164
PARTISAN REVIEW
role; they retire once they have led the living, or the dying, to the
brink of that inner abyss where mysteries of the senses, of life, and of
death lie exposed. Even the most fully embodied of these loves are
hardly more tangible than the bizarre entities in
The Wardrobe
and
in
Doctor Faustus,
the naked story-teller and the little Mermaid, both
of auto-erotic origin, perhaps. What Mann stresses in love is strange
combinations: identity of sex, disparity of race, or of age, the con–
junction of beauty and disease
within
the same body, the rarity of
physical possession, if not its lack; all these are essential ingredients
of a potion which transports to realms far from the habitual, the
licit, the known. Quite without paradox we may include within the
same category of magic the theme of incest as it occurs in
The Blood
of the Walsungs
or
The Holy Sinner.
For incest shows the individual
falling back upon himself and his family group, sealing in their isola–
tion, as it were, but at the same time breaking violently with the
mores of the group;
it
tends, for at least a part of mankind, to con–
stitute both the supreme sexual crime and the supreme magic act,
and is imbued, therefore, with both prestige and horror. Mann's dar–
ing approach to the subject is more in line with tradition than might
at first appear; more than one Oriental and German legend portrays
the hero, or the predestined one, as a son born of incest, as does
The Holy Sinner.
Equally magic is the role allotted to music : in the post-Wagner–
ian world of
Buddenbrooks
or of
Tristan
music still works an evil
spell; in
The Magic Mountain
it is frankly necromantic; it becomes
daemoniac in the atonal universe of
Doctor Faustus,
where Arnold
Schoenberg's experimentation is made the supreme symbol of destruc–
tion and renewal of forms. One might be tempted to see in this
laying of emphasis upon music a wholly German trait, but the fact
is that so typically French a writer as Proust attributes almost as
much power to that art as does Mann. "More extraordinary than
table-turning ..." : Proust, too, has felt that by some admirable
black magic each virtuoso actually engaged in performing Vinteuil's
Sonata
was reverently summoning its composer back to life. Still, for
the author of
Remembrance of Things Past
music is less a ritual in–
cantation than an intimation of immortality. Swann does not seek
to descend, as does Hans, into the realm of Death, hypnotically fol–
lowing the gyrations of gramophone disks for arias from popula,.r
