54
PARTISAN REVIEW
a more dangerous character than his opponent. Mter all Settembrini
clings to what he calls love to the very last; his humanism is not in–
capable of a corrected and reordered stateme!1t; his most fundamental
defect is that he is hopelessly out-of-date.
In the duel between them Mann symbolizes the exasperating
dilemma of the whole bourgeois intellectual world. This may be stated
historically as a death-struggle between the exhausted tradition of
liberal bourgeois humanism and a reemergent mysticism or super–
naturalism. Politically, it is to be more sharply defined as between
democracy and one or another form of totalitarianism. (By a brilliant
stroke of economy Mann manages to telescope two of the prevalent
forms of the latter-ultra-montane Catholicism and Soviet commu–
nism-in a single person; he was unable, as early as 1925, to foresee
the rise of Fascism.) But ultimately there proves to be no difference
between these counter-positions when their exponents are brought
face to face with each other on the field of action. Neither liberal
humanism nor authoritarian terrorism is able to engage the complete
will of the individual: Naphta shoots himself in impotent rage, and
Settembrini goes on making speeches. Neither reason nor spirit makes
a successful accomodation to the realm of matter. All that we are
made to understand is that Settembrini, despite his fatuous pose of
martyrdom, is still in possession of some of the right values. But there
is a tragi:comic dissolution of the conflict rather than a real resolution;
and the realm of matter bursts in upon the inhabitants of the Magic
Mountain to put both reason and spirit to flight.
Before this scene Hans Castorp himself, however, has achieved
something like a resolution within the less public sphere of his own
thoughts and feelings. But to understand what this has involved it
is
necessary to turn from the mock-epical to the mythical aspects of the
work, from the Apollonian to the Dionysian elements of its hero's
'.
expenence.
Unlike Aschenbach, Hans has apparently crossed the Freudian
borderline at adolescence and has no trouble in rediscovering
his
schoolfellow Pribislav Hippe's features in the thoroughly feminine
countenance of Clavdia Chauchat. Dark, brooding, and of an exotic
origin, the latter represents a final accentuation of the type already
encountered in the mothers of little Hanno and Tonio Kroger. At the
same time she has much of the sadistic callousness of those Amazonian
women who tormented Mann's earlier artist-heroes. Perhaps the lady
from the "good" Russian table, with the dirty finger-nails and the
habit of slamming doors,
is
best to be regarded as a modern avatar of
Ishtar, Isis, or any other one of those old fertility goddesses who com–
bined in themselves the two roles of mother and mistress. In her
mother-aspect Clavdia can afford to show a certain amount of tender
