“The Fullness of the Infinite”: Introduction to Disillusionment Papers

In his 1896 short story “Disillusionment” (Enttäuschung: disillusionment, disappointment, disenchantment), Thomas Mann creatively interrogates the developmental process of disillusionment. Only a few pages long, the work consists of a story-within-a-story: the narrator, a young tourist in Venice not yet disenchanted with life (the exotic city fails to disappoint) tells of a curious encounter with a stranger of indeterminate age who volunteers the story of his life. The man explains that since his youth he has suffered from the malady of “great and general disappointment with which everything, all of life, has in store.” His life began in “a clergyman's family, in quite a small town.” There, he says,

We breathed a strange atmosphere, compact of pulpit rhetoric, of large words for good and evil, beautiful and base, which I bitterly hate, since perhaps they are to blame for all my sufferings. For me life consisted utterly of these large words. … From man I expected divine virtue or hair-raising wickedness, from life either ravishing loveliness or else consummate horror; and I was full of avidity for that and of a profound, tormented yearning for a larger reality, for experience of not matter what kind [Mann 1896, p. 738].

Life would vex the Venetian gentleman, never fulfilling his “magnificent expectation of life”—a treasured illusion emblematized by his beloved “large words.” Nevertheless, he struggled to maintain the longings that he “zealously fed” with “a thousand books and the works of all the poets. Ah, how I have learned to hate them,” he confides, “those poets who chalked up their large words on all the wall of life. … I came to think of every large word as a lie or mockery” (p. 739).

And, despite life's betrayal, this Venetian stranger—a nineteenth-century man of letters who, deserted by the romantic, was left with bleak realism—yet turns to the poets and their hated, but perhaps still also