The Tearless Century
It is easy to arouse passion and produce pain, not too difficult to evoke laughters, provoke anger, inspire love, or jerk tears. But grief seems such a strong and personal emotion that is almost impossible to induce with special effects, clever script, or artifical intelligence.
In Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, we read about Schmuh’s Onion Cellar — a private club which serves neither alcohol nor music, but a chopping board, a paring knife, and an onions. At Mr Schmuh’s signal, the customers would start chopping the onion to smaller and smaller pieces, and the juice would make them weep, howl, and mourn for all that had been lost forever.
Some believe that the magnitude of upheavals in our era had overwhelmed us, that we blink at disasters and live in a tearless century. Realism, then, is perhaps not as powerful an expression as eels inside a horse’s head, grandma’s layers of skirt, or the fervent drumming of a midget.