THOMAS
MANN'S WORK ON MYTH': THE USES OF THE PAST
Copyright
2006 Thomas Hollweck
I
How do we understand the interest in myth that surfaced in the first
third of the twentieth century? The following remarks are meant as a
reflection on the relation between the modern experience and myth in the case
of one twentieth century author and his work,
Thomas
Mann and his work on myth.
When we think about Western modernity, we think of rejection of
tradition, an unquestioning belief in the future as the realm of human
possibilities, and a series of avant-gardes trying to outdo one another in the
quest for novelty. Yet this picture of modernity may well be called a
caricature, the stuff of countless textbooks on Western Civilization. For a
second glance at modernity reveals a far stronger concern with the past, be it
as the foundation of modernity, be it as the reaction against the perceived or
real speed of material and social change, or be it as the unquiet search for
something that is experienced as having been lost and that should by all means
be recovered for the sake of recovering the essence of our humanity, however
that essence may be conceived. In short, the argument must be made that
modernity, for all its dreams about new worlds and new ways of being, is
deeply wedded to the past. What began with Vico's discovery of the myth as
the founding element of society, in opposition to Descartes' tabula rasa
of the cogito, with Herder's Urpoesie der Vlker and his
treatise on the origin of language came into full bloom in German romanticism,
in Schellings Die Weltalter and Creuzer's Symbolik
und Mythologie der alten Vlker. Simultaneously, there is the
unprecedented flowering of historiography that marks the nineteenth century
and its late romantic revivals of the Middle Ages in
Europe
. Even Hegel's philosophy of history is founded on the idea that the spirit
that unfolds in history and that comes to its consciousness in time has its
ground in a past before all past. And, forgive my Germanic bias, what more
radical attempt to seize the past, nota bene, the essential past, not
the historical past, than Nietzsche's Genealogy, and the monumental
statement Nietzsche's antipode, Wagner made, when he let the story of the
twilight of the gods, the story of our civilization, as he saw it, begin in
the depths of the river Rhine. From there it was but a small step for Sigmund
Freud to conclude that what ails us as individuals is our refusal to remember
our own preconscious past, a deliberate refusal to recognize that the
beginning is a trauma. By the late nineteenth century, the present, all the
progressive optimism of the imperial entrepreneurs notwithstanding, had become
an uncomfortable dwelling for some of its more sensitive denizens, and it was
not long into the twentieth century when the one truly gifted Expressionist
poet, Gottfried Benn could begin a poem with the line: "Oh dass wir unsere
Ur-ur-ahnen wren./Ein Klmpchen Schleim in einem warmen Moor. (Oh, to be
one of our earliest ancestors./A clump of slime who basks in steamy moors.)"
This was written one year before the catastrophe of European civilization, in
1913.
Whatever lay behind Benn's pessimism, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are
part of its ancestry and Spengler's Decline of the West was being
written simultaneously. It conveys a sense of history fatigue, a weariness of
historicism, a rejection of the civilization that had sought salvation in
being able to recount the origins and genesis of everything under the sun and
beyond. But the past which the historian and scientists of the nineteenth
century had sought to explore had led to illusory beginnings,
Scheinanfnge, or "provisional origins" (in Lowe-Porter's
translation) that are on the way of the "Descent into Hell," the Prelude
to
Thomas
Mann's Joseph and His Brothers. Spengler made a valiant attempt to
escape from those illusory beginnings by making them all equal beginnings of
new cycles of new cultures that supplanted the dying and dead ones.
What
I would like to show in the following is that, following the First World War,
there was a changed sense of time, of the present and its extension into past
and future, and that a fundamental change in cultural memory took place,
summarized in the opening sentence of Paul Valry's The Crisis of the
Mind (1919): "We later civilizations . . . we too know now that we are
mortal." The predominant mood in literature and the arts after 1918 is one
of disruption in culture and history, the experience of time having become
lost, that time had indeed become relative, and that trying to regain a
cultural sense of time and history required the discarding of the
individualistic subjectivism that had dominated the liberal age. This changed
sense of time was indeed a shared experience, even though the responses
differed. The collapse of the European meta-narrative indicated to many
writers that the organization of experience in terms of an exemplary
individual story falsified the very nature of the new experience and its
cultural memory. Eliot's Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, and
Joyce's Ulysses stand for a new understanding of time and history, a
search for the trans-historical and the rediscovery of myth as the area where
trans-individual and trans-historical meaning could still be found. The "hunger
for the myth became itself the greatest myth of the 1920s," Theodore
Ziolkowski aptly stated already in 1970. But it was
Thomas
Mann, one of the time's most perceptive writers, who gave what I would call
the definitive description of the fundamental shift in the understanding of
time and history after World War I in the "Foreword" to his Magic
Mountain that appeared in 1924, when he wrote about the story of his
reluctant hero Hans Castorp: "It is his story, and not every story happens
to everybody this story, we say, belongs to the long ago; is already, so
to speak, covered with historic mould, and unquestionably to be presented in
the tense best suited to a narrative out of the depth of the past." Hans Castorp's story, as you will remember, is set in the years
1907 to 1914. The author of Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice was
especially well equipped to appreciate the nature of the problem, because in
the two prior works he had written the histories of a decline, the decline of
a family and the death of its young scion Hanno in Buddenbrooks, while
in Death in Venice Gustav Aschenbach, the model of a nineteenth century
historical novelist, comes to grief in pursuing the charms of the young Tadzio.
In a patriotic moment,
Thomas
Mann had already tried his hand on myth-making at the beginning of the epochal
war, when in the essay Frederick and the Grand Coalition he compared
the political situation of Germany with that of the Prussian king Frederick
the Great whom he depicts as a demonic figure who created Prussia's power
through his sheer will, almost out of nothing, in the face of overwhelming
military odds.
Thus, at a time when the contemporaries were questioning the story of
the relatively even upward movement of history towards a global civilization
based on the self-understanding of European mandarins and when they responded
with a more or less radical destruction of the idols and the creation of a
timeless, mythical present,
Thomas
Mann and Marcel Proust stayed within the "subjective" narrative of a past
they knew and in which they sensed the origins of the present. Proust tried to
accomplish this feat by recreating a meticulous book of memory of the culture
of his childhood and youth; Mann by way of creating the quasi scientific
experiment of placing his protagonist Castorp into the hermetically rarefied
atmosphere of a Swiss sanatorium, surrounded by the decaying flora of European
society before the outbreak of the war. This is not the place to discuss the
relative merits of either experiment, but only to show what
Thomas
Mann learned from conducting his narrative search for the origins of a
civilizational catastrophe and how it informed his later understanding of
humanity and its history.
My understanding of
the guiding structural principle of Mann's work is that, beginning with Buddenbrooks
and ending with Doctor Faustus, it is based in the writer's present,
a present that is never experienced as momentary, but embedded in an ongoing
reflective process in which the writer continuously responds to the social and
historical situation of which he is a part. Whatever literary scholars have
said about Mann's political writings during and after World War I,
especially his Reflections of a Non-Political Man (1918), the war
turned this initially non-political writer into an active participant in the
discussion of the
Weimar
Republic
.
The "Preface" to the Magic Mountain illustrates Mann's first
deliberate attempt to bring together the narrator and the historical present
the story of which he is about to tell. Following
the observation about the "long-ago" nature of Hans Castorp's personal
story, the narrator continues: "Since stories must be in the past, then the
more past the better, it would seem, for them as their character as histories,
and for him the teller of them, the rounding wizard of times gone by (und fr
den Erzhler, den raunenden Beschwrer des Imperfekts). With this story,
moreover, it stands as it does to-day with human beings, not least among them
writers of tales: it is far older than its years; its age may not be measured
by length of days, nor the weight of time on its head reckoned by the rising
or setting of suns. In a word, the degree of its antiquity has noways to do
with the passage of time (nicht eigentlich der Zeit) in which
statement the author intentionally touches upon the strange and questionable
double nature of that riddling element." The tone of the narrator has, ironically, as always in Mann,
shifted from that of the realistic novelist to that of the "raunenden
Beschwrer des Imperfekts," the anonymous teller of stories in the past
tense, a sophisticated "conjuror" who knows that the element that makes a
story a story is time and that this element itself has (for the first time?)
become questionable and thus an object of further investigation. What Mann's
contemporaries, from Proust to Joyce, Dblin and Broch (to name only some of
the most prominent), had experienced each in their own way, namely that time
lost its uninterrupted flow toward an immanent or transcendent goal, for Mann
it became the central concern of his existence as a novelist with the writing
of The Magic Mountain. But Mann did not like to dabble in abstractions.
The narrator is quick to differentiate between the general observation and the
particular subject of the story: "But we would not willfully obscure a plain
matter. The exaggerated pastness of our narrative is due to its taking place
before the epoch when a certain crisis shattered its way through life and
consciousness and left a deep chasm behind. It takes place - or, rather,
deliberately to avoid the present tense, it took place, and had taken place
in the long ago, in the old days, the days of the world before the Great
War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off
beginning. Yet it took place before that, yet not so long before. Is not the
pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary (mrchenhafter),
the more immediately before the present it falls?" I know of no other narrative work where an author is as careful as
Mann is in this passage to set up the time parameter of the events he is about
to narrate. Mann, unlike his more avant-garde contemporaries, wants to stay
within the traditional narrative mode, but he warns his readers here that they
should not be taken in by that traditional mode, as the story unfolds. The "long
ago" is a break in the linear historical consciousness; it alerts the
attentive reader to the relativity of time as a fundamentally human
perspective of reality.
My interest in the manner in which Mann int
rod
uces the time element of his novel should not be mistaken for a literary
scholar's preoccupation with certain narrative conventions of the modernist
novel. Rather, it aims to go straight to the heart of the matter,
Thomas
Mann's gradual approximation of a critical terminology of the mythical
dimension of human existence, I say, gradual, because Mann, unlike others at
the time, was quite reluctant to adopt a quasi mythical vocabulary and
that includes such names as Joyce, Hofmannsthal, and Broch -, let alone
indulge in the neo-mythical fantasies of the German nationalist conservatives.
Always the ironic empiricist and realist, Mann not only tested his narrative
strategies but, what is more important, their applicability to the
representation of human experience. The descendant of the Hanseatic patrician
bourgeoisie, the Brger
Thomas
Mann was not ready to break as a writer with the typical patterns that had
formed his "individual" existence, a fact that elicited some occasional
not so nice comments from the Brger manqu Eric Voegelin. But Mann's play
with the typical is more than playing the role of the "burgher with a bad
conscience" (Tonio Krger); rather it aims from its inception at a mythical
suspension of time, something Mann achieves in the sophisticated use of the
Wagnerian leitmotif with the effect that in the narrative context time
becomes a succession of archetypical situations. This technique is already
fully developed in chapter II of The Magic Mountain where Hans Castorp's
repeatedly asks his grandfather to show him the family's christening basin
and the tray on which it stands. The seven names of its successive owners are
engraved on it, beginning with Hans Castorp's father and his grandfather and
the generations before them. "Then the great' came doubled, tripled,
quadrupled from the old man's mouth, whilst the little lad listened, his
head on one side, the eyes full of thought, yet fixed and dreamy, too, the
childish lips parted, half with awe, half sleepily. That
great-great-great-great what a hollow sound it had, how it spoke of the
falling away of time, yet how it seemed the expression of a piously cherished
link between the present, his own life, and the depth of the past." The German original is far more suggestive of the relationship
between past and death: "das Ur-Ur-Ur-Ur, - diesem dunklen Laut der Gruft
und der Zeitverschttung" ("this dark sound of tomb and time caving in") The passage is being used as a Leitmotif throughout the
novel whenever the narrator wants to intimate that Hans Castorp is once again
indulging in his German-Romantic "sympathy with death" and slipping away
from the pedagogical province of his enlightened mentor Settembrini. The son,
grandson, great-grandson of Hanseatic Brger in this novel ultimately remains
the dreamer whose "hermetic" education may be of no avail to him as he
disappears on the battle fields of the Great War.
What
Mann had intended with the Magic Mountain was, in his own words of 1939
to Princeton students, a Zeitroman, simultaneously a novel about the
times and a novel about time. But as a Zeitroman it neither was meant
to "portray" the historical times in the manner of nineteenth century
realism, nor was it just "about time." Instead, it would seem to us, its
more or less successfully realized intention was to be the story of the
beginning, not yet the beginning of everything, but the beginning of what "has
scarcely yet left off beginning" as the preface states. The seven years of
Hans Castorp's hermetic education in the "all-the-same" of recurrence of
the seasons, of deaths, departures, and arrivals experienced in the magic
mountain not only end with this "beginning," that is, the outbreak of the
war, they are its beginning and thus the beginning the narrator's present.
What "has scarcely yet left of beginning" is in fact the present.
There is one point to be made that has been more or less deliberately
been left out until now. Mann's three major works, and we do not count some
of the important stories of the pre-war period, all are filled with death. The
pre-ordained death of young Hanno Buddenbrook, Aschenbach's journey, led by
Tadzio-Psychopompos into the auspiciously-immense of the Adriatic, and the
ever-present "exitus" of the patients of Professor Behrens' sanatorium
not only reenact the "world feast of death" with which European
civilization celebrated its decline, but they are also a testimony to Mann's
deeply held belief that "the religious is thinking of death," as he puts
it in "Fragment ber das Religise."
II
What I have argued so far is that
Thomas
Mann's road to a deeper understanding of time and myth was engendered by a
continuous self-examination as an artist within the context of his time and
society. The awakening from the "hermetic" timelessness of the years
preceding the First World War proceeded over a period of ten years and
concluded with the publication of The Magic Mountain in November of
1924, a novel that was eagerly received by the German reading public and which
quickly found a world-wide audience. The "hermetic" education of Hans
Castorp had also been an act of self-education. It had been an overcoming of
death in the sense that the realm of death of the not-so-long-ago had been
left behind and the view was open to, in Mann's words, "something
altogether new," which he found, by a noteworthy coincidence, in the request
from an old friend of Katja Mann's to write a brief foreword to a portfolio
of illustrations depicting the story of Joseph. Rereading the Joseph story in
his old family bible, Mann was touched by the "graceful fable" and was
reminded of Goethe's remark about the Joseph story in his Dichtung und
Wahrheit: "This natural narrative is most charming, only it seems too
short, and one feels inclined put it in the detail." Mann, for his part, "felt an indescribable fascination of the
mind and the senses at this idea of leaving the modern bourgeois sphere so far
behind and make my narrative pierce deep, deep into the human." He realized that his personal interest in the story coincided with
"tendencies of the time," because "[t]he problem of man, thanks to the
advance of his [extreme] experimentations upon himself, has attained a
peculiar actuality." The word "humane," used here "in its most
scientific, objective sense, without any sentimental bearing," had acquired
new dimensions of meaning, for "we have pushed forward our knowledge,
whether into the darkness of prehistoric times or into the night of the
unconscious; researches that at a certain point meet and fall together have
mightily broadened the scope of our anthropological knowledge, back into the
depths of time, or - what is really the same thing - down into the depths of
the soul; and in all of us there is awake a lively curiosity about what is
earliest and oldest in human things: the mythical, the legendary, the time
before the dawn of reason."
It is of considerable interest how
Thomas
Mann described his decision to embark on this mythical journey back in time,
because the Sketch, the Lebensabriss, was written in 1930, when the
memory of the beginnings of the novel was still fresh and when the "barbaric
myth," as he would call it, was loudly asserting itself in
Germany
and elsewhere. Mann was keenly aware of this, as he distinguished his personal
interest in the myth from that of some of his ideological contemporaries. He
writes: "And these interests of today are not inappropriate tastes for a
time of life that may legitimately begin to divorce itself from the peculiar
and individual and turn its gaze upon the typical which is, after all, the
mythical." And then he goes on emphatically: "I do not say that the
conquest of the myth, from the stage of development at which we have now
arrived, can ever mean a return to it. That can happen only as a result of
self-delusion. The ultra-romantic denial of the development of the cerebrum,
the exorcizing of the mind, which seems to be the philosophical order of the
day, is not everybody's affair. To blend reason and sympathy in a gentle
irony that need not be profane: a technique, an inner atmosphere of some
such kind would probably be the right one to incubate the problem I had in
mind. Myth and psychology the anti-intellectual bigots would prefer to
have these two kept far apart. And yet, I thought, amusing to attempt, by
means of a mythical psychology, a psychology of the myth." The combination of myth and psychology was to become the hallmark
of the work in progress. The point where the two came together for Mann occurs
at the beginning of the passage quoted, where he speaks of the taste for the
mythical as quite legitimate at a certain age, where the mind turns to the "typical
which is after all the mythical." It would, however, be quite appropriate
to contradict
Thomas
Mann here and to assert that in his case the mind was always with the typical,
and that the interest in the peculiar and individual that helped create the
eccentric characters of the early stories was a way to extract the mythical,
the incommensurable from the typical, which otherwise could easily sink to the
level of banal normality.
Mann's extensive research for his tetralogy includes not only the
Bible and Old Testament scholarship, such as several works by Alfred Jeremias'
Das Alte Testament im Lichte der Alten (1916) and the Handbuch der
altorientalischen Geisteskultur, A. S. Yahuda's Die Sprache des
Pentateuch in ihrer Beziehung zumgyptischen, but countless books and
articles on ancient Israel, as the two-volume anthology Die Sagen der Juden
(1919) and Elias Auerbach's Wste und gelobtesLand. Geschichte
Israels
von den Anfngen bis zum Tode Salomos (1932). He brought himself up
to date on Egyptology and especially the literature on Near Eastern myth. But
he also studied intensely such controversial books as Oskar Goldberg's Die
Wirklichkeit der Hebrer (1925) on the metaphysical unity between the
Elohim and the people of Israel, the new edition of J. J. Bachofen's Der
Mythos von Orient und Occident, edited by the Nietzsche philosopher Alfred
Baeumler (1926) and Bachofen's Urreligion und antike Symbole (1926),
Edgard Dacqu, Urwelt Sage und Menschheit (1924), Max Weber on the
sociology of religion, and with particular interest Dmitri Mereschkowski's Die
Geheimnisse des Ostens (1924), which emphasized the interconnections
between the religions and the importance of these early religions for
Christianity. One sentence was marked by Mann on the margin. It reads: "Lastingness,
the Always being, the Always repeating itself, the perpetual present of the
mystical process, history.' The deepest past is not past, but present at
every moment; through this myth becomes its (own) mystery." Mann penciled
in: "Anfang," beginning. Mereschkowski's words became the narrator's words in the "Prelude."
The library
Thomas
Mann collected for his novel and which is in the
Thomas
-Mann-Archiv in
Zurich
literally speaks volumes about Mann's work habits. Pencil marks everywhere,
the habits of a scholar. But Mann was not a scholar, he was poet, more
specifically, a novelist. What he had absorbed in his readings did not go into
arguments and footnotes; it went into his story, sometimes cited obliquely,
sometimes reappearing as the story itself.
And, last but not least,
Thomas
Mann read Freud, whose Gesammelte Schriften (1928) he owned and in
which he read extensively, especially "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and
"Totem and Taboo." It is the task of the philologist to show how Mann
internalized some of Freud's ideas, but it is a well known fact that he read
Freud very much with regard to his own ongoing project, as the lecture "Freud
and the Future" (1936), written for the occasion of Freud's eightieth
birthday, makes abundantly clear. Mann's ability of making the thoughts of
others his own, without "buying into" any doctrinal system, is precisely
what enabled him to understand the nature of myth and to be an author who
could transform the ideas and thoughts of others into the story that
transcended their supposed individual originality. Mann's seismographic
sensibility proved itself not just in the more limited context of the European
crisis of the beginning of the century, it was even more in evidence when this
crisis went into it second, global phase. Far from always being politically in
the right, as his flirtation with socialism proves, Mann, nevertheless had an
almost unsurpassed sense of the undercurrents of the times.
III
What exactly does this
mean for Joseph and His Brothers, a work about which Hermann Broch
wrote in an equally perceptive essay "Die mythische Erbschaft der Dichtung"
(1945): "Here poetry is aware of its union with the soul, and both know that
they have entered the realm of prophesy, a genuine dream knowledge, that has
overlays of past and future and in
which the dual nature of the "Once" comes together in an everlasting
present"? (My translation) Broch's idea of "mythical prophesy,"
conceived for his own project of the "polyhistorical" novel, takes its
cues from Joyce and Mann and their, however dissimilar, attempts to write the
story of the soul. What Broch expressed in this and other essays, and what
Thomas
Mann, the mythopoet of the "romance of the soul" at the end of the "Prelude"
had put into the charming story of the fall and redemption of the soul, is
itself "work on myth" the principles of which Eric Voegelin recounted in a
letter to Robert Heilman, dated August 22, 1956, when he wrote: "What I just
have adumbrated (most inadequately, to be sure) is the basis of historical
interpretation since [Johann Gottfried von] Herder and Baader and Schelling.
History is the unfolding of the human Psyche; historiography is the
reconstruction of the unfolding through the psyche of the historian. The basis
of historical interpretation is the identity of substance (the psyche) in the
object and the subject of interpretation; and its purpose is participation in
the great dialogue that goes through the centuries among men about their
nature and destiny."
Thomas
Mann would have written historiography in quotation marks, thus reminding us
that he, too, was as historian, except that he was allowed the artistic
freedom of story telling, something that smacks of the unscientific but that
derives from the humane reality of the myth. Voegelin most likely would have
agreed.
When the Egyptologist Jan Assmann noted in an essay of 1993 that
Thomas
Mann was simply not taken seriously as a "theoretician and phenomenologist
of the myth" by all the experts in the field, he put his finger on a problem
that all of us here are only too familiar with. Assmann looks at
Thomas
Mann's Joseph novels and at the essays and lectures that accompanied the
work, especially "Freud und die Zukunft" as "one of the most important
contributions to our understanding of myth and cultural memory." Beyond this
he notes what I have already alluded to several times in this paper, Mann's
ability to see life as imitation of mythical patterns, as "life in
quotation," "zitathaftes Leben," as a kind of celebration of what has
been, what is, and what will be there. One cannot come up with a formula like
this unless one has experienced it, and - this has been my argument
- Mann saw his own life in terms of such mythical patterns, as the
imitation of Erasmus and Goethe, as the last Hanseatic Brger, as to use
the still valid accolade of Erich Heller's, "the ironic German." Assmann
shows very well that Mann's interest in the beginning of human consciousness
is informed by his preoccupation with recognizing recurring patterns and
living one's life according to these remembered patterns. "The ego of
antiquity and its consciousness of itself were different from our own, less
exclusive, less sharply defined," says Mann in his Freud lecture and he
continues: "It was, as it were, open behind; it received much from the past
and by repeating it gave it presentness again." Mann here uses the example of Ortega y Gasset to illustrate how a
man of his own time lived his life as a "reanimation, an archaizing attitude",
and he states emphatically: "But it is just this life as reanimation that is
life as myth." For the ancients it
was the recognition that "the myth is the legitimization of life; only
through it and in it does life find self-awareness, sanction, consecration." That this "reanimation" can and must have a playful element is
the pervasive theme of Joseph's life in the novel, and this difference
between Joseph's play with the mythical models and Hans Castorp's much
more serious reverence of the past is at the same time a play with the
patterns that emerged in his present. To be able to distinguish between the
legitimate past and illegitimate bogus past became Mann's main concern
before and during the Nazi years. The falseness of the Nazis' Teutonic myth
went hand in hand with their lies about the nature of man, God, and society.
Theirs was an example of a fantastic mythical stupidity, and Mann saw it as
one of his main task to restore a humane function to the myth ("den Mythos
ins Humane umfunktionieren"), an phrase coined by Ernst Bloch and adopted by
Mann for its political effectiveness. A key element of this humaneness, as we
have seen earlier, lies in ridding it of false sentimentality and conceiving
it with a sense of reverence and a sense of ironic distance.
Thomas
Mann never shied from repeating the major themes that occupied his thinking at
each stage of his life. This was especially true of the Joseph novels, which
he even called a "symbol of humanity." They became a symbol of humanity's
transcendent history, seen quite unmythically as a "moving on, change,
development" which take place not just on the human level but also on the
level of God. Mann's understanding of the covenant between God and man
reflects that school of thought that emphasizes the mutualness of this
covenant in which God depends on man in their common upward striving. "For,"
Mann writes, "God, too, is subject to development; He, too, changes and
advances; from the desert-demon to the spiritual and holy, and he cannot do
this without man's help, just as man is unable to do it without God."
At
this point, Mann gives a new definition of religiosity, which he calls "attentiveness
and obedience" and which appears in the novels as the "Gottessorge,"
the caring about God, about God's plan, the worry about living
anachronistically according to what was once right but is no longer right. In
short,
Thomas
Mann's understanding of myth, far from being the endless repetition of old
practices, worship of the old for the sake of the old, is that of the artist,
whose ego is also open to the behind and seeks "fulfillment of tradition
with exciting novelty."
In 1931
Thomas
Mann thanked Max B
rod
, the friend of Kafka, for some encouraging remarks B
rod
had made about the novel, after having read excerpts. Mann wrote: "It is an
exceptionally obstinate undertaking, scarcely feasible, no novel, neither in
terms of its limits, for it is une mer boire; nor in terms of the artistic
means it employs, for the pictorial, the dramatic is permeated with analysis,
and it is really a kind of pa
rod
istic myth-historiography of which no one can know if it will be palatable." The word "pa
rod
istic" may raise some eyebrows. Humoristic, ironic those words would
doubtlessly apply to the work. But in what sense is it a pa
rod
y? For
Thomas
Mann, pa
rod
y in this as much as in his other late works, including Doctor Faustus,
The Holy Sinner, and Felix Krull, Confidence Man is a kind of
"saying farewell," a play with the "time-honored," a "conjuring up
one more time, a recapitulating," in other words, the view of the late-born.
In a way one could say that Mann's attempt to conjure up the mythical world
of the beginning imitates Joseph's attitude toward God, which differs so
much from that of Abraham and Jacob. "There is one," he wrote in his essay
on the Joseph novels, "who did not discover God, but who knows how to "treat"
him; one who is not only the hero of his stories, but their director, even
their poet, and who embellishes them; one who still participates in the
collective-mythical, but in a witty-spiritual, playful, purposeful-conscious
way." Joseph, it turns out, is an artist, a God-artist, one might say. The
artist, even Michelangelo, did not invent God that is left to more
spiritual, mystical souls but he/she never shies away from representing
God, in the dual sense of the word. We should also note the accumulation of
adjectives. The pa
rod
istic is doubling, imitation, repetition, and yes mockery. The degree
to which each of these pushes to the foreground is determined by the intent of
its author. Pa
rod
y may be kind or it may be vicious. But it is, by definition, never original.
Yet it would be not only unfair but simply wrong to call Mann's
Joseph novels unoriginal as a work of art. Of course they are original in
the sense of showing us a whole new perspective of seeing the old story. Some
stories demand to be retold over and over again, others should not be told the
first time; they are born dead. What makes Mann's Joseph original in
a fundamental sense if you wish, even in a modern sense is the fact
that it brings together the seemingly incompatible: the world of mythical
repetition and recurrence and the invention of the one, unoriginated,
imageless, familyless, singular Yahweh who cannot have a history, because He
does not have a story.
Thomas
Mann tackles this problem in an ingenious way by letting Eliezer tell the
story of how Abraham discovered God. The genius of this story lies in the
insight that it is not possible to tell stories about this God, as one tells
stories about Osiris, Tammuz, and Baal, or that God could be at all associated
with nature-myths. "God forbid that he would have had any dealing with such
affairs! But He lay in bonds and was a God of waiting upon the future; and
that made a certain likeness between Him and those other suffering godheads." And after Abraham and Shechem have consulted with Melchisedek upon
this question, God is filled with joy. "But God kissed His fingertips and
cried, much to the resentment of the angels: It is unbelievable, what
knowledge of Me is possessed by the son [lump] of earth! Have I not begun to
make Myself known through his means? Verily, I will anoint him." This God is and is not like other gods, but there is one thing
that he is, that is new and will always be new: He will be who He will be.
This God cannot be imitated, because He does not have any qualities yet; they
lie in the future and will have to wait to be invented by later theologians;
but He plays his part in the drama of man, and man does his part by sometimes
forgetting and sometimes remembering God, or even, in an occasional outbreak
of violence, by killing God.
IV
I had initially
referred to Mann's work as "work on myth," borrowing from the title of
Hans Blumenberg's book of 1979, Arbeit am Mythos. What I wanted to
stress was that Mann's work is proof, if we needed proof, that myth is not
something that once was and has ceased to be. Whatever Mann's informed and
brilliant insights into the nature of myth were, they cannot and should not be
turned into a doctrine. Jan Assman, who looks at this aspect in the article
already mentioned, has looked at Mann's writings and found that as a set of
propositions about myth they are often still valid, even if in other aspects
they have become debatable. But Assmann has an eye for Mann's poetic mastery
of the myth theme and he understands Mann's importance for his own work on
cultural memory. I would second this and would merely add that Mann's
mythical "life in quotation" makes it perhaps too easy to use him as a
classic example of how to respond to the challenges of the time, if one
refuses to be modern in the "bad" sense, that is to say, without being
rebellious, avant-garde, gnostic, fascist, surrealist, or, God forbid,
postmodern. The problem is that the work on myth, as Blumenberg has
demonstrated, always remains unfinished; and this goes especially for the work
on one's own myth, as Mann had an opportunity to find out already during his
own lifetime, when he was elevated to the part of praeceptor Germaniae
and simultaneously shoo-shooed as the bte noire who left his country in the
lurch at the time of its greatest need. When we stop looking for mythical
beginnings, as Mann suggests in the "Prelude," we find that we are always
in the middle of the story, and then the storytelling becomes complicated,
because we may not be satisfied with the easy excuse that nothing really
matters other than the eternal patterns. This is a problem the narrator was
forced to address at a critical juncture of Joseph's story, when he had to
discuss the question of how long Joseph actually stayed at Potiphar's house,
since the biblical tradition "leaves it open; a few non-committal phrases
are all we have to help us clear up the dates within our history.What shall
we conclude was the real division of time?" Here the mythical patterns do not seem to work any longer. The
authors of the biblical story did not deem it important enough to even ask the
question, let alone answer it. The modern narrator finds it difficult simply
to skip the point. So he finds himself confronted with the problem of any
narrator and has to ask himself: "Do we know our story or do we not? Is it
proper and suitable to the nature of story-telling that the narrator should
openly reckon dates and facts according to any deductions or considerations
whatever? Should he appear at all, save as anonymous source of the tale which
is being told or is telling itself, in which everything is by virtue of
itself, so and not otherwise, indisputable and certain? The narrator,
according to this view, should be in the tale, one with it, and not outside
it, reckoning and calculating. But how is it with God, whom Abram thought into
being and recognized? He is in the fire but He is not the fire. Thus He is at
once in it and outside it. Indeed, it is one thing to be a thing, quite
another to observe it. And yet there are planes and spheres where both happen
at once: the narrator is in the story, yet he is not the story; he is its
scene, but it is not his, since he is also outside it and by a turn of his
nature puts himself in the position of dealing with it." A truly Voegelinian meditation, we could say and leave it at that,
perhaps looking at it as a fine illustration of what Voegelin meant by the metaxy.
But should we be making it so easy on ourselves? I suggest that we ought to
look at this passage with the critical eye of the modern mythologist and admit
that the old myth may be retold, but it may not be repeated. Mann's narrator
has hit the brick wall of modern subjective/intentional consciousness, and he
quickly resorts to pointing to God, who of course does not have this problem.
The narrator remains the little god whose locus is not fire but the story. And
so he is content to leave it at that, adding an additional defense by
reminding the reader: "I have never tried to p
rod
uce the illusion that I am the source of the history of Joseph. Before it
could be told, it happened, it sprang from the source from which all history
springs, and tells itself as it goes." I am not criticizing
Thomas
Mann's perspicacity here, or his quite modern reflexivity, and I am far from
suggesting that he could have solved the problem any better, without seriously
endangering the flux of the story. Nor must we forget that Mann's narrator
is not really telling a myth; he is telling a story that is located in a
mythical time and that is, among other things, meant to be an attempt to
explore to what extent we moderns can put ourselves into the mythical world
without becoming hopelessly anachronistic or barbarously reactionary.
We could continue this train of thought much longer, but I would like
to pose some final questions at this point. There can be little doubt that
Mann's achievement in the Joseph novels and in the works that preceded and
followed them lies in his intuitive and later systematic search for the archai
of, first the European, and later the global crisis of the twentieth century.
This search led him to the most fundamental questions of what it means to be
human. Mann's answer was that there is a depth of history that is
trans-historical and, by implication transcendent. He further showed that it
is not enough to "know" this, but that one had to make it part of one's
personal experience. We continue to pay tribute to this artistic and
philosophical achievement, not merely as scholars of literature but as
humanists, as the eloquent testimony of Jan Assman about Mann's
accomplishment as a scholar of myth underscores.
My question would rather be: what do we learn from Mann's quest and
from the stories he told in the process? I see Mann's life work as part of
the great meta-narratives of the past two hundred years, which, if we follow
Blumenberg, can all be read as metamorphoses of the myth, be they the
world-myths of German Idealism and Romanticism, Nietzsche's eternal
recurrence of the same, Bachofen's worlds of the mothers, Spengler's
morphology of history, and by all means Heidegger's Seinsgeschichte.
What had begun with the rediscovery of the past at the end of the
Enlightenment ended in the collective unconscious filled with Jung's
archetypes. Blumenberg suggests that the work on myth is never done, and in
view of this there is the need for a philosophy of myth that refuses to fall
prey to that which it philosophical tries to illuminate. Is this the direction
into which we need to go? Has this road not turned out to be a cul de sac? We
see today that even the great projects of a philosophy of history in the style
of Toynbee and Jaspers work with categories such as "axis time" and "universal
religions" that stop short of being overtly mythical. Eric Voegelin's
story of the "leaps in being" began with the distinction between the "cosmological
empires" and
Israel
's God-invention, the Covenant that opened up the horizon of history. At the
end, Voegelin more or less admitted that even his early concept of history had
too much of a myth about it to be philosophically tenable too much "historiogenesis";
and so he went on to speak of the "process of the Whole" and to question
the correlation between history and the "length of time" in which its
happens. "Things do not happen in the astrophysical universe, the universe,
together with all things founded in it, happens in God." This after having elsewhere conducted a thought-experiment that
was to prove that "the universe" is a mythical category, Voegelin was himself hard at work on myth. But as myths have a
habit of doing, they undergo metamorphoses, and there is good reason to
consider the possibility that Voegelin was working on such a metamorphosis in
his late years, knowing that it would not be a final one. Putting it in more
absolute terms: he was working on the myth of myth.
Thomas
Mann might have followed him there - with a good measure of ironic skepticism.
What are the directions into which we should pursue these problems
further after the philosophies of history appears to have run their course? I
suggest that reason and imagination form the fides that gives meaning
to the past, the present and the future. As Voegelin put it in a letter to
Brendan Purcell in December of 1976: "If we don't respect those who have gone before
us, who will respect us when we are gone? If we exclude the community of
mankind, the community will exclude us." It is in this spirit that the work
on myth should be conducted, as the imaginative remembrance of the unfinished
story of humanity.
