HUMANISM IN THOMAS MANN
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1920s in her full, slightly ridiculous particularities, but this woman
is Germany in allegory; at a level of meaning deeper still, her stricken
body is the cave where Cancer battles Desire and the two, like crabs,
devour each other. Possibly Peeperkom is Gerhart Hauptmann, but
at the same time he
is
some god Pan strangely carved in a crag of
the Engadine; he
is,
above all, a personification of life, massive and
powerful as life itself, and mythically related to the waterfall against
which the author silhouettes him on the eve of his death. Are Naphta
and Settembrini authentic portraits, hardly caricatural, of originals
whose every aspect
is
noted, their attire, state of health, means of
livelihood, their mental twists and peculiar habits of speech? Rather,
do they not exist merely to signify what is empty and arrogant in most
of our philosophical discussions; have we climbed those glacial
heights only to pursue with them
ad absurdum
an endless sophomoric
debate? Or do they, on the contrary, embody two governing prin–
ciples in the world; are they gigantic megaphones through which
is
voiced, with the clumsiness of mere words, a problem grotesquely
stated because far too vast for words? Reality, allegory, and myth
merge into one whole; by some
~rt
of constant circulation all these
~haracters
continually return to that center of life from which they
are born.
The same complexity obtains in Mann where time
is
concerned,
and its corollary, place. Time infinitely varied, since his works are
immersed in great part in an historic or legendary past, whether re–
mote or near, and since, just because they have been fashioned in
the course of a long life, the contemporary parts of his narratives
have been caught up in the passage of time, and have slipped from
the present to the past. The Germany pictured in
Bu.ddenbrooks
or
Death in Venice
differs as much from the Germany reflected
scarcely thirty years later in
The Blood of the Walsungs, Doctor
Faustus,
and
The Black Swan
as from the Goethean setting of
The
Beloved Returns.
Furthermore, by some mysterious change, the
im–
mediate in Mann enters promptly into the category of the historical;
for this contemplator of time in motion the present has no privileged
place in the sequence of centuries; all periods, including this in which
we exist, are drifting alike within time itself. Occasionally these novels,
though set in the past, have encroached upon the future, as when
at the end of
The Magic Mountain
Joachim's ghost appears wearing
a helmet from a war which has not yet taken place; the discomfiture
