Gegenständlichkeit. Zur "neuen alle meine Möglichkeiten versammelnden Form." Die Text-Bild-Bände von Günter Grass

Standfuss, Katja. Gegenstandlichkeit. Zur "neuen alle meine Moglichkeiten versammelnden Form." Die Text-Bild-Bande von Gunter Grass. Goteborg: Goteborgs Universitet, 2008. 238 pp. Price unavailable. It is a commonplace of Grassforschung to lament the lack of research on the interrelationship between Grass's literary texts and his artistic creations - be they in the form of printmaking, watercolor painting or sculpture in bronze and clay. Since the founding of the Grass-Haus in Lubeck as a "Forum fur Kunst und Literatur," however, the lament has become somewhat of a rhetorical ploy trotted out to justify a given scholar's crossdisciplinary interpretive enterprise. Katja Standfuss is cognizant of this but does not participate in the ploy. She takes Grass' 's Doppeltalent seriously and her monograph adds yet another important study to our understanding of the artist-writer. The particular value of Standfuss's published Goteborg dissertation resides in the hyphenated formulation "Text-Bild-Band" to name the genre. By it she means not artworks attending the writing of texts - a random print of a flounder, for example - but those publications conceived of as intermedial creations from the outset. After a Forschungsstand introduction (1 1-64) and a consideration of "Bildwerke und literarische Werke," such as Gleisdreieck (1967), she closely treats Zunge zeigen (1988 / 2000), Totes FIoIz (1990 / 2002), Fundsachen fur Nichtleser (1997), and Letzte Tanze (2003). Her interpretive focus is not on the bestsellers, but on the author's less accessible publications, and Standfuss correctly evaluates the autobiographical Funf Jahrzehnte. Ein Werkstattbericht (2001 / 2004) as an important Statement by Grass (and his publisher Steidl) on the nature of his Doppeltalent. Standfuss first takes care to define Grass's notion of Gegenstandlichkeit - "sie gilt zum einen dem Ding als Objekt, zum anderen dem Gegenstand als Stoff bzw. Thema, das in dem Ding angedeutet werden kann: Die stofflich-sinnlichen Beschreibungen z.B. des Kochens der Kartoffel ... Es wird von den Menschen als Geschichte erzahlt, die diese Kartoffeln anpflanzen, ernten, verkaufen und essen etc." (46). Objects are narrative touchstones, links to both the real and to the human: "Aus der Interpretation eines Objekts im Text als konkreter Gegenstand ergibt sich in der Kontextualisierung mit dem Menschlichen eine Sinnlichkeit des Objektes ..." (47). It is, then, not coincidental that Standfuss treats each publication as an Objekt, describing its very physicality - from size to font - with most attention given the dustjacket image and to the internal layout. …