Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

Dead Ends

Thomas Mann writes about the paradox of Anna Karenina as “the greatest society novel in all literature” which is also “an anti-society novel.” Tolstoy prefaces his novel with the Biblical admonition, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, sayeth the Lord.” But Mann wonders where in Tolstoy’s novel the difference can be located between God’s punishment and the fatal constrictions placed on Anna by society: “How far do they coincide in the heart of the socially circumscribed human being?” And indeed the greatness of that novel is the complexity of Tolstoy’s response to Anna’s self-destruction. At no point is she an innocent victim of society; at no point do we not understand and sympathize with her. But this is only to say that Tolstoy is everywhere wrangling with questions of guilt and error. The question of responsibility and error is not absent; it “hovers unanswered over the whole novel.”

Buddenbrooks, another candidate for “greatest society novel” poses similar questions: Do the Buddenbrooks deserve their decline? Does Thomas’s death pay back his unscrupulous dealings with Herr von Maiboom’s estate? Are the sins of the fathers visited upon the sons? Was there some alternate, evasive course of action possible and not taken?

These must be answered in the negative. Mann is not interested in tragic causality, whereby the hero (in Sidney Lumet’s phrase) creates the situation, and the situation strips him down to his essence. In the tragic novels of Thomas Hardy, for instance, every decision is a mistake that reveals the character. His heroes are the sum of their miscalculations, weaknesses, blindness, regrets, and wrong turns. We understand them, but we would (now) do everything differently. Buddenbrooks has no irreversible, fate-sealing moments. In this, it differs from the prototypes of the “decline of a family” genre, Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Sophocles’s Theban plays. The disasters awaiting the House of Atreus and the House of Thebes are built, as Cassandra prophesies: “For in the home a dreadful anger waits. It does not forget and cannot be appeased.”

Buddenbrooks, unlike these tragedies, is both forgiving and forgetful. Forgiving, because catastrophic effects don’t threateningly pile up—they dissipate and fade into background. The family’s decline is inexorable, but not crushing and didactic, as in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The Buddenbrooks are not bankrupted or otherwise “ruined” financially or socially. Forgetful, because the disastrous marriage between Tony Buddenbrook and Bendix Grünlich is not a permanent black mark, as it would be in another novel.  “The years slipped by. The traces of what had befallen Consul Buddenbrook’s daughter grew more and more blurred, both in town and in the family.” Contrast with the tragically memorious Inspector Javert in Les Misérables, or Baron Innstetten in Effie Briest, neither of whom have heard of a statue of limitations. Past sins are eternally valid and actionable for these characters. Not so for Buddenbrooks, which is a record of entropy, lapses, and the wearing effects of time.

This is not just a feature of Buddenbrooks’ world and plot, but its form. The novel is episodic, continually skipping forward, foregoing any effect of concatenation and causality. Sometimes it is “just one thing after another.” A contrast might be helpfully drawn here with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The reader of Proust must be especially attentive because, as with a mystery novel, any small detail might come back later. Proust narrates with the eye of the jealous lover. Buddenbrooks is as detailed as you could want, but does not presume much “recall” on the reader’s part. The narrator shares our distracted lapses: “Sometimes we happen to recall someone, think of her, and wonder how she is doing, and suddenly we remember that she is no longer to be found strolling about the streets, that her voice is no longer part of the general chorus, that she has simply vanished from the arena of life and now lies beneath the earth somewhere.”

Nicholas Dames has drawn a distinction between the modernist novel, which we imagine as engaged in “heroic acts of preservation,” and the Victorian novel, in “memory is less a valorized theme than a dilemma or a threat.” In Austen, Dickens, and Trollope, we find rather “the death of memory,” and recollection operates only by a nostalgia that is useful for the present. The goal is “to eliminate the possibility, in psychological terms, of traumatic fixation, and in narratological terms, of the eruption of desultory, chaotic reminiscences.” Life is then conceived as “no longer burdened by the past, a life lived as a coherent tale, summarizable, pointed, and finally memorizable.”

Where does Buddenbrooks fit? Here is a passage following Tony’s divorce:

She was soon enjoying her role of ‘innocent woman afflicted by tragedy’; her wardrobe was dark now, her pretty ash-blond hair was parted and neatly drawn back, just as she had worn it in her youth; and, to compensate for her lack of social pleasures, she found inexhaustible joy and great dignity in the gravity and importance of her new situation and provided the household with her views on marriage, Herr Grünlich, and life and destiny in general.

Tony transforms her own bitter failure into a generic type, an identifiable “role.” She begins to dress the part and perform “experience” as an empty set of gestures. This is recollection only insofar as Tony’s alteration is general and socially recognizable. 

She is assiduous about recording the event of her divorce in the family ledger:

She assumed a serious face and approached [her father], saying, ‘You did enter it in the family records, didn’t you, Father? No? Oh, then surely I should. Please, give me the key to the secretary.’ And right beneath the lines that she had entered after her name four years before, she resolutely and proudly wrote: ‘This marriage was dissolved by law in February of 1850.’

Then she laid down her pen and pondered for a moment. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I know very well that all this leaves a blot on our family history. Yes, it does—I have given it a great deal of thought. It’s the same as if there were a splotch of ink on this page. But don’t worry, it’s up to me to see that it is erased. I am still young… One can’t spend one’s whole life being the silly goose I once was. Life sweeps one along with it.’

The legal details that Tony firmly presses onto the page immediately are canceled out as so much illegible ink: she sees her entry not as an archive but as a “blot” or “splotch.” And no sooner has she written it than she is striving to have it “erased.”

From this point on, moreover, Tony began to use a certain phrase frequently: ‘After all, life is like that…’ And at the word ‘life’ she would open her eyes wide in a pretty but serious sort of way to indicate what deep insight she now had into human life and human fate. 

Tony’s “deep insight” is a tautology, mere phrase-making and posturing. And yet has she gone through the same experience and made the same error as Sue Bridehead, Dorothea Brooke, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karenina. Still, she does it again a hundred pages later, marrying the doltish Herr Permaneder, and this too comes out badly. She marries her daughter Erika off with no better luck. And yet:

She met all these very adult experiences with something like incredulity, and [...] she experienced them with a child’s gravity and a child’s sense of importance and—most of all—a child’s inner powers to overcome them. She did not understand what she had done to deserve her suffering; for, although she sneered at her mother’s great piety, she shared in it, believing that justice is rewarded on this earth.

In short, Tony’s suffering is short-sighted and spiteful. She registers and savors the wrongs done to her, but only as expletives of scorn and slighted pride:  “Babbit!”  “That Möllendorpf woman, or Hagenström, or Semlinger, or whatever, that Julie, that creature!” Even in being brought low by time, Tony is  “unutterably smug.”

Very late in the novel, Tony comforts her nephew Hanno, a frail and artistic child who has been sent to the seashore for health reasons but has returned with no improvement.

It was Aunt Tony who showed the most ready understanding for Hanno’s yearning for the sea, which was like a wound that slowly scabbed over but would begin to sting and bleed again at the least touch of the rigors of everyday life. She obviously enjoyed listening to his descriptions of life in Travemünde and joined in enthusiastically whenever he wistfully sang its praises.

“Yes, Hanno,” she said, “the true things in life will always be true, and Travemünde is a beautiful spot. Until they lower me in my grave, I will always have happy memories, you know, of the weeks I spent there one summer when I was just a silly young goose. I lived with a family that I liked so much, and they were fond of me, too, it seemed. I was a pretty young thing back then —I’m allowed to say that now that I’m an old lady... Yes, what a wonderfully exciting time I spent with them. I learned so much there, you see, views and opinions and facts that have stood me in good stead all my life, and if other things had not interfered, all sorts of things that just happened—the way they do in life—I could have profited from it even more, even though I was a silly young goose. Do you want to know how stupid I was back then? I wanted some of those pretty colored stars that jellyfish have inside them. So I wrapped a whole bunch of them in my handkerchief and took them home and laid them out neatly in the sun on the balcony, so they would dry up. That way, I thought, only the stars would be left. Right... and when I went back to look, there was just a big wet spot. And it smelled a little like rotting seaweed.”

This brings us to the figure of Hanno. If  Tony “had never once felt the need to swallow a defeat and overcome it in silence... Nothing left unsaid gnawed at her; no unspoken emotions weighed her down. And so she did not have to carry her past around with her,” Hanno seems designed to feel every prick of the world’s torment with heightened sensitivity and tearful, weak endurance. 

Hanno is the anti-Tony. We can see this in the record he makes in the family ledger. If Tony wants to erase the blot made by her marriages, Hanno draws under his own name “two neat, lovely horizontal lines across the bottom,” explaining to his incredulous father that, “I thought... I thought... there wouldn’t be anything more.”

Any reader of novels will recognize in the passage where Tony consoles Hanno a warning about the “wrong” way to make permanent the blissful moments of life. One cannot preserve the lights of youth by setting starfish out to dry. One has to write a novel! So David Copperfield and Remembrance of Things Past teach us. Hanno is the only possible candidate for this task, being a “tenderhearted dreamer” rather than a practical man of business. Hanno is absorbed by a passion for Wagner and Beethoven, but the greatest passages of the novel are reserved for explaining Hanno’s weakness, how inadequately shielded he is from so many “instances of decline, dissolution, and termination” that slam his family and his own fragile being:

He had once again felt how painful beauty truly is, how it plunged you into shame and yearning despair and at the same time gnawed away at your courage and fitness for daily life. He had felt it as a dreadful, gloomy mountain pressing down on him so heavily that once again he was forced to admit that something more than private grief must be weighing him down, that some burden must have oppressed his soul from the very beginning and would suffocate him one day.

Hanno’s artistic sensitivity is indissociable from the pain he seems destined to bear the full brunt of. This is the cruelest irony. To be an amnesiac like Tony is to be invulnerable to the past, voluble and irrepressibly expressive. Thomas Buddenbrook, his father, is wracked by an awareness that he is only performing his own life, that he is out of step with his time and duties, but his habits, artifice of dignity, and disappointment with others make up a shield against this awareness. Memory is a threat, while to feel is to be swallowed up in a swarm of anguished, cacophonous racket. The music Hanno improvises belongs to “the fanatical cult of nothing... There was also something insatiable and depraved beyond measure in the way it was savored and exploited. It sucked hungrily at its last sweet drops with almost cynical despair, with a deliberate willing of bliss and doom, and it fell away in exhaustion, revulsion, and surfeit.” His improvisation is the closest thing that Buddenbrooks presents to its own recapitulation and appropriation of the past, but it ends in exhaustion, without a witness: the motifs simply wear themselves out.

Readers of The Magic Mountain will recognize here Mann’s “philosophy of disease” [Quotation from his essay on Goethe and Tolstoy]:

Disease has two faces and a double relation to man and his human dignity. On the one hand it is hostile: by overstressing the physical, by throwing man back upon his body, it has a dehumanizing effect. On the other hand, it is possible to think and feel about illness as a highly dignified human phenomenon. It may be going too far to say that disease is spirit, or, which would sound very tendentious, that spirit is disease. Still, the two conceptions do have very much in common. For the spirit is pride; it is a willful denial and contradiction of nature; it is detachment, withdrawal, estrangement from her. Spirit is that which distinguishes from all other forms of organic life this creature man, this being which is to such a high degree independent of her and hostile to her. And the question, the aristocratic problem, is this: is he not by just so much the more man, the more detached he is from nature—that is to say, the more diseased he is?

“Spirit is disease.” Notice how far we are from the Hegelian idea that spirit is history. Disease is inescapably presentist, while history is burdened with the accumulated wreckage of the past. Although Mann has written one of the great historical novels, in the sense of Buddenbrooks being a period piece, it is a history that sinks, voiceless, into the mire, its lips murmuring as they are dragged beneath the whirlpool.

History in Buddenbrooks is a debâcle, but one that vanishes wordlessly, without any return of the repressed or messianic plea or twilight of the gods. There is no blame or moralizing about how the bad end was avoidable. There is only the underscoring that this was a dead end of history, bequeathing nothing: account closed.

I take the last lines of 100 Years of Solitude to be doing the same thing. There, too, the family and its memory “would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men,” and their family records and “everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”