Open Wide! An Oral Examination of Thomas Mann's Early Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe early fiction of Thomas Mann displays a particular fixation on the mouth as a privileged figure for the discursive fields of speech, consumption and desire. But this threefold model of oral function is, above all, a measure of pathology and dysfunction. This article investigates the symptomatology of oral disorder throughout Mann's early stories and views them as a challenge to the stability of identity. Read intertextually with the dream of Irma's injection from Freud's Traumdeutung, I argue that the mouth comes to signify one challenge in particular – the arch‐Freudian threat of castration. It is this subversive potential which Freud's ‘phallic’ interpretation cannot tolerate, and which he works hard to disavow. Mann's texts also recuperate ambivalence in the orders of gender and sexuality, crystallised around the figure of the mouth, through the dental practice of extraction. Hence, in Buddenbrooks, Thomas and Hanno are not cured of their disordered performances of identity, and are instead simply excised from the narrative. This article suggests, therefore, that Mann presides over his early fiction in the guise of a fatal dentist, exposing the organ of the mouth to special scrutiny, but also subjecting the symptoms of oral disorder to brutal extraction through death.