56
PARTISAN REVIEW
to be identical in mechanism with the phallus.) In the pact that Hans
and Clavdia seal with their lips during his "Gethsemene" the cult of
life and feeling becomes one with the cult of death: their loyalty is
to the terrible image of death-in-life on the hospital bed. In the end
Peeperkorn does not quite escape tragedy, for he cannot escape self–
consciousness, that is to say, the human. "They saw the head sink
sideways, the broken bitterness of the lips, they saw the man of sor–
rows
in
his guise." All his show of exuberant vitality .had been but a
pose, a disguise, something suspect from the beginning, and therefore a
futile attempt at denying the human problem.
The same betrayal of the essentially deathward tendency of the
romantic attitude is included in Clavdia's rebuke to Hans that he
exists for self-enrichment rather than self-forgetfulness. No more than
in the heady region of the Apollonian does Hans find ·solace in the
feverish morasses of the Dionysian: the two cancel each other /?ut in
the altogether empty equation of death. But during his walk in the
snowstorm he has his waking vision, dreams "the Mediterranean
dream-poem of humanity," in which they are once again restored to
their proper relationship to each other and in a much more compre–
hensible fashion than in the celebrated Nietzschean synthesis.
In this episode the whole pattern of the work
is
contained in micro–
cosm: the process by which Hans stumbles blindly over the mountain
peaks and hollows parallels minutely its antitheses, its self-contradic–
tions, and its circular development. The blank and unstable precipita–
tions of the atmosphere floating everywhere around him correspond
to his own now quite completed sense of the terrifying metaphysical
identity of all things. The immediate problem is literally one of life
or death; but before this problem of the will can be solved the mind
must restore its distinction between these processes which have become
so hopelessly interfused. Significantly, it is only by shifting from leg
to leg that he is able to generate enough warmth to maintain that
"form through change of substance" which the Hofrat had offered
him as the definition of·organic life. But the snowflakes, condensing
into their too strict geometric designs, also help through their challenge
to the living principle, force him to maunder on, sense or no sense, as
from a bourgeois sense of duty. In the last analysis, it is not logic but
the secret and unpredictable triumph of the life-instinct over the death–
instinct that leads to his vision of the dancing youths and maidens, of
the ceremonial beauty of the family groups in the marketplace, and
finally of the two old witches dismembering a child in the temple. It
is
a terrible and a beautiful dream. But for Hans it constitutes a total
vision of "the human being, the delicate .child of lfie, man, his state
and standing in the universe." And in his acceptance of it he resolves
in a flash all the warring contradictions of the conscious mind: "The
