The Wild Region in Life-History

Prelude: Self-Identity and Life-History

Prelude: Self-Identity and Life-History T he time we live in is interwoven with stories. Our place in the world, before we reach self-awareness—or, I dare claim, even before we are born—is assigned by family stories. The stories we thus inherit are, in turn, supplemented by the ever-changing story of our own, which will not come to rest even at the moment of our death. What effects us from the outside, and what we ourselves do, think, imagine, or experience , we relate about ourselves and about one another to others; we relate it: we recount it to an other, again and again, in another way. Our recountings, from time to time, reach back to previous recountings, and then they start all over again: this is the way they try to encircle and enmesh the fleeing events. What we consciously pass over in silence and what we unconsciously avoid lives in the shadow of the already recounted and of that which still remains to be told. However, we encounter a question here. In his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann reflects on the recountability of time. He asks himself: “Can one tell—that is to say, narrate—time, time itself, as such, for its own sake?”1 Thus, it is a “time novel”—in the sense of a “tale about time”2 —a Zeitroman, which raises the fundamental question of not only every time novel but of every life-history as well. The “hermetical magic,”3 which, according to Mann’s text, pertains to all recountings, liberates the novel to play an ironic game with the fundamental question. The novel offers a term as an answer, which implies that a life-history is permeated with a mysterious unity. The term is destiny (Schicksal). Destiny is mentioned by Hans Castorp in his great debate with Mynheer Peeperkorn. What Castorp performs around this word is significant : first he lets it drop, then he returns to it, indicating that it is still on his mind, and then he turns to something else again. It is only much later that he is willing to explain what he meant by destiny: For love of her [that is, of Clawdia Chauchat], in defiance of Herr Settembrini , I declared myself for the principle of unreason, the spiritual xiii xiv P R E L U D E : S E L F - I D E N T I T Y A N D L I F E - H I S T O R Y principle of disease, under whose aegis I had already, in reality, stood for a long time back, and I remained up here, I no longer know precisely how long [ . . . ].4 “For a long time back” (von langer Hand und jeher schon): this expression makes it clearer what we should mean by destiny. To realize the hidden unity this expression attributes to life will not go without our astonishment . The idea of destiny will, undoubtedly, offer an answer to the fundamental question of all life stories, including time novels: although time, “time itself, as such, for its own sake” cannot be narrated, we are able to recount time woven into destiny. However, this answer remains within the realm of the ironic game. What should we think of Hans Castorp’s destiny if the last lines of the novel relate that although he may very well have stood under the aegis of the spiritual principle of disease for a long time back, he did not, eventually, remain on the magic mountain? In his novel called Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann uses destiny or sending (Schicksal) to characterize the times around the outbreak of the First World War. On this occasion, the term is used by Serenus Zeitblom, who, by looking back on those years from the time of the Second World War, recounts what he was once thoroughly enthusiastic about. So what was once said, gets retold, and retold in another way. The words once uttered in ecstasy sound like “an ancient, pagan chant,” “a tragic mythological , musical-dramatic motif.”5 This is enough to cast a somewhat poetic shadow over the concept of destiny. The term Schicksal (destiny, fate) has been branded as “usurpatory concept,” too, and by no lesser a thinker than Immanuel Kant.6 However natural it may sound that time can only be recounted when it is woven into destiny, this may very well become misleading as well, since it creates the impression that we might find...