Buddenbrooks redux.
I can not really imagine anyone reading this for pleasure. As a piece of literature it is as dull as ditchwater, and just as murky.
It starts engagingly enough. Tonio falls in love, first with Hans, then with Inge. Both represent that class of good, solid, decent Northern citizen that Tonio admires so much, those who live their lives as unselfconsciously as the flowers of the field and the birds of the air, without reflection, without self-doubt. Tonio himself, as his name would so obviously suggest, is not of this pure metal. As in Buddenbrooks, as in Mann's own biography, mother is a fiery Southern beauty with musical interests. As in Buddenbrooks, the Kröger family is crumbling and collapsing - although here the process takes but a sentence - and when Tonio's upright, carefully dressed father, who displays his lack of artifice by always wearing a flower of the field in his buttonhole rather than any exotic cultured bloom, when he dies, then mother pursues her musical interests by marrying a musician.
Tonio finds this 'liederlich', an interesting word which can be translated as anything from raffish to dissolute, from slipshod to slovenly to wanton to lewd. Clearly disapproving.
And this is where I begin to find this novella quite distasteful, because Tonio sees the whole of humanity as divided into just two types of people. There are the healthy-minded enjoyers of life, epitomised by the blond-haired, blue-eyed Hanses and Inges of this world (and yes, that feels unpleasantly racialist to me too) and then there are the mistrusting, reflective, perceptive destroyers, those who look deep into the innermost of life, but find there nothing but 'Komik und Elend' - comedy and misery. A grotesque, which provokes disgust so powerful that they can only be satanic ironists or helpless misfits. Artists.
The middle two chapters are taken up by Tonio propounding this deeply pessimistic view of art, and the really rather laughable dichotomy between captains of industry, lords of creation, who have no need to recite verses and only make themselves ridiculous if they do, and on the other hand artists; charlatans, fakes, demons, hobgoblins, brandmarked by visible signs of alienation like a stigma writ large on the brow. To Tonio, feelings are banal and trivial, the truly artistic is only to be found in 'die Gereiztheiten und kalten Ekstasen unseres verdorbenen, unseres artistischen Nervensystems' (the excitations and cold-blooded ecstasies of the artist's corrupted nervous system). Of course, everyone knows that artists are sensitive, and the Bürger with a well-founded self-assurance is not.
Tonio is given a rather ineffectual opponent in the form of Lisaweta Iwanowna, a Russian painter. More we are not told, nor do we need to know as she is only there to offer an excuse for Tonio to parade his nebulous ideas on the Russian artistic soul. Lisaweta does manage to make an objection to Tonio's long disquisition (when she can get a word in), pointing out that literature can be a guide to understanding, and forgiveness, and love, and that the artist can be seen as noble and honourable in using words to heal and redeem mankind. Oh yes, says Tonio, you can say that, with your admirable Russian literature, that truly represents sacred literature - for what reason sacred he declines to explain - but look at poor me, tired, disillusioned, unmanned by the misery I see. An artist can analyse and formulate and regulate and dispose, but life just goes on living all the same. And Lisaweta can do it - she can analyse and formulate and finish off, and she diagnoses his trouble - he's just a bourgeois, he can't let go of those bourgeois values.
The murkiness comes in trying to decide quite how much Mann subscribes to this idea of the artist as charlatan. The narrative tone throughout is cold and ironic. On the one hand, this is a demonstration of the kind of dispassionate, destructive, ironic attitude that Tonio claims as artistic, and yet on the other hand it also serves to undermine the figure of Tonio at the same time. He is made to look a little hollow, and in the final third of the novella, the whole concept of the artist as a total outsider is also shown to be so much hot air. Tonio decides to go on a journey back to his roots: he discovers that the house of his fathers is now a public library, a perfectly bourgeois assimilation of literature, with an excellent collection, as Tonio sees, and furthermore, he is required by the most upstanding representative of bourgeois solidity, a policeman, to prove his identity, as he is under suspicion of being a fraudster (!), wanted by the police in Münich, and purportedly on the run in the direction of Denmark, (just like TK himself). And how does Tonio prove that he is no criminal, but an upstanding member of society? Why, by showing his novel in progress, that has his name on it and will be published soon.
So Tonio ends up in The North, where he sees Hans and Inge again, or at least a couple who remind him of their type, the good old blond, blue-eyed type. And he's determined to change his ways and see nothing but warmth and goodness and humour, which can only come from those nice ordinary folk. Can that make for great literature? The chances of success for his project are further thrown into doubt by the image of Tonio's audience. Those good Bürgers who are interested in poetry? - they are less than whole themselves. They are the ones who cannot stay upright. The ones who fall down.