Advanced search Subscribe to our newsletter and you'll continuously be informed about our new books, series and journals. You can customize this e-mail newsletter to your particular needs and interests. Newsletters include special discount codes. To subscribe or change existing preferences press the subscribe button	Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche. Eroticism, Death, Music, and Laughter. PICART, Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA, 1999, XXII, 151 pp. Pb: 978-90-420-0557-0 / 90-420-0557-2 € 33 / US$ 45 Series: Value Inquiry Book Series 85 Central European Value Studies Traditional interpretations of Thomas Mann's relation to Nietzsche's writings plot out a simple relation of earlier adulation and later rejection. The book argues that Mann's disavowal of Nietzsche's influence was, in the words of T.J. Reed, a "necessary political act" when the repudiation of Nietzsche's more hysterical doctrines required such a response. Using a genealogical method, the book traces how Mann labors ambivalently under the shadow of Nietzsche's writings on his own political artistry through a detailed analysis of Mann's Death in Venice, Dr. Faustus, the Joseph tetralogy, and Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. Using the recurring Nietzschean themes of eroticism, death, music, and laughter as a guide, it arrives at a rough picture of how Mann both takes up and discontinues Nietzsche's poetic heritage. The book derives the vision of the interrelationships binding these four leitmotiv elements from Dürer's magic square as depicted in Melancholia I. The link with Dürer is far from arbitrary because Mann directly aligned Nietzschean insight with Dürer's world of passion, sympathy with suffering, the macabre stench of rotting flesh, and Faustian melancholy. Contents: Editorial Foreword by H.G. Callaway. Guest Foreword by Adrian Del Caro. Preface by Raymond Fleming. Acknowledgments. ONE Dürer's Magic Square. TWO The Aging Artist. THREE Eternal Recurrence. FOUR Confessions. FIVE Apprenticeship and Projection: Mann as a Reader of Nietzsche. Notes. Bibliography. About the Author. Index. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Caroline Joan ("Kay") S. Picart was born in 1966, and is married to Davis William Houck. Currently she is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, St. Lawrence University, 1999-. Prior to that, she was with the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, 1997-1999. Before then, she was with the Division of Arts and Humanities, College of Liberal Arts, Florida Atlantic University, 1996-1997. She worked as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) Instructor at the Yonsei University Foreign Language Center, Seoul, South Korea, 1991-1992; and was a University Lecturer in Zoology, Philosophy, and Astro-physics at the Ateneo de Manila and the San Carlos Pastoral Foundation, the Philippines, 1987-1989. For her Ph.D., she specialized in Social and Political Philosophy, with minors in Comparative Literature, and in Aesthetics, Critical Theory and Literary Criticism, from the Department of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University, 1993-1996. She finished her M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science as the Wolfson Prize Awardee in 1991, and Sir Run Run Shaw Scholar, from 1989-1991, at Cambridge University, England. She graduated with an M.A. with distinction in Philosophy, 1987-1989, and a B.S. in Biology, magna cum laude, 1983-1987, at the Ateneo de Manila, the Philippines. Picart's forthcoming books include Resentment and "the Feminine" in Nietzsche's Politico-Aesthetics, The Pennsylvania State University Press, and The Rebirths of Frankenstein, University of Texas Press. She has published articles and book chapters in aesthetics, philosophy and sociology of science, social and political philosophy, feminism and philosophy, philosophy and multiculturalism, Nietzsche studies, and phenomenology. Picart is also an artist, a journalist, and an enthusiast of ballroom dancing. Her art has been exhibited in South Korea, the Philippines, and many parts of the United States. Her articles have been published by two newspapers in Seoul, South Korea, as well as by three newspapers and Filipinas Magazine in the United States. Recently, she was awarded grants from the Institute on Race and Ethnicity, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Office of University Research, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, to produce videos linking her art with her journalistic and auto-ethnographic writing. She founded and taught ballroom classes with the International Dance Club in South Korea in 1993, and began participating in ballroom competitions in 1998. EDITORIAL FOREWORD In this book, Caroline Joan ("Kay") S. Picart asks us to think Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts again. We are guided to look at Nietzsche through the literature of Thomas Mann. Nietzsche, the great Romantic and anti-Romantic, has long engaged critical spirits of our age, and many have followed him, not minding the hazards. Nietzsche is also a favored whipping-boy of cultural conservatives. The effect is that the world's libraries and bookshelves are filled to overflow with advocacy and counter-advocacy centered on Nietzsche. The enthusiasts and the detractors alike tend to become trapped in one side of a paradox. For instance, the "revaluation of all values" requires standards of judgment, thus values, to use in the project. These may quickly recede beyond reach if we ceaselessly move with the enthusiasts, but values are found too easily, if we simply stand pat. In either case, a needed intellectual tension is missing. Neither Mann nor Picart stand pat. Instead, important elements of Nietzsche are arrested in the perspectives provided. We need a place to stand. Criticism presupposes a positive and constructive purpose, since lacking this it tends to futile exhaustion. Criticism cannot be total, nor can we afford to suppose that whatever is not being criticized is therefore already suspect. Seeing Nietzsche through the critical and appreciative eyes of Mann, as Picart does, assists in con- straining the enthusiasts and in avoiding ideological disregard of cultural criticism. A value of this is that it focuses needed attention on some European conceptions of the relations between values, art, and truth. This book is the third volume of the Central-European Value Studies (CEVS), a special series within the Value Inquiry Book Series (VIBS). CEVS is a pluralistic project which publishes books in all areas of value inquiry originating from Central Europe, its major philosophical traditions, and the German-speaking world in particular. The purpose of the special series is to make Central-European value studies more broadly available in the English-speaking world. I take this opportunity, on behalf of CEVS, to welcome Picart's fresh contribution. H.G. Callaway Editor, Central-European Value Studies Associate Editor, Value Inquiry Book Series University of Mainz, Germany GUEST FOREWORD In the 1970s at the University of Minnesota, I participated in a graduate seminar on the novel taught by Frank Hirschbach, whose The Arrow and the Lyre (1955) is represented in the bibliography of the present study. I recall an anecdote he related to us, of which I seem to have a perfect recollection but which I have probably botched beyond recognition, that goes like this. As a graduate student at Yale University, the young Hirschbach was given the honor of conducting Thomas Mann, der Meister (the Master), through the Yale library. At one point in their tour, they paused deliberately before a glass case containing Bildungsromane (novels of individual development, or apprentice novels): here were Parzival, Wilhelm Meister, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Nachsommer (Indian Summer), Der Grüne Heinrich (Green Henry), and Mann's own Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). Mann gazed at the display, thought for a moment, then said: "Ja, da gehöre ich hin" ("Yes, that's where I belong"). Perhaps I remember this anecdote because we graduate students venerated Mann and our professors, and such a tale easily impressed itself upon my memory as a metaphor as well. Perhaps, too, I vividly recall how Hirschbach related this to us because I secretly wanted to see other books in that display case - Goethe and "the classics" are always fine, but does one proceed straight from Lübeck to Olympus with no stop-over in hell? Had Mann himself made the trip so uneventfully? Overcoming my anxiety, I went on to write a dissertation on Nietzsche, on the Dionysian aesthetic, and did my small part to reunite Mann and Nietzsche in hell in a section devoted to the Dionysian in Doctor Faustus. Mann was right, and I have no reason to doubt the motives or the wisdom of those who constructed the display at the Yale library - genre can be quite compelling, after all. But how long will it be, if it ever comes to pass, that any such display will contain the books of Nietzsche in addition to those of Goethe and Mann? Or for that matter, what of a display containing books by Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche? One tries to visualize a Nietzsche who maintains his sanity, earns the exalted reputation of German classic, and in old age strides through the library with an admiring student only to confront a display of - what exactly? Wo gehört er hin? (Where does he belong?) Is the display case perhaps empty? This exercise of remembrance and fantasy has reinforced what I and others have quietly suspected over the years, namely, that Mann had a library (of Congress) persona suitable for framing and a very different persona that does not comfortably rest alongside Goethe. Today, the distance between us and the Second World War has grown sufficiently to allow more creative, less political approaches to both Nietzsche and Mann, such that the anxiety we felt in the cool shadow of Goethe and the classics has given way, just a little, to clearing skies. The present study is by no means insensitive to twentieth-century politics as they impact the life and works of Mann, the self-avowed unpolitical man. In fact, it goes to the heart of Mann's motivations, and for that very reason, it contributes to the clearing skies. Who knows, there are things perhaps not yet glimpsed once the clouds begin to part. The generation of the 1970s suspected that the Dreigestirn (Big Three) of 1918, namely Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, did have much to do with Mann's character and his art. That trinity encompasses the themes of eroticism, death, music, and laughter, and who would argue against Caroline Joan ("Kay") S. Picart that these are not the foundations of Mann's life and fiction? So, when we envision the tour of the Yale library and see before us the glass case containing the old masters, and the new master, we marvel somewhat that the trinity consisting of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche is not represented. They were not authors of "fiction," or were they? The Nietzsche-Mann relationship is as complicated as any such relationship between great thinkers and artists can be, and Mann did nothing to render this relationship transparent. An astute reader who is equally mindful of the wiles of Nietzsche and Mann, however, is able to discern where Mann practices imitation while preaching overcoming, just as Nietzsche, the anti-Romantic, was proficient in masking his Romantic motivations. Picart is the astute reader who reveals Mann as mythmaker, magician, and poet, a man to whom lies were as important as truths. Even in the post-war denunciation of Nietzsche, Mann struck a pose that was quintessentially Nietzschean. This is part of the irony, part of the necessity of being Mann. Once again: we visualize Mann in front of the glass, the four-sided glass display, the four-sided mirror, and we are mindful of the long and distinguished life he led. Unlike Nietzsche, whose life was brief, sheltered, and catastrophic, Mann had a long and productive life as a public figure. Mann was Aschenbach, and Joseph, and Leverkühn, and Krull, as the mask-wearing Dionysus. But the Dionysian in Nietzsche's transformation of the art-deity into a philosopher-god stands for life affirmation, for eternal recurrence, for celebration of earthly immanence, while in Mann the Dionysian is death, barrenness, that Asiatic Dionysus whom Nietzsche deplores in favor of the Attic Dionysus embraced by the Greeks. In a profound sense, Mann had opportunity to improve upon Nietzsche's Dionysian, to return the seducer god to the social world inhabited by women and men. In 1888, Nietzsche finally began openly to criticize Goethe for not embodying the tragic instinct, for lacking the Dionysian properties that only he, Nietzsche, possessed (with the possible exception of Heinrich Heine). And surely Mann was aware of this criticism of Goethe and how unfair it was. Is this why Mann depicts the Dionysian as a woman's world, be it in the form of lustily voiced stable maids, troubled daughters of former high society, or musically inclined prostitutes? In a social world, a real world, the Dionysian is perhaps less philosophical, but not therefore less dangerous. Picart's fourth chapter, entitled "Confessions," reveals a Dionysian Krull with features of both Nietzsche and Mann, leading us to wonder: how would Nietzsche's life have unfolded if Mann, not Nietzsche, had lived it? Picart proposes the thesis that Mann, in his deliberate, ironic, and carefully choreographed way, "reaches a different level by enfleshing through his fiction what Nietzsche had outlined through his philosophy" (p. 99). What of this thesis? Did Mann "live" the Nietzschean life better than Nietzsche himself? Did Mann, in styling himself as Dichter (poet) versus Schriftsteller (writer), ultimately achieve a breakthrough and a break-away from Nietzsche, who ironically had striven to style himself as the poet? The similarities between the two men are at times uncanny: they are both Faustian intellectuals "intoxicated and diseased from excess of knowledge and deficiency of belief" (p. 56). Both are tormented and tempted writers, "visionaries for whom the awareness of being in a story was a crucial force in attempting to craft their own political arts and mythic legacies" (p. 74). But Picart does not lose sight of the differences, either, which makes this an exceptionally honest book. Picart starts out with the image of Dürer's magic square from the etching Melancholia I, whose four sides are eroticism, death, music, and laughter. She follows these themes faithfully along the winding paths of Death in Venice, the Joseph trilogy, Doctor Faustus, and Confessions of Felix Krull. Her readings of these and other texts by Mann and Nietzsche are compelling in their own right as skillful philological analysis, and they become all the more fascinating as an exploration of the shifting borders between philosophy, biography, and literature. Some might suspect a diminishing of Mann's craft, an eclipse of his greatness by the shadow of Nietzsche, yet what we have here is a study on how the greatness of Mann and the greatness of Nietzsche are not easily untangled, and more importantly, need not be. Adrian Del Caro Professor of German Chair, Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures University of Colorado at Boulder SAMPLE PAGE (Note: Text only, the original lay-out of the page is not reproduced here) PAGE TWO OF CHAPTER ONE [...] listening, of sensitivity to the mysterious language of the imagination, compared with which instruments and scientific equipment are useless and of no import."1 Perhaps one of the key features of this print, which simultaneously reinforces and embodies the fundamental ambiguity that lies at the heart of the image, as both a symbol of bottomless sadness as well as of the ascent into the higher realms of contemplation and magic, is the magic square that lies on the right side of the print, above Melancholy's wreathed and leaning head, beside a scale, an hourglass, and a bell whose rope, emblematic of control over the ringing of the bell, trails off beyond the borders of the print. My aim is to examine and illustrate how a philosophical approach, using the symbolic imagery and ambience of Dürer's magic square, is crucial to reading the (dis)continuity and (self-) "overcoming" of the Nietzschean heritage in Thomas Mann. The magic square encloses sixteen Arabic-numbered smaller squares of equal size, arranged in such a way that the number "1" appears in the lower right-hand corner and the number "16" in the upper left-hand corner; its "magic" lies in the sum of these numerals: no matter how we add them up - horizontally, vertically or diagonally - we always arrive at thirty-two, which is double the number "16." This leads to the notion of a square squaring itself - vibrating in locked dialectics with itself. The connection with Dürer is not arbitrary, as Mann himself writes: "The thought of Dürer always calls up in my mind another name, Nietzsche's. . . ."2 Mann proclaims Friedrich Nietzsche to be his "medium" or guide in learning his way through Dürer's world. For it is through (the young) Nietzsche's passion for Richard Wagner's and Arthur Schopenhauer's leitmotif themes of moral fervor, the Faustian ambience, the Cross, death and the tomb, that (the young) Mann rhapsodizes over Dürer's Knight, Death, and the Devil: Here we have another essential element of the German and Dürer character-world . . . the knightliness between the Devil and Death; passion, odor of the tomb, sympathy with suffering, Faustian Melancholia - and all of it composed into an idyll of peaceful, industrious domesticity, with the sun shining warm on the death's head through the bottle-glass in the window-panes, and hourglass and lion lending dignity and a glimpse of the eternal to the modest, humble little scene. (3) The manner in which I employ the symbolism of the magic square is in keeping with Thomas Mann's implicit characterization of it, using the words of his Nietzsche-Faustus character, Adrian Leverkühn: "Relationship is everything. And if you want to give it a more precise name, it is ambiguity."4 The notion of the variation of the identical is mathematical as much as it is musically rooted for Adrian, because he remarks: "Music turns the equivocal into a system. Take this or that note. You can understand it or respectively so. You can think of it as [...]	Tijnmuiden 7 1046 AK Amsterdam The Netherlands T: +31-20-611 48 21 F: +31-20-447 29 79 248 East 44th Street - 2nd floor New York, NY 10017 USA T: 1-800-225-3998 F: 1-800-853-3881 Toll-free in the USA info@rodopi.nl