Gunter Grass' Image-Dance

...Starusch's own past is shadowy and insubstantial beyond recall, as we have seen, if political acts, too, are simply images, no more than the one-day headlines they generate then they are mere hallucinations without discoverable consequences, and history is meaningless Scherbaum knows this perfectly well, just as he knows that an ex-Nazi as Chancellor makes nonsense of the idea of moral accountability But the student is determined to act anyway, egged on by his Mao-quoting girfnend "It'll be clear and simple It'll be a fact" This existential resolve stabs through the anaesthesia in which Starusch has muffled his aching sensibilities Frantic with moral agony, he goes to great lengths to dissuade the boy, even offering in desperation to do the deed himself He gives his game away, though, by announcing that he is not afraid "I've come to realize that what's done without fear doesn't count," Scherbaum tells him "You only want to do it to prevent me from doing it You don't believe in it all you care about is limiting the damage " Something m Starusch is bitterly disappointed when the boy finally backs down The prospect of vicarious transcendence having collapsed, there is nothing to prevent him from sinking again into the protective anaesthesia of the image-dance Under the tutelage of his "amiable technocrat" of a dentist, he can dream Utopian dreams once more, and entertain painless post-ldeological visions As the treatment for Starusch's prognathism draws to a close the dentist systematically dismantles the precarious structure of his patient's past, shuffling and rejecting the numerous variants like so many playing cards "Now that you've been shaken by your student's thank the Lord abandoned project," he tells him, "you ought to relinquish your fuzzy fictions " Starusch dutifully relinquishes The trouble is that in the end the novel is itself as insubstantial and elusive as its protagonist Local Anaesthetic is an enormously clever piece of work to be sure, but like those "fuzzy fictions," it has a tendency to autodestruct m the reader's memory According to New York Times reviewer John Leonard, the work is going to separate the men from the boys Henceforth, he assures us, ignorance of Grass must be regarded as evidence of cultural illiteracy I suspect, however, that time may play havoc with such critical dictums Like the proverbial Chinese dinner, Local Anaestlietic-brilliant though it be-is unlikely to afford more than the most ephemeral nourishment...

...Writers & Writing GUNTER GRASS' IMAGE-DANCE BY KINGSLEY SHORTER Gunter Grass' new novel, Local Anaesthetic (Harcourt, Brace & World, 284 pp , $6 95), is set in what the author has scornfully dubbed the "television democracy" presided over by ex-Nazi Kurt Georg Kiesmger, the meretricious consumer's paradise that rose from the ashes of the Third Reich to mock its victims and provide ammunition for the ideologues of revolution Nineteen years old at the end of the War, Grass belongs to a transitional generation of Germans that was too old to be uncorrupted by Nazis-he himself was in the Hitler Youth-yet too young to be held responsible for its crimes In his fiction, he has followed the fortunes of his contemporaries, from the delinquency and nihilism of the immediate postwar years, through the opportunism of rearmament and Wirstschaftswunder, to the cynicism and bourgeois complacency of the '60s "We have learned to appraise the situation," says Eberhard Starusch, the 40-year-old protagonist and first-person narrator of Local Anaesthetic "To elbow our way To adapt ourselves when necessary To keep an open mind Above all not to commit ourselves Shrewd tacticians, able specialists, who strive for the possible and actually-then no unexpected obstacles arise—attain it But nothing more " Schoolteacher Starusch, his dentist-confidant, and a tv set that magically reflects the shifting contents of his consciousness, together provide the vehicle for Grass' exploration of the technological wasteland in its German incarnation Starusch is being treated for "a congemtal and therefore authentic prognathism," but suffers no physical pain at the hands of his dentist, his discomfort, rather, is all psychic as he mulls over the past, which is also Germany's, and agonizes about the present At 17, we learn, Starusch (under his nickname) was leader of the very teen-age gang whose exploits Grass earlier recounted m The Tin Drum Today, he hovers on the brink of middle age, a halfhearted pedagogue confronted by students implacably hostile to the established order, and thus as alien to him as his own lost youth The tv set-a brilliantly conceived if not altogether successful device-as far more than the expression of Starusch's role as passive spectator, for it enables the author to dispense with conventional story telling and deal directly in images Because the screen shows everything m promiscuous montage—Starusch's daydreams and scenes from his past, intercut with regular tv programs complete with commercials, as well as close-ups of the elaborate dentistry being performed on his nerveless molars-all the projected scenes are on an equal footing This does away with the distinction between reality and fantasy, the image functioning as metaphor, not narrative And what metaphors' It seems that Eberhard Starusch, turning to respectability after the War with the rest of his countrymen, put the pleasures of juvenile delinquency firmly behind him and became an industrial engineer specializing in, of all things, cement An unpromising subject9 Not at all Thanks to the tv mom-tor, what starts out as, say, a pedantic disquisition on centrifugal dust removal becomes a shooting script that carries the inner eye of the reader into landscapes of dreamlike resonance "Long shot of the Lower Eifel landscape A slow ride through the eroded ravmed and heavily-scarred pumice-mining region towards the Krings Works with their two stacks " Yet because of this quasi-cinematic method, it is quite impossible to say with any certainty what may have pushed Starusch into the wasteland His past is many stones, and the maelstrom of images swirls across the screen, the plot line dividing and subdividing, until the reader is presented with a constellation of possible events, none of them with greater claim to reality than any other This much, however, seems clear Starusch, "a successful young man amid successful young postwar men," becomes engaged to a cement baron's daughter Field Marshal Krings, the prospective father-in-law, is a war criminal held captive by the Russians When he returns home, he promptly builds a sandbox and starts fighting his lost battles over again This infuriates his daughter, Sieglmde, who turns herself into an expert on military history so she can outwit the old man in his war games Schlottau, an electncian who had served under Krings during the War, helps to set up the mock combat The girl sleeps with him to obtain information about the Field Marshal's plans, and the engagement is broken off Murderous vengeance of various kinds-whether in fact or fancy we cannot tell-is then exacted by the aggrieved Starusch Whatever the historical purport of all this-Grass as good as tells us that Krings represents "Fight-to-the-finish" Schorner, one of Hitler's most bloodthirsty generals, and we may reasonably suppose there are other correspondences-its calculated obscurity is not altogether justified by the philosophical point presumably being made (the irrecoverability of the past), or quite redeemed by the brilliance of the writing The novel first achieves sharp focus about halfway through, when Starusch is rudely awakened from his phantasma-goncal meditation on the past by an immediate problem that cannot be brushed off m a flurry of images One of his students, the 17-year-old Scherbaum, announces that to protest American use of napalm in Vietnam he is going to douse his dachshund with gasoline and burn it alive on Berlin's Kurfurstendamm, in full view of an expensive restaurant full of cake-eating matrons At this point Local Anaesthetic conies fully alive Believable characters confront one another over the clearly defined issue, which serves to anchor the political and philosophical speculation that otherwise runs wild through the book Starusch, whose revolutionary zeal is confined to timid fantasies of bulldozers clearing away mountains of consumer goods, is appalled at his student's scheme and desperately tries to talk him out of it The dentist a cool pragmatic man given to quoting Seneca offers this cynical advice "Keep up your dialogue with the boy Dialogue prevents action " And so it does, in the end But not before Starusch's whole life has been called in question The dog-burning project confronts him with the dilemma implicit throughout the book Is meaningful action possible any longer in a world increasingly made up of interchangeable images, where the cause/effect link seems to be broken...