GRGR(6) - section 8 (#3)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

On Pynchon, Grass and Doblin:

Grass sought to exorcise the evil of the "world gone wrong"
by telling stories. Pynchon asks that we "pay attention" and

I think that for both writers both of these are true--it
seems to me, that these books are
so beautiful that we must pay attention and "no hell can
take us in."

“Pay Attention” is Pynchon’s statement. “No hell can take us

in,” is Grass’s.

The novel has nothing to do with plot; we know that
originally not even the drama
had anything to do with it, and it is questionable whether
the drama was well
advised to take the rigid form it did. To simplify, pound,
and carve reality into
the shape of a plot is not the business of an epic writer.
The novelist's
watchword is ‘Classify, accumulate, rearrange and
disarrange’; that of the present
day impoverished, plot-obsessed dramatist is ‘Get ahead!’
‘Get ahead’ can never be
the watchword of the novel.
--Alfred Doblin,  “Observations on the Novel”

Dog Years does not begin with a story to be told by
someone, nor with personal memories of  some experience of
the past, but rather with who will tell a story. “You tell,
No you. Or you.” This seems to imply that the story is
somehow beyond what one teller can tell. And this seems to
be confirmed by “the Vistula flowed day in day out without
reflecting us (“long before we existed”), and emptied
forever and ever.”

Or is it beyond what any teller can tell? Joyce begins
Finnegans wake with a river that runs and ends where it
begins or never ends. Circles. GR is a circle of sought.
Begins where it ends, where it begins. The opening dream
scene begins and ends with a scream, the Kenosha Kid episode

begins, and ends with the Kenosha Kid, after warping and
mixing time and space. Lots of circles. Circle of a
nightmare screaming from hell perhaps. Where all the images
of the second industrial revolution are black with coal and
iron and the crystal palaces falls. Where in the mine, the
Inferno “In the seventh, eighth, and ninth stalls, the
stranger below is exposed, in the interest of training, to
the three cardinal emotions and their echo effects. And once

again Matern ventures to cry out: “This is hell, indeed!”
although the weeping, every human variety of which is here
represented, is tearless. Dry emotion turns the stall into a

house of woe. Swathed in degraded mourning garments, frames,

which only a little while before were scrap iron and then,
resurrected as skeletons, were invested with noisy or
soundless mechanisms and submitted to various mechanical and

acoustical tests, now stand weeping circles on the
bare-scraped floor. Each circle has set itself a different
tear-promoting yet desert-drying task. Here it begins. The
next circle can’t turn off the whimpering. This circle sobs
deep within. Wailing, crescendo and decrescendo, dents and
distends every circle
a voice on the verge of tears recites
sob stories, snot-and-water stories, stories to soften a
stone
”

Towards the end of Matern’s story, the third narrative,
Brauxel Amsel ( now Goldmouth!) announces his intentions to
join in and collaborate in telling the story: “More stories.

More stories. Keep going! As long as we're telling stories,
we’re alive
.as long as stories have power to entertain us,
no hell can take us in
.Tell stories as long as you love
your life
”

And entertain they do! For why else would we “Pay
Attention.”

Hitler’s dog makes Dog Years entertaining, beautiful art.
Slothrop down the bowl to the west does the same.



How can Jack and Malcolm X and Slothrop and Cherokee and
Boston and NYC and
 be all such a disorderly tangle of
lines? What about the holocaust, the war?

To Dublin “victories, defeats, treaties, all the dated facts

that, taken together, have come to be known as the ‘Thirty
Years’ War, are worth no more than a subordinate clause or
are, often enough, deliberately passed over. What interests
him is the comings and goings of armies looking for winter
quarters, the labyrinthine court intrigues, dragged through
the chancelleries, palace gardens, and hidden galleries, and

ending up in confessionals
. Distorted as by concave
mirrors, mystically heightened, the tangled rituals of
cunning preparations, spun in Vienna or at the court of
Maximilian of Bavaria, roll over whole pages, while the
outcome of courtier’s efforts, such as the disposition of
Wellenstein or the refusal of the Elector of Saxony to let
Gustavos Adolphus and his army pass through Saxon territory,

are mentioned (without special emphasis) only because such
things happen to be part of the picture; but history they
are not, for history means the innumerable absurd
simultaneities  that Doblin wants to lay bare.”
--Grass on Doblin

"only when I spoke of individual destinies--a flight into
death, a flight into Palestine, for example--did I hold the
children's attention...Demonstrably as television series
shatter, touch or horrify the masses, much as they move them

to pity or even shame--and this was the effect of the
Holocaust---they are quite incapable of disclosing the
complex "modernity" of genocide and the many-layered
responsibilities at the root of it....A writer, children, is

someone who writes against the passage of time."

G.Grass  What shall we tell our children?


Come Cherrycoke, no need to leave us, “keep the children
ammus’d”






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