Mario and the Magician: The Narrator’s Last Word
Spoilers for Mario and the Magician, including its ending.
The magician takes a break, and the narrator of Mario and the Magician begins to read our minds. He knows what we will ask: why did he and his wife stay, with their children, through a performance they found increasingly repellent? He has dreaded reaching this part of his account. Our objection is easy for him to predict; his own conduct proves harder to explain. “I cannot defend myself.”
By this point, Thomas Mann’s unnamed narrator has told us enough about a family holiday in the Italian resort of Torre di Venere to make his dissatisfaction familiar. We have followed the insults, the wounded pride, the wish to salvage a visit already going wrong. His cultivated intelligence has accompanied almost every irritation. Now the same intelligence has to consider a failure for which the unpleasant people around him cannot take all the blame.
I sometimes find this voice excessively elaborate, as though Mann were making a special effort to sound like Mann. Returning to Italy after Death in Venice was always going to invite a demanding comparison. The later novella’s family also commands so much of our attention that its eventual position beside Mario’s catastrophe can feel unsatisfying. At the interval, however, the elaboration acquires an exact difficulty to work on. Each attempted explanation gives the father more to say and less ground on which to excuse himself.
The reader he expects
His prediction of our thoughts follows a series of Cipolla’s experiments in discovering what other people have in mind. Mann lets the language of the performance continue into the telling. The father makes his modest demonstration of foresight just as the professional leaves the stage, and the question he attributes to us puts his own behavior under scrutiny.
There is an intimacy in being anticipated so accurately. We are invited to become the sensible listener whose objection hardly needs stating. The father can count on our judgment; perhaps, as his explanation continues, he can count on our familiarity with children too. Their resistance to leaving an entertainment is something he treats as common knowledge. Agreement about the foolishness of staying is gradually joined by agreement about the difficulty of getting away.
That appeal could soften our judgment. Anyone who has tried to end an outing while a child pleads for a few more minutes has something with which to furnish the missing explanation. Mann gives the reader a small part in making the father’s conduct intelligible. We may supply patience, fatigue, affection or weakness from experience, although none of those additions can change what he did.
His candor also makes an accusation of simple dishonesty inadequate. The account preserves the evidence that embarrasses him. He tells us that the children were asleep on their parents’ laps, that it was late, that the adults intended to take them home. These details make departure seem practicable before the explanation disperses into possibilities. A narrator determined only to acquit himself could have told a less damaging story.
The critical reading that connects his lucid detachment with his failure to intervene captures the predicament of the spectator. The teller is more agitated. He anticipates a judgment, tries out answers and rejects them, moving between the remembered evening and the conversation he conducts with us. His ability to describe the performance has become entangled with his inability to give a satisfactory account of attending it.
Mann makes the confession persuasive while leaving its explanatory work unfinished. We can believe the father’s embarrassment and continue to find his conduct indefensible. The narration keeps both responses available; its interest depends on how long that uncomfortable combination can survive his eloquence.
A little longer
The decision to stay is broken into qualifications. It was only “for the moment”; the parents’ knowledge of their own intention was limited; they meant to remain a little while. Each restriction makes their consent smaller. Read together, the qualifications prolong the sentence in which the father tries to shorten the commitment.
Something of the evening’s postponement happens in the prose. A decision with a clear practical consequence—remaining in the hall—becomes a sequence of provisional intentions. The family seems always close to leaving, while the account carries it steadily toward the next part of the performance. Mann gives hesitation a duration we have to read through.
The father’s questions then test several explanations. Perhaps the original mistake of bringing the children made a second mistake seem consistent. Perhaps the adults were entertained, or fascinated, or curious about what Cipolla (the magician) still had to offer. An answer scarcely establishes itself before another qualification disturbs it. The movement is more searching than a polished excuse would need to be, and more circular than an explanation that had reached its conclusion.
Eventually, he connects the failure to leave the hall with the earlier decision to remain in Torre di Venere. The evening concentrates what had already made the holiday oppressive. Staying through one seems continuous with staying through the other, and this continuity gives the account an attractive shape. It still leaves the practical question open: why should a previous failure to leave make departure now less possible?
The earlier account had given endurance a more honorable sound. An unpleasant experience might be instructive; leaving whenever one’s comfort or self-esteem was threatened could seem a poor way to meet life. Those considerations have substance. In this particular holiday, however, the expectation of gaining something from discomfort helps prolong the family’s exposure to it. The father’s intelligence can make staying seem worth considering again.
His decision to leave the first hotel prevents us from making him wholly passive. He can protest, pack and move when an injustice becomes intolerable. That action makes the later hesitation harder to reduce to a permanent defect of character. What fails in the hall is a capacity he has already exercised elsewhere. At the interval, he cannot identify one reason adequate to explain the difference, and Mann lets his uncertainty remain audible.
What the children saw
The children enter the account before we know what happened to Mario. On the first page, their father tells us that they witnessed a catastrophe without recognizing where the entertainment ended. He is thankful for their misunderstanding. The adults have allowed it to survive.
This disclosure gives the story two audiences. We read with advance warning of a disaster. The children, inside the remembered evening, can continue to believe they have attended a show. The distance between their understanding and ours grows as the father describes what occurred, until the ending brings those two ways of receiving the event together.
Cipolla has persuaded Mario, under hypnosis, that he is the woman Mario loves. When Mario realizes whom he has kissed, he shoots. The parents finally move toward the exit with their children, who want to be sure that the show is over. Their parents confirm that it is. The reply answers the practical question that allows the family to leave, and it permits the children’s larger misunderstanding to remain intact. The same words can be sufficient for a child and insufficient for the reader who has just witnessed the killing through the father’s account.
There is ordinary care in sparing children knowledge they may be unable to bear. There is also something awkward about this protection arriving after the parents have repeatedly postponed taking them home. Mann allows the tenderness of the response and the failure that made it necessary to occupy the same exchange. The father’s relief that the children did not understand cannot settle the question of why they were there.
We are given the disclosure that they are spared. Their father has elected to tell us about the shooting, his own hesitation and the feeling with which he left. His account therefore places us in a different relation to him from theirs. They need an answer that ends the outing. We have received enough to question the adult who supplies it.
The family’s presence determines how the ending reaches us: through a man simultaneously recalling a death, protecting his children and exposing his own behavior to judgment. It also gives the political allegory a convincing structure.
Against the nationalist aggression surrounding the holiday, the father’s cultivated disapproval offers remarkably little protection. He can describe what repels him and continue attending to the ordinary business of an outing. The children want their entertainment; departure can wait. His place among the spectators allows Mann to examine how an intelligent, uncomfortable observer remains available to a performance he increasingly despises.
Given the fascist atmosphere of the novella, that arrangement has considerable force.
The father’s failure to become the decisive actor belongs to its political meaning. Someone else undergoes the humiliation that finally provokes action, while he remains capable of explaining what happened.
My difficulty is that these functions become too conspicuous. I begin to feel how conveniently the family’s hesitation serves the allegory, how effectively its cultivated sensibility has been positioned beside Cipolla’s coercion. Their behavior remains plausible, though the political explanation starts to satisfy me sooner than the story does.
Mann has given us far more time inside the father’s irritations and qualifications than inside Mario’s attachment to the woman whose image Cipolla appropriates. We learn the intimate vulnerability almost as it becomes the means of his public humiliation. The violence is shocking; my involvement in Mario as a living character has had much less time to develop.
An allegorical reading makes this unequal distribution of attention intelligible, but I still feel the loss in the fiction. The narrator’s complicated account gives the ending something substantial to examine without supplying all the emotional preparation I wanted for the young man who brings it about.
The feeling that survives
The last sentence makes the father’s position harder to dismiss. He calls the ending horrifying and fatal, then describes it as a liberation. His insistence continues across the time separating the performance from its narration: “for I could not, and I cannot, but find it so!”
The German verb, empfinden, means to feel. What persists is his response to the event. He does not demonstrate that everyone has been liberated, or that Mario’s future has become free of consequence. We have just seen the crowd move to disarm the young man. The father is insisting on the relief he experienced, alongside the horror he also names.
At the interval, he could not give an adequate reason for staying. At the close, he cannot make himself feel otherwise about the end. The two admissions leave different things unresolved. An explanation of his conduct has failed; an account of his feeling has become unusually definite. The reader who could accept his embarrassment without accepting his excuses can now believe this relief without sharing his judgment of the shooting.
That gives another layer to the experience of the final sentence. Its movement from past to present brings the father close to us again. The evening is over; the telling continues to carry its emotional result. He has had time to reconsider and remains answerable for a feeling he cannot withdraw. His eloquence finally arrives at something it can state more readily than it can justify.
I still prefer the earlier Mann, and Mario and the Magician remains below his finest work for me. That is a comparison within an unusually demanding body of writing. Here, the intelligence can feel too insistent, and the family’s prolonged preparation can still outweigh my involvement in the young man whose name the story bears. But the narrator’s last word earns a more precise kind of attention than a general complaint about excessive cleverness would allow.
He begins the interval by knowing what we will think. He ends the novella by telling us what he cannot stop feeling. Between those moments, Mann makes our confidence in the father divide: we may come to trust the account of his discomfort while finding less comfort in his judgment. The children can leave with their question answered. The father has given us his answer too, without making it as easy to leave.
Sources
Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, in Stories of Three Decades, London: Martin Secker & Warburg, pp. 529–567. Quoted English wording follows this translation.
Thomas Mann, Mario und der Zauberer, German text at Projekt Gutenberg-DE. Used to check the reader-address, the parents’ qualifications and the ending’s distinction between explanation and feeling.
Nicholas Martin, “Thomas Mann’s Mario und der Zauberer: ‘Simply a Story of Human Affairs’?”, pp. 165–175, author-uploaded copy. His connection between the narrator’s critical detachment and failure to act supplies the reading qualified in “The reader he expects”; his discussion also preserves the ending’s ambivalence.
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