THOMAS MANN: MYTH AND REASON
William Troy
LIKE
NEARLY ALL
the more important writers of his generation,
Thomas Mann has turned finally to the frank and open exploitation
of the myth. The direction that has taken him to it has been very
generally that which has taken Yeats, Joyce, Valery and the others–
the inveterate tendency of the literary imagination to deal with whole
patterns of experience.
More particularly, it has been the late nineteenth century' move–
ment of protest against the devastating incursion of the scientific tem- .
per in the realm of literature and the arts. But Mann has come to
the myth, not in the manner of the heirs of French symbolism, who
reconstructed it gradually out of the tattered remnants and fragments
still floating along the mainstream of literary tradition, but only after
the most conscious and deliberate threshing-out of all the problems
involved in giving adequate expression to our cultural predicament.
His masters have been Dostoievski, Ibsen, Tolstoi, and Wagner; and
like those hard-working titans of "the great and suffering nineteenth
(century" he has never been able to separate the problems
of art from the problems of the historical mind. He has been
at least as much influenced by philosophers like Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche, by psychologists like Freud and Jung, as by any par–
ticular members of the literary tradition itself.
If
he has turned to
an application of the "mythical-psychological" method described in
his
essay on Wagner, therefore, it is the result of a decision supported
by reason and judgment, of a necessity imposed by his special view
of the extremely responsible role that must be played by the artist
at any time.
By some of his admirers, however, this decision has been un–
doubtedly greeted with an ill-concealed lack of enthusiasm, a certain
vague sense of apprehension and discomfort. And indeed the con–
temporary mind is sufficiently justified in responding negatively even
to the sound of the word myth, which has become synonymous with
the idea of organized falsehood. Some of the worst tendencies in every
department of modern life and thought derive their impetus and
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