156
PARTISAN REVIEW
of the Buddenbrooks family is more complete today than in the years
when it was described; the existence of an inquisitorial mysticism
such as Naphta's
in
The Magic Mountain
has been grimly authenti–
cated by the subsequent course of actual historical events.
Gradually Mann's spatial and temporal conceptions have been
enlarged, if not changed, by his progression throughout half a cen–
tury from realism
in
the literal sense of the term to realism in its
full philosophic implications. The drama of
Buddenbrooks
was still
set against a background of urban life, and moved with the town
clocks of Lubeck. In
The Magic Mountain,
however, Hans Castorp's
evocation of waves and sand along a distant Baltic shore suggests
the beat and timeless particles of pure duration. The feverish tempo
of the sanatorium, so exactly situated in an hour of universal history,
before the outbreak of the War of 1914, is gauged on the scale of
geological time, like that of the mountain itself. The
joseph
novels
have their own, Biblical time, running like a mere trickle in the im–
mensity of the Mesopotamian plain immemorially inhabited by man.
In
Doctor Faustus,
daemonic time, extended to infinity and obtained
at the price of the hero's life, is inscribed within the limits of the last
years of pre-Hitlerian Germany, but bears no relation to the visible
passage of day and night. Thus, more and more explicitly are mo–
ments in history assimilated into a cosmic conception of eternity.
"I adore you, phantom of water and albumin, destined for dis–
section in the tomb." Such are the words of Hans Castorp to Clavdia
Chauchat in the course of the strangest of avowals of love. Mann
is only formulating here, in terms of organic chemistry, views akin
to those of humanist occultists of the Renaissance: man the micro–
cosm, formed of the same substance and governed by the same laws
as the cosmos, subject like matter itself to a series of partial or total
transmutations, and connected with everything else by some highly
developed capillary system. Such basically cosmic humanism has noth–
ing to do with Platonic and Christian antinomy of soul and body,
of the world of the mind and the world of the senses, of God and
matter. It admits, therefore, neither of the process of mystic con–
version which marks the more recent writings of Aldous Huxley,
nor of that asceticism born of aesthetic standards which raises Proust
from contemplation of a world of imperfect and transitory reality
to the vision of a world which is flawless and pure. Nor does it allow
for that identification of the physiological with the repulsive which
