HUMANISM IN THOMAS MANN
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is so typical of Sartre, for whom the Christian concept of the
in–
dignity of the flesh persists in a context otherwise shorn of Christian
ideals. But the simple and reassuring notions of felicity, sanity, and
moral equilibrium, so important for the old, traditional humanism,
are likewise rejected, or rather, transformed by this humanism which
knows also the abyss. Desire, sickness, death, and evil, and, by a
bold paradox, thought itself, slowly corroding its bodily support, all
are ferments and solvents
in
a process of alchemical transmutation;
they bring the "phantom of water and albumin," whether willing or
no, again into contact with its original sphere, which is nothing less
than the universe itself.
Mann's attitude in the presence of conclusions to which his own
premises have led him (conclusions frequently subversive) is not with–
out suggestion of the cautious deliberation of his hero Hans Castorp.
His characters differ from those of most of the great novelists of our
day in that they do not at first sight appear to be solitary and de–
socialized, cut off from ideological bases, or even questioning that
such bases exist; nor are they launched in the absurd, or comfortably
installed in some imaginary world. Instead, his heroes are first pre–
sented as inseparable from a class or a group, supported but also
bound fast by social customs which they believe to be good, and
which have been so, perhaps, but which are now no more than
sclerotic remains of a life gone by; their initial state is much less one
of despair than of a certain blind complacency. Only belatedly, and
in fumbling fashion, will each one in tum try to penetrate beneath
that petrified crust, seeking to regain the world of vital energy to
which he belongs, but which he can no longer enter except by sacrific–
ing his external man in actual or symbolic death. Indeed, Mann
seems never to have eliminated wholly from his consciousness, and still
less from his unconscious mind, some remnant of puritanical repro–
bation or bourgeois timidity in face of that adventure in self-discovery;
in a period when the prevalent literary themes inclined more and
more toward facile self-liberation he steadily warned of the gruesome
perils which lie in wait for him who would go beyond familiar and
lawful bounds. To the very last this rupture of the artist with
his
bourgeois environment, though the subject is almost conventional,
continues to be for Mann the symbol of a terrifying choice; early
in his work this drama becomes charged with metaphysical implica-
