The Flounder

by Günter Grass

In November,

  when the dishwater has been emptied,

  the last colors wiped out

  and the geese plucked,

  just in time for Saint Martin’s Day,

  Agnes, who always knew

  what to cook when, cooked

  the neck in its limp skin, the gizzard and heart

  and both wings: Gänseklein

  with turnips and diced squash,

  cooked them slowly over low heat, deep in thought

  about a Swedish ensign, whose name was Axel

  and who had promised to return:

  soon, in November.

  Into it went

  a handful of barley, caraway seed, marjoram,

  and a little henbane to ward off the plague.

  All this—the gizzard was chewed, the wing gnawed,

  the neck bones sucked by painter Möller

  whom Agnes served while poet Opitz

  spooned up the mild broth, the soft turnips,

  spooned and found no words—

  though everywhere in November

  and in the cloudy soup there floated

  a goose heart looking for something to be compared with.

  Why the Flounder tried to rekindle two cold stoves

  When the Women’s Tribunal took up the case of Agnes Kurbiella, it was thought that adequate provision had been made for the accused Flounder’s security, though some attempt at aggression (e.g., kidnapping, poisoning) was to be expected. In his tank of bulletproof glass, the flatfish spent most of the time buried in Baltic sand, so that his breathing could only be surmised: nothing but his bulging eyes and crooked mouth was discernible. But when the prosecutor moved that in view of the enormous quantities of material before the court, the discussion be limited to what she termed Agnes Kurbiella’s “more relevant relationship” with the court historian Martin Opitz, the Flounder agitated his fins and stirred up his sand bed in protest.

  “High Female Court! Such supposed time-saving would halve and thereby destroy all understanding, for young Agnes did not merely carry on a dual relationship; she was truly split, though not at all to her detriment. So spacious was her nature that she was able, as cook and mistress first to painter Möller, then to poet Opitz, and finally to both of them, to keep house for them, warm their beds, and—how shall I put it?—rekindle their stoves. I must own at the very outset that I advised both Möller and Opitz. They both called me out of the Baltic Sea at the usual place. I heard and helped. That day a land breeze was blowing from the northeast. But if the esteemed prosecutor is determined to save time at all costs—that is, to questionable advantage—then let her halve me along with Agnes. I suppose ruthless decisions of this sort are fashionable these days. Let us for once be unfashionable.”

  Ms. von Carnow, the court-appointed defense counsel, who cut a pathetic figure because the Flounder consistently ignored her, supported his countermotion. In a piping little voice she said, “If such things are done to save time, people might get the idea that this is a show trial, with the verdict decided in advance. Women must never resort to such contemptible, typically masculine methods.”

  The ensuing disorder made it hard to determine where the public stood. After brief deliberation the judges decided to treat the case of Agnes Kurbiella in its dual aspect. Still, the Flounder was admonished to be brief and to abstain from prolix accounts of Möller’s artistic travels and Opitz’s diplomatic ventures, neither of which, it was pointed out, could be of much interest to the court. After all, town painter Anton Möller had been an old man of sixty-eight when he reduced Agnes, then just fourteen, to a state of dependency, and Opitz had been at least in his late thirties when Agnes, who had turned eighteen in the meantime, became his willing slave.

  “You’ve spared me the need for explanations,” said the Flounder. “As you say, they were both old, though one could have been the other’s son, and thoroughly plucked, exhausted, and burnt out. That’s why I gave the poor devils my advice. I felt sorry for them when first one, then years later the other, stood in the shallow water near Weichselmünde and cried out, ‘Flounder, say something! My bed is always half empty. I’m cold inside and out. I’m clogged with slag and I smell of cold smoke.’ My advice was, ‘Take something young. Refresh yourself. Drink of the fountain of youth. Let the feminine principle warm you back to life.’ For both Möller and Opitz needed inspiration, sensual encouragement, call it fire, in their cold stoves, if they were to wrest some late achievement, a last flare-up of youth, from their middling talents. Both of these moribund gentlemen were in need of spiritual mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The proverbial kiss of the Muse. Knowing full well that here, under the critical eye of a female assembly that takes pride in its cold reason, I am likely to be ridiculed as old-fashioned, I confess that I recommended gentle Agnes as a Muse to both the painter and the poet.”

  The public was not alone in laughing at the Flounder. “It’s too kind of you,” said Ms. Schönherr in her capacity as presiding judge, “to grant, perhaps not to women in general but at least to this particular Agnes, a further function, in addition to those of cook and bed warmer: so now she’s entitled to serve as a Muse, to give little kisses, to fertilize the moist, warm soil, and, by bestowing higher inspiration, to help burnt-out artists to mediocre achievements. What a blessing to the aging geniuses of our own day if the custom were revived! Why, these Muses could be tax deductible! But joking aside, what came of this division of labor?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” said the Flounder. “A few insignificant though rather nice-looking portraits of the nude and pregnant Agnes; for old man Möller did manage to produce a home-grown testimonial to the virility of his old age. But Opitz was unable to squeeze out a sonnet or an ode to Agnes. He couldn’t even put her dill garden into iambics. He devoted himself rather peevishly to a new edition of his old poems. He kept himself busy correcting the proofs of successive new editions of Arcadia, a tear-jerker he had translated from the English. His translations of the Psalms of David were creditable but hardly inspired. The one thing he was really good at was commissions, the usual panegyrics to princes. Apparently, he didn’t even succeed in impregnating Agnes, for when, three years after the death of her firstborn daughter, she burgeoned a second time, the restless Opitz had again been absent for quite a while, in Thorn, Königsberg, Warsaw, and so on. Possibly painter Möller had managed once again to fan up a bit of flame from the ashes. No, esteemed Tribunal, neither Möller nor Opitz succeeded in producing an enduring work of art, a gift to the world, the real thing, a late-ripened panel painting—the long-planned crucifixion on the Hagelsberg with sinful Danzig in the background—or a shattering war, plague, and vale-of-tears allegory, comparable to Opitz’s early poem about the plague in Bunzlau, although young Agnes, with her touching, always rather giddy-seeming charm, was well able to create the buzzing silence in which art can germinate. True, Opitz’s eyes bugged out with visions when, looking as transparent as an astral body, Agnes stirred an egg into the chicken broth, but all that came of his visions was poetic first lines and hopeful stammerings that never settled into an iambic order. Quick sketches, yes, suggestive of grand designs, but never carried to completion. All in the realm of promise. In short, my well-meaning advice fired both painter and poet like tinder, but after a while both stoves went cold again.”

  After a pause, during which the Flounder probably listened for the effect of his half confession (the sounds of the public part of the hall were channeled into his bulletproof compartment), he observed, once again in a piping falsetto: “I hear derisive laughter. You people never seem to tire of trying to be witty at my expense. And yet I’m quite willing to admit that I wasted young Agnes Kurbiella’s gifts as a Muse. I was deceived by hope. I sincerely believed that a work of lasting value could be wrested from the talented Möller and from Opitz the brilliant theoretician. Möller was no run-of-the-mill town painter, you know. And without Opitz it seems unlikely that German poetry would ever have achieved proper rhymes and
a regular succession of accented and unaccented syllables. I therefore ask the High Court to take cognizance of the scholarly comments on Opitz, a reading of which I have requested, and to authorize an illustrated lecture by way of showing an uninformed public how promisingly painter Möller started out, how soon he began to allegorize, and how pitifully his not inconsiderable talent went to the dogs. Only then will you be in a position to judge whether I, the Flounder so sternly accused by womankind, acted criminally, mistakenly, or, permit me to suggest, rightly, in providing these two just about washed-up artists with a Muse.”

  Despite protests from the public—“Now he’s trying to sell us Muses’ kisses!” “This Flounder is nothing but a shitty Germanist!”—the Tribunal decided in favor of the accused, largely because Ms. von Carnow, the defense counsel, threatened with wild gestures and fluttering voice to withdraw from the case. (She even wept a bit—effectively.)

  First photographs of Möller’s best-known works, The Last Judgment and The Tribute Money, whole and in detail, were flashed on the screen of the movie-house-turned-court-room. Then examples of his more popular work: ladies of the Danzig bourgeoisie against a background of sumptuous Hanseatic façades, fishwives on the Long Bridge, a buxom lass or two, maidens on their way to church, all in the costumes of the day. An art historian from Holland lectured informatively about the unknown provincial painter: how the son of a Königsberg court barber had studied painting more in the Netherlands than in Italy; how his copies of Dürers had unfortunately been lost; why, despite the many influences discernible in his work, he could not be written off as an epigone; how hard it was for youthful talents between the declining Renaissance and early Baroque; why, despite all its little allegorical games, Möller’s Last Judgment could be reckoned among the outstanding productions of the time; how noteworthy a figure Möller had been before, roughly in 1610, his creative powers failed, and what high hope his talent had justified.

  Next the affidavits of prominent literary critics were read. The court learned that on comparison with Gryphius and Hoffmannswaldau, Opitz was lacking in metaphoric power and formal refinement. Quotations were employed to show what skillful use Opitz had made of quotations from other authors. On the basis of his biography, the events of a varied, adventurous, but increasingly dubious existence, darkened by his activity as a double agent, were dated. Then came the regretful observation, “Little of this is concretized in his poems. Even in the love poems everything is coded, spiritualized, mythologized, or reduced to didactic epigrams. A pity that his opera libretto and Heinrich Schütz’s undoubtedly far-superior music have been lost.” A quotation or two was offered (“… freedom demands to be oppressed, enslaved, contested …”) by way of showing that a few of his lines had had staying power. “He was a man of compromise, who as a diplomat, sometimes in the Protestant, sometimes in the Catholic service, tried to mediate between the two warring religions: ‘Force maketh no man pious. Force cannot make a Christian!’”

  Another affidavit characterized the poet’s political position as unchanged through all his seemingly opportunistic transformations. “In the very midst of the Thirty Years’ War, Opitz was an irenicist. Eirene, which is Greek for peace, was his guiding star. Tolerance was his motto. And that is why we find no partisan passion in his writing, but, often to its detriment, a well-balanced artistry. The man was too intelligent, too committed to orderly reasoning, to turn out bold, exalted, beautiful, and in the last analysis stupid metaphors. And this explains his painful encounter, soon after his arrival in Danzig, with young Gryphius, the liberator of the German language, who attacked the esteemed master for the political activity that had consumed his energies, for his service as a paid double agent, for the pusillanimity that deterred him from candidly baring his soul and openly proclaiming his sorrow. Nevertheless, his influence on our literature has been considerable. Not so long ago a deserving Germanic scholar was able to prove that the account of the Battle of Wittstock on the Dosse in Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus was at least inpired by the battle scenes in Opitz’s translation of Arcadia. Possibly young Grimmelshausen, while viewing the battle scenes from the top of a tree, compared them with the printed metaphors and so recognized their authenticity, since they presented all the palpable horror that literature prescribes, so demonstrating once again that nothing happens but what has first been prefigured by the written word.”

  But all the affidavits agreed that Opitz’s true achievement was to be found in his theoretical treatise Über die Poeterey (On Poetics). For the common tongue created by Luther had been fit only for jingles, but Opitz had purified it and made it into a medium of art. One of the affidavits went so far as to say, “Thanks to Opitz, high-level writing was set free from its centuries-long Latin captivity; he was an emancipator.”

  The Tribunal took note of all this and would probably have arrived at a mild verdict if Sieglinde Huntscha, the prosecutor, had not provoked the Flounder with barbed questions. This woman, who rose to heroic stature even when seated, jumped up, turn red to the roots of her hair, fortified her voice with contempt, pointed a gaunt forefinger at the bulletproof cage where the Flounder, possibly cheered by the affidavits of the literary critics, had brought all his fins into play several handbreadths above the bed of sand. Then, suddenly assuming a Saxon accent, she directed—no, fired—question after question at the accused flatfish. The effect was immediate. The Flounder drooped as though shot, burrowed into the Baltic sand, threw sand over his pebbly, age-old skin, and muddied the water of his glass house, which may have been secure against bullets but offered no protection against well-aimed questions. He seemed to have vanished, escaped, to be gone forever.

  And yet the prosecutor’s questions were no intellectual fishhooks. The Flounder was not attacked as such. Simply and directly Sieglinde Huntscha asked: “If a woman can be a professional Muse, what about men? Are they, too, eligible? And if so, what men have functioned as Muses, what men, that is, have indirectly promoted art by helping to inspire well-known woman artists? Or does the defendant hold that the role of woman in art can only be one of passive, servile, manuring mediation? Are we only good for firing your burnt-out stoves? Is there to be an hourly wage for female Muse work? Maybe the Flounder will be kind enough to draw up a wage scale, or even found a Muses’ union. And tell me this, defendant Flounder: can a woman keep a male Muse if she pays him properly? Or was the verbiage those experts of yours dished up just a smoke screen to hide your true meaning? Because here’s what you really mean: Yes, yes, some of the girls play the piano very nicely and some do well enough in applied art or interior decorating, for instance, and when they go in for loving or suffering or Ophelia-like schizophrenia, they sometimes manage to write touching, absorbing, melancholy verses in heart’s blood, cunt juice, or black bile. But Handel’s Messiah, the categorical imperative, the Strassburg Cathedral, Goethe’s Faust, Rodin’s Thinker, and Picasso’s Guernica—such summits of art are beyond their reach. Is that it, defendant Flounder?”

  The stirred-up Baltic sand had settled in the meantime. The Flounder had stopped thrashing his tail and lay still. Only rising bubbles showed where his gills were drawing breath. And his crooked mouth came to life. “Ye-es,” he said, “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

  The public was floored, too weak even for indignation. The most they could summon up was one long sigh. Only Ms. von Carnow, the court-appointed defense counsel, spoke. “How awful,” she gasped.

  Then silence invited the Flounder to say more. “Without trying to attenuate my ‘Yes,’ I would like to praise woman’s power to serve as a Muse by telling you about Agnes. She was more than Möller and Opitz together. Not even a Rubens, not even a Hölderlin could have used all she had to offer. My mistake was to bury two worn-out talents under her superabundance. No, Agnes produced no art. But she was a source for all the arts: her fluid form, her epic silence, her thinking in which nothingness spoke, her ambiguity, her moist warmth. Only in her cooking was she creative, when she coddle
d Opitz’s sick stomach with potted calves’ brains and asparagus tips, all the more creative because she sang over her cook pots, always in one and the same tone, which was quite sufficient, because it was richer than any melodic development. Mostly she sang brief ditties in which the Swedes had forced all the horrors of war into rhyme. Here I must tell you that in the spring of 1632 Agnes, then thirteen, had been made a full orphan and used as a knothole on the Hela Peninsula by some Swedish cavalrymen belonging to Oxenstierna’s occupation regiment, and that the experience had scrambled her wits. Sometimes she talked about someone called Axel. He must have been one of the cavalrymen. He alone seems to have penetrated her lastingly.

  “So much, esteemed court, for Agnes Kurbiella. Yes, I say, yes and again yes. Agnes had no need to produce, to create. She had no need to be creative. Because she was a creature—and perfect as such.”

  Though the Flounder’s speech, gradually swelling to the old deep organ tones, was undoubtedly conveyed to the ears of the judges and of the public as well, the verdict went against him. He was found guilty of encouraging two worn-out old men to derive stimulation from their abuse of a child who was already addled as a result of male war crimes. Something was said of male pimping. In reading the court’s opinion, the presiding judge smiled as though finding savor in bitter almonds and conceded that a certain indulgence was warranted in view of the defendant’s limited male intelligence. “The lords of creation just can’t help it,” she declared. “They can’t do without their monopoly on creativity. We women have to be creatures—perfect creatures, what’s more. Thanks be to the Swedish cavalrymen, especially to the sinister Axel, for driving the childlike Agnes crazy in a manner so conducive to art. Slightly batty women make excellent Muses. We are looking forward to the next session, when the defendant will speak fishily on love.”

  When the Flounder’s court-appointed counsel stood up to plead in his defense, a good part of the public walked noisily out of the former movie house. Nor was the Revolutionary Advisory Council interested in listening to Ms. von Carnow. I myself found her plaintive, whining, piping monotone hard to bear, even though Bettina—outwardly an attractive young woman, inwardly a plucked angel—may have resembled my Agnes: the curly, rust-colored hair, the steadily blinking eyes, the smile that nothing could efface, the high-arched, childlike forehead.