MODERN LITERATURE
27
ity surrendering to forces that, in his Apollonian character, he
thought shameful-although this was certainly to my purpose–
but rather for Aschenbach's fevered dreams of the erotic past,
and in particular that dream of the goat-orgy which Mann,
being the kind of writer he is, having the kind of relation to
Nietzsche he had, might well have written to serve as an illustra–
tion of what
The Birth of Tragedy
means by religious frenzy,
the more so, of course, because Mann chooses that particular
orgiastic ritual, the killing and eating of the goat, from which
tragedy is traditionally said to have been derived. A notable ele–
ment of this story in which the birth of tragedy plays an impor–
tant part is that the degradation and downfall of the protagonist
is not represented as tragic in the usual sense of the word-that is,
it is not represented as a great deplorable event. It is a com–
monplace of modern literary thought that the tragic mode is not
available even to the gravest and noblest of our writers. I am not
sure that this is the deprivation that some people think it to be
and a mark of our spiritual inferiority. But if we ask why it has
come about, one reason may be that we have learned to think
our way back through tragedy to the primal stuff out of which
tragedy arose.
If
we consider the primitive forbidden ways of
conduct which traditionally in tragedy lead to punishment by
death, we think of them as being the path to reality and truth,
to an ultimate self-realization. We have always wondered if
tragedy itself may not have been saying just this in a deeply
hidden way, drawing us to think of the hero's sin and death as
somehow conferring justification, even salvation of a sort-no
doubt this is what Nietzsche had in mind when he said that
"tragedy denies ethics." What tragedy once seemed to hint, our
literature now is willing to say quite explicitly.
If
Mann's
Aschenbach dies at the height of his intellectual and artistic
powers, at the behest of a passion that his ethical reason con–
demns, we do not take this to be a defeat, rather a kind of ter–
rible rebirth: at his latter end the artist knows a reality that he
had until now refused to admit to consciousness.
This
being so, how fortunate that the Anchor edition of
