The Arrow and the Lyre: A Study of the Role of Love in the Works of Thomas Mann

205 Pages·1955·9.79 MB·English

by  Frank Donald Hirschbach (auth.)

THE ARROW AND THE LYRE
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THE ARROW AND
THE LYRE
A STUDY OF THE ROLE OF LOVE IN THE WORKS OF
THOMAS MANN
by
FRANK DONALD HIRSCHBACH
YALE UNIVERSITY
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
1955
ISBN 978-94-017-4586-4 ISBN 978-94-017-4776-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-4776-9
Copyrig/U Z955 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Martinus Nijho:tt; The Hague, Netherlands in 1955
Softcover reprint oft he hankover 1st edition 1955
AU rigllts resm~etl, including 1M rigid lo translate or to
reprolluce this book or parts thereof in any form.
FOR MY PARENTS
PREFACE
When I first thought about this topic I encountered many ex
pressions of surprise among my better-read friends, and a number
of them asked me: "Is there really much love in Thomas Mann's
works, and is it really important?" The posing of this question is
the direct result of three decades of criticism which has represented
Mann mainly as a serious and sober novelist, and frequently
also as a prosy and prolix author who "clutters up" his works
with superfluous bits of erudition. HisMagicMountain bids fair
to join the list of immortal works of world literature which people
bring back from their summer vacations - unread. Mann is, of
course, serious and sober and very North German in most of his
works, and the charge of occasional verbosity and divagation can
well be substantiated. Nevertheless, Mann has, in my opinion,
tried to be fundamentally a humorist throughout his life and
career, not in the conventional sense of the word in which Fritz
Reuter, P. G. Wodehouse or Ring Lardner qualify, but as a man
who at an astonishingly early age saw through his fellow humans,
analyzed and defined their basic confiicts and decided to be a
mediator, a prophet of the realm of the middle. The humor
in Mann's works derives from his manner of looking at the human
comedy, and our amusement is in direct proportion to our
ability to discern a comic element in life, even in tragedy.
Certainly there is nothing humorous about the majority of the
actual love stories which Mann tells: too many of them begin
and end in tragedy. But there is something essentially and
delightfully humorous about the warm light of interest and
sympathy which Mann sheds on the denizens of the shady side
of life's street, about the friendly irony with which he treats
their brethren from across the street, and about the hope which
he holds out for an eventual narrowing of the street which might
bring the two groups closer together.
Love has a place in almost every one of his works, and the
VIII PREFACE
more important works contain the element of love in prominent
position. To define the concept of love is a most difficult task,
however, and I am not sure that I have been able to include
all its various facets. Love to me means any type of erotic
relationship between human beings which includes any one or
all of the following elements: friendship, respect, esteem, venera
tion, adoration, symphathy, kinship, passion, sexual desire,
and lust, all of which generally have in common a desire for greater
intensity of the relationship with the beloved. I have also given
some consideration to the subject of self-love although not as
much as it deserves in connection with Mann's works.
Thomas Mann, never a mere narrator of stories, constructs
his novels and stories carefully and loads them with the cargo
of his thoughts. It remains to us, his public, therefore, to discover
the role which certain persons or affections in his fiction are
meant to play. Thus, love is the king-pin in a carefully thought
out system which might be called Mann's philosophy of life,
if this did not seem a somewhat pretentious name for it. He
has discussed parts of this "philosophy" in a number of essays,
but perhaps the clearest definition of the role of Eros can be
found in that most controversial of Mann's books, Reflections of
a Non-Political Man (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen). Here he
describes the relationship between Nature and Intellect, Natur
and Geist, as extremely delicate, difficult, exciting, and painful,
fraught with irony and Eros. For many years, beginning perhaps
as early as 1903 when Tonio Kroger was written, it had been
Mann's ~hesis that the intellect and the intellectuals harbor a
deep and ,'.biding love for the representatives of life, typified by
the "blond and blue-eyed" type of people who neither need
intellect nor have any use for it. Then, some ten years later,
he discovered .1 strong and similarly unfulfi.lled love on the part
of Life for the Intellect. Philosophically speaking, this signified
the beginning of his departure from Nietzsche; from the political
point of view it meant his gradual descent from the peak of
conservatism to the broader plains of liberalism.
According to Mann, this mutual longing between N atur and
Geist is essentially erotic. It represents a sexual polarity in which
neither can de defined as masculine or feminine. A perpetual
tension exists between them which can never be resolved per-
PREFACE IX
manently, though he admits the possibility of a brief and
intoxicating illusion of union and understanding. Each pole
considers the other beautiful, probably by the very nature of
the fact that they never coalesce and only rarely have contact.
The potential tragedy and frustration of such a relationship is
obvious, though in Mann's works it is not always really tragic
because of the element of irony which is an integral part of every
page he ever wrote. To paraphrase Mann: when the intellect
loves, it does not love fanatically. It loves cleverly; it is political;
it woos and its wooing is erotic irony. To illustrate further the
role of love, of irony, of life and death, simplicity and intellect,
health and disease, conservatism and liberalism is the purpose
of this work.
I am deeply indebted to Yale University and the Morse
Fellowship grant for making this study possible. My gratitude
also belongs to a number of former teachers of mine whose
intelligent and sympathetic guidance was ever-present throughout
the years when this book was written: James White, who
provided me with many new insights in the works of Thomas
Mann, Hermann Weigand, Curt von Faber du Faur, and
Konstantin Reichardt, who read the manuscript and suggested
certain revisions, and Carl Schreiber, whose encouragement has
been invaluable. A special note of thanks goes to Miss Lydia
Rammler who typed the manuscript three times without showing
her boredom.
F. D. H.
New Haven, Connecticut
CONTENTS
Preface . . . . . • . • • • • • • . . • . . . . . . VII
I. THECOMINGOFTHESTRANGERGOD.TheStories. 1
End of an Illusion. Fallen (3). Three Aesthetes in Search
of Life. Little Herr Friedemann, TheDilettante,TheBlood
of the Walsungs (5). The Eye-Opener. Tristan (10).
The Loves of Two Artists. T onio Kroger and Death in
Venice (14). Illusion and Disillusion. The Transposed
Heads and The Black Swan (21). Conclusions (26).
II. LONELINESS AND HAPPINESS. Buddenbrooks and
Royal Highness. . . . • . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
III. LOVE IN THE SHADOW OF A LINDEN TREE
The Magic Mountain . . . . . • . . . . . . . . 53
IV. THE SPECTACLE OF SELF-ABSORPTION. joseph
and his Brothers • • . . . • . . . . . . . • • . 85
V. DEVIL'S JIG ON HALLOWED GROUND. Doctor
Faustus • . . . . . . . . . II5
VI. THE ETERNAL POLARITY
Appendix .
Notes . ...
Bibliography