HUMANISM IN THOMAS MANN
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heavily descriptive, carrying over into the dialogue the paraphrasis
and courteous formulas of a bygone age, is less hermetic than exegetic.
That cautious advance which takes up no new point until the preced–
ing has been properly exhausted, that thesis which perpetually pro–
duces its own antithesis, reminds us at once of medieval scholasticism
and of Renaissance scholia. The endless dialectic interpretation
in
Doctor Faustus,
the almost frenzied extension of analysis in the
joseph
volumes (where are set forth with rabbinic meticulosity Joseph's
seventeen reasons, among others implied, for resisting Potiphar's
wife) correspond historically to a type of oblique thinking in which
Mann shares; they also express his determination not to rationalize,
but to scrutinize with reason's aid the vast complexity of a world
which will always defy purely human categories. It follows, therefore,
that
his
style tends not only to conserve the logical structure of lan–
guage in its strictest form, but to emphasize this logical pattern even at
the sacrifice of realism in dialogue, thus preserving for discourse its
classical role of an intellectual rather than .an emotional medium of
expression. At certain strategic points of his work, in places where
the unutterable or the inadmissible are in question, he proceeds not
in the manner of modern poets explosively breaking syntactic con–
nections but
in
passing from the current language to one more secret,
which is sometimes a learned language as well. The near parody of
archaism in
The Holy Sinner,
the extraordinary, dream-like French,
slightly distorted as it is by foreigners, which the lovers speak
in
The Magic Mountain,
the German of Luther's time which Lever–
kuhn employs in
his
delirium and his confession, all these are ex–
amples of such protective, indirect language. At a much lower level
the lisping of Potiphar's wife and relapses into dialect on the part
of Frau von Tummler serve also as rudimentary forms of secret
languages, .and are thinly veiled, half-conscious expressions of desire.
Mann's deliberate stylistic complexity matches the painstaking thor–
oughness of his investigation of reality; his problem is to keep the
reader, like the character, from advancing too fast, and only on the
surface. Hence the slow, patient unwinding of thought and of symbol
in
these works, very different from the haughty obscurity of a poet
like George where the abstruse flashes with a diamond's fire, or from
the triply locked allegory of a novelist like Kafka. Mann's discursive
commentary stops just short of vulgar didacticism, and where it
