(no subject)
Since finishing the disappointing Winter's Tale, I've been reading Thomas Mann--a collection of his shorter works translated by Joachim Neugroschel. It's an improvement on Mark Helprin, for sure. The first five stories I read were sharp little sketches that often focused on the ugly side of human nature. Even though none of them really grabbed me, they were interesting.
But this morning I read Mann's novella "Tristan," and I loved it. It is the story of a writer who falls in love with a young married woman while they are both patients at a sanatorium. It is not a sentimental story. In fact, Mann seems mainly to be poking fun at the conventions of high Romanticism and emphasizing the value of daily life over mythic dreams of love and death. The writer is a self-conscious aesthete whose novel is terrible and whose obsession with Beauty is held up for ridicule, and the woman he loves is a rather unexceptional wife and mother. Yet in the midst of all this, at the midpoint of the novella, this weak, self-important man and this ordinary woman are given one truly beautiful scene together. It is, in some ways, a very simple scene. Everyone else has gone out for a sleigh-ride, leaving Herr Spinnell and Frau Klöterjahn alone in the sanatorium. She plays Wagner on the piano for him while darkness falls over the snow outside. That's all it is, but Mann makes the little details of the scene glow so beautifully and describes the music with such precise phrases that this scene is elevated above the rest of the story--a moment of true emotion in the midst of Mann's irony.
I operate in the mode of sincerity rather than irony, always, so it's no surprise that I loved this scene. I loved its language and the way it held me spellbound in the same way that Herr Spinnell and Frau Klöterjahn are spellbound until they are interrupted by the voices and jingling bells of the returning sleigh-riders. But I also loved the fact that it is fleeting, the way it suggests that even a character as ridiculous and as deluded as Herr Spinnell can see clearly, can feel deeply, can be exalted--only for a moment.
But this morning I read Mann's novella "Tristan," and I loved it. It is the story of a writer who falls in love with a young married woman while they are both patients at a sanatorium. It is not a sentimental story. In fact, Mann seems mainly to be poking fun at the conventions of high Romanticism and emphasizing the value of daily life over mythic dreams of love and death. The writer is a self-conscious aesthete whose novel is terrible and whose obsession with Beauty is held up for ridicule, and the woman he loves is a rather unexceptional wife and mother. Yet in the midst of all this, at the midpoint of the novella, this weak, self-important man and this ordinary woman are given one truly beautiful scene together. It is, in some ways, a very simple scene. Everyone else has gone out for a sleigh-ride, leaving Herr Spinnell and Frau Klöterjahn alone in the sanatorium. She plays Wagner on the piano for him while darkness falls over the snow outside. That's all it is, but Mann makes the little details of the scene glow so beautifully and describes the music with such precise phrases that this scene is elevated above the rest of the story--a moment of true emotion in the midst of Mann's irony.
I operate in the mode of sincerity rather than irony, always, so it's no surprise that I loved this scene. I loved its language and the way it held me spellbound in the same way that Herr Spinnell and Frau Klöterjahn are spellbound until they are interrupted by the voices and jingling bells of the returning sleigh-riders. But I also loved the fact that it is fleeting, the way it suggests that even a character as ridiculous and as deluded as Herr Spinnell can see clearly, can feel deeply, can be exalted--only for a moment.