26
PARTISAN REVIEW
problem but a set- of terms representing a spiritual conflict-it be–
comes possible to hate scientists!
This reflex to science is a major platitude of our times. And the
analogical technique in elaborating its symbol-language discovers
in
medicine and physiology a rich warehouse of death masks and
infernal stageprops. Cocteau, for example, creates in his
Orpheus
a
meticulous vaudeville with arrangements of surgical implements, mes–
sengers from the grave, sex, the Artist, and other items of the new–
myth paraphernalia.
Marxism anticipates the overcoming of individual alienation
through the reorganization of society. The spiritual predicament of
modern man is conceived by materialist historical thought as belong–
ing to a definite stage of man's struggle with nature; from this view
science is an indispensable instrument of the human, the weapon of
its knowledge and consciousness of the world. Mann, however, whose
politics make so vital an issue of freedom, presents the spiritual
dilemma of present day man as an eternal situation. He translates the
conflict between individual and socie{y ·into a cyclical drama of moral
absolutes, a form of allegory or Mystery Play. The old angels of
Heaven and Hell emerge once more upon the stage, where nothing
has changed but the costumes and manners of the actors. In the half–
farce of the medieval theatre, Satan, Hell's Mouth, and the Tortures
of the Damned provided a spectacular decor for the Last Judgment
and the Triumph of Virtue: on Mann's modern stage the ornamental
function is performed by Science and its arcana-doctors, diagnoses,
effects of the weather and intoxication, the physiology of!'shame and
exaltation.
Having fixed the identity of society, discipline, science, and
death, Mann's method creates a perspective of polar absolutes
in
which all the data of modern man's existence reproduce themselves
in
the tableau of an eternal destiny. The life of the individual now works
itself out as a series of self-destructive phases : making its debut in the
social community of the family (duty-bound, legal, and ritualistic
in
its essence), the ego is drawn by "love, disease, and music" towards
an extreme of isolation and self-recognition, where it is confirmed,
heightened, exaggerated, and, finally, through an irony of reversal, dis–
solved into its opposite; by means of this dissolution 1t passes, meta–
phorically, through the rainbow of Dionysian mysteries and trans–
cendental states- it comes to know death, eternity and prophecy; with
a dual awfulness and beauty the individual receives h1s keenest sense
of himself as a unique, free being, a once-occurring, completely dif–
ferentiated and cosmically centred entity, at the very moment when,
