In one of the twentieth century’s most memorable scenes from literature, a man is standing on a beach, pulling on a long rope that stretches out to sea. The rope is covered in thick seaweed. He yanks and tugs, and out of the foaming waves comes a horse’s head. It’s black and shiny and lies there at the water’s edge, its dead eyes staring while greenish eels slither from every orifice. The eels crawl out, shiny and entrails-like, more than two dozen of them; when the man has shoved them all into a potato sack, he pries open the horse’s grinning mouth, sticks his hands into its throat, and pulls out two more eels, as thick as his own arms.
This macabre fishing method is described in Günter Grass’s 1959 novel, The Tin Drum. Rarely has the eel been more detestable.
The eel does not appear frequently in literature or art, but when it does, it’s often an unsettling, slightly revolting creature. It’s slimy and slithering, oily and slippery, a scavenger of the dark that salaciously crawls out of cadavers with gaping mouth and beady black eyes.
Sometimes, however, it’s more than that. In The Tin Drum, the eel actually plays a rather important role. It both foreshadows and triggers tragedy.
The people standing on that Baltic beach, watching the man pull the horse’s head from the sea, are the novel’s main characters, the boy, Oskar Matzerath; his father, Alfred; his mother, Agnes; and her cousin and lover, Jan Bronski. Agnes is pregnant but hasn’t told anyone. We don’t know who the father is, Alfred or Jan, nor do we know if Alfred is really Oskar’s father. Agnes is depressed and self-destructive and seems to view the life growing within her more as a devouring tumor than a gift. What’s happening inside her is a mystery, to both her family and the reader.
The four of them have gone for a walk along the beach when they come across the eel fisherman. Agnes curiously asks what he’s doing, but he makes no reply. He just grins, flashing filthy teeth, and continues to tug on the rope. Once the horse’s head is out of the water and Agnes sees the eels crawling out of its skull, something happens to her. She’s revolted by them both physically and psychologically. She has to lean against her lover, Jan, to keep from swooning. The seagulls swarm above them, flying in ever-tighter circles, screeching like sirens; when the grinning man pulls the two fattest eels out of the horse’s throat, Agnes turns and vomits. It’s as though she’s trying to expel both her acute nausea and the unwanted fetus in her belly. As though one is inextricably linked to the other. She never fully recovers from the experience.
Read Full Article »