human dog metaphors (3)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

I simply want to note the use of dog metaphors in Pynchon,
Grass, and Melville and provide
some personal observations.

I will discuss the dogs, but also History, Story Telling
(how to begin telling the tragic history of the ongoing war)
and Readers of Fiction.

Lars wrote:

Also, am I the only one who´s reminded of Günter Grass´s
"Dog Years",
when reading all those dog-metaphors?
Makes me remember, why I prefer cats.
    Lars

        Well now you know that your
        Cat has nine lives
        Nine lives to itself
        But you only got one
        And a dog's life ain't fun
 --Lennon, Crippled Inside

With the first sentence--"Granted I am an inmate of a mental

hospital..."--my block was gone, words pressed in on me,
memory, imagination, playfulness, and obsession with detail
gave themselves free rein, chapter engendered chapter. When
a gap broke the flow of my story, I hopped over it; history
comes to my help with local offerings; little jars sprang
open, releasing smells.
                        ---Gunter Grass

You tell. No, you. Or you. Should the actor begin? Or the
scarecrows, all at cross purposes? Or should we wait until
the eight planets have collected in the sign of Aquarius?
You begin, please. After all it was your dog. But before my
dog, your dog and the dog descended from the dog. One of us
has to begin: You or he or you or I


Thus begins Dog Years, a Fantastic novel by Gunter Grass.

Writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the
thousand and one things—childhood, certainties, cities,
doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on
slipping, like sand, through our fingers. I have tried to
learn the lesson of the midget drummer. And one more, which
I got from that other immense work, Dog Years: When you’ve
done it once, start all over and do it better.”
 --Salman Rushdie, Introduction to “Gunter Grass On Writing
And Politics 1967-1983”

Rushdie is alluding to the first, second, and third drafts
of The Tin Drum, which Grass fed to the furnace. With the
words “Granted I am an inmate of a mental hospital,” his
words began, as Johnson said of Shakespeare, to flow like
sap from a tree.

Extrapolating from Rushdie’s comments and the story of Grass
in the furnace room writing and rewriting, we might consider
what I like to call Thomas Mann’s Problem, again, he asks
that we read his books twice. No easy task, what with so
many great texts available, now in translations, on the
internet, from east and west, ancient to postmodern.
Moreover, it is difficult to understand The Tin Drum or Dog
Years or GR for that matter, with one read. Therefore, if we
are going to spend a lot precious time reading books twice
or three times, we need to make choices. Teaching a book can
be a great way to really get to know a text. In teaching,
one learns from others and what might otherwise be a rather
idiosyncratic or god forbid solipsistic reading of a text is
augmented, developed, and rendered more enjoyable by others.
Putting texts together, say Things Fall Apart, The Second
Coming, Titanic (the recent film) and a political/historical
text in order to see how things fall apart when historical
social structures are undermined, disrupted or destroyed,
when history brings cultures in contact, can further enhance
the reading transaction. It seems to me, that is the value
of what we have here.

In a previous post I said,

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.