Inside Through The Outside. The Artist. Tonio Kroeger.
September 27 2010

The Pianobabbler has said it before (see Pianobabbler 75): the writings of Thomas Mann loom large in his mindscape. The authour of Buddenbrooks, Magic Mountain, Death in Venice and Doktor Faustus planted many a seed in the fertile mind of the young Pianobabbler. The seeds have blossomed over time.

Mann also gifted the world with his short story Tonio Kroeger. A masterly depiction of the artist's inner world.

Relying on autobiographical elements, Mann explores his eponym's, Tonio Kroeger's, soul. We follow Tonio from youth to adulthood as he evolves into a writer. Tonio offers the inside view of an artist's life.

The essence of Tonio Kroeger: artists are in, but not of, society.

Scarred with a mark of Cain that sets them apart, artists serve as interpreters and observers of life's phenomena. Yet they play active, not passive, roles in those phenomena. From, but not necessarily because of, the ongoing struggle between this active versus passive conflict, emerges the artist's art.

In Tonio's words, for the artist:

...feelings, living and warm feelings are trivial, useless, and only the vibrations, the cold ecstasies of our corrupt nervous systems, our artists' nervous systems, have an aesthetic character. It is necessary to be, to some extent, outside of humanity, to be a little inhuman, to live with regard to what is human in a distant and disinterested relationship [...] An artist, a real one, not one of those whose art is his social position, but a predestined and cursed artist, knows without great insight that he is in the midst of a crowd. The feeling he has of being apart, of not belonging to the world, of being recognized and observed, is something at once regal and embarrassed one can read on his face.

People warm to artists. People shun artists. How often have my colleagues and I been welcomed as heroes? How often have we been slighted as serfs?

The U.S. Ambassador and his wife rushed to thank me personally for the private concert at the Canadian Ambassador's residence in Japan. A few months earlier, a disdainfully wealthy partygiver refused us any food and drink for an entire evening, resented our taking breaks, and insisted we hide in the back room out of view when we did. Dirt we were.

Yet we create. We live as artists. We try to fit, even though by being artists we do not fit. We live differently in society than others. Yet we are a part of society, with others. We are as Tonio Kroeger says, "predestined and cursed".

We look within. Discover words, sounds, images. Extract them. Package them. Present the packaged words, sounds, images to the world outside, to seduce others into finding what we found within ourselves in the first place.

We release what comes from our inside. In return, we receive impermanent invitations to leave the outside of society, and enter the inside. Inside from the outside. But we always remain on the outside. Tonio Kroeger again:

I am placed between two worlds, I find myself at home in neither, so life is a little painful for me. You artists, you call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois are tempted to have me arrested... I do not know which of the two hurts me most cruelly.

Make no mistake. We artists derive joy from what we do. We do the work of art because we choose to do so. "Predestined and cursed", perhaps. But a different destiny would be our uncursed misery.

The Pianobabbler is happy to make music. Inside and out. And happy to recommend that you, artist or not, inside or outside, read Tonio Kroeger.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

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