162
PARTISAN REVIEW
tant themes in
The Magic Mountain,
have sinisterly disappeared;
instead, the hero of this work achieves his full stature by methods
of self-destruction, or else by imprisonment within his own being.
The initiate has become the damned. Going back beyond Goethe for
interpretation of the pact, Mann immerses his utterly modern Faust
in an atmosphere of the dying Middle Ages which is also an at–
mosphere of apocalypse, the end of the world. By a technique of
apparent withdrawal characteristic of Mann's literary game Lever–
kuhn's grim tragedy is reported in conventional and flatly academic
terms by a narrator, Doctor Zeitblom, interposed between us and the
hero, and it thus becomes about what the story of Faust would be
if recounted by the scholar Wagner, or Hamlet's story if told by
some Horatio crossed with old Polonius. The virtuous sentiments of
Doctor Zeitblom form a kind of neutralizing agent between the ac–
cursed composer and the legitimate apprehension of the reader. So
grave are the political and moral implications of this work, as set
forth in Leverkiihn's problem as an artist, that we understand why
the author has resorted to prudent circumlocution: this novel of
veiled meanings aims at nothing less than revealing the inevitable,
and accordingly almost justifiable, collaboration of Satan in every
human achievement, however horrifying the thought of such justifi–
cation may be. The reader is the more uneasy in that this novel,
mingling as it does incidents drawn from the lives of Nietzsche and
Tchaikovsky, portraits
a
clef,
and autobiographical suggestions (even
using the mirror-like device of portraying its hero as treating in music
subjects which Mann
has
treated in literature), seems to sound a fear–
some echo to Tonic Kroger's lamentations, some half-century before,
as to the dubious status of the artist and the sinister nature of the
artistic process itself. One wonders, in the end, if the somber grandeur
of this product of Mann's old age does not lie in his categorical
return to the traditional opposition of good and evil, abandoning
outright every humanist position; or whether, on the contrary, be–
neath the apparent, dramatic denunciation of the daemoniac a
strangely subversive daemonism has not secretly won the day.
It would be easy to compile from Mann's writings a list of
hermetic themes or incidents somewhat similar to the symbols of
Qo~the's
Fairy Tale
or of the Second Part of
Faust,
or to Masonic alle·
