such a lively fresco of human history. But there is no doubt that the creative ambition of the disciple in this case far excelled that of the master, and that to find affiliations we must look to the best examples of the genre, where novelists, in the grip of an exaggerated and naïve frenzy, did not hesitate in opposing the real world with an imaginary world in which this real world is both captured and negated, summarised and abjured like an exorcism.
Poetry is intense; the novel is extensive. The number, the quantity, is an integral part of its quality because every fiction takes place and develops in time, it is time being made and remade under the gaze of the reader. In all the masterpieces of the genre, this quantitative factor — to be abundant, to multiply and to endure — is always present: generally a great novel is also a big novel. The Tin Drum belongs to this illustrious genealogy, as a world that is large and complex, brimming with diversity and contrasts, is erected in front of our eyes as readers, to the beat of a drum. But despite its vividness and sheer size, the novel never appears as a chaotic, dispersed world, without a centre (as occurs in Berlin Alexanderplatz or in the Dos Passos trilogy, U.S.A.), because the perspective from which the fictive world is seen and represented gives consistency and coherence to its baroque disorder. This perspective is that of the protagonist and narrator Oskar Matzerath, one of the most fertile inventions of modern narrative. He supplies an original point of view that suffuses everything he describes with originality and irony — thus separating the fictive reality from its historical model — as well as embodying, in his impossible nature, in his anomalous condition, between fantasy and reality, a metaphor for the novel itself: a sovereign world apart in which, however, the concrete world is refracted in essence; a lie in whose folds a profound truth can be seen.