THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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attempt to find true individuation through imitation,
identification with the typical, supra-personal reality of the
myth. In this sense, Mann’s art is anything but Gnostic. 54
What it ironizes and parodies is the modern gnosis, the myth
of the modern artist, his tragic and sometimes comic
narcissism, his inability to create something truly new, as
perhaps no other narrative shows as clearly as Death in
Venice. Mann’s interest in myth is that of the poet of
belatedness, the narrator of a past that is always in danger of
becoming a dead past unless it brought back in the form of the
periodic feast and its mythical recurrence. At last we recognize
in this interest the Nietzschean fascination with eternal return
and the resentment of the „it was“, Mann’s own version of the
„lying against time“.
But Mann’s past, his „it was“ is different from Nietzsche’s. Its
Gnostic connection is more subtle than the Bloomian undoing
of the prior myth through its Gnostic anti-myths, the „strong“
readings of modern poetry. The connection lies in the idea that
narrative must show the presence of the beginning in the
54 The reader who is interested in the sources of Mann’s thought on
psychology and myth should refer to Manfred Dierks, Studien zu Mythos
und Psychologie bei Thomas Mann: An seinem Nachlaß orientierte
Untersuchungen zum „Tod in Venedig“, zum „Zauberberg“ und zur
„Joseph“-Tetralogie, Bern and Munich: Francke Verlag, 1972. Carsten
Colpe in his contribution to the Festschrift for Hans Jonas entitled „The
Challenge of Gnostic Thought for Philosophy, Alchemy, and Literature“
speaks of Mann’s myth-making in Joseph as „synthetic myth“, where
demythologization produces irony, and theology and anthropology
supplement eachother. Cf. Barabara Aland, ed, Festschrift für Hans Jonas,
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. See esp, pp.50-54. One of
Colpe’s students, Klaus Borchers, examined problem of demythologization
and irony in a full-length study Mythos und Gnosis im Werk Thomas Manns:
Eine religionswissenschaftliche Untersuchung, Freiburg: HochschulVerlag,
1980.