SOURCE: "Some Thoughts on Tonio Krdger," in Antaeus, Nos. 73-4, Spring, 1994, pp. 199-223.

[Millhauser is an American novelist and critic. In the following essay, he examines the structure and major themes of Tonio Kröger.]

TIME

An immediately striking fact about Tonio Kröger (1903), Mann's second novella, is that it covers a large amount of time: some seventeen years. There is no law of fiction, no principle of imagination, that requires a short narrative to take place in a short span of time, but it remains true that the physical shortness of a story or novella invites concentrated effects. Mann's own practice in his four other major novellas is instructive. The action of Tristan (1903), his first novella, begins in January, reaches its climax in February, and ends in the spring. Death in Venice (1913) begins in the spring and ends in the summer; the past is briskly disposed of in the short second chapter, which serves as a summarizing flashback. Disorder and Early Sorrow (1926) takes place in one afternoon and evening. Mario and the Mgician (1930) begins with an introductory movement that covers several summer weeks and continues with the long narration of the events of a single evening. The lengthy temporal span of Tonio Xwger sets it radically apart from these other novellas and immediately raises the question of structure. A fifty-page story that covers nearly twenty years and is arranged chronologically risks a dissipation of its effects, risks, that is, becoming scattered or diffuse; and a writer committed to such a scheme must continually strive to overcome the dispersive tendency of his narrative. What the writer needs is a method of binding together the various parts of his tale—a method that cuts across chronology, that serves to halt or defeat the relentless advance of fictional time. It is precisely as such a method that the technique of repetition—the famous technique of the leitmotif—finds its central justification.

LEITMOTIF

The deliberate repetition of phrases and sentences in widely separated portions of a narrative constitutes the device known as leitmotif. The device serves a number of purposes, such as simple emphasis: a repeated phrase, like any repeated element in a work of art, draws attention to itself—among the vast number of details that compose even a short work of literature, this one is thrust upon our awareness. But the deepest purpose of the leitmotif is that of uniting one part of a narrative to another. By the device of repetition, which Mann in his climax broadens to include an entire episode, the past is summoned into the present: as we read forward, we are also reading backward. At the moment of repetition, past and present become one, or rather are held in the mind separately but concurrently. For an instant, confluence abolishes chronology. Time is deceived, outwitted, overcome.

CHRONOLOGY

But let us look more closely at the chronological development of Tonio Kager against which the technique of the leitmotif is used as a counter-weight. In doing so, it will be useful to keep in mind that the story is divided into nine parts or chapters; the divisions are numbered in the Fischer Verlag edition of Mann's collected works, but erroneously left unnumbered by H. T. Lowe-Porter in what is still the most widely read translation. The first chapter is a fully rendered scene in which fourteen-year-old Tonio is shown during a significant afternoon meeting with Hans Hansen, whom Tonio loves but who does not love him in return. In the second chapter, Tonio Kröger is sixteen years old; Hans Hansen has vanished from the action and has been replaced in Tonio's affections by pretty Ingeborg Holm, who does not return his love. The structure of the chapter differs from the structure of the first chapter in one important respect: although it contains another fully rendered scene, this time at Herr Knaak's dancing class, the chapter begins and ends with several paragraphs of temporal summary. We learn of Tonio's love for Ingeborg Holm, are led gradually and almost imperceptibly into the fully rendered scene, and are ushered out of the scene into unspecific time by means of the word "often" ("Often after that he stood thus, with burning cheeks in lonely corners … "). The short third chapter summarizes Tonio Kröger's life in Italy and covers what we feel to be a great many years. (Later we are told that he has been away from home for thirteen years, but we never learn how many of those years were spent in Italy and how many in Munich.) Chapter 4 takes place on a single spring day in Munich; it opens when Tonio Kröger is "slightly past thirty" and consists of a long conversation with Tonio's friend Lisabeta Ivanovna. Chapter 5 opens in the autumn of the same year and records Tonio Kriger's decision to travel to Denmark. From this point on, the narration is continuous. In chapter 6 he spends two days in his native town (the scene of the opening chapter); in chapter 7, which begins on the evening of the second day, he crosses to Denmark, where he arrives the next morning and spends three days; in chapter 8, "some days pass" in Denmark before he has a decisive experience; and the brief final chapter consists of a letter that he writes to his friend Lisabeta.

From this sketch of Mann's temporal scheme, a curious fact emerges. Whereas the action of the first five chapters covers some seventeen years, the action of the last four chapters covers roughly two weeks. The two uneven temporal divisions are nearly equal in reading time: the first five chapters span pages 77-106 of the Vintage International edition, and the last four chapters span pages 106-132. The scheme is this:

1/2 novella chapters 1-5 (age 14-31) about 17 years 1/2 novella chapter 6: 2 days chapter 7: same night; 3 following days about 2 weeks chapter 8: "some days" and "several days" chapter 9: the letter

The effect of such an arrangement is to throw the weight of the story onto the second half, when the story for the first time becomes continuous, without odd leaps of time in the white spaces between chapters; our attention is focused on a series of closely connected actions that swell to a climax in chapter 8. The temporal continuity of the second half has the effect of changing our experience of the first half: the early chapters settle into place as preparatory (the long speech of chapter 4 is a special case, which will be considered later). In fact it begins to seem as if the first half of the story exists solely in order to be summoned back in changed form in the second half. In short, although the temporal span of the novella is seventeen years, and although the order of events is chronologically straightforward, the actual temporal arrangement is in significant imbalance—an imbalance that works fruitfully against the incohesiveness of a drawn-out chronological scheme.

LEITMOTIF AND FLASHBACK

Leitmotif and flashback are both devices by which a work of art condemned to move forward in time can break the habit of progression and evoke, in the present, time past. But there is a crucial difference. The flashback, however vivid it may be, and however artfully it may be introduced into the flow of later time, always has the effect of introducing a pause in the narrative. The present comes to a heavy halt as the past replaces it. This is true of both major kinds of flashback: the summarizing flashback, used by Mann in the second chapter of Death in Venice and the second chapter of The Magic Mountin, and the scenic or dramatic flashback, used by Mann in chapter 4 of The Magic Mountain, when Hans Castorp is cast back to a vivid memory of Pribislav Hippe ("Quite suddenly he found himself in the far distant past… "). The interruptive quality of the flashback may find its justification in the annihilating power of memory, but the flashback is always accompanied by a certain creaking of machinery in its entrances and exits, while the poor reader stops short, coughs into his fist, and perhaps out of sheer kindness averts his eyes. The leitmotif, though no less a contrivance, is never interruptive. If the reader failed to notice the fact of repetition, the narrative would proceed without the chronological wrenchings required by flashbacks. But of course the leitmotif wishes to be noticed, and the result is curious: the reader experiences simultaneously the present and the past. In this respect the leitmotif is psychologically superior to the flashback, for, except in cases of hallucination or insanity, the uprushing of the past is always accompanied by a sense of the present. The summoning of the past is itself of interest, for the leitmotif, in evoking past instances of itself, will also summon forth past settings or situations or even entire scenes—a whole cluster of pasts.

In this way the past of the text is continually carried forward into the present. It remains true that the leitmotif is narrower in range than the flashback, because the leitmotif can never go outside the text itself. But in a text that covers a long span of time it is not necessary to seek a past outside the text, since the past evoked by flashback in a temporally concentrated narrative will in a temporally drawn-out narrative be represented directly as part of the unfolding temporal scheme. The flashback encourages effects of temporal concentration; its flaw is its interruptive nature, which undermines the very concentration that is being sought. The leitmotif is suited to narratives with a long time span; it is an attempt to overcome a diffuseness that it perhaps secretly encourages.

THE LAST SENTENCE

The last sentence of Tonio Kröger, in the Lowe-Porter translation, reads:

There is longing in it, and a gentle envy; a touch of contempt and no little innocent bliss.

The sentence is very close to the final sentence of chapter I:

His heart beat richly: longing was awake in it, and a gentle envy; a faint contempt, and no little innocent bliss.

We are unquestionably meant to connect the two passages, and the repetition brings about an interesting effect: a sentence that in the first instance applies to a particular person, Hans Hansen, has suddenly widened its meaning to include all the blond and blue-eyed, that is, all of everyday, healthy, unproblematic life. But Mann's German makes it clear that the relation between the two passages is even closer than the one indicated by Lowe-Porter. Mann's final sentence reads:

Sehnsucht ist darin und schwermiitiger Neid und ein klein wenig Verachtung und eine ganze keusche Seligkeit.

The last sentence of chapter I reads:

Damals lebte sein Herze; Sehnsucht war darin und schwermiitiger Neid und ein klein wenig Verachtung und eine ganze keusche Seligkeit.

The two German passages beginning with "Sehnsucht" are identical, with a single exception: the final sentence of the novella is in the present, whereas the final clause of chapter I is in the past (this identity is preserved in the recent translation by David Luke). The effect is disarming: as Erich Heller has said, Tonio Krbger here takes the words out of the author's mouth. In fact, it isn't easy to explain the precise effect of this apparent plagiarism of Mann by his own character. Mann probably intended us to feel that the mature Tonio Kröger has become fully conscious of an emotion that he recalls having had at the age of fourteen, and which only now is he able to express. But there remains the nagging sense that in this instance Tonio Krbger has quoted a sentence by Thomas Mann, as if at the moment the story ends the fictional author becomes the actual author.

GEOGRAPHY

As if to refuse geographical as well as temporal concision, the novella moves restlessly from place to place. It opens in Tonio Kröger's native northern town (unnamed, but clearly the Liubeck of Mann's youth), shifts to Italy in chapter 3, moves to Munich in chapter 4, returns to the native town in chapter 6, crosses the Baltic to Copenhagen in chapter 7, and ends in Aalsgaard, a resort on the Øresund in north Zealand. The motion from place to place is of course a sign of the hero's restlessness and dissatisfaction, but gradually a deeper pattern emerges: like smaller details in this intricately organized work, cities and countries themselves form a system of significant antitheses. The decisive opposition here is north and south: Tonio Kröger's native town lies in the north, he becomes an artist in the south (Italy), as a grown man he lives in southern Germany (Munich), and at a moment of spiritual crisis he travels to the far north (Denmark). The north/south scheme of the nine chapters is this:

1-2 North (Lubeck)
3-5 South (Italy and Munich)
6-9 North (Liibeck and Denmark)

The geographical structure reflects a division in the name of the protagonist of which he himself is conscious: Tonio (south) and Kroger (north). To put it another way, Tonio Kröger in his travels is entering opposed regions of himself, the Tonio region and the Kroger region. Travel in Mann is always a form of spiritual voyage; Death in Venice and the opening pages of The Magic Mountain are famous examples, but movement here is no less burdened with meaning. Geography keeps turning into psychology.

MUNICH

Unlike Tonio's native northern town, which is portrayed in careful and tender detail, Munich is little more than a word, an element in the geographical structure. Nevertheless, its role is crucial and complex. Although Munich is in south Germany, and is opposed in specific ways to the unnamed northern birthplace, it is at the same time opposed to Italy: Tonio Kröger dislikes Italy and chooses to live in Munich. Munich is in the south, which in Mann's scheme is always the place where art is possible, but it is not as far south as the Italian south. It is as if, by traveling to Italy, Tonio Kröger explores the deepest or most extreme region of the southern half of his divided nature, and then pulls back: in Munich he is still in the artistic south, but he is not all the way south. In this sense, Munich represents a middle place between south and north. It is the place in which Tonio Kröger is able to articulate his crisis, and it is also, significantly, the place to which he will return after his northern journey—there is never any question of actually living in the north, as the letter that ends the novella makes clear. If, then, the southernness of Munich is essential to the geographical and spiritual structure of the story, its function as a midpoint between the extremes of north and south is no less important. In this respect it is interesting to recall the use Mann makes of Munich in Death in Venice. There, Munich represents not the south but the Germanic north, to which Venice is opposed: Aschenbach is making the classic voyage from northern Europe to the Mediterranean south.

But in a brilliant passage in chapter 4, where Mann describes Aschenbach's summer home in the mountains, Munich changes for an instant to the middle place between the sensuous, death-ridden Latin south and the stormy Teutonic north, now represented by Aschenbach's mountain home where violent storms extinguish the lights of the house at night, and ravens—birds associated with Friedrich Barbarossa asleep in the Kyfflhiuser and with Odin—swing in the tops of fir trees. Munich remains a fluid place in Mann's imagination, attracting to itself opposite and even contradictory qualities that in turn depend on the precise use to which the city is put in a particular work.

DENMARK

If Italy is the far south, the south that is south of Munich, then Denmark is the far north: it is north of Tonio Krdger's native northern town, it is north of north. The decision to stage the climax of the novella in Denmark was a brilliant one. It must have seemed tempting to arrange the climactic dance in Tonio's childhood town and thereby to complete the circle perfectly, but to have done so would have been to commit the one esthetic crime for which there is no forgiveness: not sentimentality, but banality. A first-rate instinct warned Mann to take his story farther north. In a sense, he has it both ways: he has his hero return to his native town and visit his childhood home, but only as part of a longer journey, and the real return takes place in a country he has never visited before. By going north of north, the divided hero enters the deepest part of his Krbger nature: he passes beyond his childhood home into his spiritual home, he passes beyond nostalgia and its attendant ironies to a more intense place, where rebirth becomes possible.

But long before the climactic day in the hotel at Aalsgaard, the theme of return is clearly sounded. In Copenhagen, where Tonio Krbger studies the sights in the manner of a conventional tourist, he sees not exactly the Frauenkirch, or Thorwaldsen's statues, or the Tivoli, all of which are carefully named, but rather something else: he sees the familiar baroque gables of his native town, he sees the familiar names on the house doors, he sees nothing less than his childhood; and when he draws "deep, lingering draughts of moist sea air" it is as though he were entering, in a foreign place, a deeper layer of his own past. But even this is not enough for him, he longs to be farther north, close to the sea; and he takes a ship northward, along the coast of Zealand. At Aalsgaard he spends his mornings and afternoons on the beach, and, like Aschenbach in the lyrical-mythological fourth chapter of Death in Venice, he loses the sense of time: we hear of "some days" passing and then of "several days." And there is a nice touch: he likes to sit (Lowe-Porter unaccountably makes him stand) so that "he had before his eyes not the Swedish coast but the open horizon." That is, he is so far north on the island of Zealand that instead of looking only at the Øresund, the body of water separating Zealand from Sweden, he can look north to the broad waters of the Kattegat. It is as if, at the end of his northern journey, he wishes to take in as much sea as possible, to immerse himself utterly in the "wild friend" of his youth. The mornings and afternoons on the beach at Aalsgaard are themselves a return to the summer vacations of his childhood and boyhood, summoned briefly in chapter I, when he liked to sit dreaming on another beach, on the Baltic shore not far from his native home. It is in this carefully composed atmosphere of sand and sea, in a foreign hotel whose veranda leads directly down to the beach ("druch die Veranda wieder an Strand hinuntergehen"), that the climax of the story takes place—a climax that is above all a climax of memory.

HAMLET

When Tonio Krbger leaves Copenhangen and travels by ship northward along the coast of Zealand, he is said to be headed "towards Helsingør"; from the seaport of Helsingør he takes a carriage to Aalsgaard. The final scene therefore takes place in the vicinity of Helsingør; indeed, the guests who will later dance are specifically said to be tourists from Helsingør. When, in A Sketch of My Life, Mann speaks of his actual visit to Aalsgaard before the writing of Tonio Kriger, he notes that it was "near Helsingør." The emphasis on Helsingor is deliberate: Helsingor, Englished, is Elsinore, the site of Hamlet's castle. In chapter 5, when Tonio Krbger tells Lisabeta Ivanovna of his plan to travel north, he says that he wants to stand on the terrace at Kronborg (i.e., Kronborg Castle), where the ghost appeared to Hamlet. With his usual tact, Mann omits Hamlet's castle from his hero's itinerary, but it is no accident that the climactic scene takes place in the vicinity of Elsinore.

Mann has taken pains to sound the Hamlet theme throughout his composition. In the attack on art delivered to Lisabeta Ivanovna in chapter 4, Tonio Krbger speaks of being "sick of knowledge" and adds: "Such was the case of Hamlet the Dane, that typical literary man." Hamlet is a literary man because it was enough for him "to see through a thing in order to be sick to death of it"—a reading of Hamlet's nature that is not far from Nietzsche's bold formulation in the seventh chapter of The Birth of Tragedy: "Dionysiac man might be said to resemble Hamlet: both have looked deeply into the true nature of things, they have understood and are now loath to act." When Tonio Kröger voyages to Denmark, he is therefore embarking on a double voyage: a voyage to the spiritual center of his childhood, and a voyage to the realm of Hamlet, that is, the realm of bitter knowledge. His heart has died in Italy, in the carefree south; his heart's awakening takes place in the shadow of Elsinore. At the very end, when Tonio Krbger writes to Lisabeta Ivanovna that "if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my bourgeois love of the human, the living and usual," he is asserting his separation from Hamlet, that typical literary man, just as earlier he had asserted his separation from Adalbert the novelist, that other literary man. Tonio Kruger remains part Hamlet, for he cannot unknow what he knows, but he is a Hamlet who tempers knowledgesickness with love. Hamlet is a fate that he flees. Hamlet is the dark side of the north, the side of the north that lies on the other side of blond and blue-eyed innocence. And is it possible that Tonio Kruger's father, that melancholy northern gentleman with his thoughtful blue eyes, has a touch of Hamlet in him? Is he a Hans Hansen with some bitter draft of northness in his being? Hamlet is the place where the stern, melancholy north coincides with the knowledge-heavy darkness of the south. Is it a wonder that Tonio Kröger is drawn to Hamlet's home?

HANS HANSEN'S CAP

In the seventh paragraph of chapter I Mann pauses, in the leisurely and scrupulous manner of a good nineteenth-century storyteller, to describe the clothes and features of Tonio Kröger and Hans Hansen. A reader new to the story is struck by the clear, swiftly established system of contrasts, which extends even to the hats of both boys: Hans Hansen is wearing "a Danish sailor cap with black ribbons" and Tonio Kröger is wearing a "round fur cap." Among the carefully, perhaps too carefully, arranged contrasts, we experience this one as particularly apt: Tonio's cap is less boyish that his friend's, darker, more formal, less lively. But for a reader familiar with the story—for a re-reader—Hans Hansen's cap takes on the kind of sudden, spacious significance that details in Mann often do: the Danish sailor cap seems to contain within itself the entire voyage to Denmark, the strong salt wind of the Baltic, the long mornings and afternoons on the beach in Zealand, the vision of the Danish Hans Hansen in the hotel at Aalsgaard, the Danish dance, the Hamlet theme, the ocean theme, the whole array of motifs associated with the far north; and one seems to see, in this minor detail sketched in with a naturalist's light but careful touch, the long, inescapable shadow cast backward by the story's future.

SECONDARY ARTISTS

Sometimes in a story about an artist Mann will insert a minor character who is also an artist of sorts and whose role is to form an ironic commentary on the central artist. In Death in Venice the secondary artist is the barber who dyes Aschenbach's hair black and colors his cheeks and lips; Mann calls him an "artist in cosmetic." The barberartist is a parody of Aschenbach. Instead of plumbing the depths of souls, he attends only to appearances; his sole interest is deception and illusion. Since the genuine artist also has what Nietzsche calls a will to illusion, the comic barber has a touch of the sinister: he is that aspect of art which is indifferent to everything except illusion. He is Aschenbach stripped of belief. It is no accident that Aschenbach succumbs to him only after his obscene, shattering dream.

In Tonio Kröger the secondary artist is Herr Knaak, the dancing master from Hamburg who instructs the sons and daughters of leading families. Herr Knaak is an artist of dance, of social grace, and despite his grotesquerie he is no less self-assured in the practice of his public art than Tonio Kröger is of his private art. The resemblance between them is driven home by Herr Knaak's dark eyes, for the story emphasizes a distinction between blue, bourgeois eyes and dark, artistic eyes. But there is another resemblance as well. Herr Knaak's full name is Frangois Knaak; the violent, comic contrast between the smoothflowing French syllables of the first name and the harsh German gutturals of the last name echoes the division in Tonio Kröger's name. The art of which Herr Knaak is a master is significant: dancing is a social art, and it is fitting that Tonio Kröger should dance badly.

FRAULEIN KROGER

During the quadrille conducted by Herr Knaak, a small mishap occurs. Herr Knaak announces the moulinet des dames, a division of the dance for women only; Tonio Krbger, brooding over Ingeborg Holm and the poetry of Storm, dreamily joins the girls. Knaak assumes a ballet pose "conventionally expressive of horror" and cries:

Stop! Stop! Kröger among the ladies! En arriére,
Fräulein Kröger, step back, fi donc!

Everyone laughs; the episode is soon forgotten. Fifteen years later Tonio Kröger delivers an attack on art to a painter friend in Munich. In a burst of bitterness he asks:

Is an artist a male, anyhow? Ask the females! It seems to me we artists are all of us something like those unsexed papal singers … we sing like angels; but—

The outburst grows out of his angry and frustrated sense that the artist stands apart from life, observing it coldly, but the nature of the outburst remains startling and extreme. Is it possible to imagine Stephen Dedalus asking such a question?—to say nothing of Paul Morel. Tonio Krbger's scornful questioning of the artist's masculinity is not peculiar to his character, for in several stories of the same period Mann presents satirical portraits of artists whose masculinity is dubious. In "The Infant Prodigy," published in the same year as Tonlo Kroger, the child prodigy wears a silk bow in his hair and greets the crowd with a shy, charming gesture, "like a little girl"; in Tristan, written in 1902 and published in the same collection as Tonio Korger (Tristan. Sechs Novellen, 1903), Detlev Spinell, the grotesque writer who lives in a sanatorium because he likes its Empire furnishings, is in his early thirties, like Tonio Kröger, and has a face "without a vestige of a beard. Not that it was shaven—you would have told; it was soft, smooth, boyish, with at most downy hair here and there." Mann in his own way can be as self-punishing as Kafka; this is the bourgeois in him, sneering at the artist. It is perhaps also a man raging at his own uncertain or undefined sexuality, for Mann much later confessed in a diary entry to what he called his "sexual inversion." But is it also more than that? May it not be the artist's own savage recoil against art, his protest against the price exacted by the harsh, monastic discipline of art? If the practice of art is by necessity solitary and austere, if beauty itself, in Baudelaire's phrase, has a heart of snow ("La Beaute"), is there not something in the very nature of art that is inimical to life? Stephen Dedalus's discovery of his vocation as artist is at the same time a welcoming of life, represented by the birdlike girl in the stream. Mann's view of art is always more ambiguous than Joyce's, at once more doubting and more probing. For Mann, art is always on the verge of moving in either of two directions: that of the sickly, the decadent, the precious, the unhealthy; or that of the criminal, the forbidden, the demonic. It is precisely his bourgeois distrust of art that leads Mann down dark paths of insight; it is his conservative temperament that drives him to his most radical questionings.

ART AND LIFE (I)

In the dialectic of the story, art and life are in opposition. The meaning of the antithesis seems to me clear enough, but it is worth considering for a moment what it means for an artist to feel that he is in any sense opposed to life. After all, the artist is alive, he is part of life. For him to feel opposed to life is for him to experience himself as a contradiction—to experience himself, that is, as a problem. And it is only when the artist experiences himself as a problem that there arises a literature with an artist as a central figure. Artists as human beings are of little interest to Renaissance dramatists; an occasional artist appears as a minor character, like the sycophantic Poet and Painter in Timon of Athens, and when an artist very infrequently appears as a protagonist it is always satirically (witness Ben Jonson's attack on Marston and Dekker in The Poetaster and Dekker's counterattack in Satiromastix, or Buckingham's brutal attack on Dryden in The Rehearsal). The artist as a serious figure first becomes interesting to the European imagination in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—precisely at a time when artists begin to experience themselves as problematical. German Romantic literature is filled with disturbed artist figures, of whom E. T. A. Hoffman's crazed composer is only the most famous; and it is significant in this respect that one of the earliest treatments of an artist is Goethe's Torquato Tasso (1790), a play that explicitly presents the artist as a problem. In this sense Tonfo Kroger is directly in the line of German Romanticism. Like Death in Venice ten years later, it is German Romanticism carried into the twentieth century, but made sharper and drier and more rigorous—it is Romanticism that has passed through the discipline of Flaubert and Chekhov.

But there is a further consideration. A writer such as Mann, producing an early-twentieth-century work of art in which the artist is presented as a problem, is writing for a largely bourgeois audience that is ready and indeed eager to read about the problem of the artist. In the second chapter of Death in Venice Mann writes: "Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering in it a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable—it is sympathy." The fame of Tonio Kröger in its own time suggests that the problem of the artist was not the peculiar obsession of a particular writer but the expression of a malaise in the society for which he wrote. Looked at in one way, the problem of the artist, at least as formulated by Mann, is also the problem of the burgher: the real problem is the relation between the two. Is it possible that Mann was wrong, and that the artist is not the only one with a bad conscience? Is is possible that at a certain moment of history, the burgher also has a bad conscience—that he longs, not for the bliss of the commonplace, but for the uncommon, the exotic, the morally dubious, in short, for the artist?

ART AND LIFE (2)

The antithesis is not original with Mann, although he plays with it and extends its range in ways that are entirely his own. The most immediate and likely precedent is Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken (1899), in which art, in the person of the sculptor Rubek, is presented as a betrayer or destroyer of life. Mann was an early and lifelong admirer of Ibsen. He used four lines of verse by Ibsen as the motto for the Tristan volume, which contained Tonio Kröger—lines that insist on a distinction between living and writing—and when, in a bravura passage in the essay Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner, Mann compares Wagner with Ibsen, those two "northern wizards," those "crafty old weavers of spells," he says of When We Dead Awaken that it is "the awesome whispered confession of the production-man bemoaning his late, too late declaration of love of life." But even apart from Ibsen, European literature in the last quarter of the nineteenth century provided innumerable pairings of life and art (or the imagination)—usually to the disadvantage of life. A wellknown example is Villier de l'Isle Adam's symbolist drama Axel (1890), with its notorious line: "Living? Our servants can do that for us"; while in England the witty disparagement of life in relation to art became for Wilde a fashionable habit. But even these late-nineteenth-century dichotomies are only a specialized development of a much broader debate waged in Europe since the Renaissance, in which the active terms were Art and Nature and which had its roots in the classical world (see Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature by Edward Tayler for countless classical, medieval, and Renaissance examples). What is new, late in the nineteenth century, is not the antithesis itself but the sense that art and life have become hostile to each other, that they have no connection, that an abyss separates them. It is precisely this sense of separation that Tonio Kröger experiences and attempts to overcome. Detlev Spinell experiences an identical separation and glories in it—it is as if Mann would distinguish the genuine artist from the decadent by the degree of his refusal to succumb to the feeling that life and art are hopelessly separated. But even for Tonio Kröger the gulf remains: art continues to be experienced as a deviation from life. In this sense, is he really so different from Adalbert the novelist?

ADALBERT THE NOVELIST

"God damn the spring!" says Adalbert the novelist—and goes into the "neutral territory" of a cafe to work. The difference between Tonio Krdger and Adalbert the novelist is that Tonio Kröger doesn't follow him into the cafe. His decision to be disturbed, which is also a decision not to work, is a judgment passed on Adalbert the novelist: the cafe becomes an evasion rather than a solution. With a witty speech and a shrug of his spiritual shoulders, Adalbert the novelist dismisses the crisis that torments Tonio Krbger, dismisses the very possibility of crisis. We all know him, Adalbert the novelist: nothing can stem the tide of his copious and mediocre prose.

But are we really so certain we know him, Adalbert the novelist? May there not be another way of looking at him, a way that releases him from caricature? If we shift our standpoint ever so slightly, if for a moment we remove our sympathy from Tonio Kröger and cast a skeptical eye on his assumptions, it becomes possible to think of Adalbert the novelist as someone akin to Lisabeta Ivanovna: the artist who goes about his business without fuss or melodrama, the artist who refuses the invitation to suffer. For looked at in a certain way, doesn't Tonio Kröger's judgment of Adalbert the novelist amount to disdain for his failure to be tormented? It is the hatred of the romantic for the craftsman—and the banning of the craftsman from the brotherhood of artist-saints whose motto is loneliness and whose sign is suffering.

IDLENESS AND INDUSTRY (I)

As a schoolboy, Tonio Kröger is no Stephen Dedalus: he is absent-minded in class and receives poor grades. His school idleness is specifically connected with his habit of brooding over his intuitions and writing poems. Hans Hansen, who prefers horse books to Don Carlos, is described as a "capital scholar" ("ein vortrefflicher Schiller"—an excellent student). Hans Hansen, that is to say, is the industrious student who always gets good grades. He is in no sense an intellectual, but neither is he stupid or slow; rather, he is the diligent, obedient, and proper son of a prominent businessman (his father owns a big lumberyard), and his diligence and good grades are part of his middle-class nature. Tonio's idleness is precisely a sign of apartness, of class betrayal—for he too is the son of a prominent businessman (a grain merchant, like the Buddenbrooks) and is said to live in the finest house in town. But he flees the fine house for Italy, where he learns to be an artist. And it is then that his name—"that good middle-class name with the exotic twist to it"—becomes a synonym for, among other things, "persistent industry." It is very interesting: the indolent schoolboy now works "not like a man who works that he may live; but as one who is bent on doing nothing but work." Idle as a student, he is industrious as an artist: it's as if, having cast off a bourgeois calling, he assumes almost ferociously all the bourgeois virtues, turned, however, in the opposite direction—the direction of art. Tonio Kröger is never more middle-class than when he is going against the grain of the middle class; only in the act of disloyalty can he permit himself to display his loyalty.

IDLENESS AND INDUSTRY (2)

But the relation between idleness and industry does not stop at the contrast between schoolwork and art, adolescence and maturity. Industry is the opposite of idleness, but it is also a cure for idleness; in this sense, the industry of the artist is a continual overcoming of a tendency toward indolence and dream that is also part of the artist's nature. The mature Mann recognized this truth in A Sketch of My Life in a passage describing his love of the carefree summer vacations at Travemiinde on the Baltic: the idyllic life at the seashore "encouraged my native tendency to idleness and dreams—corrected much later and with difficulty." One suspects that native tendencies are stubborn and that correction does not imply eradication. Indeed, one might argue that idleness and dreams are as essential to the creation of art as industry itself. But idleness and dreams, which are anathema to the burgher, are no less disturbing to the disciplined artist, since they threaten his way of life even as they nourish it. The theme of the seductiveness of relaxation, of the temptation of idleness, sounds throughout Mann's mature work, most movingly in The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice; and his early stories are filled with idle, dilettantish characters whom he sometimes treats with a savagery that suggests a secret fear.

ANTITHESIS

Tonio/Krbger, art/life, south/north, mother/father, artist/burgher, idleness/industry, dark eyes/blue eyes, dreamy eyes/keen eyes, idle and uneven walk/elastic, rhythmic tread, Don Carlos/horse books, exotic/commonplace, fixative/the breath of spring, the perilous knifedance of art/life's lulling, trivial waltz-rhythm—the antitheses are so abundant and alluring that one begins to long for an escape from the habit of opposition, which desires to account for every detail by drawing it into a system that is both wide-ranging and constrictive. The deep attraction of antithesis is the prevention of randomness and irresponsible profusion; its danger is the exclusion of the mysterious, the unaccountable, the inexplicable.

EYES

Eye color, like hair color, has long been the occasion of significant contrast in fiction, usually serving as the outward sign of an inward difference. In the literature of north European countries, such as England, Germany, and France, blue or grey eyes are the standard against which dark eyes are measured and in contrast to which dark eyes are felt to be disturbing, exotic, passionate, foreign, vital, evil, or even ugly; hence, for example, the repeated attention given by Sidney to Stella's dark eyes, an attention carried over by Shakespeare to dark-eyed ladies such as Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost and the dark lady of the sonnets. By the nineteenth century, contrasts between blue and dark eyes have become a novelistic cliche: consider blue-eyed Rowena and dark-eyed Rebecca in Ivanhoe, blue-eyed Alice and dark-eyed Cora in The Last of the Mohicans, the blue-eyed Lintons and the dark-eyed Earnshaws in Wuthering Heights. But it is not until Tonoi Krger, at the beginning of the next century, that a work of literature raises eye color to a central place in the symbolic structure.

The crucial contrast is that between dark eyes (artist eyes) and blue eyes (burgher eyes), but Mann complicates the antithesis in ways that prevent it from remaining merely mechanical. Tonio Kruger's eyes are dreamy as well as dark; they stand in contrast to Hans Hansen's blue eyes, which are both "keen" and "clear." But the simple opposition is complicated by the first statement of the fatherleitmotif: "A tall, fastidiously dressed man, with thoughtful blue eyes, and always a wild flower in his buttonhole." The eyes of the father are blue, but thoughtful; there is a touch of introspection and melancholy in these eyes (the father is called "slightly melancholy" in the last appearance of the leitmotif) that is not present in Hans Hansen's eyes and that corresponds to something in Tonio himself—the father here betrays a kinship to Thomas Buddenbrook, the grain merchant who reads Schopenhauer. Ingeborg Holm's laughing blue eyes are merely another version of Hans Hansen's eyes, but there are four additional pairs of dark eyes, all of which belong to artists or artisttypes.

There are first of all the eyes of Tonio Kröger's piano-playing mother, eyes that are never mentioned but that we infer are dark, for she has black hair and is from "the south"; since she is characterized by blitheness and moral indifference, we imagine her eyes as having less depth than her son's eyes. Frangois Knaak, the artist of dance, has "beautiful brown eyes" that "did not plumb the depths of things to the place where life becomes complex and melancholy"; his eyes, like his art, are superficial. But immediately a secondary antithesis is established between the depthless dark eyes of Herr Knaak and the thoughtful blue eyes of Herr Kroger, almost as if Mann wished to insist that the initial contrast between dark and blue should not be taken literally, but only symbolically. Among the dancers in Herr Knaak's class is Magdalena Vermehren, who has "great, dark, brilliant eyes, so serious and adoring"; she is interested in Tonio's verses, she is artistic, but she is also clumsy—she falls down in the dance. Her brilliant, dark, serious eyes are the eyes not of an artist but of an artist-adorer: the adult Tonio Kröger cruelly describes her as the kind of person for whom poetry serves as a mild revenge on life. The friend to whom he offers this description is Lisabeta Ivanovna, a painter, who also has dark eyes: "little bright black eyes." She is a genuine artist, who works even as she listens to the opening of Tonio Kröger's tirade against art ("I will just finish this little place—work out this little effect"), but she is an artist for whom art is not a problem: in this respect she stands midway between Herr Knaak and Tonio Kröger. Thus without ever losing the central opposition between dark eyes and blue eyes, Mann manages to cover a wide and almost contradictory range, extending all the way to thoughtful blue and superficial dark.

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON STRUCTURE: THE FOURTH CHAPTER

The temporal and geographical schemes that I have suggested for Tonio KrAger overlap in certain respects but are by no means identical; and neither fully accounts for the elusive and perhaps not finally explicable experience that we call the structure of a work of fiction. If we try once again to fathom the plan of the novella, with the sense that something has remained unaccounted for, we may be struck by the peculiar nature of the fourth chapter, which stands out from the other chapters almost in the manner of an essay inserted into a dramatic tale. Almost: for the chapter isn't an essay, and the story into which it is inserted is not notably dramatic. But the fourth chapter does have the effect of standing out from the surrounding material, of stopping the flow of narrative, of presenting itself as an exception, even as an obstacle. In this sense the novella breaks into three parts: the first three chapters, which recount Tonio Krbger's youth; the essayistic fourth chapter; and the last five chapters, which recount his northern voyage and deliberately recapitulate elements of the first three chapters.

Mann confessed to having had great difficulty with the fourth chapter. For months the story wouldn't budge; he was unable to write a word. His decision to write what he calls, in A Sketch of My Life, the "lyric-essayistic middle part" ("das lyrisch-essayistische Mittlestiick"—LowePorter translates the concise phrase as "the middle part, lyric and prose essay in one"), was a bold one, but the chapter nevertheless remains a problem. In it the central conflict of the story is brought to precise articulation, and the effect can seem to be a deliberate abandonment of drama, a flirtation with esthetic collapse. Mann is aware of the dangers and, having gone out of his way to violate the conventional dramatic development of his story, makes every effort to draw the chapter back into the realm of the dramatic. His main technique for doing so is to have Tonio Kröger allude obliquely to experiences that are familiar to us from earlier chapters. When he speaks of people who are always falling down in the dance, we remember Magdalena Vermehren and the dancing lesson; when he says that one ought not to tempt people to read poetry who would rather read books about the instantaneous photography of horses, we are invited to recall not only a particular moment in chapter I but the entire incident concerning Don Carlos and Hans Hansen's betrayal, indeed the entire chapter in all its meanings as they radiate out from the image of horse books. In addition to drawing on earlier moments of drama, Mann repeatedly attempts to overcome the essayistic tendency of the chapter by reminding us of the speech's occasion. That occasion is nothing less than a crisis in the hero's spiritual life: things have reached such a pass that, unlike Adalbert the novelist, who seeks out the neutral territory of a cafe when confronted with the distractions of spring, Tonio Kröger can no longer work. We are urged to experience the speech as the long revelation of a problem—as part of the plot. It is the tormented though orderly outpouring of a man in deep spiritual trouble; and the orderly, logical nature of the outburst is entirely in keeping with Tonio Kröger's character. But if so much is granted, it nevertheless remains true that the chapter radically refuses to behave like other chapters. It tends to sit like a lump in the middle of the story—even if it is a lump that the story can digest. Despite its air of redeeming boldness, the chapter cannot entirely evade the suspicion that important material has simply failed to be incorporated dramatically in the story.

THE TREATMENT OF PASSING TIME

How shall a work of fiction, with its continual urge toward particularization as it attempts to create and sustain the illusion of a world, handle the passing of time? Events in the fictional world that are presented as the temporal equivalent of events in the reader's world invite specification—invite, that is, the careful and abundant accumulation of significant detail. But what of the passing of days, of weeks, of entire years? Here, by the very nature of the case, accumulation is discouraged. One method of over-coming the hampering effects of swiftly passing fictional time is to arrange the material of the fiction so as to permit the greatest number of detailed scenes, which are then joined by brisk passages that report the passing of time. This is essentially the method of Tonio Kriger, although it would be a mistake to think of it as the only one. It would be a mistake, in particular, to think of the passages in Tonfo Kriger in which days or years pass as efficient, workmanlike segments that exist solely to convey information before permitting the real story to continue. There are passages of this kind, but there are also episodes of passing time that are meant to be experienced in their own right—are meant to have a flavor distinct from the flavor of a fully rendered scene.

Two such passages are the opening movement of chapter 8, in which Tonio Kröger passes "some days" and then "several" more days at Aalsgaard before arriving at the particular day on which the climactic dance takes place, and all of chapter 3, which recounts his Italian years. A difference between the passages immediately presents itself—a difference that may partially be explained as the difference between treating the passing of days on the one hand and years on the other, but that is not exhausted by this first and rather too easy explanation. For it is important to notice that the Danish passage, which covers an unknown number of days in six paragraphs, is characterized by an abundance of precise and evocative details. The sea that Tonio Kröger watches in the long mornings and afternoons sometimes lay "idle and smooth, in stripes of blue and russet and bottle-green." The jellyfish lying on the sunny beach are captured in a single memorable detail: "the jellyfish lay steaming." In an inspired simile, the sound of the surf is a noise "like boards collapsing at a distance." The guests in the dining room, who play no part in the story, are as sharply seen as minor characters in Dickens: an old fish dealer from Copenhagen "kept putting his beringed first finger to one nostril, and snorting violently to get a passage of air through the other." There is, very deliberately, no scene in these six paragraphs, for the experience being described is habitual: it is important that we lose the sense of precise moments in order to bathe in an atmosphere, to gain a sense of significantly repeated sights and gestures and sounds. But the absence of a closeup scene does not mean the loss of precise detail: it is merely that the detail comes at us in a different manner.

The effect of the ten paragraphs of the Italian chapter is distinctly different. Here there is a sudden and striking loss of detail:

He lived in large cities and in the south, promising himself a luxuriant ripening of his art by southern suns.…

he fell into adventures of the flesh, descended into the depths of lust and searing sin.…

And then, with knowledge, its torments and its arrogance, came solitude.…

It isn't that large, general statements are impermissible in a work of literature; it is, rather, that large, general statements need to grow out of sharply rendered details, require a precise habitat. Such details as in fact are present in the Italian chapter are all details of leitmotif, which connect Tonio Kröger to his past. But Italy itself remains strikingly unrendered; it is an abstract space in which certain mental events take place. My point is that the failure to render Italy cannot be explained away as a necessary consequence of treating a large span of time; the absence of a specific scene, as the Denmark passage shows, does not require the absence of the kind of precise detail we usually associate with a specific scene. Mann, who completed the story at the still youthful age of twenty-seven, has simply made an error here: he has treated the passing of time as if it were independent of things. His sentences in this section retain a firm thematic relation to the novella—there is never any loss of structural clarity—but they tend to sound curiously abstract, rhetorical, disconnected from the stuff of experience, and this at the very moment when they are making large assertions about experience. The cause of the failure may be psychological—Mann's inability to speak of his Italian years, or of sexuality—but the result is technical: an absence of detail, a vacuity.

IMMENSEE

Sixteen-year-old Tonio Kröger stands brooding in the corridor outside the room where Ingeborg Holm is dancing and thinks, "So lovely and laughing as you are one can only be if one does not read Immensee and never tries to write things like it." That Immensee was a cherished book of his own adolescence is confirmed by Mann in his affectionate essay on Theodor Storm, whom he names as one of the two "spiritual fathers" of Tonlo Kröger—the other being Turgenev.

Did Mann have Immensee in mind when composing Tomio Krger? In Immensee he would have found an arrangement of nine short chapters, often separated by large gaps of time; a chapter of childhood love; a broad time span, ranging from an experience of the protagonist at ten years old to his experiences as a young man of unstated age, who appears to be in his middle or late twenties (as well as a hoary frame-device that shows him in old age); the theme of unrequited love; an emphasis on love-sorrow, loneliness, and nostalgia. Above all, he might have received a hint for his own recapitulative scheme, for in the penultimate chapter Reinhard has two experiences that repeat moments in earlier chapters: he watches Elisabeth sitting in the shade of an overhanging branch and has the sense that it has all happened before, while the reader recalls a similar moment when Reinhard watched her seated in the shade of a tree when he was seventeen; and he sees a beggar girl who looks at him wildly and sings a song he remembers being sung by a gypsy girl in his university days. The similarities between the novellas are real but slight, and should not be exaggerated; perhaps what connects them most closely is what is most questionable in Tonio Krger: a certain heaviness of feeling, a tendency toward the lyricism of sorrow, toward the dubious pleasures of nostalgia.

BIOGRAPHY

Mann completed Tonfo Kruger in December 1902—it appeared in the February 1903 issue of the Neue Deutsche Rundschau, and again in the volume of stories called Tristan that appeared later in the same year—but precisely when he began it is unclear. The first evidence of actual composition occurs in a letter to Heinrich Mann of 8 January 1901, in which he complains that what he is writing is too long for Simplicissimus, the journal in which several of his earlier stories had appeared. A month later he complains to Heinrich that the artist theme has so thrust itself forward that the long-planned story ought to be called "Literature." But in this same letter he reports that he is at work on Tristan, which he calls a burlesque and which he appears to have completed in the spring of 1901. A question immediately presents itself: was it only by creating the satiric and even cruel portrait of the artist found in Tristan that Mann was able to release himself into Tonio Kru'ger? Was it only by mocking the pretensions and affectations of the artist that he could feel free to treat the artist seriously in a work of fiction? Detlev Spinell is a decadent Tonio Kröger, a Tonio Kröger corrupted by preciousness; his sinister kinship is suggested by the fact that he shares not only Tonio Kruger's age but his habit of holding his head to one side (a trait later given to Hans Castorp when he listens to music). In any case, the release, if it was one, was by no means immediate, for Mann later complains to a friend that he has made no progress on Tonio Kruger during the entire winter (the winter of 1901-1902); only in the spring of 1902 does he report that he is at work, but the work is torment: he speaks of doubts, hesitations, dissatisfaction. He is still at work when the proofs of the five other stories of the Tristan collection arrive in October, and he finishes only in mid-December.

But even this checkered history of composition, extending over nearly two years, is only part of the story. In A Sketch of My Life (1930), Mann claims that he conceived the idea for Tonio Kruger while still working on Buddenbrooks: "I spent a two weeks' holiday in that excursion via Lubeck to Denmark which is described in the tale; and the impressions of my visit to Aalsgaard am Sund, near Helsingor, were the nucleus round which the elements of the allusive little composition shot together." Just when the elements shot together is by no means clear, for in an address called Lubeck als geistige Lebensform, delivered on the occasion of Lubeck's 700th anniversary in 1926, he says somewhat enigmatically that Tonio Kruger was "unconsciously sketched" at Aalsgaard ("der Tonio Kruger unbewusst entworfen wurde"), the "unconsciously" suggesting that the story had not yet even been imagined. The trip to Liibeck and Aalsgaard took place in September 1899 (Buddenbrooks was completed in July 1900, a month after his twenty-fifth birthday), and the timing of the trip is worth noting. In Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist, Richard Winston points out that, in the writing of Buddenbrooks, Mann had arrived at the death of Senator Buddenbrook's mother and the sale of the house, and suggests that Mann might have wanted to pay a visit to his old house in order to set the scene. But Hans Rudolf Vaget in his Kommentar zu sämtlichen Erzählungen (Commentary on the Complete Stories) makes what seems to me a more pregnant suggestion: "TM stand vor der Aufgabe, die Jugend Hanno Buddenbrooks zu gestalten und verspurte wohl das Bedurfnis, seine Erinnerungen aufzufrischen und noch einmal seinen 'Ausgangspunkt' zu beriihren." ("TM faced the task of shaping the youth of Hanno Buddenbrook, and probably felt the need to refresh his memories and touch his 'point of origin' again.") That is, Mann was about to plunge into a detailed evocation of a childhood very much like his own. The composition of Tonio Kröger therefore attaches itself spiritually to the last movement of Buddenbrooks, and it surrounds, so to speak, the composition of Tristan. To put it another way, it has its origin in the sickly artist-figure of Hanno Buddenbrook, and surrounds the decadent artist-figure of Detlev Spinell, who writes with excruciating slowness and who lives in a sanatorium because he likes the decor. It is as if Tonio Kröger represents an overcoming of both Hanno Buddenbrook and Detlev Spinell—as if Tonio's bad conscience is a knowledge of the disease and decadence that might have been his own, had Mann not lavished them on other characters instead.

EVALUATION

The harshest thing one can say about Tonio Kröger is that it is not Death in Venice. Exactly what it is, however, has proved more difficult to say. Far more than Death in Venice, it carries with it the distinct and somewhat faded flavor of its time, without begging the indulgence accorded to the mere period piece. The oppositions have a disturbing clarity that make them seem more suitable to comedy, and history has complicated our response to the blond and blue-eyed Hans Hansens of the North in a way that interferes seriously with Mann's intellectual scheme. The image of the lonely artist at odds with the world takes its place more clearly than ever as part of the history of European Romanticism, but the attempted resolution lacks the fine daring and bravado of romantic rebellion. The energy of narrative is in a significant degree recollective, and does not always resist the perilous enticements of nostalgia.

It must nevertheless also be said that the problem which the story painstakingly examines—the problem of the artist in his relation to the world, which is also the problem of the artist in relation to his art—is one that has not only not vanished in the twentieth century but has increased in urgency even as the conditions of the problem have changed. The artist in exile, the artist at odds with the state—those quintessential artists of the century—may put the problem differently, but the choices they make are forms of spiritual allegiance that are kin to the crucial antitheses of Tonio Kröger. In a bitter attack on literature called "A Poet Between East and West," Czeslaw Milosz, who even manages to sound like Mann when he calls poetry "morally suspect," says that he now accepts a dark premise of Tonio Kröger (the unhealthy origin of art) that he had rejected in his youth. But the issue of relevance is itself highly equivocal, since a work of art may be vital in ways bearing little relation to the questions it may seem to raise. Formally, the recapitulative method of Tonio Kru'ger remains impressive: the final chapters draw on earlier chapters in a precise, subtle, and exhaustive way that is unprecedented in the history of fiction. The story is bold in its extensive use of a device, the leitmotif, that goes against the grain of narrative cause and effect and introduces a different principle of organization, and it is no less bold in its use of a large essayistic chapter that knowingly takes the risk of violating the forward movement of the story. And in a work that in many ways looks back to the nineteenth century, Mann strikes a peculiarly modern note by treating art itself, that holy of holies, as problematic. From the very beginning, Mann's fascination as a writer lay in his peculiar combination of the cautious and the daring, the conservative and the destructive—a combination that separates him, for example, from his near-contemporary, Kafka, who was all daring and destruction—and the tension of that division in his temperament gave rise to Tonio Kröger, which Kafka is known to have admired, as well as to later and darker works. For it must never be forgotten that Tonio Kröger is a youthful story, written by a young man of twenty-six and twenty-seven, who, it is true, had already written Buddenbrooks—a young man, in short, whose youthfulness is itself complex and problematic, with its fruitful mixture of indolence and almost soldierly discipline, of pessimism and ambition, its habit of questioning the whole enterprise of art while practicing that art with unalterable devotion.