THOMAS MANN
55
sympathy for the
joli petit bourgeois
whose conception of making love
is to deliver pedantic speeches in questionable French. For Hans can
express his deepest needs only through a medium which permits the
same sense of irresponsibility that belongs to the dream. Only in the
unreal atmosphere of the "Dance of Death" can he bring himself
to speak of the desires of the body, employ the intimate
tu,
and seek
at least a substitute satisfaction through the vicarious instrument of
language. (Something like this last would seem to be the meaning of
the playful insistence on the pencil symbol.) This is altogether con–
sistent with the attitude toward love earlier in the book, in which
Hans' infatuation is registered with clinical accuracy on the mounting
thermometer of his fever. And it is also consistent, of course, with that
general identification of sex with disease and death, with the assem–
bled powers of darkness, that has been a feature of Mann's writing
from the beginning. But what is 'particularly significant here
is
that it
is not the special artist-type but a rather commonplace product of the
culture who has been incapacitated for any direct and spontaneous
emotional expression. It is bourgeois man as a species that the little
earth-goddess from Daghestan rejects when she puts the carnival hat
on Hans Castorp's head.
As
mistress she must descend to the lowlands
and seek out a more adequate lover.
Presented almost entirely through symbols, a remarkable composo–
graph of Falstaff, old man Karamazov, and Zarathustra, Mynheer
Peeperkorn is not only one of Mann's greatest triumphs of pure crea–
tion but one of the few real
mana-characters
in modern fiction.
As
the two lobes of the Apollonian brain had competed with each other
in
their own sterile realm, this living embodiment of the Dionysian is
pitted against nature itself- as
in
the famous scene by the waterfall.
Even his extreme verbal incoherence attests to the dynamic fluidity
of a personality that is "the organ through which God consecrates his
marriage with roused and intoxicated life." What Peeperkorn stands
for historically, of course, is the other side of the liberal bourgeois
medal- the movement of diffuse, inarticulate, and self-consuming
romanticism that was the revenge of feeling on its much-vaunted and
socially more respectable worship of reason in science. And he is made
to serve as an awful example of the consequences of attempting to
make of the romantic attitude a satisfactory attitude toward life. For the
man to whom feeling is such a sacred duty that a failure in feeling
amounts to nothing less than blasphemy must suffer the ignominy of
his
own impotence.
If
Naphta must turn a revolver against the head
that had fabricated so much confusion, Peeperkorn must inject into
his
veins one of the worst poisons of that same earth whose "classic
gifts" he has made his sole criteria of
value~
(By an ingenious piece of
poetic justic the hypodermic syringe, as scientifically described, proves
