Telematique, water and fire.

Treating the Aspiring Amnesiac

I first read the Tin Drum in December 1969, ten years after it was published. I was living in Vienna (Austria, not Virginia) at the time, about to dive into a central european winter, and I was taken with just how much of the earliest half of the twentieth century was still present in the daily life of the Viennese. I can recall that, after reading the book in three sittings, I was giddy, dizzy, horrified, terrified, haunted and thankful. I devoured the rest of the Dantzig Trilogy, but always have had the same reaction to Oskar and the Tin Drum.

Over the years, I found myself put off by Grass -- by the holier-than-thou, sackcloth and ashes, finger-pointing. I stopped reading Grass' essays. I spent a lot of time in Germany during the late 70s and the 80s. I stopped reading Grass' novels. In fact, I haven't picked up the Trilogy for 20 years. And now, the revelation.

I've spent idle moments over the past two weeks trying to figure out how I feel about it. And then, last night, I came across this article from Time, and realized that its last paragraph is about as close as I'm going to get. Trying to delve much deeper would take me places I don't want to go.

From TIME.com: Günter Grass's Silence

...
If Grass had not been living with this wretched little skeleton in his closet, he might never have written a word. Like 99% of his compatriots, he might have just dusted himself off at war's end, said his 20 Hail Marys, and gone about joining the blithely ahistorical postwar boom. Instead, a haunted Grass cranked out a series of brutal novels about the war and childhood in occupied Poland, beginning with his powerful 1959 novel The Tin Drum. Those unforgettable narratives, along with a good measure of his public hectoring and politicking, helped his entire country stave off collective amnesia for decades. So while his opponents, and even a share of his friends, are piling on him about the lies he told about his past, it's worth considering that those personal lies helped keep alive important national truths.

Technorati Tags: memoir

Misery and Memoirs

Benjamin Kunkel's article Misery Loves a Memoir in this morning's New York Times Sunday Book Review struck a chord. In describing the literary form of memoirs and autobiography, he considers (what I consider) the self-indulgence of those who write about adversarial suffering or victimization, and their victory/epiphany. Like Kunkel, I wince when encountering it. Kunkel, however, provided me this morning with an excellent explanation of why I wince. While his writing in this article sometimes gets in the way of his point, I enjoyed (? -- appreciated) his explication.

"A lie exposed is a fantasy revealed, and here, in the cases of James Frey and JT LeRoy, was the fantasy underlying contemporary autobiographical writing: Suffering produces meaning. Life is what happens to you, not what you do. Victim and hero are one. Hence the preponderance of memoirs having to do with mental illness, sexual and other violence, drug and alcohol addiction, bad parents and/or mad or missing loved ones. "
...
Contemporary memoirs tend to be either convalescent or nostalgic in mood. (It's as Augustine said in his "Confessions": "I remember with joy a sadness that has passed and with sadness a lost joy.") But is there nothing more to life than recovery and grief? Is there no idea of the good life we can sustain beyond the possession of health?
...
The best and most Romantic memoir an American has produced is "Walden" — though nobody calls it one. But it is: Here is what I did with a few years of my life and how I feel about it now. What Thoreau has to overcome during his time in the woods is not a lapse in mental health. His great problem is to escape the mental health of his neighbors, their collection-plate opinions, their studious repetition of gossip.

Technorati Tags: memoir