36
PARTISAN REVIEW
ing a final alternative. Death is omnipresent, not as a threat to con–
tinuity but as one of its major styles. Castorp's growth, while it
in–
volves loss of equilibrium, cannot be checked by anything in the outer
world. His education is founded upon pedagogy, reading, and self–
recognition, a sort of spiritual bookkeeping-"taking stock" Mann
appropriately calls it-rather than upon the defeat or attainment of
some human purposes. His is the record of a preordained career, of
a gamble in which nothing is risked, since everything fits it. One
is
reminded, by way of contrast, of Dostoyevsky's "blank walP'-for–
midable obstacle to man's desire. "What stone wall?" the Man from
the Underground asks. "Why, of course, the laws of nature . .." Cas–
torp freely contemplating this wall simply absorbs it into his sym–
bolist instruction. The only conclusive act attempted in
The Magic
Mountain,
the suicide of Naphta, breaks out of the structure of the
novel and lacks convincing motivation: so, too, with the entranced
assassination of Cipolla in
Mario.
In Mann's world the act that fixes
and defines is always an Irrational.
Is there not a social kernel in this formulation of life as an un–
broken continuation of the old ·through an eternal process, within
which the "human" role is to maintain balance and not be carried
over too
f~
either on the side of life or on the side of death?
The conservative merchant life which Mann so much admires
dominated a period of German history when social changes worked
in
the main through a gradual accumulation which modified the past
by augmenting it. True, the burgher of Mann's youth had lost the
springtide vitality he had enjoyed in Goethe's days. That "real
per·
sonality, the picturesque figure" of the merchant, whom Castorp
recognized as his ancestor, proved upon closer examination to have
acquired certain scarcely noticeable traits-gestures, momentary
lapses-harmless enough in themselves, but, when one thought about
it, hinting· unmistakably at the presence of death. The vigor of the
~dividual
Will fell short somehow of being the sole lord of harmo–
nious, well-timed transformation. "Dark forces" had risen, both with–
in and without, to challenge the steady progress towards a better life.
Yet in this autumn phase the opposition between new and old,
while growing more distinct, more
systematic
in character, seemed at
the same time to be fused in the increase and ripeness of the latter.
Conflict itself seemed a principle of health. Before 1914 there was
little external evidence of a final limit, a mortal period.
It is pre-war Germany that is reflected in Mann's theory of
change. The economic contradictions of this epoch are, like its moral,
theoretical, and esthetic ones, lifted to the level of universal law. The
process of growth might
be
periodically dislocated (as in business
