On unsatisfactory endings in two novels

　



　

　

No doubt some industrious German has catalogued ways in which novels can end. I don’t have that tome, but can imagine it. Therefore, I will supply my own partial list.

Some novels are coterminous with the life of the principal character. When Emma Bovary dies, the novel named after her ends as well. Josef K. dies "like a dog" at the end of Kafka’s The Trial. The hapless Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy ends in the electric chair after about a thousand pages chronicling his life and crimes. Nothing signifies ending as much as the death of the book’s hero or heroine.

Many novels posit a kind of quest. The novel finishes when the quest is complete or has gone so completely awry as to be doomed. Treasure is found in the form of silver coins at the end of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The prospectors in B. Traven’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre lose their wealth in the end of that novel. The monstrous Judge in Blood Meridian somehow absorbs the kid, now become a man, into his embrace, although McCarthy adds an enigmatic final epilogue complicating the book’s system of causes and effects. Ahab’s search for the white whale ends when Moby Dick rams the Pequod and drowns everyone but the narrator. (The grandiose, Wagnerian ending of Moby Dick is the "gold standard" for an ending of this sort – the kind of conclusion against which other ways of ending books is to be judged.)

Simply stated, most novels tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The novel concludes when the story or plot ends. Novels by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow are generally constructed around a plot-line and end when the story concludes. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment follows this pattern as do many novels by Hemingway and Faulkner.

But there are other approaches to ending a novel. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is done when the disorder unleashed in the world by Napoleon’s incursions into Russia is confronted and, then, resolved with a return to normality, here defined as peace. Some book’s end when the hero’s education is completed: Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ellison’s Invisible Man have this structure. Philosophically inclined writers end their books when they have demonstrated the metaphysical or existential proposition motivating the writing: Sartre’s novels have this form as does Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Another device for ending a novel is the development of a counter-theme that posits a perspective completely foreign to that of the protagonist – from this new, and radically different, perspective the previously narrated events in the book are judged. Examples of this way of ending a novel are Joyce’s Ulysses in which the voice of Molly Bloom in the last section comments indelibly on the adventures of Leopold Bloom (and Stephen Daedulus) in the preceding 700 pages. Apuleis’ The Golden Ass ending with hero’s vision of the Goddess and his entry into a gnostic religious cult is similar – the conclusion of the book is related to, but undercuts most of what has gone before.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Thomas Mann’s The Confessions of the Confidence Man, Felix Krull, Part One are two novels that end anticlimactically with concluding chapters that don’t amount to much of anything. At least, with respect to Wallace’s huge book, critics and readers alike report that they feel somehow "cheated" or "disappointed" by the ending of the novel. I have a similar impression with respect to Mann’s book. Whether these books end unsatisfactorily and, if so, what this signifies is the subject of this essay.

　


Infinite Jest

Most critics profess disappointment with the way David Foster Wallace’s book, Infinite Jest, ends. The energy required to read this massive and daunting book seems disproportionate to the novel’s ending or lack of ending. If the reader expects revelation, the book’s ending will be distressing: in fact, nothing is revealed.

Early in the novel, the reader encounters an odd term: "fantods". In fact, the word often appears in the phrase "howling fantods." "Fantod" is a mid-19th century term for an irrational horror or fear, strong enough to induce a swoon. The etymology of the word is uncertain – "fantods" first appears in American pulp novels written about thirty years before the Civil War; in fact, the word may be a neologism. The eccentric artist and picture book author, Edward Gorey, resurrected the word and uses it in some of his works. Gorey was a peculiar figure, an aesthete who adopted the style and accoutrements of an Edwardian gentleman – the wan and obsessed figures in his macabre picture books, generally, haunt decrepit Victorian mansions and his stories seem set at the dawn of the automobile age, that is, around 1906. Gorey is an artist who might be described as a "decadent" and Wallace’s use of a term that he revived is significant: it is a clue about the kind of novel that Wallace has written.

Baudelaire, the progenitor of the decadent school in literature, announced that he sought "systematic derangement of the senses." Wallace’s Infinite Jest pursues this program to its reductio ad absurdam. Every character in the book without exception seems to be seeking "derangement of the senses" through illicit drugs or alcohol. Characters spend dozens of pages ingesting vast amounts of mind-altering substances. One man’s plight, waiting for someone to deliver his marijuana, occupies a dozen densely printed pages, thousands of words obsessing about when and how the weed will be delivered. The book ends with an orgy of Dilaudid use, also described over about 20 pages. These examples must suffice for literally dozens, if not hundreds, of episodes in the book. Writing at the end of the 20^th century, Wallace embodies the sensibilities of late 19^th century, fin de siecle decadent. The characters in his novel are mainly self-absorbed monsters, intensely attuned to the nuances of their various addictions. Infinite Jest’s subject, simply, stated is the nature of pleasure and pain. The people described in his book are engaged in various experiments involving pleasure and pain. The so-called "entertainment", a film so compelling that viewers exposed to it sink into a vegetative state of endless and lethal contemplation of its images, is a paradigm for addiction. Addiction is the pleasure principle distorted by the death instinct – that is, a mania for endless repetition that is ultimately deadly. As the book progresses, the death instinct, a drive at the core of addiction, becomes increasingly predominant. The characters either drug or drink themselves to death or slide into the throes of withdrawal. Foster’s thesis is that addiction may arise in many cases as an attempt to defeat depression. Clinical depression is the sinister twin of addiction – it is a prevailing pain that drives Wallace’s characters to drugs and alcohol. Thus, the whole vast enterprise of Infinite Jest reduces to an anatomy of melancholy and the means that Wallace’s alcoholics and addicts use to repress their depression.

Baudelaire and Huysman explored similar terrain. The decadent hero was a neurasthenic isolate, obsessive in his (these characters are all male) pursuit of pleasures ever more refined and outre. He wavers between suicide and ecstatic debauchery. These characters are exquisitely refined in sensibility, scholars of the arcane, and their supernatural cultivation is reflected in a vocabulary that is, both, immense and grotesque. Like Flaubert in his decadent works such as Salammbo and The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Wallace delights in bizarre words – there is an academic and monkish strain to his prose: he crams the book with linguistic curiosities. It’s evident that Wallace’s addiction, as a writer, is to peculiar and exotic words and he delights in strewing these gems throughout the book.

Wallace’s Infinite Jest seems closer to H. P. Lovecraft than to Dreiser or F. Scott Fitzgerald. In America, the decadent strain, following the early example of Edgar A. Poe (for instance "The Masque of Red Death"), migrated into horror. A curious antecedent to Wallace’s Infinite Jest is the story cycle by the American decadent Robert Chambers, The King in Yellow (1895) Chambers’ stories refer to a play that is similar to "the entertainment" in Infinite Jest. Those exposed to the play, called "The King in Yellow", a macabre story about demon-haunted Carcosa, succumb to the literary work’s influence – they become insane. Like Chambers, Wallace is fascinated with the concept of the lethal work of art, that is, the book or movie that displaces actual life to the extent that those beholding that art become so severely addicted to its contemplation that their lives are forfeit. In fact, Wallace’s Infinite Jest occupies a position analogous to the "entertainment" – the book imposes demands on its readers that are exorbitant and unreasonable. The book is too long, too erudite, too staggeringly repetitive – it offers the same experience, bemused contemplation of lethal addiction, over and over and over again. The book proposes itself as an addiction itself. And, those who have read the book to its end (or non-ending) will have eerie sense that their relationship to the novel is the shadow of the various deadly addictions depicted in the book.

Chambers derived his Carcosa from Ambrose Bierce, possibly the pre-eminent American decadent. Lovecraft, in turn, derives his Cthullu mythos and other aspects integral to his short stories and novellas from Chambers. Lovecraft has a showy vocabulary that is akin in some respects of Wallace’s thicket of exotic words, scientific terms, mathematical formulae and other esoterica. In fact, one of Lovecraft’s short stories, "The Hound" about a death-addict, exhumes all of the sinister and, fundamentally, corrupt esthetics of the decadents and displays them in a text that is only about 12 pages long – the tale embalms the central decadent theme: the sinister beauty of decomposition. Wallace’s morose encyclopedia of addictions, his delectation in describing various kinds of freaks (a monstrous spider-like dwarf, faceless babies, women without skulls), and the MacGuffin that is the engine of Infinite Jest’s plot, the deadly "entertainment", all seem closer to Lovecraft than to a writer like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth or, for that matter, Thomas Pynchon.

Most novels involve portraits of characters in a society that proposes to them various choices. Characters are driven by pleasure and pain but not at a primary level. The novel depicts a society in which institutions exist. Characters interact with those institutions and other characters on the basis of societal norms as to what is desirable or undesirable. Jane Austen’s characters are displayed within a framework of ideas about marriage and friendship that are communal and socially defined. Wallace strips away the institutions – his version of a Jane Austen novel would focus on the primal experience of sexual desire and the need to repeat the pleasure arising from sexual desire. In other words, his vision is severely, even, austerely reductive. Social institutions don’t concern him except as conduits for delivering pleasure and pain to his characters. The only institution depicted in depth in Infinite Jest is the tennis school, another symbol for organizing pain and pleasure into addiction – the students at the tennis school are, in effect, tortured by their instructors. The objective is to turn the boys and girls into professional athletes. But everyone knows that this objective is futile – only a vanishingly small number will be good enough to play professionally and, then, they will learn that professional athletes aren’t happy but rather victims of higher, and more intense, forms of pain. The students are encouraged to become addicted to tennis, to submit their lives to the sport, but this only leads to addiction. The tennis school is, in effect, an institute for producing addicts – the principal character, Hal, emerges from school as a monster of addiction; he seems scarcely human.

In light of the oddities of Wallace’s novel, it’s not surprising that the book can’t end well. The decadent pursuit of ever more abstruse and exotic forms of pleasure ultimately leads to a dead end: when all physical forms of ecstasy are exhausted, the libertine turns to pain. Pain (and its brother, death) become the objects of the hero’s quest. This is demonstrated by Wallace across the last 400 pages of Infinite Jest. The book’s hero, Don Gately, has been shot, lies paralyzed in a hospital bed, and, in order, to avoid relapse into his addictions, refuses the narcotic analgesics necessary to suppress his agony. Wallace spends hundreds of pages entombed with Gately’s mind – as Gately is tormented, he experiences compulsive memories, relives his past (a horror show), and, unable to speak, suffers the agonies of the damned. Addiction has transformed pleasure into pain. And, so, the book mirroring this lethal progression moves from accounts of depression and addiction toward the most fully developed and lengthy description of physical agony ever published.

In a 1996 interview on Los Angeles’ KCRW, Wallace disclosed to Michael Silverblatt that he had built the novel as a fractal structure. Fractals are mathematically intriguing systems – a structure that is organized as a fractal replicates the same basic formation on all scales. The best example for such a structure is the so-called Sierpinski triangle. A Sierpinski triangle is an equilateral triangle that is built from smaller equilateral triangles. Each smaller triangle is itself a Sierpinski – that means, that the smaller triangles are all comprised by even small triangles, a mise en abym that can be extended infinitely either to increase or decrease the size of the formation. Applied to literature, this structure means that every smaller unit of the novel recapitulates the themes and structures of the novel’s larger units. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is built this way – each paragraph generally recapitulates the story HCE’s life and fall, an account that forms both the microscopic and macroscopic structure of the book.

Many phenomena in nature seems to grow according fractal formulae – a tree initially consists of a trunk and a branch, but each branch develops its own branch and those branches have twigs and the twigs have capillary twigs and so on. (The human circulatory system is similarly designed – at all scales it looks more or less the same.)

Needless to say, a fractal structure isn’t linear, can’t have climaxes, and should be uniform from outset to end. These characteristics define Infinite Jest – everything repeats and the chief obstacle that a reader faces in confronting this enormous book is that it is monstrously repetitive. There’s isn’t anything approximating a climax and there’s no rising or falling action. The big fight occurring in the middle of the book is showy, but described with such infinite exactitude that it can’t be followed – the bloody conflict dissolves into a welter of details. And, further, the fight, a pointless fracas, exists only to plunge Don Gately into the interior hell that he occupies for the book’s last 400 pages. Wallace’s book is a Moebius strip of endlessly replicated processes – pleasure leads to addiction leads to pain leads to miserable death or, alternatively, pleasure leads to addiction leads to pain leads to AA. (There’s more about AA in Wallace’s novel then there is in the whole AA program – the book is longer than AA’s founding documents, for instance, The Blue Book, and, certainly, more comprehensive.) An addicts embrace of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or NA or any of the other 12-step programs can’t be construed as a satisfactory and decisive ending of any kind. This is because AA is itself a program that is fractally organized – it’s not an objective but a process and the process involves endless repetition of cliches and truisms declared at endlessly repeated meetings. As portrayed by Wallace, and, I think, accurately, AA is a hellish antidote to a hellish problem – both addiction and AA involve ceaseless self-reflection on pleasure and the absence of pleasure. The Death Instinct, defined as a mindless drive toward repetition, governs both addiction and the alcoholic’s commitment to bearing witness to his or her struggle by endlessly narratives about addiction. Wallace seems to endorse AA in a full-throated unequivocal way – but he understands that AA is not the solution to the problem; in fact, it’s just another problem, albeit one that is less mortal – the problem of the alcoholic’s boundless self-absorption elevated into a program that mimics the compulsive features of the addiction. The "happy ending" to an addiction story might be construed as joining AA – but AA has as its mantra "one day at a time" and this slogan, namely that "recovery" is always temporary and provisional, doesn’t cohere into any kind of climax or satisfying conclusion. AA is just the addiction process domesticated.

For these reasons, Wallace’s Infinite Jest simply can’t end. The book is committed to a world-view that doesn’t allow for any ending except the death of the character. No character dies redeemed or victorious. Characters just arbitrarily die from accidental overdoses, mistakes, medical misadventures. Death doesn’t have a meaning – it just shuts off the flow of repetitive narrative from that character. Gately’s entombment in his own psyche, a place where memory torments him by endless recapitulation of his crimes committed as an addict, doesn’t end. The text just shuts down mid-thought as it were. On first reading, I thought that the book suggests that Gately is dying or had died. I’m now not convinced of that interpretation. The last pages of the book are more sinister – Gately’s Hell is infinite; it doesn’t end. Like Infinite Jest, it just goes on and on and on.

　


Felix Krull
Thomas Mann published The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (Part One) in 1954. Felix Krull is Mann’s last novel. There is no Part Two as implicitly promised by the title. In fact, I think, the promise of a second part to the long novel is fraudulent. Mann’s con man seduces us into expecting a conventional novel with, perhaps, morals drawn about ethics and the role of deception in society. But the book doesn’t conclude with any satisfying thematic message communicated to the reader. Why should it? The book is the confessions of a criminal. What we see is what we get – no less and no more. Felix Krull is a book about appearances, about how physical beauty seduces not only the body but also the mind – viewed in isolation, the novel is nothing more than a series of sordid episodes arbitrarily ending with the hero’s seduction of yet another woman entranced by his charm and beauty. When you reach the end of this long and very intricately written novel, your first response is to turn the page and look for something more. Throughout the book, we’ve seen the hero indefatigably servicing various women – most of whom he doesn’t have to seduce: they are drawn to him like moths to the flame. In the final pages, the anti-hero sets his sights on the virgin daughter of his benefactor, the museum curator and scientist, Senor Kuckuck. Krull is also attracted to Kuckuck’s wife, a severe-looking and grave Portuguese woman infused with the ancient blood of the goddess matriarchs of the Iberian peninsula. Krull overcomes the reservations of the maiden, embraces her, and is, then, interrupted in his amours by the girl’s mother. Angrily, the mother sends the virgin to her room and advances on Krull like a matador approaching a doomed bull – Mann’s florid prose makes it obvious what will happen next.

This erotic interlude, however, replicates earlier sex scenes including an episode involving a wealthy, middle-aged countess who acts out rape fantasies with the picaresque hero. We’ve seen this sort of stuff before. In other words, there is nothing about the final sexual episode that represents a decisive plot development or that can be construed as somehow climactic. The book just ends, as it were, mid-thrust and the reader feels cheated. But, of course, the entire book is unreliable, the fabrications of a self-acknowledged con man, and, therefore, any reader expecting a meaningful ending to the novel is a dupe: of course, the end of the book is a cheat – this is programmatic: the entire novel is a con-game in which the readers are complicit as victims of the confidence scheme.

Mann’s novel divides into a prelude and, then, four episodes in which the hero demonstrates his prowess in committing frauds. Mann’s prose-style is Victorian – he writes from a standpoint that doesn’t acknowledge Hemingway or similarly laconic trends in German literature (for instance, the epigrammatic and terse style of writers like Wolfgang Borchert). The tone of the prose is similar to the high-flown rhetoric that Mann deploys in Death in Venice and, indeed, in some ways the book is a companion piece to that 1912 novella. (German scholars observe that Mann seems to be parodying Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit – Poetry and Truth – another layer of fraud perpetrated upon the reader: To what extent is the revered Goethe like the anti-hero of Mann’s book?)

In the prelude, our hero lives in the lap of luxury with his father, a producer of a noxious-tasting but popular cheap champagne. The family’s fortunes decline and Krull’s father kills himself. His frivolous mother and sister move to the big city, possibly to set up a brothel. Krull, who has been training himself for pleasure, departs his ruined home in Rheingau for Paris. He’s been in an ambiguous relationship with a painter and family friend, Godfather Schimmelpreester. This figure may (or may not have) sexually molested Krull – with Mann, it always pays to have a dirty mind. But, in any event, Schimmelpreester has posed the young boy, both nude and in elaborate garb, as a subject for his paintings. From these experiences, Krull has become intensely oriented toward physical pleasure and, also, the masquerade – he likes dressing up and becoming other people.

Schimmelpreester gives the youth a letter of recommendation to a hotelier in Paris. But, first, the boy has to evade military service. This is the book’s first episode in which Krull commits fraud. Appearing at the military conscription facility – the book seems to be set before World War One, perhaps, in 1906 – Krull implies that he is sexually deviant, demands to be granted access to an uniform so that he can do his patriotic duty and, then, pitches a fit, a seizure that convinces everyone that he is unsuitable for service in the army. On the way to Paris, at customs, Krull either steals or is given a pouch of jewels. He hides the jewels and becomes an elevator operator at a hotel. Gradually, he rises (ascends) to the position of waiter in the hotel’s swanky restaurant. During these adventures, Krull encounters the wealthy woman whose jewels he has hidden and, upon which, he relies to supplement his meager earnings at the hotel. The wealthy woman is a countess and she delights in having sex with the young man, someone she denounces for her pleasure as "a lascivious, rebellious servant-boy." Simultaneously, Krull has a series of relationships with prostitutes and other members of the demi-monde. The countess gives Krull more money and, in fact, praises him for appropriating her gems to his use. Krull sets up an apartment away from the dormitory in the hotel where he has been staying and delights in dressing up as a wealthy young nobleman and touring the city. One evening, while in this guise, he encounters the Marquis of Venosta, a dissipated young man in danger of being disinherited by his family, wealthy nobles in Luxembourg. The young man has a low-born girlfriend and doesn’t want to leave her. But his family is importuning him to go on a grand tour of the world, a way to enforce separation between the youth and his mistress. Krull and Venosta agree to switch identities – this aspect of the book has some elements of thrillers by Patricia Highsmith, particularly the Talented Mr. Ripley and one must imagine that she read Mann’s novel and adopted some of its plot elements. Krull uses Venosta’s money (or his parent’s money) to travel to Lisbon, the first leg of his ‘round the world tour. On the train to Lisbon, Krull meets the eccentric Senor Kuckuck who lectures him at length on paleontology, natural sciences, and, even, quantum mechanics. Kuckuck invites Krull to visit him in the bosom of his family. There Krull conceives an affection for both Kuckuck’s wife and daughter. After a vividly described bullfight, Krull discourses on love to the Kuckuck’s virgin daughter – here the novel comes to screeching halt for a long speech (it’s about 15 pages) that seems completely incongruous and out-of-character. This is Mann speaking directly to the reader, his last thoughts on erotic love. (In fact, the last sixty pages of book are congested with material of this sort – there is an elaborate letter that Krull writes to Venosta’s parents complete with forged signature in response to their equally long letter to their erring son; this material is important to Mann on another issue – it’s his envoi to the doomed European nobility with all their petty prejudices and ostentatious, if fascinating, folly, a topic that, one must confess, is off the radar-screens of modern American readers and, therefore, not just uninteresting but irritating when developed at length. And, of course, there is Kuckuck’s multi-page lecture on science when he encounters Krull on the train – a lecture that, also, seems misplaced since I don’t think anyone in 1906 knew much about quantum theory, one of the subjects discussed.) Gradually, the young girl succumbs to Krull’s ministrations and, just as he is about to make his conquest, mamma intervenes with her own agenda.

Throughout the book, Krull, writing to the reader in the first person, proclaims that he is not only extraordinarily beautiful, but, also, well-spoken – at one point, he is introduced to the King of Portugal and charms the old boy with his witticisms. Krull, further, declares that he is supremely disciplined – that he has taught himself how to write flawlessly in, not only the tone, but also the handwriting of other persons. (This art he acquired in order to carry forged letters from his father to his school teachers). He is a little like Hannibal Lector in that his tastes are much more highly developed than those of an ordinary person and his sense infinitely more acute.

It’s odd that Mann emphasizes Krull’s commitment to a very thoroughgoing and Teutonic kind of self-discipline. But this aspect of the novel signifies that the book, although it is without proper ending itself, nonetheless, represents Mann’s last testament with respect to issues that concerned him obsessively throughout his whole life. Therefore, we are faced with a paradox – although the novel doesn’t end in any way that the reader finds satisfactory, the book itself stands as Mann’s last word on lifelong themes.

The reason that Mann has Krull announce to us his rigorous self-discipline is that the picaresque hero is a figure for the artist. As early as 1903 in　Tonio Kroeger, Mann declared that the artist must "die every day" and that he is a man set apart from others, one who dares to disturb surfaces to explore the dark pathologies lurking below. In Mann’s view, the artist is singled-out – like Krull, he has special abilities fostered through long, rigorous exercise. Further, he is a professional liar, a master of deceit and manipulation, indeed, a form of con-man. What is a novel, after all, but a long narrative made-up of innumerable lies that purport to be true. Krull starts by stealing candy from a local delicatessen, then, deceives state bureaucrats who seek to conscript him, and, then, advances into picaresque amorous adventures – love is always the realm of deception and, more significantly, self-deception and, therefore, lovers are conspicuously prone to being led astray by the hero’s con-games. But the deception expands. Krull adopts an entirely false identity, transposing himself for the Marquis of Venosta – this con subverts the order of the European aristocracy existing before World War One. He shows himself capable of writing in the high-flown literary prose affected by nobility. And, at last, he expands his con-game to the reader – he assumes the style of Goethe, Germany’s ultimate culture-hero, retailing his lies to the reader of the novel with all the ostentatious confidence of the Sage of Weimar. It’s all a con, because the book doesn’t reach a climax – the novel is a sort of hoax. When we get to the final paragraph, the hero’s sexual conquest of his host Professor Kuckuck’s wife, the book’s structure is revealed to be a scam – it leads nowhere and there is no Part Two. (I’m sure there are literary scholars who will remark that the book was originally planned to have a second part and that Mann had been brooding on this subject for most of his life, modeling Krull off the Rumanian con-artist Georges Manolescu whose memoirs were published in 1905; Mann wrote a short story in 1911 in which Krull appears – therefore, an argument can be made that the book’s peculiar ending is accidental: Mann died before he could carry the exercise to completion. I prefer to misread the book, perhaps, as a hoax perpetrated on the reader – an accurate depiction of the book on almost all levels.)

Krull is an unreliable narrator. In this regard, the book expands a theme central to Doctor Faustus (1947), a book in which the verbose narrator, a variant of Shakespeare’s Polonius, observes everything, tells all, and knows nothing. Faustus is a very profound book, in both the best and worst senses of that word. But it’s the reader that supplies the profundity to the novel – the narrator mostly speaks in platitudes. In Faustus, the narrator cons the reader unintentionally by misinterpreting what he sees and hears – he is witness to the horrifying deterioration of book’s protagonist, the demonic composer Adrian Leverkuehn, a figure whose collapse runs parallel to the decomposition of German idealism and culture into the Nazi cult. Krull is an altogether sunnier book, a comic novel, and one that asserts the importance of surface appearance – Oscar Wilde reminds us that "it is only shallow people who don’t judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." But, of course, surface appearances can be manipulated and this is what Krull does throughout the novel.

I am moved by Felix Krull on a extra-textual basis. All my life, I’ve been struggling through Mann’s torturously intricate German prose. Mann, like David Foster Wallace, is the ultimate maximalist – Krull is long, 386 tightly printed pages: it contains probably about 60 pages of detailed descriptions of furniture, the lay-out of fin-de-siecle dining rooms and elevators. Mann doesn’t just sketch an interior; he gives you the blueprints, the color-scheme, and, generally, makes a few references to the zoning and construction codes applicable. In other words, he tells you far more than you want to know and, I must confess, a profound irritation with Krull’s last seventy pages or so: Mann shows off with a lengthy parody of the letter-writing styles of petty European nobility (for a modern reader, this is an annoying non sequitur) indulges in many pages of scientific speculation in the worst and most pompous Carl Sagan style, describes the contents of a natural history museum with pointless photographic accuracy, and, then, delivers a bull-fight also presented with frame-by-frame verisimilitude. Most annoying is an interminable discourse on love that postulates, ultimately, that the impenetrable solitude of human beings is an intense obstacle to eros and that sexual embrace begins with the capacity of people to shake hands with one another – this lecture, ostensibly delivered by Krull to the target of his seduction, is about as sexy as a gynecological handbook written by Hegel, and, further, is esthetically inapposite: there is no way that the callow, lecherous Felix Krull would be able to lecture his prospective inamorata in this way – it’s wholly out of character, although obviously important to the aging writer. Yet, notwithstanding these defects, there is something to be treasured in this book: here Tadzio, the unobtainable object of desire in Death in Venice, Mann’s masterpiece written 42 years before, speaks.

In Death in Venice, Aschenbach worships Tadzio, the embodiment of Phoebus Apollo, Ganymede, and Eros himself, from afar. Aschenbach idealizes the beautiful boy – a classic example of what Freud termed "the over-valuation of the object of desire." The dying writer cloaks his sexual lust in Apollonian terms: Tadzio is the image of the great love that leads, as in Plato’s Symposium, to the contemplation of the Forms, the ideas of Love and Beauty and Truth (all with capital letters). But, in fact, dark forces are at work – love equals death – and what Aschenbach believes to be the gentle embrace of the lucid sun-lit Apollo is, in fact, the Dioynisian orgy that leads to death. It’s a form a self-deception that destroys the elderly writer.

Krull was written when Mann had become Aschenbach and, then, some – he was in his eighties. In this novel, the beautiful boy speaks for himself – he is no longer a remote, idealized figure but a vibrant voice on the page. Mann imagines Felix Krull as supernaturally beautiful and attractive to both sexes – in a poignant comment, the old writer has Krull tell us that he senses a transient moment of revulsion in his male characters when they encounter Krull; they are disgusted by their own sexual impulses toward the boy. Krull epitomizes a charade, or confidence-game, that underlies all human life: we are led to regard the beautiful as evidence of the radiant Apollonian truth, but this is deceptive, a mask that the world wears. The Beautiful is a hook, a lure, designed to ensnare us. Below the glamorous mask, there is the dark chthonian realm, seething with uncontrollable desires and irrational instincts – and these desires and instincts are, ultimately, allied with death. Reality is masked: We think we are seeing Apollo, but, instead, the eros leads us on the path downward to the dark subterranean world of reptilian desires. (Mann demonstrated this most brutally in The Black Swan (Die Betrogen), also published in 1954, in which an upright, punctilious and menopausal matron falls madly in love with a much younger man. Before consummating her love, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer and dies – the growth of the tumor in her womb stimulated in her feelings of love and desire that were, in fact, literally pathological – symptoms of her deadly disease). Felix Krull is a comic novel, part of a tradition of picaresque narratives dating to Cervantes and, even, Petronius. The book ends in the bright sunshine of Lisbon with a seduction about to be consummated. It’s a happy book, without shadow – but, by giving a figure like Tadzio, here Felix Krull, voice, Mann closes the loop with his great works written almost a half-century before: love is deceit, the author is a con-man, art is fraudulent, and the sun is shining, the food excellent, the prospect of love imminent and all is well in the world.