POPULARITY AND THE MAGIC CIRCLE OF CULTURE: THOMAS MANN IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract

Thomas Mann's popularity distinguishes him from Modernism. A passage from Nietzsche's 'Die fröhliche Wissenschaft' is discussed as a point of balance, historically, between two ways of thinking about cultural gratification: Stendhal's 'promesse de bonheur' and the attachment of Modernism to the aesthetic importance of uniqueness, and hence, I argue, to the stern authenticity of human mortality in a godless existence. Lionel Trilling, writing now after Mann, connected this latter Modernist aesthetic with the death drive and the gratification of unpleasure. Mann's work treats this historical schism thematically, but resists alignment with unpleasure and death in favour of cultural pleasure closer to Freud's own (nineteenth-century) idea of sublimation. Far from consigning Mann to the nineteenth century, however, this commitment gives renewed currency to his work from the contemporary view (expressed, for instance, by Catherine Belsey) that the mobilization of pleasure on behalf of culture does not deny the existence of alterity, but recognizes it in culture's own very constitution as pleasurable.