The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Thomas Mann

A critical paper by
June Salm

I’m almost tempted to title this paper “How I Spent My Summer,” since I’m about to tell you, briefly, how I did. I spent it first at University Hospitals, undergoing surgery for a broken thigh-bone, then at Judson Park for rehab. I broke the bone by miscalculating my position in bed as I awoke one morning: thinking I was lying at its mathematical center, I sat up and rolled over. But as it happened I was at the very edge of the bed, so that what I rolled over to was the floor, shockingly and with a thud.  What I’m getting to is that Judson – living for over a month in that insular community – made me think from time to time of The Magic Mountain.  For Judson was like its own island in the larger sea of things, and  though it offered no Settembrini or Naphta, it was  an island where, especially in a dining room whose lack of seating arrangement created an anarchic free-for-all, there often rose to fever pitch friendships, enmities, and intricate plots.

         But let us move to a higher plane, to a mountain in Switzerland, where a group of Europeans with faulty lungs live in splendid isolation and the hope of a cure.

         Our Hans Castorp may or may not be hoping for a cure, having come to Davos in a presumed state of good health, and simply for a three-week visit with his cousin Joachim at a sanitorium for the tubercular.  But after a while, when  X-rays reveal that Hans likewise is tainted, our hero falls almost happily into the routine of the legitimately ill, and is reluctant to leave Haus Berghof.  He remains, in fact, for seven years.

         The  Berghof and its ambience, and the topography on which it sits, are a far cry from  the “flatlands” in Germany that formed Castorp, his ancestral Hamburg. Had he not forsaken the latter for this Swiss altitudinous residence, he’d have been unlikely to undergo the evolution that the reader is privy to.  Would have settled, rather, into the life he’d planned as an engineer, a shipbuilder actually, and  become an unquestioningly solid member of the German bourgeoisie.  But Sanatorium Berghof has no need for shipbuilding, unless it be a vessel to cross the River Styx.

         Here, then, in rarefied air, amidst spectacular peaks, thrashing cataracts, and silent snows, the somewhat passive Hans is bombarded by influences that in addition to  the geological and meteorological, come from a motley crew of ailing Europeans. Two of them vie for Hans’s soul, or at least his allegiance: Settembrini, outspoken, verbose, devotee of liberalism, humanism, and the Enlightenment; and Naphta, extremist and revolutionary, lusting for blood and terror.  And there is Clavdia Chauchat, she of the slanting eyes, high cheekbones, and white arms, one of which she uses nightly upon entering the dining room, to slam the door behind her. 

         Wittingly or not, they and a cast of others propel Hans into maelstroms and adventures, mental and physical, that shape the contours of his journey on the Mountain. That cast includes of course the guiding spirit of the place, Dr. Behrens, and the assistant guiding spirit, Dr. Krowkowski, in company with patients who provide background and sometimes as in the case of Mijnheer Peeperkorn, foreground music.

         The novel is often referred to as a Bildungsroman, that literary genre which depicts the development of a protagonist on the rough route from youth to maturity.  But Magic Mountain  is more ambitious than that. I think Mann is trying to make a compendium of reality, coming at it from every perspective that his pen can summon, in which the topical and the eternal clasp hands. We have the pre-World War One period that is the story’s setting – its manners and mores; its politics and their historical underpinnings; and its science and medicine, including cross-currents from theories engendered by Freud and company.  And we have the cosmos, including the dot within it inhabited by multifarious life, including us. And we have us: the human body and spirit from whose energies there arise cities and nations, technology and industry, philosophy and religion, the arts, murder, and love. Pervading all: the elusive, persistent reality of  Time.  It is Hans Castorp who threads his way through this unnerving mesh.  And since it is a mesh – nothing linear about it – dialogue, narrative, and debate in the novel are replete with echoes of the past or hints at what’s to come.

         Let us look, then at some of these interlacings, in matters, for instance, like eros and thanatos.  And music. 

         Hans had always loved music, even in his native flatlands; it affected him, we’re told,  much like the strong alcoholic drink he used to take with his morning snack, “calming, numbing, and doze-inducing.” He had long loved the lied from Schubert’s Wintereise, The Lindenbaum.  Years later, in fact, when he takes up residency at the Berghof, and Dr. Behrens presents its denizens with a new stroke of technology called the gramophone, a mesmerized Hans appropriates the machine to himself.  From its “truncated coffin of fiddlewood” come among other delights the strains of his beloved Lindenbaum andthe voice of Caruso. Mann devotes an entire chapter of Magic Mountain to this machine, which, as the critic Erich Heller observed, seems to retell the story of the novel, this time in the guise of meditations on works by Verdi, Bizet, Debussy, Gounod, and, yes, Schubert. Here is Aida willingly joining her entombed lover, where the two will expire in an ecstasy of suffocation.  Here is poor don Jose whose passion for Carmen likewise ends in blood. As for the Lindenbaum, Hans, speculating on the haunting melancholy of its music and lyrics, asks: what is this song but death? 

         Let us slink toward the lady whose name implies “warm cat”, Madame Chauchat. There is much in Hans’s experience, and in his very soul, that predisposes him to this decadent daughter of the East:  a tendency even as a child to lethargy; the death of his parents at the age of seven (a recurring numeral in the book’s mythology); later, the death of his grandfather; and at thirteen, an intense, secret love for his schoolmate Pribislav Hippe. It had taken the adolescent Hans a year to summon the courage to say anything at all to Hippe – who had slanting eyes and high cheekbones – and this was to request the loan of a pencil. The above-mentioned critic Erich Heller has pointed out that  hippe is German for scythe, a medieval image of death. (Actually we still say the grim reaper, and what is a reaper but a scythe)?

         So now a Hans in his twenties, and on a Magic Mountain, takes a walk by a waterfall (his love of the sound of rushing water paralleling his love of music), where he suffers a violent nosebleed, falls into a kind of trance, and has a vision of the schoolyard where he had dared address Hippe. When he emerges from the trance (or does he?), and returning to the Berghof attends a  lecture by Dr. Krowkoski, he finds himself seated directly behind Clavdia Chauchat. As soon as she turns to look at him, and at the spot of blood on his coat, Hans is smitten “by Hippe’s very eyes”. 

         Time passes, as it does in life and in Mann, and just as Hans completes his seventh month on the Mountain we arrive at the Mardi Gras holiday, celebrated with gusto in the streets of Davos and with equal or surpassing gusto at the Sanitorium itself.  The chapter’s title, Walpurgisnacht, recalls from Goethe’s Faust a night of orgiastic revels on a mountain, the witches’ sabbath.  At the sanatorium during this carnival of abandon, Hans and Clavdia make love for the first and last time. When Chauchat bids Hans adieu she asks him to return the silver pencil she had lent him a few hours earlier.

         Let us fast-forward (or flash-forward, since we’re approaching a barrage of fire) to the killing fields of World War One, where Hans, accompanied by anonymous thousands as they stumble through mud and slaughter, sings to himself snatches of the Lindenbaum.  Rushing water, rushing blood, the rush of memory, and a pencil: thus does Mann connect experiences that are separate in time and space but meet in a kind of echo chamber.

         Mann himself once said that the characters in Magic Mountain are all “exponents, representatives, and messengers of intellectual districts, principles, and worlds,” and that he hoped he had not made them mere wandering allegories.  I think part of his genius is that he hasn’t; for the residents of Haus Berghof, aside from what they may represent, are a riveting lot: Behrens, clad in perpetual white, his “hand the size of a shovel, his neck stuck out, his large, goggling, bloodshot blue eyes swimming in tears”; Krokowski, garbed in black, yellow teeth gleaming against a beard, part charlatan and part, in his skewed and dogmatic way, adventurer into such new frontiers as the role of psychogenic factors in disease.  Plus a host of lively, even if dying, others, from the old to the seductively young, such as Marusja of the insufficient lungs and more than sufficient  bosom, who is Joachim’s obscure object of desire. My affection for Joachim, honor-and-duty-bound son of the Fatherland, grew as the story progressed, and when he died I felt weepy. Not only people, moreover, but things, inanimate things, reach into realms beyond themselves: the thermometer, the deck chair, Behrens’ X-ray machine, the Maria Mancinis that are Hans’s cigars. Freud may have said that sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, but the Marias so relished by Hans overstep the boundaries of tobacco.

         What of the dance of opposites in this book? I’ve wondered if Mann was ever into the Yin and the Yang. In the 1950’s, when my husband was teaching at Wesleyan University in Connnecticut, John Cage (speaking of music, or perhaps nonmusic) was a composer-in-residence there. He was deeply into the I Ching and various streams of Buddhist thought, and it is he who first told me about the Yin and the Yang -- in brief, that seemingly opposite forces are linked, that you can’t have the back of a hand without the front.  Perhaps Mann, being of the Occident, was thinking dialectically, but the two approaches may not be that dissimilar. At any rate we have in the novel a potpourri of polarities that include the heights and the flatlands; the rational and the irrational; flowering and rot; east and west, light and dark.  Hans himself contains opposites: a tendency to lethargy, or what the Italians refer to so deliciously as dolce far niente (sweet to do nothing), and co-existing with that, a potential for strenuous mental and physical exertion which on the Mountain and under the influence of fever comes into full play. We also have the Apollonian and the Dionysian, as critics more learned than I have observed, and who know their Nietzsche.  Peeperkorn represents the Dionysian; so bursting is he with the life force that speech comes from him like stuttering buckshot. The joy of sex is his credo, and of good food, good wine, and bracing scenery.  But he’s aging, and since a penalty of that process may be impotence, Peeperkorn does away with himself. This was before the age of Viagra.

         Aging and death are of course, a married pair without recourse to divorce, and their abode is Time. And it is Time, as I’ve mentioned and as you know, that in various guises permeates Mann’s tale. Time as circular; time as subjective; time as linear. All lie embedded in the pivotal episode where Hans, rebelling against Berghof policy, takes an  excursion into the snow-wrapped wild and gets lost in a blizzard. Against that blinding onslaught he tries to make his way back to the Berghof by following what he assumes to be a straight line. But at length realizes that he has only come back to the place he’d set out from, has come, in fact, full circle. (Intimations of Nietzsche’s theory of “the eternal recurrence”, of time as cyclical). At last an exhausted Hans stumbles towards the wall of a hut for protection, sinks into a deep sleep, and has a dream -- a delightful scene of human harmony and rationality, which suddenly metamorphoses into an act of savagery.  When he awakens, he’s startled to find on looking at his watch, the solid, bourgeois timepiece inherited from his father, that only a few minutes have passed.  Because for Hans the dream has played out over a period of weeks, or even years. What is clock time, then, so measurable, so concrete, but a fiction universally agreed upon?  Does the psyche’s experience of time not come closer to what’s real?  Does Hans’s dream, perhaps, transform the linear story of the race, the story told in  schoolbooks, into an all-encompassing moment that transcends chronology?

         Is the book timeless?  Time will tell.

         At the present moment, a moment that even as I read this paper to the Novel Club slips slyly into the past, I suspect Magic Mountain may have eternal life. Because the author, with an élan that comes through even in translation, not only speaks vividly to a desire that begins in childhood and never ends  -- tell me a story --  but simultaneously, profoundly, speaks to the mind. In a world where the dumbing-down of what we call culture is making rapid strides, Mann may be one of a vanishing breed, the European intellectual. For he seems to have absorbed into his very flesh all of science and the humanities -- more, even, than what Hans Castorp in his passionate quest for knowledge accumulates at the Berghof.  Happily Mann’s learning isn’t laid on with a heavy hand; the book unfolds with ironic distance and more than a touch of the comical.  In a sense Magic Mountain is Mann at erudite play. And since, as I said, his type may be on the way out, perhaps, just as we do with other endangered species, we should consider protecting whatever Manns may still be around or shall be born: give them a haven, a safe retreat. Possibly in Davos. But may their lungs stay clear.