The Magic Mountain (2 page)

German literature is a dialogue between German classicism and German romanticism, and there is also a German-classical original of the magic mountain. Nietzsche uses the precise word, ‘Zauberberg’ in
The Birth of Tragedy
(1870–71) to refer to Mount Olympus. ‘Now,’ he writes, ‘the Olympian magic mountain opens itself before us, showing its very roots.’ This ‘now’ in
The Birth of Tragedy
, is the moment when Nietzsche quotes the wisdom of Dionysus’s satyr companion, Silenus, who tells King Midas what is the greatest good of the human condition:

Here is a very pertinent concatenation of a satyr, the desire for death which tempts Hans Castorp, and a mountain hutching illusory forms. Nietzsche’s argument in
The Birth of Tragedy
is that the beauty of Greek tragedy derives from the satyr chorus, which was originally a religious ritual celebrating the dismemberment and eating of the dying god, Dionysus, and later became the chorus, and the comic fourth satyr play which accompanied the classical tragic trilogy of plays at the City Dionysia. Nietzsche’s text turns on the opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysiac principles in Greek art. Apollo goes with clarity, definition, individuality, dream and illusion. Dionysus represents the drive to bloody dissolution, annihilation, and a strong and gleeful admission of the terror and meaninglessness of life. Sophoclean heroes, Nietzsche tells us, are Apollonian masks, which are the opposite of the dark circles we see when looking at the sun. They are luminous spots designed to ‘cure an eye hurt by ghastly night’.

The Birth of Tragedy
haunts European culture. Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920) establishes a death drive, or principle of thanatos, to change his vision of dreams as essentially pleasure-seeking. It was written partly in response to the persisting dark dreams of the soldiers of the First World War, forced to relive horrors. Mann plays with its ironies and ambiguities in many of his texts. Both Aschenbach, in
Death in Venice
, and Hans Castorp, have riddling dreams, directly drawn from Nietzsche’s vision, which are turning-points in their respective stories.

Aschenbach, the lucid artist, begins his descent into madness when he meets the stranger outside the mortuary chapel in Munich. This sharp-toothed person, with ‘an air of imperious survey, something bold or even wild about his posture’, and looking exotic and strange, is surely the figure of Dionysus who appears outside the little temple and greets Pentheus at the beginning of Euripides’
Bacchae
. The boy, Tadziu, with whom Aschenbach falls in love in Venice, has a name that sounds like Zagreus, a name for the dismembered Dionysus. The stranger god, with his panthers, and the cholera, both come out of the East as does the smiling Clavdia Chauchat, with her slanted Kirghiz eyes. Like Pentheus, Aschenbach disintegrates and has a very precise dream-vision of the stranger-god, with his flute-music, his rout of companions, ‘a human and animal swarm’ of maenads and goats, who tear at each other and devour ‘steaming gobbets of flesh’. It is a vision of the loss of self in the religious frenzy of the sacrificial feast.

Hans Castorp, in the late chapter, ‘Snow’, lost and wandering in circles, falls into an exhausted sleep. Castorp’s dream-vision is at first a blissful and idyllic vision of a classical Mediterranean landscape (based on a painting by Arnold Böcklin) of beautiful and healthy humans working and playing in orchards, in meadows, by the sea. But the dreamer is led into a temple where two old hags in the sanctuary are dismembering a living child above a basin, and cracking its bones between their teeth. The lovely order is intimately connected to the mystery of the dismembered god. This vision causes Castorp to understand that the ‘courteous and charming’ people are intimately connected to ‘that horror’. They are interdependent, health and horror. Castorp is the object, like Everyman, of a tug-of-war between the two philosophers, the life-loving, reasonable Settembrini and the destructive, voluptuous and malicious Naphta. In the snow he sees that neither is right. What matters is his heart-beat, and love.

*

The Magic Mountain
, as well as being a German myth, is a parody of the Bildungsroman, in which a young man goes out into the world, and discovers his nature through his encounters. The two talkative opponents are pedagogues, representing visions of human nature and the world which were tested in Thomas Mann himself during the 1914–18 war. Settembrini is partly attractive, and partly, as Castorp sees him, an organ-grinder playing one tune, resolutely unaware of its limitations. Naphta, Jew, Jesuit, connoisseur of the irrational, the anarchic, the nihilistic, is closer to Mann’s own vision, which itself is closer to Nietzsche’s strong pessimism than to the hopefulness of the Age of Reason. An enormous proportion of the novel consists of bravura descriptions of battling ideas, and it is fashionable now to dismiss Mann as a ‘dry’ (even desiccated) ‘novelist of ideas’, as though that description meant that he did not understand human feeling, or passion, or tragedy. It is possible to argue that novelists in general give disproportionately less space to intellectual passions than their power in society warrants. People do think, and they do live and die for thoughts, as well as for jealousy or sex, or erotic or parental love. As that wise critic, Peter Stern, remarked drily, ‘seeing that modern men are as often intellectuals as they are gamekeepers or bullfighters, Mann’s preoccupation is, after all, hardly very esoteric’. It is perhaps worth making the point that my own early readings of
The Magic Mountain
, impeded by scholarly earnestness, trying to get my bearings in an ocean of unfamiliar words, and baffled by an inadequate translation, quite failed to see how
funny
, as well as ironic and subtle, much of the argumentation and debate is. The nature of our relation to the comedy changes as Castorp educates himself out of the extraordinary bourgeois unreflecting innocence in which he begins. He begins to be amused, and we readers begin to share his amusement, rather than laughing at him, or observing him from outside his world.

It is necessary to say something about the late appearance of the Personality, Mynheer Peeperkorn, a figure somewhere between Dionysus and Silenus, who is so little part of the verbal argument that he can never finish a sentence. The idea behind him is that here is someone who does not discuss living and dying, but simply lives and dies. He
is
what he is, and claims Clavdia because he is alive. To take him seriously as someone who transcends the dialectic between the disputing angels of ‘life’ and ‘death’ we need, I think, to see him in terms of Thomas Mann’s essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, published in 1922.

This complicated, passionate, witty essay compares the two great writers as earthy writers, comfortable in their skins, possessed of a natural egoism which is at the center of their power as writers and as observers of the earth they live in. He uses for both of them the legend of the giant Antaeus ‘who was unconquerable because fresh strength streamed into him whenever he touched his mother earth’. Mann tells tales of the physical presence of the great men—Tolstoy at sixty, playing games called ‘Numidian horsemen’ with a room full of adults and children. He recounts an incident recorded by Tolstoy’s father-in-law, Behrs:

They were walking about the room together in light converse one evening, when suddenly the elderly prophet sprang upon Behrs’s shoulder. He probably jumped down again at once; but for a second he actually perched up there, like a grey-bearded kobold—it gives one an uncanny feeling!

In the case of Goethe, Mann records, among other things, his sensitiveness to weather conditions:

It was due to his almost exaggerated sense-endowment; and became positively occult when that night in his chamber in Weimar he felt the earthquake in Messina. Animals have a nervous equipment that enables them to feel such events when they occur and even beforehand. The animal in us transcends; and all transcendence is animal. The highly irritable sense-equipment of a man who is nature’s familiar goes beyond the bounds of the actual senses, and issues in the supra-sensual, in natural mysticism. With Goethe the divine animal is frankly and proudly justified of itself in all spheres of activity, even the sexual. His mood was sometimes priapic—a thing which of course does not happen with Tolstoy.

Mann contrasts this earthy self-possession with the spiritual ‘shadow-world’ of Dostoevsky (‘exaggeratedly true’) and with Schiller, another ‘son of thought’. Schiller’s essay, ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ was described by Mann as ‘the greatest of all German essays’. In it Schiller distinguishes between the ‘naive’ poet who has the plastic energy simply to make a world (Shakespeare, Homer), and the ‘sentimental’ poet who can only find a world through his own sensibility and reflections. Mann puts Schiller with Dostoevsky:

. . . the conflict between contemplation and ecstatic vision, is neither new nor old, it is eternal. And it finds complete expression in, on the one side, Goethe and Tolstoy, and on the other Schiller and Dostoevsky. And to all eternity the truth, power, calm and humility of nature will be in conflict with the disproportionate, fevered and dogmatic presumption of spirit.

During the war Thomas opposed himself and Heinrich as ‘nature’ and Geist (an untranslatable and essential German word that appears sometimes as ‘mind’ and sometimes, as above, as ‘spirit’. In this essay the oppositions are more subtle, but related. Goethe’s reasonable respect for French culture is given credit. But Mann’s attempt to present the ‘Antaeus’ aspect of Tolstoy and Goethe is surely related to what he hoped to present in Peeperkorn, who exceeds both Settembrini and Naphta, to whom the educated Hans Castorp pays respect. Like Castorp himself, Peeperkorn differs from Mann’s usual heroes in being neither intellectual, articulate nor artistic. Like Tolstoy, according to Mann, but not like Goethe, Peeperkorn understands and has an affinity with the Oriental and the Asian. Tolstoy’s ‘tremendous Orientalism found intellectual expression in this mockery and denial of European progress’. Goethe ‘beyond a doubt hated and despised Asia and has more affiliation with the humanity of Western Europe, which has given the mold to our civilization, than with the shapeless and savage human nature of Half-Asia’. Symbolically both Clavdia and Peeperkorn are related to that shapeless and savage half-Asia, out of which Dionysus advanced on classical Greece, and the cholera crept on in
Death in Venice
. It is interesting that in another essay, ‘Freud and the Future’, Mann uses Europe’s geographical relation to Asia in a metaphor to describe the spatial relations of Sigmund Freud’s map of the psyche. Europe is the ego, Asia is the id.

As for the ego itself, its situation is pathetic, well-nigh alarming. It is an alert prominent and enlightened little part of the id much as Europe is a small and lively province of the greater Asia.

Although Peeperkorn is not an artist, he was partly based, at least physically, on Gerhard Hauptmann, which later became an embarrassment, and may have inhibited Mann’s presentation of him. He should be above all a living presence. He is in fact only the
idea
of a living presence.

It is perhaps worth remarking that Hans Castorp’s curious pursuit his contemplative moments which he refers to from childhood on as ‘regieren’—reigning, governing—are also related to the instinctive animal well-being Mann admires in Goethe and Tolstoy. (It has been persuasively suggested that there is a sly reference to masturbation, the fleshly egoistic pursuit par excellence.) At such moments Castorp is wiser and sounder than the frenzied beings around him.

Thomas Mann saw himself as one in a line of German artists—the line ran from Goethe through Nietzsche and Wagner.
The Magic Mountain
as Bildungsroman is aware of
Wilhelm Meister
, whose hero progresses from travelling theatre to medical researches. In many ways the most passionate and exciting parts of
The Magic Mountain
are those chapters in which Hans Castorp acquires knowledge of anatomy and physiology, the composition of the cells of the body, the forms of the bones and the nerves. Here again, we touch the original idea of the novel as one sympathetic to the idea of death. Goethe was an anatomical researcher Mann in the essay describes the moment when Goethe saw ‘a broken sheepskull on the Lido and had that morphological insight into the development of all the bones of the skull out of the vertebrae which shed such important illumination upon the metamorphosis of the animal body’. (It is possible that if Goethe had not been an anatomist and morphologist, George Eliot would not have invented the interlocking form and subject matter of
Middlemarch
.) Mann contrasts Goethe’s organic sympathy with living matter with Tolstoy’s deep interest in death:

Tolstoy’s poetic genius for questioning death is the pendant to Goethe’s intuition in the field of natural science, and sympathy with the organic is at the bottom of both. Death is a very sensual, very physical business; and it would be hard to say whether Tolstoy was so interested in death because he was so much and so sensually interested in the body, and in nature as the life of the body, or whether it was the other way about. In any case, in his fixation with death, love comes into play too . . .

This provides a way of seeing the wonderful chapter, entitled simply ‘Research’, in which Hans Castorp, inside the mountain, looks at the primal tissues of life and death—and the way in which the organic comes out of the inorganic, death and decay are interwoven with life, procreation and energy. In a conventional novel, there would be something ridiculous in the transformation of all this strenuous attempt at information and analysis into an erotic vision of Clavdia Chauchat. But to read it only in that way is to underestimate it. Castorp is educated. His vision of Clavdia is complex. He will carry not her photo, but an image of an x-ray of her skeleton and interior organs.