Thomas Mann Writing Style

On the boat to Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach looks at a party of young clerks and sees that one of them is not young. The man wears dyed hair, a curled moustache and rouge, his teeth are false, and he shrieks along with the rest as the steamer comes in. Aschenbach is disgusted by him. Late in the novella a barber at the Lido hotel dyes Aschenbach's hair, tints his brows and colors his cheeks, and sends him out into a city with cholera in it wearing the face he could not stand to look at. Mann does not join the two scenes for you. He puts the same paint on the second face and moves on.

The narrator is why they land. He opens the novella by giving Aschenbach's name in its ennobled form together with the date the honor was granted, the way a reference entry would, and that is also the way Aschenbach carries himself down a street. Mann hands his characters their own flattering vocabulary, and then he runs the sentence one clause too long. What began as praise starts reading as a symptom.

German lets a writer hold the verb back to the end of a clause, and he treats that as a stall rather than as grammar. You get the subject, the qualifications, a courteous guess at what a reasonable person would think here, and still no word for what happened. The verdict lands last. Translators have to break the frame. He reads as long-winded in English and as a held breath in German. Henry James built his late sentences by pushing clauses inside other clauses, the shape Pinker names as the one that clogs, while Mann queues his and saves the last position for the heaviest thing he has.

In The Magic Mountain an ordinary young engineer goes up for three weeks and stays seven years. His first day up there gets chapters. The seventh goes past in a summary you could read in a minute, and the ratio is the argument, because Hans Castorp has lost the ability to feel a week as a week and the book takes the same faculty away from the reader at the same rate. Plenty of novels are about time. This one spends its pages the way its subject spends its years.

The same paint, used twice

One image is attached to a figure the reader is invited to despise, and much later the same image is put on the person the reader has been travelling with. The dandy on the boat to Venice, with his dyed hair and his rouge, is repellent, and the repulsion is the point. When the hotel barber does identical work on Aschenbach, no sentence reminds you of the earlier man, and the reversal is left to a reader who agreed to that verdict once and now has to spend it on somebody he likes. Build the first use as a judgment you expect to be shared.

Slowness as the marker

Pace tells a reader where to look. Transitions stay quick, and the moment a line gets crossed expands, so duration itself points at the crossing before anyone names it, which is why the carnival evening in The Magic Mountain takes more room than the year around it. The man at the centre of it changes language to finish a sentence. Weight registers as tempo instead of commentary. Spent in the wrong place the same move reads as self-importance, so it belongs only where something is being decided that the story cannot undo.

The concept answered by the body

A character reaches for a concept that promises order. The next line answers with a body. Health, art, duty, the dignity of an old firm. Each is a way of not saying what somebody wants. The correction stays small and concrete. A temperature reading, a bad tooth, an overripe strawberry bought in a plague city and eaten anyway. Frisch works the same opposition in Homo faber, where an engineer's technical vocabulary keeps coming up short against a body that will not be filed under it. The difficulty is that the detail cannot look symbolic on arrival, so it has to be a plain fact of the scene first, and it is allowed to mean something only once several facts of that kind have accumulated.

Duration spent at the front

The opening stretch takes far more space than the later years, and the ratio itself makes the case, since Castorp's first day at the sanatorium is gone through hour by hour while his seventh year passes in a summary. The book removes the reader's sense of time in the same movement that removes the character's, which no statement about time could achieve. What it demands is structural patience, because the slow part has to come first, and a writer who front-loads a monotonous stretch has to make the monotony specific enough to hold a reader inside it.

The decent narrator, implicated

Give the telling to a voice with manners and a stake, then let the manners fail visibly. Zeitblom keeps his composure through Doctor Faustus while his hand shakes and his country burns, and the strain in his courtesy does more damage than an accusation would. His decency is what makes the material bearable and what makes it worse. Choosing a narrator like this means accepting a limit, since he cannot see everything, and the scenes he will not enter have to be built out of what he would rather not say.

The argument with no winner

Two characters carry incompatible positions and the book declines to award the point. Settembrini speaks for reason and progress, Naphta for terror and faith, and their duel ends with Naphta turning the pistol on himself, which settles nothing whatever about the ideas. Kundera calls this refusal the centre of the form, since the novel's irony has no interest in messages. The practical benefit is that a reader who cannot work out which side you are on keeps reading to find out, and the difficulty is writing a position you reject well enough that a fair person could hold it.

Borrowed diction

The narrator slides into a character's vocabulary without warning and without quotation marks, so a phrase can belong to the character, to the narrator, or to both at once. Wood's question for any such sentence is whose word it is, and Mann keeps the answer unstable on purpose, so Aschenbach's discipline arrives described in the language a man uses after decades of being praised for it. The device carries the moral weight a commenting narrator would have to state out loud, and it protects the character's stature at the same time, because the words that convict him are the words he chose to be admired by.

The verbatim motif

A fixed phrase returns in exactly the same words while everything around it changes. Mann took the idea from Wagner and made it cheaper to run, since a phrase costs a line where a musical theme costs a passage. It links moments no plot connects, and the link arrives as recognition rather than instruction. The cost is nerve. You have to trust that a reader who met the phrase much earlier will feel it come back, and you have to leave the connection unexplained at the moment it lands.

The held verb

German sends the finite verb to the end of a subordinate clause. Mann runs that grammatical fact as a delay mechanism, so everything a reader needs in order to judge is on the table while the decisive word is still missing, and the missing word is what keeps the eye moving. English offers no equivalent, which is why translations either break his sentences apart or slow to a crawl inside them. The principle behind it does transfer. Whatever settles the question goes last. The concessions go in front of it, where they can no longer soften anything.

The chronicler who says we

The narrator of The Magic Mountain speaks as a we, calls his hero an ordinary young man, and halts the book to wonder aloud whether time can be narrated at all. That we enrolls the reader in a club without asking him, and the membership is what makes the judgments land, because you are seated among the people doing the judging. The posture also lets a narrator admit that his own hero puzzles him. A voice that admits what it cannot face gives you more than an omniscience claiming to see the lot.

Stacking clauses with no frame to hold them

Length is the visible part and the cheap part. Pinker's account of why one long sentence reads easily and another clogs is about geometry rather than word count: a phrase pushed inside another phrase forces the reader to hold an unfinished thought while a second one starts, and a few of those at once is where syntax becomes unreadable. Mann's clauses mostly queue rather than nest, and the heaviest item waits at the end. Count the open brackets in your own long sentence. More than two at once and your reader is doing your bookkeeping.

Treating the irony as a superior attitude

Mann makes the case at full strength before he undercuts it. Settembrini gets his humanism undamaged and Naphta gets an argument a reader can be talked into, which is exactly why the reversal costs something when it arrives. Skip the persuasion, go straight to the raised eyebrow, and the characters arrive pre-judged with nothing left for the reader. There is a plain test for this. Write your character's self-justification as a paragraph you would be willing to sign, and if you cannot manage that, you have not earned the correction and the tone will read as contempt.

Announcing the motif instead of repeating it

A motif in Mann keeps an ordinary reason to be in the room. Patients take their temperature because they are ill. The Buddenbrooks have dental trouble because families do. The object earns its place in the scene first and gathers meaning only by coming back, so the pattern assembles itself in a reader who was handed no instructions. Imitators introduce a symbol with no work to do in the world of the story, then repeat it with visible emphasis, and the machinery shows through the floor. Grass keeps Oskar's drum an object he beats on for years before it is allowed to mean anything about Germany.

Letting the analysis replace the scene

The essayistic passages hold because something physical is going wrong underneath them. Aschenbach reasons about beauty and discipline while cholera moves through a city whose authorities keep denying it, and while his own body is being groomed into a lie at a hotel barber's. Remove the epidemic and the reflection is an article. Before you let a character think for a page, name the thing in the room that can deteriorate while the thinking happens, then let it deteriorate. Reflection borrows the reader's attention against a debt that the scene itself has to be able to pay.