THOMAS MANN
25
authority from one or another of the old myths of the past surviving
into the present. We live in an age whose atmosphere has become so
charged with the sulphurous fumes of conflicting mythologies that
reason has less and less air in which to respire. And for Mann, who
has been above all the spokesman of a more
enlightened
humanity, to
invite us back into the dark and tortuous regions of Hebrew myth,
cannot but seem to some people a kind of spiritual and intellectual
backsliding.
But the purpose of this essay is to suggest that rather than being
inconsistent with his long devotion to the cause of reason, Mann's
turning to the myth in his new work represents a synthesis between
reason and experience that is full of the highest possibilities for our
time. Moreover, it is to point out that the processes involved in this
synthesis have been implicit in his work almost from the beginning.
For even the most casual reading of his earlier novels and tales must
reveal to what extent the images and symbols underlying or appearing
alongside the analytical and discursive exposition are capable of
being ordered according to the immemorial pattern of the myth. It
is as if we are confronted with two orders of meaning, with their
corresponding structures-the logical and the. symbolical, and as if
the dialectic interplay between the two constitutes his work as a whole.
I
From the beginning Mann has discovered his hero in that lonely
and neglected figure, that "marked man," that black sheep of modern
bourgeois society to which he has referred as the artist-type. In those
carbolic little tales that he wrote around the age of twenty, the pro–
found social ostracism of the type is frequently indicated through the
device of symbolical deformity. Johannes Friedemann is humpbacked,
Tobia Mindernickel's exterior is "provoking to laughter," Christian
Jacoby is collosally fat, and Praisegod Piepsam's face is a huge "fu–
nereal joke." This is the Tatality which in the case of every one of
them leads to some terrible and overwhelming humiliation. Little
Herr Friedemann is literally kicked back to reality by the beautiful
woman to whom he makes love; poor Jacoby, in "Little Lizzy,"
forced to dress up in baby's clothes and sing a tune composed by his
wife's lover, dies of mortification.
As
for Mindernickel and Piepsam,
children jeer at them as they pass down the street. These stories reek
of the sort of
fin de siecle
sadism and masochism that Mario Praz
has treated in
The Romantic Agony.
For all their precocious urbanity
and studied objectivity they are the products of an imagination which
has not yet attained maturity, which is writing at the level of the
abyss. Their characters are simply
Doppelganger
for the young writer
