Decadence and Decline

I've been meaning to post on Buddenbrooks since last week, but I've been experiencing difficulties with my laptop (it needs a new part). Now that I'm back from vacation, I have the school's computer lab at my disposal. Anyway....

I enjoyed the book very much. As I said before, it is very different from The Magic Mountain stylistically. Its scale is both grand and minute. The book spans four generations, so it covers a lot plot-wise. But Mann zooms in on certain characters and fleshes them out in such a way that Buddenbrooks does not feel like a history. The decline is more intimate, more immediate. I read in The Uses of Tradition that Mann began with the end -- the last Buddenbrook -- and worked backwards, but as he did, he began to get sidetracked by other characters and other ideas. So what began as an end, a decline into 'artistic decadence,' in fact generated the entire family. For instance, much of the book deals with Tony Buddenbrook's ill-fated marriages which, even though the book was conceived around two of the male characters -- her brother Thomas and his son Hanno (Johann).

I would have had no idea that Hanno was the starting point for the novel had I read only the novel because the other characters dominate. The mood definitely changes when he is born, though; things become much more melancholy and self-reflective. A part of that whole idea of the linking of artistic sensibility, decadence, and decline.

And despite Mann's reputation for density, Buddenbrooks was very funny. During the uprisings of 1848, the consul Buddenbrook goes outside and sees that the gas lamps have not been lit even though it is evening. That makes him more indignant than anything else. "Really," he says, "that's taking the revolution too far!"

Much as I liked Buddenbrooks, though, I am very interested to see what Mann did later in his career, in his less 'realistic' works. I brought Doctor Faustus back with me (as well as Goethe's play, which I want to read first), but I doubt I'll get to it before the end of the semester. I've begun Goethe's Faust, but lately Gathering Evidence has been calling my name, so I might return to Thomas Bernhard. Which is perfectly justifiable, since I don't get my computer back until Wednesday....