2 - Heteroglossia from Grimmelshausen to the Grimm Brothers

Summary

Without attempting to be all-inclusive in its discussion of heteroglossia in Grass's novel, which would be a Gargantuan enterprise, this chapter presents those texts that through their carnivalesque features have either been acknowledged as having influenced Grass's novel (Rabelais and Grimmelshausen) or with which, upon closer structural analysis, Grass's novel engages in an intertextual dialogue (fairy tales, trickster myth, commedia dell'arte). The carnivalesque features that Bakhtin discusses all belong to a popular culture rooted in the trickster myths. In Europe this myth resurfaces in the carnival tradition, the medieval Feast of Fools and the Feast of Asses, and extends to the oral tradition of some folk-tales as well as to literature. The trickster myth has had a substantial impact on such written culture as the picaresque novel, the literary fairy tale, and some twentieth-century novels. In much of this literature it has been used for satire.

Grass's novel engages in a structure-forming dialogue with a multitude of texts from the oral and written tradition and the dwarf-fairy tale tradition, and with Rabelais and Grimmelshausen, both of whom are central sources. Like Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (published from 1532 on) and Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668), Die Blechtrommel is rooted in the Menippean satire, “one of the main carriers and channels for the carnival sense of the world in literature” to this day (DP, 113). Texts always feed off and into other texts, deliberately or not.