Rezümékötet 2008. - vmtdk

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H U M Á N T U D O M Á N Y O K
THE RE-DRUMMED PAST
(Günter Grass: The tin drum)
Author: Nikolett ZITA BALOGH AUER 3 rd year student
Supervisor: Dr. Antal BÓKAY university professor
Institution: University of Pécs, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Modern Literature, Pécs
If it is not read as a perfectly continuous text, Oskar Matzerath’s autobiography could be easily interpreted as a
corpus of various drafts. In his novel Günter Grass presents an autobiography of an author who cannot find a final point
of departure so he re-writes himself again and again. Then, breaking Lejeune’s autopacte, he publishes the whole
corpus at once to leave the readers absolutely unsure about the final variant.
As Paul de Man writes, blending fact and fiction results in newer and newer texts. Grass’s central figure, the tin
drum seems to be a material fuse of these autobiographical components. On the one hand the drum is responsible
for events that are transformed in writing by Grass’s main character, Oskar Matzerath. But on the other hand, in spite
of its history-making character, the drum is only a tangible and replaceable object.
Oskar has a special connection with this instrument: with it he can create and overwrite stories, so he treats it as a
store of his life history. As he produces his life events with the assistance of the drum and later recalls them with the
help of it, Oskar’s autobiography appears to be the story of irreversible unreadability.
Reading Günter Grass’s novel as an autobiography, the essay tries to analyze the fusion of reality and fiction, including
a group of questions about self-writing, overwriting and over-reading.
Keywords: The Tin Drum, autobiography, reality, fiction
V I I . V A J D A S Á G I M A G Y A R T U D O M Á