Abstract
The common variety of irony is a way of suggesting what one means by saying its opposite. The ironic temper of Thomas Mann consists in his always conveying more than he appears to be saying. The ironic temper has an intellectual flavor. It never fuses completely with the object on which it is focussed: the mind never surrenders control of the situation to the emotion. For the ironic temper the concrete situation never has the character of finality; it is but the meeting-ground, so to speak, of relations that extend forward and backward, into space and time, into the self and into the cosmos; of energies that link the individual with the universal.... The ironic temper involves consciousness, detachment, freedom. It spurns all commitments of an absolute character. It makes no pronouncement on values without limiting the scope of its validity by a reservation, expressed or implied. While it would include in its range the most passionate intensity of experience, it refuses to yield the clarity of its vision for any price.1
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References
Hermann J. Weigand, Thomas Mann’s Novel Der Zauberberg. New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933, pp. 62–63.
Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947, p. 109.
Erich Heller shows how “Schopenhauer’s philosophical system issues in paradox, with irony taking over from logical consistency.” Erich Heller, The Ironic German. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1958, p. 28.
E. A. Nicholls, Nietzsche in the Early Work of Thomas Mann. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955, p. 5.
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: The Modern Library, 1935, II, 39.
In My Brother Death, Cyrus Sulzberger vividly analyzes the dichotomies of existence: birth and death, creation and destruction. Man seeks first of all to live, but he cannot shut out the threat of death; he tries to avoid the knowledge of his mortality, but in the mind, during sleep and waking, this knowledge overwhelms him. Death whispers the words that spell the end of life; death raises questions that the mind struggles in vain to answer. No philosophy and no theology has ever succeeded in triumphing over the fact of death. Man, Sulzberger writes with an inflection of irony, “is so touchingly egocentric he can conceive with neither willingness nor resignation the idea of immutable death as it impinges on himself.” Cyrus Sulzberger, My Brother Death. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961, p. 39.
Joseph Gerard Brennan, Thomas Mann’s World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942, p. 172. Brennan goes on to say: “The handling of personages like Settembrini and Naphta is replete with irony of this sort. During their prodigious speeches, the reader feels that Hans Castorp (and his creator) are thinking ‘Yes, yes — true enough, but there’s a lot to be said for the other side.’ In Mann’s view, irony must be more than the Settembrinian ‘direct and classic device of oratory,’ to fulfill its cosmic function; it must be two-sided, equivocal.” Ibid., p. 172.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Moutain. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: The Modern Library, 1932, p. 279.
Quoted in Fritz Kaufmann, Thomas Mann. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957, p. 189.
In The Ironic German, in a Chapter called “The Theology of Irony,” Erich Heller deals with Mann’s use of irony as a literary device. He points out that irony is a slippery term to conjure with, semantically so complex that is covers a multitude of meanings. Though it has been defined a host of times, it defies all attempts at definition. “Every attempt to define irony unambiguously is in itself ironical. It is wiser to speak about it ironically.... For every assertion ever made about irony (unless what is meant is simply the figure of speech or the conventional pleasantry which goes by that name) is such that anyone might legitimately reply: ‘Ah, but that is not irony!’ ” (Erich Heller, The Ironic German. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1958, p. 235.) Perhaps it is true that a definition of irony which will satisfy all critical minds is hard to formulate, but so long as the function of irony is analyzed concretely within a number of literary contexts it can, like such omnibus terms as romanticism or classicism or tragedy, be invested with a sufficient degree of determinate meaning. The symptoms can be isolated and studied even if they do not conform to a single clinical pattern. If the forms of irony in modern literature are complex, individualized, often unpredictable, it is because metaphysical irony is torn with internal contradictions and strains to transcend itself, that is to destroy itself.
Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961, p. 31.
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948, p. 100.
“Both are holding a monologue and mistake it for a dialogue; for both are trembling on the brink of madness.” E. M. Butler, The Fortunes of Faust. Cambridge: The University Press, 1952; p. 323.
Ibid., p. 240. For a discussion of this theme, see Gunilla Bergsten, Thomas Manns Doctor Faustus. Bonniers, Sweden: Svenska Bokförlaget, 1963, pp. 140–141.
Denis de Rougemont points out the paradox inherent in the character of Satan, who “wishes to make us believe that there is no other world. If we believe him, immediately we find ourselves unable to believe in God or in Satan!” Denis de Rougemont, The Devil’s Share. New York: Pantheon Books, 1944, Translated by Haakon Chevalier, p. 46.
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© 1969 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1969). The Irony of Thomas Mann. In: The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0977-0_12
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