Falstaff and his descendants

I probably should have provided this link when discussing Rushdie on Desani in my last post, but it was already quite long.  There is quite a lot of good material there, but I am still wrapping my head around Rushdie passing on some thoughts of Milan Kundera that all English literature "descends from either Richardson's Clarissa or Sterne's Tristram Shandy."  In this case, Desani (and Joyce and even Anthony Burgess) are clearly on Team Tristram.  And I can buy that an awful lot of literature really is about a damsel in distress, even if the novels are not epistolary in nature.  However, like all militant binaries, it tends to fall apart when pressed too hard.  Are all bildungsroman (scrambled or not) to be classified as Shandean, even if they are primarily moral in nature?  Anything with a anti-hero is also put into the Sterne column?  I would have preferred it if Kundera had gone back to the classics and said that literature tended to be Apollonian (Clarissa) or Dionysian (Tristram Shandy), as I think that formulation makes more sense.

However, even there things break down when you consider Shakespeare, who really did blend the two approaches, typically in the same play.  Often I consider Shakespeare to be a Dionysian at heart but one who felt obligated to wrap up his plays in a moral fashion, appealing to the intellect and reason, i.e. an Apollonian ending.  And sometimes this just doesn't go over that convincingly.  (As You Like It must have the worst cop-out ending of any Shakespeare comedy.  It's on my mind as they are doing it in Toronto's High Park this summer.  I plan to go but need to remind myself to basically disregard the last five minutes.)  And really both Richardson and Sterne descend from different aspects of Shakespeare.

The influence of Shakespeare on English literature is truly immense, and Falstaff (or Falstaff analogs) being a character that emerges periodically in comedies.  I thought I had already touched on this in this blog, but apparently not.  Most people are well aware of Ignatius J. Reilly from Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.  However, a more obscure novel by a Canadian author (My Present Age by Guy Vandergaeghe) features Ed, who is also an overweight, over-educated and totally exasperating character.  The two are quite similar, but seem to have been derived independently from each other, but from the same root source.  If anything, Vandergeaghe came first, since the Ed character is also in the last two stories of his collection, Man Descending.  I'm not sure if I will reread these "Ed stories" and/or My Present Age, but if I do, I'll post a review.

So why this long digression on Falstaff?  I've finally reached the point in The Tin Drum where Oskar gives us a long description of the jazz musician Klepp.  He is corpulent and basically living in his own filth when Oskar enters his room at the boarding house they share (Oskar apparently sleeps in the tub of a decommissioned bathroom).  The description of the spaghetti dinner Klepp cooks actually made me retch.  Eventually, Oskar gets him out of bed by playing his drum, and soon they are busking in Dusseldorf (at least I think that's where the story is taking place at this point).  Slightly after this, they find a guitarist and are hired on as a jazz trio at The Onion Cellar (in one of the better set pieces of the novel).  Klepp is probably the most disgusting Falstaff yet, with sloth and gluttony overwhelming his lust (though he does get married later to a cigarette girl -- to Oskar's disgust).  It's not a perfect analogy, mostly because characters are supposed to outgrow their Falstaffs; Oskar encounters his quite late in the game and doesn't appear to demonstrate any moral growth at all that would allow him to move out of the orbit of Klepp.  Maybe this is one reason why the novel in general is so unsatisfying: late growth spurt aside, Oskar is essentially unchanging and thus not terribly compelling as a character.