52
PARTISAN REVIEW
one or another of the voices crying from the abyss but a still more
vigorous application of the conscious mind to the problems of experi–
ence. (The arena of conflict is the brisk and sun-lit mountain-top of
the mind as
it
had been the lush jungle of the sensibility in
Death in
Venice.)
And, anagogically, it
leads
us back to the world of concrete
living experience, to the world of men in action, where all the con–
clusions or resolutions of the mind must finally be brought to test.
But such a reading relates the work exclusively to that rather
simple type of folk-myth in which the hero is not required to pass
beyond the boundaries that separate the human from the divine, the
terrestrial from the supernatural. And there is actually the hilarious
suggestion that the mountain-sanitarium represents an
absolute
sepa–
ration from the rest of the earthly planet. The mountain is a "magic"
one, peopled with all sorts of elves and trolls, who play at their special
variety of dice for Hans Castorp's soul. It is the old evil abstract
world of the Northern imagination: the
macabre
hangs about it from
beginning to end. But Mann has also been influenced by the brighter
Mediterranean tradition, and we hardly need his hint that the work
is epic in form to distinguish in its more important characters modern
parallels for Apollo, Dionysius, Cybele, and the other incumbents of
the Homeric heaven. The sanitarium is above all a kind of Mount
Olympus, an international theocracy of invalids and cranks, who per–
sonify all the attitudes and points of view current in Europe of the
period. It is as if we are brought to a much later stage of literary
development than was represented by the primitive ritual-drama of
Death in Venice.
Weare at that more civilized and more irreverent
stage in which not only is the culture-hero made to cut a ridiculous
figure among the gods but the gods themselves are deprived of their
dignity as the projected idealisations of the race. In brief, Hans Cast–
orp is a "strayed bourgeois" among the malingering Immortals of the
bourgeois epoch.
For convenience the Olympian contestants for Hans Castorp's
soul may be divided into the two groups of the Apollonian and the
Dionysian-a classification that with a little effort can be made to fit
each of the innumerable more abstract formulations of the dialectic
conflict between reason and feeling which is the subject of the work.
It enables us, for example, to bring under a single aegis two such
apparently irreconcilable characters as Naphta and Settembrini. For
to what does the bitter struggle between these two self-avowed expo–
nents of reason correspond but to the tension that must always exist in
the Apollonian between the form of reason and its medium or expres–
sion, between logic and rhetoric? In Settembrini, the representative of
the Renaissance tradition of liberal bourgeois democracy, reason ex–
presses itself in a language overwhelming to the young civilian from
