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rather as Doubt cures his cold Lisbeth by the application of an “unidentified slug.” 27 The black gall or bile that this curiosity of naturemagically draws out of the depressive Lisbeth was, as Grass reminds us, still current in the sixteenth century as a synonym for the ink with which the writer draws his circles. However, a writer who uses black bile as a medium for creative work risks taking on the misunderstood depression of those for whom he writes.
    The further course of Doubt’s story illustrates this very forcefully. After he has proved “that melancholia is curable”—by means of a suction slug—the author condemns him to twelve years in a mental hospital where he lives forgotten, “muttering over the jumbled handwriting on his papers” until, we do not know how, he himself is cured and finds a niche as a cultural affairs official in Kassel in West Germany. 28
    If we ignore this too optimistic turn in the plot, the story tells us that in the social system of the division of labor it is the writer squaring morality who overcomes the collective conscience and, like Dürer in his self-portrait (cited in Grass’s text), points his right finger to the site of illness in his pen and ink drawing, adding the words: “Where the yellow spot is and where the finger is pointing, that is where it hurts.” 29
    In choosing Dürer’s demonstration of suffering as the emblem of his own philosophy of mourning, Grass transcends the question of whether melancholy is a constitutional or a reactive condition, a question that ultimately cannot be clinically determined. It may be true that the chronicle of Grass’s journey through Germany would havebeen a far less intelligent book without that contrapuntal excursus into mourning, but it is equally true that there is something laboriously constructed about the excursus, making it rather like the performance of a historical duty.

Des Häschens Kind, der kleine Has
(The Little Hare, Child of the Hare)
ON THE POET ERNST HERBECK’S TOTEM ANIMAL
     

 
    Most of the recent literature we persist in reading seems inane only a few years later. Or at least, and so far as I am concerned, very little of it has stood the test of time as well as the poems written by Ernst Herbeck from around 1960 onward in his mental hospital in Gugging.
    I first came upon Herbeck’s eccentric figures of speech in 1966. I remember sitting in the Rylands Library in Manchester reading a work on the calamitous Carl Sternheim, and every now and then, as if to refresh my mind, picking up a little volume published by dtv,
Schizophrenie und Sprache
(“Schizophrenia and Language”) and finding myself amazed by the brilliance of the riddling verbal images conjured up, evidently at random, by this most unfortunate of poets. Today, such sequences of words as
Firn der Schnee das Eis gefriert
(“Firn the snow the ice freezes”) or
Blau. Die Rote Farbe. Die Gelbe Farbe. Die Dunkelgrüne. Der Himmel ELLENO
(“Blue. The Red Color. The Yellow Color. The Dark Green.The sky ELLENO ”) still seem to me to verge on the frontiers of a breathless other world.
    Again and again passages of slight distortion and gentle resignation remind one of the way in which Matthias Claudius sometimes manages, with a single semitone or pause, to induce a momentary feeling of levitation in the reader. Ernst Herbeck writes: “Bright we read in the misty sky / How stout the winter days. Are.” There is probably no greater sense of both distance and closeness anywhere in literature. Herbeck’s poems show us the world in reverse perspective. Everything is contained in a tiny circular image.
    It is astonishing that over and beyond his own poems Herbeck also gave us a theory of poetics in a few statements of principle. “Poetry,” he writes, “is an oral way of shaping history in slow motion.… Poetry is also antipathetic to reality, and weighs more heavily. Poetry transfers authority to the pupil. The pupil learns poetry; and that is