Review

Author(s): Rudolph von Abele

Review by: Rudolph von Abele
Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 1969), pp.
466-468
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/429437
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 466
in relation to the 1422 altarpiece. Both here and
in the third part, another very sound survey of
the individual works, there is much allusion to
the sequence of Masaccio's work. This concerns
only specialists, since they were all painted in
four years. But they are great monuments, and
I see them in a different order more akin to
Procacci's. In his longest footnote (178), the
author argues against Procacci that he packs too
many works into one year, but his alternative
offered there seems to me to pack more works
by Masolino into eight months.
The twenty-four large color plates are above
average quality. A direct check with twelve of
the originals shows that they are too bright
(which can be a legitimate effect of floodlight-
ing) and not blended enough (usual in print-
ing). I found three bad colors: in 2, the bluish
throne and bright blue robe should be pure
gray and blue-black, respectively; in 49, Peter's
reddish robe should be ochre, and in 52, the
standing cripple's blue shirt should be green.
All other falsities are less serious. It is fine to
have included the fresco expert Tintori's dia-
grams of the days' work; those on pages 103 and
155 are regrettably not noted in any list of il-
lustrations.
Unhappily the author has not been well
served by his American handlers. The transla-
tion is fluent and graceful but was done by
someone unfamiliar with the material being
discussed. After we stumble over the old chest-
nut of calling trecento and quattrocento "thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries," it is the more
peculiar to find "fifteenth century" where four-
teenth is meant (pp. 15, 47). Masaccio copied
antiquities, not antiques. "Sant'Anna Metterza"
is an iconographic term for which the only
English equivalent is "Virgin with St. Anne;"
to call it "The Metterza Saint Anne" just makes
mysteries. It is sloppy business to cite Italian
translated titles of books that had been written
in English and French. Besides a crucial omitted
"not" in note 78, the worst misprints are
typically in proper names, which (like Metterza)
constitute much of art history's special language.
These were not left by a failure to notice them,
but, as proper names, carefully copied into
the index, which thus is full of them from
Algerti to the Bluter collection and I. R.
Spencer. The index as a whole is naive and
capricious; the only thing odder than having
entries like "Italian Renaissance, elements in"
or "Mathematics, use of" is that each is followed
by one reference. It is a pity that the book's
handsome appearance is so marred, but I would
like to be explicit that I list these and the pre-
vious points, which take most of the space, pre-
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cisely because the book is good enough to war-
rant much use.
CREIGHTON GILBERT
Brandeis University
BULHOF, FRANCIS. Transpersonalismus und
Synchronizitdt: Wiederholung als Strukturele-
ment in Thomas Manns "Zauberberg." Gron-
ingen, Drukkerij van Denderen, 1966, pp. xi
+ 228.
Francis Bulhof's underlying purpose seems to
have been to demonstrate that, for all their
evident divergences, Ulysses and the Zauberberg
are brothers under the skin. How he goes about
his self-imposed task is interesting, if not
exactly original. Briefly, and not unjustly put,
waiving the elaborate apparatus of categories
and distinctions whose explication and illus-
tration take up most of his book, Bulhof argues
that the "mere story" (blosse Geschichte) of the
Zauberberg is, for all its accessibility and power,
only a kind of occasion for the establishment of
a "network of textural cross-references" (ein
Netz der texturale Verweisungen), which consti-
tutes the "real" structure and creates the "real"
unity of the novel. This "real" structure and
"real" unity is to be seen as a patterning of mo-
tifs relative to each other; it exists as a "spatial"
configuration, out of time; and thus, unlike
the "mere story," it must be ideally grasped as a
totality all at once. To quote Bulhof at his
most enthusiastic: "A spatial unity dissolves the
temporally linear character of the narrative
[upon repeated readings]; the narrative is trans-
formed into a 'thing': It becomes a texture, that
is: It is disengaged from its relations with reality
and from all temporal aspects" (p. 191). And in
this way the Zauberberg becomes, like Ulysses,
a member of the class of "unreadable books"
(ein unlesbares Buch), the ideal apprehension of
which stands as a limit the reader may approach
only asymptotically (as Bulhof says, no one but
a person with the powers of a computer could
achieve this sort of experience, cf. pp. 109-110).
Like Ulysses, accordingly, it becomes a book
whose essence (Wesen) and core (Kern) lie in
the structure of its texture, of which the govern-
ing, and centrally significant, property is its
"timelessness" (Zeitlosigkeit). The Zauberberg,
for all its apparent concern with the interplay
of notions about clock and subjective time, is
"really" about something althogether different,
something transcendent: the total "dissolution
of time" (Aufhebung der Zeit). Inasmuch as
the ideal apprehension of which Bulhof speaks
can only be entered upon with the aid of a
Reviews
word-index similar to the one already existing
for Ulysses, it is but consistent that he should
be currently engaged in preparing such a docu-
ment. It is hard to judge the degree to which
criticism of the novel will benefit thereby; but
it is in any case interesting to know that, con-
trary to the assumptions of most commentators,
the Zauberberg is as liberally supplied with
Leitmotiven as any of Mann's other works-
though Bulhof's implicit definition of Leitmotiv,
offered through his categorization of its various
types, is somewhat more inclusive than usual.
Bulhof's eye is fixed on the "structure of the
texture," which he regards as the central aspect
of the total structure of the novel. "It must be
conceded," he says, "that the concept of struc-
ture is in general of wider scope, and that the
emphasis in the present study has been narrowed
to but one aspect of the total structure. But
this is surely (freilich) the most essential (wesen-
tlichste) aspect of structure in general, that is,
the one which realizes in highest sense (in
hochstem Grade) the metaphorical concept of
'structure'" (p. 195). And it is to be noted that
in thus circumscribing his notion of "structure,"
Bulhof explicitly dissociates it from narrative
meaning. For, if by "structure" he means "the
spatial organization of the texture," and if by
"texture" he means "the concrete tissue of words,
without reference to the situations which these
words may call forth," then it follows that the
"structure" he is referring to is a structure
divorced from the "mere story" and its sig-
nificance. About that "mere story," which he
distinguishes from the whole novel (Erzdhlung),
which includes both Geschichte and Struktur
in his sense, he has nothing at all to say. And
even though he defines the Leitmotiv so as to
include recurrences of personal traits and events
(Situationen), both of which surely belong to the
Geschichte, he says he will treat of them, and
does in fact treat of them to a large extent, only
insofar as they are themselves ultimately re-
ducible to the interweaving of the recurrent
verbal formulations he calls "pure textural
Leitmotiven" (cf. pp. 28-29). Moreover, he
systematically eliminates, as bearers of the true
"spirit of the novel" the narrator who cannot
be trusted because he does not fully know or
control his own narrative; the various kinds of
narrative time-flow, because they only contra-
dict one another; the narrative space (Raum),
because it is somehow "broken up" (gespaltet);
and the hero, Hans Castorp, who has, through
the workings of what Bulhof calls Transper-
sonalismus, become a construct rather than an
entity, built out of fragments from many sources
-traits and words of other persons, descriptions
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467
by the narrator, quotations from parts of the
book he himself has no commerce with, and so
on. So that, "Taking the point of view proper
to textural study, the world of the Zauberberg
is called forth only by its words" (cf. pp. 186,
187, 194). If this be so, then the world of the
novel is finally dependent on, and understand-
able only in terms of, that world of words,
which for Bulhof is merely a texture organized
into a structure, without narrative meaning,
whose true modality is "timelessness." Thus the
"spirit of the novel" as a whole becomes col-
lapsed into the "spirit of the structure."
Bulhof is offering, and answering, an old and
somewhat dubious riddle in literary aesthetics:
"When is a novel a cathedral?" (cf. pp. 189-
191). Answer, "When it is Ulysses or the Zauber-
berg." The aim is to show that, for various
aesthetic and historical reasons, certain novelists
have contrived to bring about the destruction of
narrative in its sense of the description of a
sequence of events whose significance is de-
pendent in considerable measure on their tem-
poral ordering. The resulting "timelessness"
imputed to the Zauberberg seems close kin to
that "timelessness" of myth, that ahistoricity
mentioned by Joseph Frank in his well-known
paper, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature,"
in Schorer, Miles 8c McKenzie, Criticism: The
Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment
(New York, 1948) as one among other rationales
for the invention of "spatial form" by such
men as Flaubert, Proust, and Joyce. Bulhof, of
course, is adding Mann to this ensemble. I do
not know what myth, except perhaps Howard
Nemerov's myth of the "quester hero," Bulhof
is interested in invoking relative to the Zauber-
berg; he nowhere says. But he does adopt
Frank's theory of "spatial form," as well as
Frank's view of Ulysses, in developing his own
thesis.
Now, Frank equates "spatial form" with the
principle of "reflexive reference" (p. 383), which
Bulhof calls the "network of textural cross-
references." The more intricate this network
becomes, the truer it is said to be that ".. . the
dimension of depth has vanished from history
as it forms the content of these works: past and
present are seen spatially, locked in a timeless
unity which ... eliminates any feeling of his-
torical sequence by the very act of juxtaposition"
(p. 392). To be seen "spatially" means, to
Bulhof, to be grasped as a "totum simul," every-
thing all at once. But even if this sort of ap-
prehension of a novel were possible, there is
no reason to assume that it would "dissolve" the
experience of the temporal arrangement of
events within the fictive world. To accept the
 468
theory of "spatial form" involves accepting the
idea that it is a matter of indifference how the
events making up a novel like Ulysses or the
Zauberberg are ordered in time; for since their
significance is independent of time, the ordering
cannot have any bearing on it. But this is ab-
surd, for, in any narrative, it remains the case
that events do succeed each other, and that
their succession happens to be one particular
succession and not another. And each particular
succession carries its own implications. Mr.
Bloom's being cuckolded at four-thirty in the
afternoon requires everything that has gone be-
fore and all that follows to go before and follow
in its given order; the same is true of what
precedes Hans Castorp's snow-adventure and of
what follows it. The fact is that narrative and
narrative time is no more destroyed in Ulysses,
or rendered irrelevant, than English syntax is
destroyed or rendered irrelevant in Finnegans
Wake. Nothing whatever in logic or experience
forces us to beleive that the anorganization of
what is given, in Joyce's work, must necessarily
destroy the very carefully temporally ordered
narrative structures of these works.
And if this can be argued in respect of novels
so radical as Joyce's, how much more plausibly
can it not be argued in the case of so funda-
mentally conventional a novel as the Zauber-
berg? Bulhof's effort to equate Mann with
Joyce falls flat. Granted that personal traits,
habits of speech, situational involvements are
shifted about from character to character, and
even from character to narrator and back again:
this can be seen as a special aspect of the over-
all psychological problems posed by the novel.
Why must it be seen as a maneuver to withdraw
the novel from time? Granted that Dr. Krokow-
ski's seance and Dr. Behrens' X-raying are linked
by verbal formulations having to do with the
requirement of darkness for certain sorts of ac-
tivity, and the necessity to clear the eyes, the
link can be seen as a subtle comment on the
relations between physical and "psychic" medi-
cine. Why must it be seen as a maneuver to with-
draw the novel from time? "Textural cross-
references" may well put the events they link
into new lights respective to each other; but
they need not, and do not, negate their temporal
relationships.
If Bulhof is minded to embrace the theory of
"spatial form" and apply it to the Zauberberg,
nobody can stop him. On the other hand, it is
somewhat dogmatic for him to assert that this
is the only correct way to read the novel, and
that the conclusions it yields are the only cor-
rect conclusions to be reached about it. My own
feeling is that Mann's book, in its preoccupa-
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tion with paradoxes about time, and with the
relations between time and disease, masks a far
deeper and more crucial concern: a dread of
death and a separation-anxiety so strong as
fatally to inhibit the social and personal matura-
tion of the hero. This is no place to argue such
a thesis; I mention it because Bulhof, apart
from his misguided conflations of novels with
material objects in the same aesthetic category,
seems to be trying very hard to turn an object
lesson in one of the profoundest of human
maladies into a quasi-religious paean of tri-
umph. Since Mann himself spent much time
and energy trying to do the same thing; and
since Mann criticism has, like Joyce criticism,
been seriously hampered by too much devotion
to the intentional fallacy ("If he says he done
it, he done it"), Bulhof's emphasis is not at all
surprising; it is merely saddening.
Bulhof has pointed out many interesting de-
tails in the Zauberberg (as in his analysis of
the sources of Hans Castorp's French, or in
his tracing of the vicissitudes of various quota-
tions through the text). On the whole, though,
he handles a great novel with curious niggardli-
ness. That he stipulates the limits of his critical
apparatus at the onset does not save him from
the charge of being niggardly: first because limits
impose limits however they may be excused;
second, because in the end he tries to show that
his limits are not limits at all, since within them
he is able to identify what is of greatest impor-
tance about the book, namely, that, the mere
story being unimportant, and the "real" story
being the structure of the texture, which either
causes (in the reader) or achieves (in the novel) a
somehow highly valuable "dissolution of time,"
the soul of the Zauberberg lies in translation
to the plane of the eternal Now. There are those
who will doubtless find these claims plausible
and therefore worth making. Maybe another
critic will be able so to put Bulhof's incidental
insights to work as to tell us something more
meaningful and relevant about a Zauberberg far
grander and richer than the shriveled cartoon of
it which is the subject of this academically asep-
tic anatomy.
RUDOLPH VON ABELE
The American University
FUGATE, JOE K. The Psychological Basis of
Herder's Aesthetics. The Hague and Paris,
Mouton and Co., 1966, pp. 303.
This investigation proceeds from Herder's basic
conviction that the soul is a spiritual entity:
that it is of divine creation. Owing to this fact,