Re: Technicalities

While preparing for my hopeless defense of American Apparel I ran into "Technicalities" and thought I'd offer a quick response by way of "What am I reading now" (the "now" is redundant there, isn't it).

A week ago, I picked up The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass. I stole this particular copy from the ex-office of one Alan Singer, PhD, but had yet to get into it. In this book (the only Grass I've read) a man in a mental hospital recalls his German childhood (so far, as I'm only halfway thru). There is a technique Grass uses, where he transitions between the man speaking from the mental hospital and the story's main narrative. Over the course of a paragraph, the narrator steps into the background, and we simply see the action. I have no word but "fluid" to describe the process. At the beginning of a paragraph, the narrator is speaking and we see him. Four or five sentences later, we are in the past. And I mean in it. If it's cold in the story I shiver. I haven't been that physically involved in a story since I first read The Hobbit circa 1992. It's like Grass is drawing us into the narrator's mental eye. I call it fluid because we have no choice but to follow him, we are "carried along" as the cliche tells us. For a careful (read: anal) and painfully slow (read: dyslexic) reader like me, "finding" myself at the bottom of a page is startling. I have not been able to pin down the technique. It has something to do with the order in which information is given. To follow my jalopy metaphor, it's like Grass understands the way the reading mind works, the way it flows from idea to idea, and he throws information (visual, tactile, psychological) ahead of the current, so our mind catches up to it at the perfect moment.

Glancing over the pages I've read so far, it seems too much effort to come up with an exemplary passage, as the techniques vary so much from passage to passage. How lazy!