MYTH AND HISTORY
27
through love, disease, divine grace, or symbolically identical agencies,
his ego has begun to recede and he is becoming a new curious "shell
made of his own substance", lifeless, solemn, formal, and "noble."
Into this corpse, however, the process continuing, there seep once
more the seeds of growth and organic integration, bringing again
April, anguish, and shame. And then, he returns again to the com–
munity, grows mechanical, rational, social, and, in a different sense
than that of his organic "initiation", finds himself, here too, to
be
transcendental and super-personal.
Respectable people reject Cocteau as an irresponsible impresario
of cultural
trompe d'oeil,
and his art as a mixture of opium levitation
and surrealist hoaxing. Yet in the same quarters a heavy solemnity
greets Mann's even-keeled philosophic Zeppelin buoyed by a more
careful blending of the same gases. Science, death, vision, ecstasy,
combine in a typical passage of
The Magic Mountain
(Castorp has
just
stripped off his shirt before the X-ray machine) :
"Put your arms about it," he [the doctor] said. "Embrace the
board, pretend it's something else-if you like. Press your breast
against it as though
it
filled you with rapture. Like that. Draw a deep
breath."
(And a little later, when the doctor permits Castorp to observe the
inner structure of.
his
own~and)
:
"With the eyes of
his
Tienappel ancestress [who had visions of
the skeletons of those about to die] penetrating, prophetic eyes, he
gazed at this familiar part of his own body, and for the first time in
his
life he understood that he would die. At the thought there came
over his face the expression it usually wore when he listened to music:
a little dull, sleepy, and pious, his mouth half open, his head inclined
towards one shoulder."
Though Mann's dramas are decided on the subjective plane,
the limits of the psychology of character and motivation are set by
the mechanics of his dogmatic-moral scheme. His favorite theme, the
slipping over of restraint into abandonment, follows a deductive pat–
tern
which excludes the possibility of individual variation. Mann's
characters are moved by a determinism far more rigid than that of
the
real world. One or two examples will demonstrate how his novels
contradict his optimistic asseverations that man is free to decide his
· by choosing
his
values. Castorp, whose physical condition de–
on Mann's moral juxtapositions, has been listening to the
couple making love in an adjoining room:
"Here Hans Castorp remarked with surprise that the flush which
mounted in his freshly shaven cheek did not subside, nor its
warmth; his face glowed with the same dry heat as
