FLOUNDERING IN FEMINISM: THE MEANING OF GUNTER GRASS’S DER BUTT

BY PETER RUSSELL

So celebrated is Gunter Grass, and so well-known his capacity to surprise the public with his imaginative products, that the publication of a new, long and long-awaited novel by him in 1977 was bound to provoke animated discussion. Der Butt drew particular attention to itself, moreover, by two immediately striking features: a brilliant prose style even richer in mischievous idiosyncrasy than those of his previous novels, and a highly topical theme: the place of women in society. What Grass is actually saying on the latter issue in Der Butt has been a matter of debate ever since; and it is the question to which this article addresses itself. But a necessary first task is to analyse and map the novel’s terrain; this will demonstrate that the seemingly jungle-like texture which greets the reader of Der Butt is actually an overgrowth on an underlying, highly rational organization and intent. Only when the latter are fully appreciated can lucidity be brought to bear on the problem-for problem it is-of the novel’s ‘message’. During the following pages readers may find it useful to refer to the structural diagram on p. 256.

Structurally, the most conspicuous feature of Der Butt is undoubtedly its device of spanning a narrative through several centuries by the expedient of reincarnating the hero in ddferent guises. This device is not original: Virginia Woolf used it with characteristic finesse in O r h d o (1928), the story of a young Elizabethan who re-emerges in numerous reincarnations (including a change of sex) in the following centuries. But although Virginia Woolf and the Grass of Der Butt do share a pre- occupation with feminism, with the place of women in a man-dominated world, Grass’s purpose in Der Butt is very different from Virginia Woolf s in Odando, and different in a typically German way-if, that is, we agree that didactic zeal, hugely ambitious design and dogged thoroughness are all characteristic German qualities. For what Grass sets out to do in Der Butt is to examine, on an ex- haustive scale, the whole question of women in society: not merely as it presents itself today, but as it has occurred since time began. Readers of Die Blechtrommel and Hundejuhre know that Grass seldom takes half-measures; this time he. begins in the Stone Age, and traces the history of women age by age to the present day.

Combined with the documentary zeal of the historian, however, is a more personal preoccupation. The novel was written during a period of crisis in Grass’s own marriage (resulting in divorce and his subsequent remarriage), and is also dedicated to his daughter Helene, who was conceived and born during the writing of Der Butt. But even the reader with no knowledge of these facts cannot help but sense that Grass is using the novel to explore his own experience of marriage, and work out in fictional form some of the problems besetting his own sexual and emotional relationships. He has admitted as much himself, in interviews published in Die Zeit and in Der SpiegeL. I This dual motivation-the chance to tackle a

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highly topical issue, and the compulsion to explore personal experiences bearing on that issue-gives the work its basic structure, which ingeniously contrives to combine both worlds.

For the novel is narrated by a writer living in the present day near Hamburg, with his wife, the somewhat dissatisfied and refractory Ilsebill. They decide to engender a child: the novel opens with the sexual act designed to achieve that end. During the nine months of Ilsebill’s pregnancy which follow, which give the novel its nine chapters, the narrator fulfils a promise to relate to Ilsebill the story of the relationship of the sexes to each other as it has existed since human society began: a story which, it turns out, he is peculiarly well-equipped to tell, since he has in successive reincarnations-in some cases multiple-experienced at first hand each successive age. Indeed, we are instructed on the very first page to believe that Ilsebill too is a reincarnation of all the women the narrator has ex- perienced before: ‘Ich, das bin ich jederzeit. Und auch Ilsebill war von Anfang an da. Gegen Ende der Jungsteinzeit erinnere.ich unseren ersten Streit . . .’.* The long excursions into social history which follow are unified not only by the recurrent theme of male-female relationships and by the continuing consciousness of the perpetually reincarnated narrative figure, but by a deliberate-and beneficial- limitation of place. It is a curious fact about Grass that, for all the fantastic extravagance of his imagination, his best fiction has again and again drawn its sustenance from one geographically very limited but apparently infinitely fecund source: his native city, Danzig. Thus the story begins in the swamps of the Vistula delta, progresses through the first fortified settlement to the flourishing medieval city, the Danzig of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, the Prussian province of Frederick the Great, the city under Napoleonic domination, late nine- teenth century Danzig; we end in 1970 with Polish Gdadsk.

There is also, as always in Grass, a dense knot of central themes. In each successive period, the narrator is linked in two ways to a specific woman: by food and by sex, those two major obsessions which Grass shares with Rabelais, and which also dominate his earlier novels and poetry. Each woman is both cook and lover to the narrator (sometimes, though not necessarily, as wife): the novel is indeed much more pre-occupied with food than with sex, and affords Grass the pleasure of indulging as never before his passion for food, its preparation and con- sumption. ‘Geschichte aus der Kuchenperspektive’ , as one German commentary puts it.3 Among other things, the novel is a kind of grandiose culinary history of the Danzig area, most convincing in its account of changing foods and eating habits. Indeed, Der Butt can be read, to use the words of an American reviewer, ‘as a digestive tract that runs from one end of history to the other’.4 As this metaphor suggests, the reader sometimes threatens to choke on the sheer nutritious abundance; one is surfeited as by a succession of too rich meals. Grass’s pre- occupation with the importance of food in history, and with the problems of feeding the world, also results in some of the novel’s many digressions-including a trip by jumbo jet to Calcutta in Chapter Three (‘Vasco kehrt wieder’), and a section on China in Chapter Five relating ‘Wie der grosse Sprung zur chinesischen Weltverkostigung fiihren soll’. But behind the insatiability of appetite there always lies unmistakably Grass’s other and more serious purpose: to investigate the

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relationship between men and women as it has been shaped and reshaped by historical conditioning.

Grass is brilliant in his detailed evocations of the different periods of social history: they are wholly convincing. He has clearly not just relied on the remarkable ferulity of his imagination, but has taken pains to do the kind of historical research which will lend verisimilitude to his picture; and his occasional introduction into the narrative of historical characters, events and inventions is ingenious and often witty. More important than the effort at historical accuracy, however, is the triumphant imaginative empathy which enables Grass to bring each age in turn to convincing life: a feat no less successful than that of Virginia Woolf in Orlando, though utterly different in style. So wholly does Grass immerse the reader in his historical environments, so easily does he seem to enter into the minds of his characters, that one is emotionally captured by the created atmosphere, with its unique physical, emotional and spiritual conditions, whether it be a neolithic uibe in the swamps of the Vistula, a medieval Catholic community, a city beleaguered in the Thirty Years’ War, a farm in Prussia under the administration of Frederick the Great, Germany under French dominion, or a proletarian soup-kitchen in the 1890’s.

The feat is all the more remarkable when one considers that each account is steeped in those entertaining ironies which result from the narrator’s historical hindsight and foresight, especially since he habitually views life with the vigorous irreverence which earlier characterized the hero of Die Blechtrommel-and indeed speaks in the same sardonic, impertinent and tongue-in-cheek manner. That Grass’s account of things is so constantly entertaining, though, should not blind us to the fact that he has mapped each scenario with some forethought. Above all, each age is depicted in a way which draws attention to its major and typdying pre- occupations. Thus the emphasis on hunting, fishing and eating of the neolithic age gives way to the cultivation in the Iron Age of useful skills such as metal-smelting and pottery. While the Catholicism of Bishop Adalbert of Prague and his cook Mestwina in the tenth century is still cheerfully suffused with pagan beliefs, Dorothea von Montau in the saint-and-witch-ridden fourteenth century is possessed by a fanatic and self-mortdying religious mania; the sixteenth century cloister of Abbess Margarete Rusch, ‘die dicke Gret’, is on the other hand characterized by an easy-going worldliness, conviviality and licence. The loosening of the hold of the Church on men’s minds which is implied by this change is perpetuated in the increasingly secular emphasis of the following chapters. The seventeenth century is represented by the decisive historical experience of the Thirty Years’ War-Opitz and Gryphius also put in an appearance; the eighteenth by a depiction of rural life under a much-respected Frederick the Great, in which the narrator becomes August Romeike, Veteran and Royal Inspector of the Domain of Zuckau, and the all-important introduction of the potato to Prussia forms the central theme. French domination and revolutionary agitation form the main themes of the Napoleonic era: the cook Sophie Rotzoll is herself a Jacobin, whose two specialiti- mushrooms and patriotism-she combines in- an abortive attempt to poison the French governor of Danzig. Here the Romantic Movement also makes an appear- ance, in the persons of the Brothers Grimm, Arnim, Brentano, his sister Bettina,

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and the painter Otto Philipp Runge, who have joined each other for a stay in the nearby Oliva Forest in 1807. The year of Sophie’s death, 1849, is significantly the year of birth of her successor, Lena Stubbe, an ‘Armenkochin’, ardent socialist, and author of a Proletarian Cookbook, the highlight of whose life is a visit to her home by August Bebel. Lena is twice widowed, by the two major wars of the period, the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War; she dies in 1941 in a Nazi concentration camp. This forms the seventh month of the narration; two further scenarios bring us up to the present day, and to Ilsebill’s confinement. The first of these takes us from Danzig to West Berlin, to the celebration of ‘Vatertag’ in June 1963: a picture of aimless and pleasure-seekmg consumer society which culminates in a horrifying gang rape. The second takes us back to Danzig- but it is now Gdahsk, and the central event is the rebellion of workers at the Lenin Shipyard in 1970.

This succession of scenarios constitutes a colourful, comic, continually thought- provoking historical and social pageant; in this it is somewhat like Orlando. It goes well beyond Orlando, though, in its ulterior motive. For threaded through all these scenarios runs the continuous yarn of a purpose: Grass is trying to make a point. This brings us to that element of the novel which, though it has not yet been mentioned, constitutes its main unrfying feature: ‘der Butt’, the flounder which gives the novel its title and (for it should not be omitted) its splendid cover- illustration by the author. >

Grass’s novel is basically the elaboration on aJoycean scale of a famous fairy- tale involving a flounder, the tale ‘Von dem Fischer un syner Fru’, which is recorded in Low German in Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmarchen. In the chapter of his book involving the Brothers Grimm, Grass would have us believe that this tale exists in two versions, both of them taken down by the painter Otto Philipp Runge from an old woman on a Frisian island. In the well-known version recorded by the Grimms, a poor fisherman one day catches a talking flounder, which claims to be an enchanted prince. He kindly lets it go again, but when he gets home his wife, the quarrelsome and greedy Ilsebill, forces him to go back again and-as a quidpro quo-make increasingly extravagant demands on the flounder. The fish accedes to them all, making Ilsebill King, Emperor, and even Pope-until finally she goes too far, and demands to be llke God. The tale ends with her punishment: “a, wat will se denn?’ sad de Butt. ‘Ach’, sad he, ‘se will warden as de lewe Gott.’-‘Ga man hen, se sitt all weder in’n Pissputt.’ Door sitten se noch bet up hiiiit un diissen Dag.’6 But the alternative version of the tale, Grass would have us believe, reverses the roles of husband and wife: this time it is the husband who is ambitious, and whose megalomania eventually proves his downfall. On this version of the tale Grass bases his novel, which expands the tale of the fisherman and the flounder into an account of world history, with as its central theme the rise and fall of male dominance. For men were once, Grass tells us, anything but dominant: in prehistoric times they lived in childlike dependence on their women,-in the matriarchal society presided over by the three-breasted cook and priestess, Aua. In this age before Prometheus, women have stolen fire from the gods, and rule through the cooking-pot. But one day the fisherman Edek, the first of the narrator’s incarnations, catches a talking flounder, who whispers to him

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the crucial information which begins male domination: fire can also be used to smelt metal, and metal can be forged into spearheads and axes. Thus is set in motion the progress of man’s domination-not only of women, but of the world. For the flounder tells Edek of other civilizations- the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian, the Minoan-much more advanced than his, and promises always to come at his bidding throughout the ages, to instruct him in how to achieve such advances. What is thus begun is evoked in a passage which well illustrates the baroque verbal skill characteristic of Der Butt:

. . . Zweitausend Jahre zu lang habt ihr Stillzeit gehabt, habt ihr die Zeit im Stillstand vertrodelt. Ich rate euch: Weg von der Brust. Ihr musst euch entwohnen. Mein Sohn, du musst dich endlich entwohnen!’

. ‘

Das war einfach gesagt vom Butt, zu einfach. Wir, jedenfalls, brauchten noch ein sattes Jahrtausend, um mannlich im Sinne des Butt zu werden. Doch dann wurden wir Manner, wie man nachlesen kann: Manner unter Lederkappen und Helmen mit nagelndem Blick. Miinner mit schweifendem, die Horizonte abtastendem Auge. &ugungswiitige Mbner, die h e Stinkmor- cheln zu Geschlechtertiirmen, Torpedos, Weltraumraketen umdachten. Miinner mit System, in Miinnerorden versammelt. Wortgewaltige Wortspalter. Sich unbekannte Entdecker. Helden, die nicht, nie und auf keinen Fall im Bett sterben wollten. Manner, die mit hartem Mund Freiheit verordneten. Durchhaltende, sich selbst uberwindende, standhafte, ungebeugte, immer wieder trotzdem sagende, den Feind sich erfindende, grandios verstiegene, die Ehre um der Ehre willen suchende, prinzipielle, zur Sache kommende, sich ironisch spiegelnde, tragische, kaputte. dariiberhinaus weisende Endzielmanner.

The flounder thus accompanies the narrator throughout history, advising him how he may secure an ever-increasing male dominance in the world. But there is a yet further structural ingenuity to the novel: for following the chapter in which the flounder’s first capture is described, is another describing his second capture- this time in the Baltic by a group of fanatic feminists on holiday in the 1970’s. They triumphantly cart the flounder off to Berlin, where he is put on trial in a derelict cinema before a tribunal of nine feminists. Their accusation is un- equivocal: he has betrayed women by siding with men, to the detriment of humanity. The hilarious progress of the trial is a further thread of the book: for as we advance through each historical period, it is earnestly discussed by the tribunal of feminists, ‘das Feminal’, as the flounder dubs it, who weigh up, often with heated altercation, the way male-female relationships have been institutionalized in each period and the guilt which a-mches to the flounder for the way men have behaved. Thus the novel progresses on three simultaneous narrative levels: the situation of Ilsebill and the progress of her pregnancy; the successive htorical stories; and the story of the feminist tribunal. Needless to say, this makes for a very complicated novel, the more so because the narrator figures on each structural level, including the tribunal, whose proceedings he attends and whose

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members he comes to know personally. Indeed-an additional intricacy which seems simply wilful-each of the nine feminists corresponds to, and emerges as a reincarnation of, each of the historical partners. To make it even more complicated, the narrative is interleaved with about forty poems in free verse, whose themes are usually those exuberant favourites, food, sex and excretion, but which are of a density and obscurity which often make them hard work for the reader, particularly as their relevance to the narrative is only occasionally clear.

Having mapped an overview of the novel’s structure-one from which many incidental details and cross-relationships have necessarily been omitted-we are now in a position to approach the problem of the ‘message’. Of paramount importance here is the manner in which the novel ends-bearing in mind that there are three endings, because there are three narrative levels. On the face of it, all the endings seem to add up to one thing: the end of male domination on earth. For not only the feminists, but the narrator and even the flounder himself, conclude that men have botched their destiny. The conclusion when it finally comes, though, can be no surprise, for the warnings have begun early. Already in the second month the flounder’s message to the narrator, at a furtive private meeting in the deserted cinema, is unmistakable:

‘Ich werde dir nicht helfen konnen, mein Sohn. Nicht einmal mbsiges Bedauern konnte ich dir entgegenbringen. Alle Macht, die ich dir verliehen habe, hast du missbraucht. Anstatt dein dir gegebenes Recht fiirsorglich geltend zu machen, ist dir Herrschaft zur Unterdriickung, ist dir Macht zum Selbstzweck missraten. W h e n d Jahrhunderten blieb ich bemiiht, deine Niederlagen zu vermschen, dein jiimmerliches Versagen als Fortschritt zu deuten, deinen nun offenbaren Ruin mit Grossbauten zu verstellen, mit Symphonien zu iibertonen, in Tafelbildern auf Goldgrund zu schonen und in Biichem mal humorig, mal elegisch, notfalls nur gescheit wegzuschwatzen. Um deinen Uberbau zu stiitzen, habe ich sogar Gotter hilfreich erfunden: von Zeus bis Marx. Selbst zur Jetztzeit-die f i r mich nur eine Weltsekunde ist-muss ich, solange dieses an sich amiisante Tribunal andauem mag, deinen herrischen Dummheiten Witz untern5hen und deiner Pleite Sinngebung abzapfen.’8

By the seventh month the flounder’s analysis is more specific, the conclusion drastic:

‘Wissen und Macht habe ich euch verliehen, doch nur Kriege und Elend habt ihr bezweckt. Die Natur wurde euch anvertraut, worauf ihr sie ausgelaugt, verschmutzt, unkenntlich gemacht und zerston habt. Bei all dem uberfluss, den ich euch eroffnet habe, konnt ihr dennoch die Welt nicht satt machen. Der Hunger nimmt zu. Eure Ara klingt misstonend aus. Kurzum: der Mann ist am Ende. So vie1 perfekter Leerlauf last sich kaum noch verwalten. Ob im Kapitalismus oder im Kommunismus: iiberall verniinftelt der Wahnsinn. Das habe ich nicht gewollt. Euch ist nicht mehr zu raten. Die Mannersache erledigt sich selbst. Feierabend, mein Sohn. Es gilt abzudanken. Mach es mit Anstand. ’ 9

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He adds as his concluding word:

‘Ihr konnt mir Alexander und Ciisar, die Hohenstaufen und Deutschherren, auch noch Napoleon und den zweiten Wilhelm anlasten, aber nicht diesen Hitler und diesen Stalin. Die liegen ausser meiner Verantwortung . Was danach kam, kam ohne mich. Diese Gegenwart ist nicht meine. Mein Buch ist geschlossen, meine Geschichte ist aus. ’9

At the end of his trial, in a passionate summing-u.p speech, the flounder utterly denounces men and what masculine domination his wrought on earth: a ghastly destruction. Power henceforth must go to women:

‘Das Feminal, dem ich mich ausgeliefert habe, das meine Schuld offenbar machte und dem mein Wille zur Siihne angeboten bleibt, sollte nicht nur urteilen, sondern auch begreifen, dass fortan den Frauen Macht zufallen wird. Sie werden nicht mehr wortlos am F b d e stehen miissen. Die Geschichte will weiblich gepragt werden. Zeitenwende! Schon fallt der Mann verdrossen aus seiner Rolle. Schon will er nicht mehr wollen. Schon behagt ihm sein Schuldgefiihl. Aus ist es, aus! Das Feminal setze ein Zeichen, damit wieder Zukunft ist.’1°

Accordingly, the end of the novel takes its course. The flounder’s sentence, after much argument, is to be forced to witness a ritual banquet of flounder-eating, ‘das grosse Buttessen’, after which he is to be released into the Baltic again off the Island of M#n, so that he may atone for his crime-a procedure which is duly carried out, though the more radical feminists, their bloodlust aroused, do their utmost to assassinate the flounder at the last minute. Ilsebill, meanwhile, produces not the boy she so ardently wants, but a daughter; that she and the narrator are by now irrevocably estranged, has become depressingly clear. The novel ends then with the narrator’s last encounter with a woman: with Maria Kuczorra, the canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdahsk, who has earlier lost her fiance Jan in a brutal police shooting of striking dock workers. That a reversal of male-female roles has taken place is clearly demonstrated by this last desolate sexual encounter in the dunes by Danzig: the demoralized narrator is wholly the subservient, almost helpless partner, the woman the powerful and confident one. Then Maria wades into the sea and summons the flounder:

Bis zu den Knien in h e n Jeans ging Maria in die See. Sie stand eine Weile, dann rief sie laut dreimal ein kaschubisches Wort und hielt die Arme wie eine Schussel. Da sprang ihr der Butt, der platte, uralte, dunkle, geruntelte Butt, dessen Haut gesteint ist, nein, nicht mehr mein Butt, ihr Butt, wie neu aus der See in die Arme.

So now it is women who hold the keys of power. As Maria returns to the beach, she symbolizes all the women the narrator has known; only now they are full of sublime self-assurance and power. The novel ends thus:

2 5 2 FLOUNDERING IN FEMINISM

Es diimmerte schon, als sich Maria mit dem Butt ausgesprochen hatte. Und als sie ihn an die See zuriickgab, rillte der Abendwind das baltische Meer. Sie stand eine Weile und zeigte mir ihren Riicken. Dann kam sie langsam ihren Spuren entgegen. Doch nicht Maria kam zuriick. Es wird Dorothea sein, sorgte ich mich. Als sie mir Schritt nach Schritt grosser wurde, hoffte ich schon auf Agnes. Das war nicht Sophies Gang. Kommt Billy, die arme Sibylle zuriick? Ilsebill kam. Sie iibersah mich, iiberging mich. Schon war sie an mir vorbei. Ich lief ihr nach. l2

This can only mean one thing: that the future does indeed now belong to women. But that radical and simple ‘message’-for there is no doubt that Grass intended it explicitly as such-must raise a host of doubts and questions in the mind of any reader who has been following the novel attentively; for so little in the novel justifies this ‘message’, and so much appears to point to conclusions of a very different kind, which receive no weight at all at the end. In my final pages I shall indeed be arguing that there is a contradiction in Der Butt between the proffered message and the concrete evidence; between the author’s rational intent, and his fictional execution of that intent; in a more personal sense, between the author’s logical reasoning, and an emotional temperament which keeps running counter to that reasoning.

Fundamental to the novel, it will have been seen, is the belief that men and women conflict in their attitudes to life: that women have always considered the home to be sufficient, whereas men have gone out to fight, govern, create and invent. Women, Grass tells us at one point, have no need to worry about immor- tality because they embody life; men, on the other hand, can only survive outside themselves, by building a house, planting a tree, doing a deed, falling gloriously in battle. Unlike women, who tend to be self-sufficient, they are strivers and conquerors; they need abstractions and systems; they agonize over such things as meaning, success and progress.

On the whole, the evidence of the novel supports this dichotomy of the sexes. What it does not do, though, is to show us that either sex is necessarily better fitted to direct human affairs than the other. Grass’s account of history shows that he is highly critical of both sexes, at different times and for different reasons; not only that, it shows that in certain periods of history women have been more genuinely emancipated than men-for instance in the sixteenth century, when convents like that of the Abbess Margarete Rusch offered women an opportunity for unusual solidarity, freedom and power. In case it should be thought that Grass is arguing that now, in our age, men have made such a mess of things that women have at last earned the right to absolute power, it must be pointed out that his portrait of contempomy women anything but supports this view. His portrait of the feminists in particular is highly satirical; further, many of them obviously illustrate the danger that, in seeking to end the dominance of men, women may be guilty of aping men’s worst characteristics. The flounder is himself aware of this danger, and towards the end of his final speech issues this warning to the tribunal:

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‘Die Frauen, so sagt man, sind politischer geworden. Sie organisieren sich. Streitbar treten sie auf und lassen sich nicht das Wort abschneiden. Schon verzeichnen sie Teilerfolge. Doch wird-so frage ich mich besorgt-die Forderung nach sozialer Gleichberechtigung dazu fiihren, dass auch der mannliche Moralkanon gebrochen wird? Oder wird die Gleichberechtigung der Geschlechter nur die Potenzierung des mannlichen Machtstrebens tur Folge haben?’ ‘3

Not only that, but the narrator lets us know that not a single woman on the tribunal has proved able, by the end of the novel, to resist his sexual advances! Obviously it is not to these women that Grass would wish to entrust the future of the human race. But to whom, then? For Ilsebill, the narrator’s wife, and the latest in his long line of partners, is anything but an inspiring candidate for the task. Ilsebill is a colourless and limited ‘Hausfrau’ who embodies to a painful degree most of the weaknesses traditionally attributed to women. Her dreams do not go beyond a quieter automatic dishwasher-a recurring refrain of the novel-and a holiday in the Antilles.

If, then, Der Butt shows women to be all in all no better than men, one is bound to ask why it I s that they end up with all the power. A further inconsistency of the novel lies in the fact that, in a psychological sense, women seem throughout the novel to wield the essential power anyway: for the narrator, the chosen re- presentative of the culturally dominant male sex, is in every reincarnation very much in emotional thrall to his female cook and lover, sometimes helplessly so. This inconsistency between men’s cultural dominance and their emotional sub- servience is never explained by Grass, and it seems fair to ask what he means to imply by it: that all men, great and small, are in reality dominated by their women? That men may produce visible effects in the world but that women are actually their secret controllers? That women are always the winners? These are not new ideas, of course-but they are not explained or elaborated in Der Butt, and the contradiction remains. So what is Grass really uying to say?

A sampling of reviews of Der Bgtt makes it clear that there has been widespread perplexity about this question, not only in Germany but also in England and America, where Ralph Manheim’s translation of the novel appeared in 1978. Many reviewers found themselves troubled not so much by what one might call the typically Grassian excesses of the novel-length, prolixity, obscurity, obscenity, digression, exaggeration-as by the confusion of its central theme, a confusion which has resulted in much confusion of response. Thus the message of the novel has been variously guessed as an act of homage to women and cooks, as a serious contribution to the Women’s Movement, as an attempt to ‘ipater les femmes’, and as a scornful send-up of the Women’s Movement. It surely cannot be all of these-unless it is claimed that the meaning of Der Butt resides in those ultimate ambiguities so often said to be the property of great works of art!

I would suggest that this is not so; that we are dealing here not with ambiguities, but with confusions; further that these confusions derive from confusions of feeling in Grass himself. This was the view of the Observer critic, Neal Ascherson, whose strictures on the book, though overstated, so accurately draw attention to

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this essential flaw that they deserve quotation:

What spoils this novel is Grass’s furious confusion about the central theme. He accepts that the flounder has changed sides, and yet he won’t accept it. He writes about all that has been inflicted upon women through the centuries, but bawls with infantile rage and fear as they try to remove him personally from their lap. He adopts a tone, as he describes the ‘Women’s Tribunal’ or the aspirations of his narrator’s wife, which is exactly that recorded recently by Anna Coote: ‘Men learned to preface remarks about women with natty little disclaimers: ‘Male chauvinist pig that I am. . .’

The narrator bows to the Tribunal’s authority, but-inevitably-none of the women who make it up has been able to resist his advances. Yes, he has seduced them all! So much for feminism! Such passages, where Grass falls into a nervous, sulky style which is quite unlike his normal manner, throw the whole novel into confusion.

If the author can’t sort out his feelings about the major theme, or even conceal the muddle from the reader, then the book disintegrates as a work of art. ‘4

Ascherson’s complaint is not that Grass is the victim of ambivalent and conflicting attitudes towards women (for all men undoubtedly are), but that he has been unable to clardy his feelings sufficiently in his own mind to distance himself artistically from his subject-matter. Intellectually, Grass seems to have decided, in tune with the Zeitgeist, that male power must yield now to female, and has planned the flounder’s trial accordingly; but his emotional being-powerfully and irrationally compounded of need, hostility and fear-continually belies and works against the simple, preconceived intention. One result of this stalemate is the novel’s failure ever to develop convincingly; instead, it bogs down into a repetitive self-indulgence, its successive episodes being inconclusive excursions which do not lead us anywhere. For all the successive entertainments offered by the historical chronicle, and the‘constant delights of incidental detail, the reader of Der Butt is dogged by a feeling that the novel is not progressing, but turning circles on itself: it is a colossal but static epic, in which every moment is very like every other moment, whose characters interact. in repetitive configurations, and whose final outcome is muddle. What ‘plot’ there is is intellectually imposed, and does not grow from the characters and situations portrayed. The reader is asked to accept a victory for women which not only does not follow logically from the evidence with which he has been presented, but also clearly lacks the emotional conviction of the author.

Those with a penchant for the autobiographical or psychoanalytical might wish to relate this failing of Der Butt to some recent personal admissions of Grass: to a confessed ‘Abhangigkeit von Frauen, die sicher problematisch ist, aber zu der ich stehe’, and to ‘einen ausgewachsenen Mutterkomplex’, which, he says, he has never been willing to take to a psychiatrist’. l5 Reluctant as one is to resort to speculation on

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an author’s emotional life in order to explain the confusions of his work, it might at least help to explain why the narrator, the representative of a supposedly dominant and controlling male world, is in every reincarnation so in thrall to his female lover. ‘Ich bin immer auaglaubig geblieben, bis heute’ , the narrator lets slip, early on;16 perhaps that is also m e of his creator.

The stated purpose of this article was to determine whether a ‘message’ can be perceived in the jungle of Der Butt: I hope I have succeeded in showing that, if message there be, it is a confused and unsatisfactory message. But it would be unjust to end there. For Grass, after all, is writing a novel, not a tract; and his business as a writer of fiction has always been entertainment rather than enlighten- ment. Like other contemporary novelists-Saul Bellow springs to mind-Grass may not establish any certainties for us, in this age so anxious for certainties; but he does, like Bellow, succeed in being continuously entertaining. As the vessel for a ‘message’, Der Butt is inconsistent and inconclusive, static and repetitive, and it can only be dissatisfying to the seeker of truth. But few of its pages fail to entertain, as both the structural analysis and the quoted passages have illustrated. Indeed, Der Butt continually delights the reader with its cleverness, its wit, and, not least, its enormous intelligence. In it Grass exploits with vivacious verve his proven mastery of the German language: it is a work of ‘Sprachschopfung’, and one which has consequently posed mind-boggling problems for translators. In his own phrase, Grass is a ‘wortgewaltiger Wortspalter’; he has lost none of his knack. Much of the life of Der Butt lies indeed in the detail of its linguistic and metaphoric ingenuities; but to discuss those delights here would exceed the scope of this article.

NOTES

‘Heute luge ich lieber gedruckt’. Zeit-Gespriich uber den ‘Butt’ mit Giinter Grass von Fritz J. Raddatz. Die Zeit, 12. August 1977. ‘Am liebsten luge ich gedtuckt’. Interviews mit Giinter Grass. DerSpiegel, 2. April 1979, p. 222.

* Gunter Grass. DerButt, Darmstadt 1777, p. 7.

3 Toni Meissner. title of miew in Bucher&ommentare, Aug. ISept. 1977.

R. Z. Sheppard, Time, 23 October 1978.

‘Butt’ should suictly be translated as ‘turbot’; however the American translator, Ralph Manheim, prefers ‘flounder’ because the word has archetypal associations for the English reader which ‘turbot’ docs not, and is uanslated thus in Grimms‘ Faitytdes.

Die Marchen derBtiider Gnmm, Munchen 1764, p. 86.

’ Der Butt, p. 44. Ibid.,p. 188. Ibid.. p. 572.

lo Ibid., p. 662. Ibid., p. 693. l2 Ibid., pp. 693-4. l3 Ibid., p. 664.

l4 Neal Aschenon, ’A fish out ofwater’. Observer, 8 October 1978.

15 DerSpiegel, 2. April 1979, pp. 222,223

256 FLOUNDERING IN FEMINISM

’ 6 DerButt, p. 38.

l7 Cf. Dieter E. Zimmer, ‘Was heisst Glumse auf japanisch?’ Die Zeit, 10. Februar 1978. Reprinted in English in The German Tribune, 26 February 1978, p. 10.

GUNER GRASS: ‘DER BUTT’

Enabler- Verkorperung

Jager u. Fischer Edek

Fischer, Kohler, Torfstecher Edek

Zeitdter Wcbin/Geliebte

Jungsteinzeit: 2211vorChr.

Eisenzeit: Volkerwanderung

10. Jahrh.: Die Pomorschen

Siimpfe der Weichselmiindung

Siimpfe der Weichselmundung

Hakelwerk an der Weichselmiindung

Die dreibriistige Aua, Kiichin u. Priesterin

Wigga, Kochin und Priesterin ’

Schifer/Bischof Adalbert v. Prag, getotet 994

Mescwina, pomorsche Fischenfrau. Klichin u. Priesrerin

14. Jahrh.: Hochgotik

Danzig Schwertfeger Albrecht Schlichting

Franziskaner- monch/ Burger- meister Ferberl Prediger Hegge

Dichter Martin Opitz/ Stadunaler Moller

Dorothea von Montau, Heilige

16. Jahrh. : Reformation

Danzig Margarete Rusch, ‘die dicke Gret’, Abtissin der Bir- gittinen

Agnes Kurbiella, Kochin

4. 17. Jahrh.: Dreissigjiihri- ger Krieg

18. Jahrh.: Friedrich der Grosse

Napoleonisches Zeitalter

Danzig

Staatsdomane Zuckau

Domaneninspektor August Romeike

Amanda Woyke, Gesinde-Kochin der Staatsdomane Zuckau

5 .

6. Gymnasiast Friedrich Bar- thold y / Pastor Blechl Gouverneur Jean Rapp

Ankeachmied

Danzig Sophie Rotzoll, Revolution%rin, gest. 1849

7. 19.-20. Jahrh. Danzig k n a Stubbe. Stobbe, gest. Armenkiichin u. 187 l/Ankenchmied Sozialistin, 1849- Stubbe, gest. 1914 1941

Schriftsteller, Billy (Sibylle friiherer Verlobter Miehlau) von Sibylle Miehlau

Schriftsteller, Maria Kuczorra, mit Ilsebill Kantinenklichin an verheiratet der Leninwerft

West-Berlin 8.

9.

Vatertag, Juni 1963

Gdafisk 1970