450
PARTISAN
REVIEW
edge m which subject and object will have become identical, was se–
duced. The tale sounded motifs akin
~o
those that he was developing
symphonicaIIy in
Joseph and His Brothers.
In a playful, very sophisti–
cated excursion, therefore, he composed, with plastic irony, an erotic
idyl reminiscent of his own much earlier
Tristan,
yet catching wonder–
fuIIy many of Zimmer's themes and through these a glimpse of the
timeless East.
One notes, however, a fundamental difference between Thomas
Mann's reading of the Indian material and Heinrich Zimmer's. The
novelist, retaining a rational, psychological position, aIlows the distinc–
tion between subject and object to remain as an impasse and brings
his tale to a pathetic end. Just as in
Death in Venice,
a tragic yearning
for union ends in a love-death. Zimmer's elucidation of the same Indian
story, on the other hand, is from the position of Indian experience and
belief. The reader is not held within the frame of empirical experience,
but is carried beyond.
In the Indian story, as Zimmer shows, the king to whom the tale
of the transposed heads is told is brought to a realization of the world
as a texture of inevitable contrarieties originating beyond the field and
reach of the categories of human judgment, and therefore not compre–
hensible to the discriminating inteIIect. A new experience of the super–
natural boundlessness of being is made available to him. His vision di–
lates. His ears open to the roar of eternity. The Creator himself bestows
on him a sword, "Invincible," which is the sovereignty of the earth. And
so his end is not the pathetic or tragic defeat of the body but a
beatific victory in the understanding of himself as the temporal seat
of eternal being, eternal consciousness, and eternal bliss. The whole
universe of names and forms (which includes the noumenality and
phenomenality of the Creator as weIl as of the king) is realized and
experienced as a reflex of that transcendent yet immanent eternal ground
and source which in Hinduism is caIled
atman,
the Self, and in Bud–
dhism shunyata, the Void.
"Just as in true love," wrote Zimmer, in a briIliant exposition of
Indian philosophy,
Ewiges Indien,
published in 1930, "or just as in
a true marriage, the two no longer live 'for one another' but are within
each other, so is the eternaIly living Divine Principle ever within the
world as its animating power. The play of the world-embracing and
consuming itself-which is throughout a play of power, the seer recog–
nizes as the apprehensible part of the Divine, as the magic in which
True Being enwraps itself for its own display. And this world is
holy through and through-'Divinity's living garment,' not a Vale of
Tears. The one who knows this remains untouched by the terror of
