Socratic Dialogues"The Magic Mountain" is a sequel to “Death in Venice”.Just as Plato’s Socratic Dialogues were the foundation of the novella, they guide the narrative of "TMM", a "Bildungsroman" that is concerned with the education of the protagonist, Hans Castorp, during the seven year period from ages 23 to 30.Castorp doesn’t so much learn or grow by his physical actions. The character development is intellectual, a development which is equally apparent in both the author and the reader.Because it's structured as a Socratic Dialogue, there is no guarantee that all readers will take the same message from the novel. Mann presents us with two, if not multiple, pedagogical or metaphysical points of view. While we might be able to infer Mann’s preference, it's not always clear, and it's left to us to draw our own conclusions.This reinforces the reputation of the novel as one of the great works of literature, not only because its subject matter is the rival ideas upon which civilization is founded, but because it lets us be the judge.As with Socrates, the goal is to make us think methodically about the issues, rather than to encourage us to approach them with inflexible preconceptions or to depart captive to rigid dogma.In Which the Hero is Heightened and Enhanced"TMM" is set in a sanatorium on a Swiss mountain, where patients suffering from tuberculosis go to receive treatment and a cure.To do so, they must leave the flatlands of Germany and elsewhere and reside "up here" in a rarefied, pure, idealized atmosphere and world. They undergo a "change of air" and learn to breathe afresh.They are pulled out of day-to-day timetables, responsibilities, cares and conflicts. On the mountain, they can see things for what they really are.Not that it is all heavenly and harmonious: there is no less rivalry and conflict or, for that matter, gossip up here. At times the novel betrays an almost comic fantasy tone associated with fables, morality plays (Goethe described his "Faust" as a "very serious jest") and fairy tales (not to mention "The Master and Margarita").Olympian RivalriesThe title of the novel derives from Nietzsche’s "The Birth of Tragedy":"Now it is as if the Olympian magic mountain had opened before us and revealed its roots to us. The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. That he might endure this terror at all, he had to interpose between himself and life the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians."For Nietzsche, the Olympian gods helped mankind battle "that overwhelming dismay in the face of the titanic powers of nature."Because the gods lived the lives of mortals, their example gave the Greeks strength, resolve and moral guidance. However, unlike Christianity, there were multiple gods, and thus scope for differences of perspective or emphasis, in particular, the difference that most interested Nietzsche, the difference between the Apollonian and the Dionysian (a preoccupation of Mann in both "Death in Venice" and "TMM").Dialectics, Dialogues and DiabolicsIn both Nietzsche and Mann, there is a polarity, a dialectic, a double-sidedness.The dialectic is ideological. However, Mann presents it to us in the form of a dialogue or duel between two characters. It is personalized, as it is with Dostoyevsky.While the dialogue is often essayistic in total length, it is not just fodder for a dry "novel of ideas", it is a dramatic embodiment and reflection of a personal and philosophical tension between two vital people. It comes to us in short, sharp, punchy grabs. It’s like going 15 rounds with two intellectually-gifted prize fighters.If you’re not interested in the rivalry of ideas, this novel might not be for you. If you are, it could be a wonderful reading and thinking experience.Still, Mann’s refusal to always resolve the tensions between the ideas might not be to your liking. Some see it as disingenuous, witness this assessment by one of my favourite critics, Alfred Kazin, who once met Mann in Hollywood:"Mann, the creative peer and contemporary of great experimental novelists like Proust and Joyce, is easier to read but actually harder to grasp through the external conventionality of his form and the heavy load of Germanic philosophic apparatus. "He is so continuously double-sided, so ‘safe’ in manner and so subversive within, so much the pompous German pedant in his literary manner and in his substance so representative of his aesthetic, nihilist, decadent generation, that it is almost impossible to do justice to the range and elusiveness of his mind. "Either one makes too much of only one side of him or one imitates his own tiresome Olympian irony, the suavely self-protective use to which he put his doubleness by effectively concealing his real opinions."Kazin damns Mann with faint praise. In contrast, the Marxist Hungarian critic Georg Lukacs (who unknown to him was the model for the character, Leo Naphta) declared Mann the "last great bourgeois writer", writing:"Thomas Mann is a realist whose respect, indeed reverence, for reality is of rare distinction."Whether or not the subversiveness, the elusiveness, the concealment to which Kazin adverts is real, it might have contributed fuel to recent attempts to go beyond Mann’s writing and venture into his personal life, in particular for the purposes of reassessing his legacy on the basis of perceived homoeroticism. This trend is prurient, but in an age of media voyeurism seems to be inevitable. Regrettably, it distracts attention from the writing and the subject matter, which can’t be any more fundamental to the concerns of any civilization, and was regarded as sufficiently meritorious to justify the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature.Taking Stock of Time and SpaceHans Castorp is an inexperienced and inexpert engineer, a simpleton, a naïf, a neophyte.When he arrives at the Berghof, he takes stock of both time and space. He takes his bearings, he is measured, he measures himself, so that he can determine exactly where he is and what he's about (as he will later use a thermometer to "measure" his temperature and his illness). However, gradually, he loses his sense of time and place, and as if he were on Olympus or in Heaven or Eternity, his experience becomes timeless, almost dreamlike. Apart from the dialogues, nothing much happens to Castorp. He doesn’t cover a lot of space. The narrative doesn’t depend on the passage of time, so much as the transmission of ideas. Before we know it, Mann has quietly covered seven years in 700 pages.In a way, Mann plucks Castorp out of his world, out of his time and makes him listen to pedagogues, perhaps because, like most of us, he is not yet able to think particularly deeply about these issues himself.Not only is "TMM" a great work of literature, but it is about how a great work of literature works: it takes us on a journey from innocence and ignorance to experience and wisdom. It’s we who experience character development. If we are lucky, we can put our lessons into practice in our lives. Settembrini versus NaphtaThe principal dialogues are between Settembrini (an heroic individualist) and Naphta (a divine collectivist).Settembrini is an eloquent Italian, "a dark man of graceful carriage, with curling black moustaches." He’s a humanist, an individualist, a rationalist who upholds the beauty and dignity of man: "Our Western heritage is reason – reason, analysis, action, progress."Leo Naphta is small, thin, clean-shaven, ugly, hook-nosed, bespectacled, well-dressed. He is a Jew by birth, but a Jesuit by inclination and training. Paradoxically, he is a collectivist who supports both the Catholic Church and Socialism:"Like many gifted people of his race, Naphta was both natural aristocrat and natural revolutionary; a socialist, yet possessed by the dream of shining in the proudest, finest, most exclusive and conventional sphere of life. "[In effect, he had made] a declaration of affection for the Roman Church, as a power at once spiritual and aristocratic (in other words anti-material), at once superior and inimical to worldly things."Perhaps, what Naphta is seeking spiritually is both Heaven in Eternity and Heaven on Earth. Both require a respect for authority, the authority of God (and the Church) and the authority of the State, whether religious or secular.Sometimes, to establish and protect the authority of a State, it is necessary to use force. In other words, sometimes, Naphta must advocate Revolution and Terror. Life and DeathThe contrast between the two worldviews is revealed in their perspectives on Death.Settembrini sees Death as part and parcel of Life, as the flipside of Life. If it is differentiated from Life, it takes on a negative quality:"Severed from life, it becomes a spectre, a distortion, and worse. For death, as an independent power, is a lustful power, whose vicious attraction is strong indeed; to feel drawn to it, to feel sympathy with it, is without any doubt at all the most ghastly aberration to which the spirit of man is prone."Naphta sees the nobility of man solely in terms of the Spirit, not the organic or animal aspect of the human. Death and disease are in dialectical opposition to the life of the Spirit, yet they govern and influence Life at the level of the non-spiritual human, the animal, the organism that is capable of disease, of illness, of dissolution, of suffering:"Disease was very human indeed. For to be man was to be ailing. Man was essentially ailing, his state of unhealthiness was what made him man. There were those who wanted to make him 'healthy,' to make him 'go back to nature,' when, the truth was, he never had been 'natural.' "All the propaganda carried on to-day by the prophets of nature, the experiments in regeneration, the uncooked food, fresh-air cures, sun-bathing, and so on, the whole Rousseauian paraphernalia, had as its goal nothing but the dehumanization, the animalizing of man. "They talked of 'humanity,' of nobility — but it was the spirit alone that distinguished man, as a creature largely divorced from nature, largely opposed to her in feeling, from all other forms of organic life. "In man’s spirit, then, resided his true nobility and his merit—in his state of disease, as it were; in a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he the more man." Man is less than Spirit.Point and Counter-PointCastorp listens to all this and remarks:"You say we did not come up here to get wiser, but healthier, and that is true. But all this confusion must be reconciled; and if you don’t think so, why then you are dividing the world up into two hostile camps, which, I may tell you, is a grievous error, most reprehensible."Just as if he is listening to two Greek gods, he regards the two pedagogues as aristocratic. However, in the chapter entitled "Snow", he sees the light in a dream-like state on an Olympian mountain:"Man is the lord of counterpositions, they can be only through him, and thus he is more aristocratic than they. More so than death, too aristocratic for death—that is the freedom of his mind. More aristocratic than life, too aristocratic for life, and that is the piety in his heart. "There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts...Death is a great power...Reason stands simple before him, for reason is only virtue, while death is release, immensity, abandon, desire. "Desire, says my dream. Lust, not love. Death and love—no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together. Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. "Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilization, friendly, enlightened, beautiful human intercourse...For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. - And with this - I awake." The Awakening of LoveSo, after point and counterpoint, after the working of the dialectic, finally we have an awakening of Eros."Adventures of the flesh and in the spirit...granted thee to know in the spirit what in the flesh thou scarcely couldst have done. Moments there were...when there came a dream of Love...may it be that Love one day shall mount?"As in "Death in Venice", Castorp awakens to the light of Desire, Lust and Love. Only, while Aschenbach died in peacetime, Castorp survives in wartime. Still, in neither case does Mann allow us to witness his protagonist mount his Love. Perhaps, after all, it's legitimate for Kazin and others to wonder why Mann denies his protagonists the fulfilment of Love? This doesn't necessarily mean that we readers are also denied. We must find and consummate our own Love while we fend off Death. VERSE:Homo HumanusHerr Settembrini,Homo humanus,Man of acumen,Judgement and learning,Carping pedagogue,Chronic windbag andOppositionist,Proudly discerning,Wielding influenceOn those gullible,Confiding, childlike, Still full of yearningWith his garrulousGift of florid gab,Lively harangue andAnimus burning.Naphta's Catholic Communism[After and in the Words of Thomas Mann]I believe not in original sin,But in an ideal state Of man as the child of God,A paradise without government And without force, In which there is neither Lordship nor service, Neither law nor penalty, Nor sin nor relation After the flesh. No distinction of classes, No work, no property. Nothing but equality, Brotherhood and Moral perfectitude.Clavdia Chauchat, Hot Cat[After and in the Words of Thomas Mann]Whenever he thought of Her, Clavdia Chauchat,Kirghiz-eyed and tainted,Grinning like a hot cat,He was back in his boat,Fantasising aboutA time crepuscular,The place a Holstein lake,Scanning with dazzled eyes,From the glassy daylightAbove the western shoreTo the mist and moonbeamsThat wrapped eastern heavensRound likely lovers, inTight embrace, hoping forDesire evermore.Sleeping between TB SheetsOnce I receivedA circularWarning me thatI'd possiblyCaught some diseaseTubercular.Mynheer PeeperkornWho is this man of Java,Regal and plutocratic, Who exclaims in foreign Dutch, That’s both guttural and thick?Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn,A coffee-king retired,Larded with money andExpensively attired.Indisposed by an achingSpleen that’s quite inflamed, He saves a weighty summons forHis small Malayan valet.His face is sparsely whiskeredAnd his skull’s white-haired,Though he is otherwiseColourless and blurred.His personality matchesThe pallid gaze of eyes,Each small and pale, beneathStern deep-wrinkled brows.He’s an alcoholic whoLoves to sniff one of those Fine burgundies with his Large and fleshy nose,But better still to sipThe glass in his tight grip Through his oddly thick And much distorted lips.Nevertheless, you know, thisNetherlander from abroadIs somewhat lean and tall,His chest robust and broad.A wealthy business magnateWith a mighty money magnet,Whose silent push and pull Towards women gravitates.Now, it’s Madame Chauchat,The hero of our tale believes,With whom the Dutchman’s Quietly thick as thieves.For he noticed in dismayAnd much perplexityThat their arrival wasConcurrent, if not coincident.Still, unperturbed, PeeperkornSought a place inside an innTo take unto himselfA glass of Holland’s gin."The Art of Seduction (For Men and Women Alike)"Literally translated from the French,Hopefully preserving its elegance,"The Art of Seduction", read by a Mensch,Could teach him a few of the elementsOf sensual passion learned from a wench,Meant, too, for women of preeminenceWho desire in beaus no arrogance,Just a man of the world's beneficence,An aura of debonair resonanceAnd a suitably furnished residence.The Egyptian PrincessOnly the English guests who chewedOn their cucumber sandwichesComplained with ascetic attitudeThat speaking foreign languagesWas just plebeian and too crude.Like the extroverted paramour,Princess of Lesbia and of Egypt,Who’d exchanged three months’ cure For a carton of sphinx cigarettes And a brand new coffee machine.For she eschewed skirts and blousesFor severely short-cropped hair,A sack coat and well-pressed trousers,While her multi-beringed fingersWere yellow-stained with nicotine.Except her sickly Moorish eunuch,She scorned the world of hetero men,And their rampant egomania,To pant hot and heavy in the bed ofFrau Landauer, a Jewess from Romania.Nazi Party Girl[Apologies to Elvis Costello]You’re nothing but a nasty party girlLooking for new party membersThat you can check up uponAnd add to your collection.You know the two little Hitlers?The ones that you’ve been pursuing?It's said, all's not gold that glitters,Could fools gold be your undoing?You think you’re not a guilty party, girl,But it's obvious your mouth is made upAnd some of us know your mind is undone,The true colours of your flag have unfurled.You're in a knitting circle, on yourHobbyhorse, seeking Lebensraum.If you don’t have the space for us,Why would we have the time for you?You’re nothing but a Nazi Party Girl.You believe you’ve got it made, your pocketsAre full and you’re rolling deep in clover,But what'll you do when the Party’s over?Carnaval[After and in the Words of Thomas Mann]Out on the streets andIn the market place,A mighty magic-mad,Mountain carnivalWith harlequins And columbines,Shaking rattles And tin trumpets.Comic opera and costumes,Masquerades and bedlam.Confetti on the groundAnd maskers on foot.Decorated sleighsAnd skirmishes.Champagne and burgundy,Sweet and spiritous.The Kiss[After and in the Words of Thomas Mann]He beheld the imageOf a life in flower,Of flesh-borne loveliness,As she opened her arms,So unspeakably sweet.First leaning from above,She inclined unto him,Then bent down overhead,While he became consciousOf organic fragranceAnd the mild pulsationOf the heart in her blouse.Something warm and tenderClasped him around the neck.Melting with desire,He sensed her upper arms,He felt her fine-grained skin,Heavenly cool to touch.Then upon his shy lips,The moist cling of her kiss.
Ah yes, irony!tBeware of the irony that flourishes here, my good engineer.tIn my freshman year of college, I took a literature course to fulfill a core curriculum requirement: Sexuality in Literature. It was a great class; we read Plato’s Symposium, Sappho’s poetry, the Song of Solomon, Sade, and Sacher-Masoch. But of all the great books we made our way through that semester, the one that most stuck with me was Mann’s collection of short fiction, which included Death in Venice.I was a negligent student of literature in high school. Only rarely did I do my assigned readings, and so I had a remarkably poor vocabulary. (In fact, a friend recently borrowed my copy of Death in Venice, wherein I underlined every word I didn’t know; “Man, your vocabulary sucked,” he said as he returned it.) So you can imagine what it was like for me to try and tackle the enormous erudition and sophistication of Thomas Mann. I was underprepared and overwhelmed. It was work enough to simply understand a sentence; unweaving his sophisticated themes and symbols was beyond my ken. Yet I still managed to enjoy the collection; more, I even savored it. The acute joys of reading fine literature, so alien before, were slowly opening themselves up to me. The point of this autobiographical digression is that Thomas Mann has earned himself a special place in my reader’s heart. So it was with excitement and trepidation that I recently walked into a book store and impulsively bought a copy of his most iconic novel: The Magic Mountain.Now, seven long weeks later, I have set myself the difficult task of reviewing this book. And, make no mistake, the task is difficult; for The Magic Mountain is perhaps the most ambiguous and elusive work of literature I’ve ever read. Even perhaps more so than Ulysses, the novel is a throwing down of the gauntlet, a tremendous, impudent challenge to any would-be critic. So I hope my reader will excuse me if this review it a bit disorganized, a bit slipshod, as I wrestle with this novel’s hydra heads in no particular order.The premise is simple: Hans Castorp, a likable, if simpleminded, young man visits his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, in a sanatorium for a three-week stay, and ends up staying seven years. All of the action takes place on the titular mountain—a reference to a sentence in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche is himself referring to Mount Olympus—as the young, impressionable Castorp gets sucked into the environment. He toys around with ideas, he listens to learned discussions, he befriends interesting personalities, he acquaints himself with death, he falls in love, he indulges in food and alcohol—in a word, he dabbles. He almost entirely forgets about his former life as an aspiring engineer “down there” in the “flatlands”—as the residents of the Berghof call the hustling, bustling world of the healthy below.When characterizing the style of this novel, one falls naturally into paradoxes: the book is both carefully realistic and deeply allegorical, it is both poetic and prosaic, both lyrical and didactic, both ironic and earnest, both knowing and naïve. Mann accomplishes this feat of ambiguity by adopting a narrative voice of the most gentle and subtle irony. Mann’s own opinions of any of the ideas and characters presented in the book are difficult, if not impossible, to guess at. Simply put, Mann takes no sides; he never professes unguarded allegiance or admiration; everything, in short, is coated in an understated mocking humor. And this ambiguity is summed up perfectly well in the person of our protagonist Hans himself, who dabbles in all things and commits to none, and who is constantly vacillating in his dilettante fashion.Perhaps as a result of this essential abstruseness, the novel seems to make reference to everything at once. Dostoyevsky often comes to mind, as Mann involves his characters in long philosophical debates, à la The Brothers Karamazov. And like Dostoyevsky’s fiction, Mann creates characters which are allegories for certain philosophies of life: we have Settembrini the rational humanist, Naphta the religious radical, Madame Chauchat the symbol of lust, and, my personal favorite, Mynheer Peeperkorn the hedonist. But then suddenly the novel will take a distinctly Proustian turn, as the narrator indulges in long, lyrical discussions of time, music, and the passing seasons. We sometimes get doses of Faust or even Don Quixote, as Hans, our would-be scholar, our wandering knight-errant, trundles about with Joachim in tow, often getting himself into farcical situations. And then suddenly Dante will appear, with Settembrini as Virgil, Madame Chauchat as Beatrice, and the sanatorium itself as the Mountain of Purgatory—where the patients come to be purged of their sickness, rather than their sins.What is so arresting about all of these literary parallels is that Mann manages to evoke them in the context of story wherein—it must be admitted—almost nothing at all happens; at least, nothing out of the ordinary. There’s no plot to speak of, no major obstacle to overcome, no central struggle, and even no consistent theme. Rather, the story is episodic in nature (here we are reminded of Cervantes again), and is quite realistic to boot. In fact, on the surface, The Magic Mountain is a fairly conventional novel; at least, it isn’t nearly as difficult to read as either Proust or Joyce. Mann’s sentences, though sometimes long, are rarely rococo; and his dialogue and characterizations are, on the surface at least, rather orthodox. Again, here we see Mann as a master of subtlety, evoking the whole Western cannon in the course of a conversation between a patient and his doctor.Now let me try to unravel some of the themes heard in Mann's great symphony. One obvious theme is that of sickness and death. Hans encounters a wide variety of attitudes towards illness during his stay. First, we have the medical staff, represented by Dr. Behrens, who sees sickness and death as just matters of business and biology—a matter for science. Contrasted with Behrens, we have Dr. Krokowski, the aspiring psychologist, who sees sickness as unrequited love, as a product of mental tensions. Then, we see Settembrini’s proud disdain of sickness, for it the enemy of vital human life, of social progress. Castorp is inclined to see something poetic in sickness—a kind of ennobling suffering, which parallels the genius’s intellectual struggle. Naphta is wont to praise sickness, for it weakens man’s love of the flesh, and turns his attention to the ascetic Spirit. And we cannot forget the dutiful Joachim, who hates sickness, because it prevents the accomplishment of one’s duty.Amid the great themes of the novel, we also encounter innumerable smaller motifs. One is that of music. Castorp becomes obsessed with a gramophone; the narrator speculates on the experience of time in music and literature; Settembrini famously calls music “politically suspect.” Another is politics, as the reader gets absorbed in the intellectual clashes between the humanist Settembrini, who champions liberalism and enlightement, and the caustic Naphta, who is a monomaniacal Christian-Marxist-Hegelian. Mann also displays his talents in evoking sexual tension, as Castorp eyes the alluring Chauchat for months and months, just as Aschenbach observed Tadzio.But perhaps the major theme of this novel is time. In the Berghof, time is experienced differently. Down below, in the flatlands, time is measured in days, hours, minutes, seconds. Up here, in the sanatorium, time is measured in weeks, months, years. Time forms the whole basis of their stay; for their sickness is often likened to a prison sentence, a sentence which is constantly increased. Their day is carefully divided into segments—five meals, “rest cures” (which consist of just laying down for hours on end), and little strolls. They regularly measure their temperature—holding the thermometer in their mouths for seven painful minutes—and chart their fevers through the passing weeks, hoping to see it normalize. One is often even reminded of Einstein’s theory, for time seems to be supernaturally stretched out, dilated and distended, up in the mountain.Connected with the leitmotif of time is that of acclimatization. When Castorp arrives, he is a stranger in a strange land. Everything is unfamiliar to him. His habits are all out of sync; he finds the patients’ behavior odd and uncanny. But slowly Hans gets used to things (or, as it’s put by Behrens, he gets used to not getting used to things). The reader, too, experiences a sort of acclimatization, as we acquaint ourselves with the Berghof and its many residents. The world of rest-cures and the half-lung club are, to us as well, strange at first, but gradually become intimately familiar. How much the reader himself has gotten used to things is made clear when Hans gets a visit from his uncle. Hans’s uncle goes through the same process as did Hans when he first arrived; but whereas we were outsiders for Hans’s arrival, we are locals for his uncle’s. We are inclined to laugh at the uncle’s incredulity and foreignness; we are now part of the knowing club, and can wink to each other when the flat-footed visiter from the flatlands commits a faux-pas.Because so much of this novel has to do with getting used to things, it almost demands to be read slowly—a little bit at a time, over many weeks. Indeed, I was almost dismayed at how much time it took me to get through; for not only does the novel take a long time to read, but it feels long. This book simply revels in its own length. One can even go further and say that the experience of reading the novel—to a degree that is almost eerie—mirrors the experience of Castorp as he stays in the Berghof. I picked up the book from the bookstore in almost the same spirit as Castorp when he arrived to visit his cousin—a casual impulsiveness. And gradually, inevitably, I got absorbed in it, entranced by it. I too committed more time than I expected to toy with ideas, to acclimatize myself to a strange place, to put normal life on hold and indulge in an aesthetic experience. When the reader gets to the 700th page, and reflects that he has been with Hans Castorp for seven whole years, and has gotten to know so many characters so well, he, too, may feel that he has gotten himself a little lost. The atmosphere of the novel, so rich in ambiguity and so full of ideas, may also awake some lingering sickness of soul, or maybe just make us a little dizzy. And now, as I take my leave of the book, I am, like my companion Hans, thrown back into the hustle and bustle of the buzzing flatlands, expelled from the rarefied air of The Magic Mountain—a little wiser, a little more experienced, and, with any luck, a little healthier.
What do You think about The Magic Mountain (1996)?
You’re faced with a daunting task when you try to talk about The Magic Mountain – there are so many threads that to pull on one seems unfair to the others. For some it’s a meditation on time, for others it’s the foundational ‘sick-lit’ masterpiece; it’s an allegory of pre-First World War Europe, say one group of supporters; not at all, argue others, it’s a parody of the Bildungsroman tradition.And yet despite the profusion of themes and ideas, this is a supremely contained book. ‘Insular’ you might almost say, were the etymology not so inappropriate; perhaps ‘hermetically sealed’ is better (and indeed that becomes an important phrase in the text). The world of this novel is a closed one, or so at least it appears – sealed off from reality, with its own rules, its own time, its own space. The extent to which the characters here can interact with the ‘real’ world is something they have to discover themselves through the book’s seven-hundred-plus pages.The plot can be disposed of in a single statement: that a young engineer called Hans Castorp takes a three-week visit to see his cousin in a Swiss sanatorium and ends up staying for seven years. This is not a novel of events, but a novel of ideas. (The main idea was apparently, I wonder if I can write seven hundred pages where literally nothing happens?)At first the set-up seems to anticipate the whole imprisoned-in-a-medical-facility trope that has subsequently become familiar – as Hans gets sucked into the routine, and gradually diagnosed with problems of his own that prevent his leaving, I was picking up on a vague One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest vibe, and I also found myself thinking of the Alpine clinic scenes from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or even the Timothy Cavendish bits of Cloud Atlas.But the danger here is more subtle. The staff are friendly and accommodating (despite a sense that ‘above and behind [the Director] stood invisible forces’); you can leave for a trip into town, or even discharge yourself, whenever you wish. To paraphrase The Eagles, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never discount the possibility of a tubercular relapse forcing you to return with a collapsed lung. The patients claim they want to get out, but their attitude, in reality, is much more ambiguous. There’s a brilliant moment where Hans rails against the surroundings a little too much, and the director of the sanatorium calls his bluff with a quick examination:When he was done, he said, ‘You may leave.’Hans Castorp stammered, ‘You mean…but how can that be? Am I cured?’‘Yes, you’re cured […]. As far as I’m concerned, you may leave.’‘But, Director Behrens. You’re not really serious, are you?’And suddenly we realise that Hans does not want to leave at all. He doesn’t want to go back to the responsibilities and expectations of his engineering job; here, in the sanatorium, he has freedom – freedom, and also a certain license in behaviour granted to the sick.This is what lies behind the book’s treatment of time, and why the narrator can refer to the story as a Zeitroman, a ‘time-novel’. The inhabitants are in some sense degraded by being there, but they also cherish their privileged status, exempt from the world’s calendar. One character speaks of the sanatorium as an ‘isle of Circe’; it is a ‘life without time’, where the ‘true tense of all existence is the “inelastic present”’ (ausdehnungslose Gegenwart). In such an environment, there is a tendency for ideas, ideologies, dogma, to clash together unmediated – and also, conversely, for petty jealousies, flirtations and sexual desires to be unnaturally heightened.Indeed this must be one of the most sexual novels ever written to involve so little actual sex. Everything is sublimated into various social conventions, so that Hans’s quasi-relationship with his mysterious fellow patient Clavdia Chauchat is initiated when he asks to borrow a pencil, and a climactic instance of sexual union is described, adorably, as a moment when ‘the use of informal pronouns achieved its full meaning’.Psychoanalytic critics have had a field-day with the pencil-lending, not least because it reminds Hans of his homoerotic feelings for a childhood friend. But what makes the book truly Freudian in a less trivial sense is its close examination of the links between sex and death, eros and thanatos. One of my favourite chapters is the section called ‘Research’, where Hans stays up all night reading books about anatomy and biochemistry and feeling intimations of mortality mixed with a vague horniness. Life is imagined as ‘a secret, sensate stirring in the chaste chill of space’ – ‘matter blushing in reflex’ – while evolution is ‘the quintessence of sensuality and desire’, stirred into action ‘by reeking flesh’. Gazing out over the nighttime Alpine landscape, Hans sees only a cosmic, naked (female) human body:The night of its pubic region built a mystic triangle with the steaming pungent darkness of the armpits, just as the red epithelial mouth did with the eyes, or the red buds of the breast with the vertically elongated navel.(This whole virtuoso section reminded me of university, spending all night poring over textbooks while trying to manage teenage hormones.)So much for the metaphysical games, the grand narrative theories. I’d expected something of the sort just from the novel’s reputation. What I had not expected – and it came as a very pleasant surprise – was to find that The Magic Mountain is a comic novel. In fact the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that it’s this tone that lifts it, for me, into the first rank. Apart from anything else, it’s so important for the reader that they have some counterpoint to the grandiose theories so many of the characters want to expound upon, and Mann provides exactly that through the endearing character of Hans himself, our ‘thoroughly unpretentious’, ‘unheroic hero’. High-minded comments – and there are many – are rarely allowed to stand without an invitation for us to smile at them:‘Did you know that the great Plotinus is recorded to have said that he was ashamed to have a body?’ Settembrini asked, and with such earnest expectation of an answer that Hans Castorp found himself forced to admit that this was the first he had heard of it.Later, after a similarly earnest apophthegm from another character, we are allowed to eavesdrop on Hans's thought process: ‘Well, there’s a Delphic remark for you,’ he says to himself. ‘And if you purse your lips tight after delivering it, that will certainly intimidate everyone for a bit.’ In fact even when Hans is the one delivering the sententiousness, he can’t take himself very seriously:‘There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst. Hello! Why, I think I’ve just coined a phrase, a bon mot. How do you like it?’(‘Very much,’ comes the deadpan reply. ‘I cannot wait for your first collection of aphorisms.’) Without these ironic shifts in register, the book would still be fascinating but it would be monotone: with them, the effect is almost orchestral.Such things are brought out especially well by John E Woods in his 1996 translation, an improvement on the old 1927 Lowe-Porter version in every way. Lowe-Porter, it has been said, succeeded in translating the novel into German, and having tried the first few pages of her translation I admit I found it almost unreadable. I had to order the Woods from the US, but it was worth it, despite the godawful cover and font design used by Vintage, and passing over also the Americanisms scattered through the text (catercorner being perhaps the most jarring; Woods also silently amends the patients’ temperatures from Celsius to Fahrenheit!).Towards the end of the book, we finally suspect that Mann is pushing us beyond the ‘hyperarticulate’ arguments and towards real-world applications of these theories – to ‘leave logomachy behind’, as the narrator says at one point. The final couple of pages of this book move for the first time beyond Davos, to show us the Western Front – and we realise with a terrific jolt that it is 1914 and time has not stopped moving after all. Suddenly we appreciate the full importance of the novel’s investigation into how love and life can be made to emerge from death.But now I am in danger of just rephrasing the book’s final lines in less felicitous language. Suffice to say that the whole mountainous project comes together in the climax, and it all ends, characteristically, in a question mark. Readers today may be better-placed than they wish to supply the answers.
—Warwick
If you give this book a chance, and some long quiet hours with your full attention, you will be in the midst of incredible richness.Wise, erudite, deeply engaged but titanically remote, grand, magisterial, ironic, cosmopolitan, comic in a sly gently mocking way.They don't write 'em like this anymore. the title is onomatpoeic. The book itself is mountainous....some of the deepest philosophical prophecy on what the 20th Century was, and would become. The characters are allegorical, true, but the character sketches are limned with living detail which suggests more than just "smart guy= intellect" and "rowdy guy= passion" or whatever.I hated this when I foolishly tried to dip into it as a sophmore in high school. You really gotta be a bit older, wiser, more patient and more ironically inquiring to get the full effect here.This is one for the ages. Drink it slow and you're bound to find some of the more delcious textures this side of the big hoary giants which everyone already (supposedly) already knows by heart....
—matt
tThis book had been sitting, unread, on my bookshelf for some time. It has the reputation like Ulysses. It doesn’t help that I know people who gave up half way into both. But I read Joyce, and with this book, there was a group reading it. So I read it.tAnd liked it far more than I liked Ulysses.tThe two books are somewhat similar – massive, dense, reputations. I always had the impression with Ulysses that Joyce was showing off how smart and clever he was, and that feeling interfered with the enjoyment of the novel. This is not the case with MM. Mann is clever, but he isn’t shoving it down the reader’s throat. He too is puzzling the idea, worrying the bone. Unlike my dog, Mann wants to share his bone, and maybe he and the reader can crack it together.tIn many ways, the Magic Mountain is about the undying lands. Those lands that a man (and it is usually a man) travels to, loses himself in, until he leaves and realizes how many years have passed. It’s a version of Rip Van Winkle. The mountain and the sanatorium that occupies it are a modern version of this, travel to not be horse or magic – but by that new romantic travel railroad. It is a Neverland. And like Pan’s home there is a dark edge to it.tIn part, this fairy land saps not only the health of those who resides, supposedly to heal; this other world holds time and spends it rashly. It is unreal, but it has its attractions. The feel of putting off death, of not having to deal with life. And that is the danger that always is the danger. It always feels as if it would be nice to get off the ride for a bit.tThe awakening, the reader knows, will be rude. The reader knows what comes to the mountain, the war that will change the map of Europe. The post 1950 reader knows even more that the Great War which wrecks the mountain also leads to the Second. A double awakening that Mann was not fully aware of. Knowing how Mann was not received in Nazi Germany makes the book even more powerful. This coming harsh reality even makes the reader at times wish for the timeless of the mountain.tAnd that would be the point.tIt is the sense of the otherworldliness that echoes even in the style. At times the reader despairs of the density, and then the page turns, light shines though the rose window in the dark gothic cathedral and all is beautiful.tUntil the cloud comes. But then it goes, and all repeats.tThe unreality raises questions. Would Hans’ fate, would Europe or Germany’s fate, had been different if he had not visited his cousin? Which is worse giving up on life, letting past or being told to do it by someone who simply wants your money? Is the phrase for health a mind altering trick or a prophecy?tThe answer to the above, to all questions that the novel raises and poses is the Holy Grail that Mann speaks of his in afterword. The Grail that we all, Mann, the reader, all search for.
—Chris
