Vol. 23 No. 2 1956 - page 159

HUMANISM IN THOMAS MANN
159
work in sounding new and strange depths. Here, upon the snow,
myth dawns, openly: that element of the fantastic which is diffused
through some of the early stories is channeled now in accordance
with laws of primitive, magic epic and of rituals of initiation. At
the same time Mann attains to what may be called a classic phase
in his romanticism, recognizable from the fact that this work, like all
classic achievement, closes with some slight gain in the realm of
human understanding; the novel of the triumph of death has be–
come a novel of education in the vein of
Wilhelm Meister:
Hans
Castorp has
learned
to live. That somewhat inept, almost comical
young bourgeois, whom the author dispatches into the battle smoke
of the War of 1914 without wishing, or perhaps being able, to tell
whether or not he will come out alive, exemplifies a species more and
more threatened with extinction,
Homo Sapiens.
Such an eternal
student is the antithesis of the Sorcerer's Apprentice: for him the
study of science, which is too often blamed for dehumanizing, leads
only to a more accurate conception of the possibilities and limitations
of man's estate, and does so by a method which has ever been that
of the true humanist; experimentation with those doubtful sciences,
half true, half false, which are called the occult sciences, are no
more than a valiant exploration carried on to the farthest point of
human knowledge. Hermetic wisdom has become for him wisdom
pure and simple.
The tetralogy
Joseph and His Brothers,
set on the borderland
between history and myth, is one of those great humanistic interpre–
tations of the past made possible of accomplishment only because of
the slow and little-advertised work of generations of scholars, in this
case notably ethnographers, historians of ancient religions, and archae–
ologists of the last half-century. For the first time a literary work
which is intended neither as a defense of the Jewish point of view
nor as Christian exegesis shows us both what unites the Jewish race
with, and separates it from, the vast world of pagan religion and
myth, and makes us witness that monstrous birth, as it were, of the
monotheistic conception of God.
If
of all Mann's great books the
Joseph
novels alone have the erotic interest concentrated almost ex–
clusively upon conjugal love, or rather, upon the procreative forms
of sensuality, it is because the entire series is in a way the story of
a symbolic pregnancy: Jacob-called-Israel gives birth to God much
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