The Great German Novel

Sun Feb 18 04:37:08 CST 2018

Yes, picaresque novel parallels ...

See also the classic of German picaresque novels (& major inspiration for Grass ... actually the literary critic Fritz Raddatz called Grass a "new Grimmelshausen") -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicius_Simplicissimus

> Simplicius Simplicissimus (German: Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch) is a picaresque novel<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picaresque_novel> of the lower Baroque<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque> style, written in 1668 by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jakob_Christoffel_von_Grimmelshausen> and probably published the same year (although bearing the date 1669).[1]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicius_Simplicissimus#cite_note-1> Inspired by the events and horrors of the Thirty Years' War<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War> which devastated Germany from 1618 to 1648, it is regarded as the first adventure novel<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_novel> in the German language and the first German novel masterpiece.

The full subtitle is "The account of the life of an odd vagrant named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim: namely where and in what manner he came into this world, what he saw, learned, experienced, and endured therein; also why he again left it of his own free will."

The novel is told from the perspective of its protagonist Simplicius, a rogue or picaro<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picaro> typical of the picaresque novel<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picaresque_novel>, as he traverses the tumultuous world of the Holy Roman Empire<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire> during the Thirty Years' War<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War>. Raised by a peasant family, he is separated from his home by foraging dragoons and is adopted by a hermit living in the forest, who teaches him to read and introduces him to religion. The hermit also gives Simplicius his name because he was so simple that he did not know what his own name was.[2]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicius_Simplicissimus#cite_note-2> After the death of the hermit, Simplicius must fend for himself. He is conscripted at a young age into service, and from there embarks on years of foraging, military triumph, wealth, prostitution, disease, bourgeois domestic life, and travels to Russia, France, and to an alternative world inhabited by mermen<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merman>. The novel ends with Simplicius turning to a life of hermitage himself, denouncing the world as corrupt ... <

Sounds even more GRish than the The Tin Drum, no?

And the following passage evokes echoes from M & D!

" ... Indessen wurde es mit unseren Kranken von Stund zu Stund besser, so daß wir den vierten Tag auch keinen einzigen mehr hatten, der sich klagt; wir besserten im Schiff, was zu bessern war, nahmen frisch Wasser und anders von der Insul ein und fuhren, nachdem wir sechs Tag sich auf der Insul uns gnugsam ergetzt und erfrischet, den siebenten Tag aber gegen der Insel St. Helenae, allwo wir teils Schiff von unserer Armada fanden, die auch ihren Kranken pflegten und der überigen Schiff erwarteten, von dannen wir nachgehends glücklich allhier in Holland ankamen.

   Hierbei hat der Herr auch ein paar von den leuchtenden Käfern zu empfangen, vermittelst deren ich mit oftgemeldten Teutschen in obgesagte Höhle kommen, welches wohl eine grausame Wunderspelunke ist ... "

Final part, chapter 27; see H.J.C. v. Grimmelshausen: Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch. Berlin (Ost) & Weimar 1988: Aufbau-Verlag, pp. 577-8.

In English --

https://archive.org/details/adventuroussimpl00grimrich

Am 15.02.2017 um 13:27 schrieb Johnny Marr:
Interesting thought. I happen to be reading The Magic Mountain at the moment, equally beguiled and frustrated with it.

GR also contains a couple of parallels with The Tin Drum.

On Wednesday, February 15, 2017, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de<mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>> wrote:

"... Yes, sort of German, these episodes here. Well, these days Slothrop is even dreaming in the language. Folks have been teaching him dialects, Plattdeutsch for the zone the British plan to occupy, Thuringian if the Russians happen not to drive as far as Nordhausen, where the central rocket works is located. Along with the language teachers come experts in ordnance, electronics and aerodynamics, and a fellow from Shell International Petroleum named Hillary Bounce, who is going to teach him about propulsion ..." (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 240)

> ... On its first page, “Gravity’s Rainbow” seems to make a sly reference to Mann’s Naphta, who claims in “The Magic Mountain” that terror is “what our age demands.” (...) But I would have no qualms about staking this book’s claim to be the Great German Novel; not in the sense, obviously, of being the best novel written by a German, but rather as a work in which the historical trajectory of German literary culture — the progression through Idealism and Romanticism to Nazi-fringed techno-mysticism and beyond — attains both its apex and its most spectacular cloudburst. I kept thinking, as I listened to Guidall, of a line in Heidegger’s “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” where he describes homelessness as the “summons that calls mortals into their dwelling.” Virtually every one of Pynchon’s characters is homeless or displaced, wandering the earth’s great bombed-out Zone in search of some abode: a homeland, house or simply bed to spend the night in (if you like, a coefficient). Even the novel’s insects crave this: We see cockroaches trying to establish temporary dwellings in the “mysterious sheaf of vectors” of a straw bed even as their nibbling causes their small “tenement-world” to crumble. The scene is reprised later beneath a “lambent, all seeing” electric bulb — but first time round it plays out in the Christ-child’s crib in Bethlehem, under that other annunciating star. The prevalence of cockroaches points, of course, to the writer (also Germanophone) to whom Pynchon perhaps owes most of all: Kafka. The prisoners of “In the Penal Colony” are strapped into a giant killing-machine that writes in code on their own skin; as they die, angelic children stationed by their side, they’re meant to get a final burst of revelation — but the only subject whom we actually watch undergo the ritual is granted no such grace on his demise. The same holds true in “Gravity’s Rainbow” ... <

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/gravitys-rainbow-read-by-george-guidall.html

> ... Thomas Pynchon is the Richard Wagner of American fiction. This isn't only because his magnum opus, "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973), about the quest for a devastating V-2 rocket secreted inside Nazi Germany, both parodies and embraces the epic Teutonic insanity of the Ring Cycle. There's also a stylistic kinship: Mr. Pynchon's writing is startling, mesmeric, bombastic. He has a hideous genius ... <

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323846504579071433982952074

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