Acting Figuratively, Telling Tropically: Figures of Insanity in Günter Grass's Die Blechtrommel

Figures of speech are traditionally conceived of as symptoms of the artistic mastery of a language, of originality and wit. But dealing with literary utterances challenging the very notion of “mastery” and “competence” urges us to reconsider the premises of figurative speech. In this article, several textual instances are investigated in which the mental deterioration of the speaker in moments of affective, epistemological and experiential crisis goes hand in hand with a disinhibition on the level of figurative language. At the center of the investigation stands Günter Grass's 1959 bestselling novel Die Blechtrommel. The straightforward untruthfulness of Oskar Matzerath, the narrator-protagonist, is a unique example in post-war German fiction of how communicative success and failure operate as mutual presuppositions in the narrative representation of madness. The article shows how figurative processes are intertwined in the novel, how they are linked with the changing narrative positions, and how they indicate, exactly at the point where the protagonist's insanity seems to peak, the emergence of interpersonal understanding.