Nadine Gordimer - Living in Hope and History - Notes from Our Century

The Snail is the ikon of our slow and painful trail when, as Günter’s companion in great achievement, Bertolt Brecht, says: ‘The travails of the mountains lie behind us./Before us lie the travails of the plains.’ Oskar, from under the skirts of the past, misses nothing of what the world is making of itself for the future.

Genius is always controversial, no matter in what context it occurs. The iconoclasm of painters who rearrange the perceptions of the eye is attacked from whatever is the current conservatism — abstraction, conceptualism, neo-expressionism, whatever. In literature, for the writer as for the painter, there is the same basic imperative: we have to find the way to ‘say’ in our medium, what can deal with, express our time in its particularity and in its place fatally roped to human history.

Günter Grass not only has brought a formidable intellect to the political meaning of human destiny — his own life shaped by it in the dire twentieth-century manifestations of war and social engineering. He has found, for himself, in his writing the richly discursive, expansive mode, the ironic humour, the inverse tenderness, the chaos become a kind of order, the fantastic character of ordinary life in times when brutality is everyday and lies are retold often enough to become that apparently outdated definition, truth.

He is one of those rare writers who have changed the possibilities of fiction. Made it perform anew. While many literary critics credit Gabriel García Márquez with this, it was and is Günter Grass who exploded contemporary fiction and discovered new spaces, new freedom for the imagination as it transforms the thin representation of life that is fact.

It is not his stylistic innovation in the imaginative re-creation of reality that has made him controversial, however; indeed, that has inspired a number of writers, widely dispersed, who derive from him. He has been and remains controversial because he has not and never will accept substitute definitions of the truth — for then, and now; for what was East, and what still is West, at home in Germany, and in the world. In his latest writings, as in the work he has splendidly achieved during the whole of his three-score-and-ten-years, his genius is still going out after the truth, he is in pursuit. And that is what is noble, in the life of a writer and a human being; that quest is his reputation , which cannot be soiled by the slavering and yelping of any media-man.

Günter Grass is a modern Renaissance phenomenon. Even if he had not been a writer, his paintings and sculpture would have distinguished him with high originality, passion, and wit. While exploring the political destiny of our century he has a loving awareness of the natural world in whose context all destinies are played. There’s a consequent wholeness to his vision; I was enchanted to find it symbolised in a small incident when, showing me water-colours of the countryside into which he had painted poetry, he called this his aquadichte , translated for me into English as ‘aquarhyme’.

I have been lucky enough to get to know Günter personally, but even if I had never met him I would have come, as I have now, thousands of kilometres to celebrate him, because his writings have roused in me fresh responses and understanding of this strange century, now passing into history with all its ugly sins, he and I have inhabited.

— Günter Grass seventieth-birthday celebration

Hamburg, 1997

I have visited Egypt three times in my life and have never met Naguib Mahfouz. The first times, 1954 and 1958, I had not heard of him or his work; by the third time, 1993, all his work available in English translation was deeply familiar to me and counted, in my canon, as part of the few great international contemporary literary achievements. In 1993 I had asked my kind hosts to arrange for us to meet, but in their zeal to make me welcome they planned for this to happen at a large gathering with other Egyptian writers, and Naguib Mahfouz, by temperament and in the deserved privacy of old age, does not attend such public events. My days in Cairo were few and there was not time to seek another opportunity. It does not matter. The essence of a writer’s being is in the work, not the personality, though the world values things otherwise, and would rather see what the writer looks like on television than read where he or she really is to be found: in the writings.

I am inclined to believe that a similar valuation may be applied to autobiography. The writer’s gift to fellow humans is his or her gifts, the bounty of the creative imagination which comes from no-one knows where or why. The persona of the writer is the vessel. Whether it is flamboyantly decorated by a life-style of excess in alcoholism, adventurism, sexual experiment, or whether it is sparsely chased by what appears to be domestic dullness, its content has been poured into the work; the truth of it is there. (Sometimes in spite of the author. .) Of course there are exceptions, but in general fiction writers who produce autobiographies are those whose autobiographies are better than their novels. Which has something to indicate about the limitation of their gifts. Let the biographers trace the chronology of life from the circumstances of the birth to the honoured or forgotten grave. What that span produced is already extant, transformed, freed from place and time.

The aphorisms, parables, allegories in the latest work of Naguib Mahfouz, Echoes of an Autobiography , have no dates appended. It’s of no account when he wrote them. The back-and-forth of a mind creating its consciousness expands and contracts, rather than roves between past and present, with a totality which is not merely memory. Indeed, with the wry humour that flashes through profundity in all his thinking, Mahfouz meets memory as ‘an enormous person with a stomach as large as the ocean, and a mouth that could swallow an elephant. I asked him in amazement, “Who are you, sir?” He answered with surprise, “I am forgetfulness. How could you have forgotten me?” ‘ The totality is comprehension of past and present experience as elements which exist contemporaneously. These pieces are meditations which echo that which was, has been, and is the writer Mahfouz. They are — in the words of the title of one of its prose pieces—‘The Dialogue of Late Afternoon’ of his life. I don’t believe any autobiography, with its inevitable implication of self-presentation, could have matched what we have here.

If the prose pieces in Echoes of an Autobiography have no dates they do each have a title, and these in themselves are what one might call the essence of the essence of Mahfouz’s discoveries in and contemplation of life. The preoccupations so marvellously explored in his fiction appear almost ideographically, the single word or phrase standing for morality, justice, time, religion, memory, sensuality, beauty, ambition, death, freedom. And all these are regarded through a changing focus: narrowing briefly to cynical; taking the middle distance of humour and affection; opening wide to reverence. Prompted by his own words — another title, ‘The Train of the Unexpected’—I take the liberty of paraphrasing myself in what I have remarked elsewhere of Mahfouz: he has the gift of only great writers to contemplate all the possibilities inherent in life rather than discard this or that awkwardness for consistency. The stimulus of his writing comes from the conflict of responses he elicits.

In ‘A Man Reserves a Seat’ a bus from a working-class suburb and a private car from a wealthy one set out for Cairo’s station at the same moment, and arrive at the same time, colliding in an accident in which both are slightly damaged. But a man passing between the two is crushed and dies. ‘He was crossing the Square to book a seat on the train going to Upper Egypt.’ As one reads this laconic concluding sentence, almost an aside, the title suddenly leaps out, heavy type, in all the complexity of the many meanings it may carry. I read it thus: rich and poor arrive at the same point in human destiny whatever their means. Even the man who travels with neither, seeking to pass between the two, cannot escape; you cannot reserve a seat in destiny. There is no escape from the human condition, the final destination of which is death.