The Magic Mountain (3 page)

*

There is a way in which it is possible to read this thousand-page
tour de force
as though it were a conventional realistic novel—though readers who set out to do so uncritically risk bafflement and disappointment. The narrative tone of voice is bland and slightly jocular—a tale-teller’s voice, distancing the reader from involvement with the characters. The narrator is showing the civilized reader around the curiosities of a menagerie. Novel-readers expect certain emotional satisfactions love and liking, drama and tension, insights into the motivation and drives of characters. At first, and at second glance these things are deficient in this story. The most powerful emotion, apparently, is Hans Castorp’s growing erotic obsession with Madame Chauchat, which is not love, but the repressed excitement that swarms in boarding schools and other closed communities. It is associated by Castorp with his earlier repressed passion for Pribislav Hippe. (And is thus also associated with the love of death, since Hippe means scythe.) Clavdia Chauchat is an erotic presence or absence—rather than a character in any real sense. Castorp’s erotic speech to her, derived from his anatomical researches and Walt Whitman’s ‘I sing the Body Electric’ is bizarre and even farcical—part of the grotesquerie of the Walpurgisnacht. He grows up, yes, but it is not what readers looking for ‘relationships’ will find satisfactory. Even Settembrini and Naphta are less than characters because they so fully fill their function of being European types, southern anarchist, northern German-Jewish mystic, and their clothes and possessions are precisely constructed to sharpen the edges of their representative functions.

Nevertheless, I think, we persist in trying to read this story as a novel, and not simply as an allegory. This is partly at least because Mann always raises his structures of meaning on a foundation of the real, the solid, the banal, the observable. The sanatorium, its menus, its doors and windows, its relation to the valley and the village, the blankets and the chaises-longues and the social conventions are very precisely observed—as are the details of the phases of consumption, the medical paraphernalia, the paintings of Behrens and the séances of the psychoanalyst Dr. Krokowski. When Hans Castorp sees the x-ray of his hand, and realizes that he is seeing his death, understands for the first time that he will die, this is a moment of pure realism which immediately takes its place in a symbolic structure.

And there are two characters in the novel who are characters almost despite the nature of the story. One is Castorp himself, and the other is Joachim. Joachim is the silent and obedient Good Soldier. The Thomas Mann of the Unpolitical Reflections claimed military honor and steadfast obedience as peculiarly German virtues. Joachim is one of those opaque characters we learn to love from outside. His attempt to evade the Magic Mountain, and his defeated return and death are appalling and moving. He believes in war—‘War is necessary. Without war the world would soon go to rot, as Moltke said.’ When his spirit is summoned in the séance, it is through Gounod’s song for Valentin, Gretchen’s honorable soldier brother in
Faust
, who is murdered in a duel. Joachim is genuinely sick, a patient patient, unlike Castorp, who may be merely indulging curiosity or a need for speculative inactivity. Joachim’s death comes before the onset of war, and the grisly appearance of his spirit foreshadows it.

Castorp himself began as the hero of a comic satyr-play, and has an essential element of the buffoon which persists. He is also an innocent. He is embarrassing—Mann the novelist makes his readers squirm with Joachim at Castorp’s imperceptive remarks to the sick patients around him, who are so careful of each other’s feelings. But he learns, and the amount he learns—and the way in which what he learns is not through the feelings but through the exercise of the mind—is both surprising and satisfying. If Joachim’s military fortitude is one German virtue, Castorp’s final connection to music is another.

He returns to the land of the living and is last seen struggling through the Flanders mud singing Schubert’s
Lindenbaum
. The tree in the song is one of those leitmotifs that cannot be reduced to a simple symbol with a definable meaning. Castorp uses the new invention of the gramophone to turn the Berghof into another microcosm and gathering of ghosts, hearing music by unseen singers from all over the world—‘in America, in Milan, in Vienna, in St Petersburg’. He listens to the drama of
Aida
and
Carmen
, and ends up with the irreducible simplicity of the
Lindenbaum
.

And the love Castorp is able to feel for the song, the narrator asserts, is the love for death—born out of the depths of his nation’s emotions. The combination of irony and genuine sympathy with which Mann explores Castorp’s understanding of his lyric passion, and implies the forthcoming national consequences of this lyrical compulsion, are very complex and far too long to quote.

Mann saw Wagner as the German national genius after Goethe, and his novels have the ambition to resemble the musical
gesamtkunstwerk
, although composed only of words on paper. Mann composes language throughout his long text, playing with etymologies and metaphors, changing the key of motifs from farce to terror. Another reading experience that happens—at least for me—with this novel, is analogous to the realization that there is no ‘love’ and no ‘characters’—which leads to a reassessment of everything there is. In the same way we try to read the novel at a normal speed. It is long, we must hurry. That hurry makes it seem intolerably slow and overloaded. And then, as we begin to notice linguistic subtleties on the microscopic scale the reading, as it slows down, comes to life and acquires a different sort of speed. Serious, virtuoso play with words begins to stand out. The patterns made with the idea of mercury, for instance. Mercury is the measure of fever in the thermometer. Mercury, the messenger of the gods, was also the psychopomp, who led the living safely through the world of the dead, and led the dead to their new abodes. Mercury is Hermes, and Hermes Trismegistus was the occult author of the Egyptian books of the dead. Hermetic knowledge is knowledge of hidden mysteries. The Berghof is hermetically sealed from the weather and time outside its domain. And the stolid Hans Castorp has a wonderful set of remarks on the hermetically sealed jars in the larders of his Flatland home, where the fruits of summer are preserved for winter eating. The mythic symbols are held down to earth by the solid jars.

In the same way, perhaps, Castorp’s calling of civil engineer—an earthly pursuit, tied to daily life—is changed by Settembrini’s habit of addressing him as ‘Ingenieur’, and Joachim’s sense that he is a ‘Civilian’, into a complex cultural object. The word ‘Ingenieur’ goes with genies, genius, ingenious thought. ‘Zivil’ goes with Civilization, as well as with Civilian, and takes its place in the oppositions between Culture and Civilization which were fought out in the wartime essays.

And there are memorable events that wait hundreds of pages for their narrative metamorphosis and completion. When we first meet Hans Castorp he is impressed by the living, and then by the dead, presence of his grandfather. He is impressed also by the ‘lovely austere richness’ of the scent of the tuberoses which have been placed over the coffin to cover other, more embarrassing and unpleasant odors. This episode is transfigured when Castorp’s uncle, coming up the mountain to reclaim his nephew for the ‘real’ world of business, is driven away by Behrens, the superintendant. Uncle James makes the mistake of asking Behrens how the body decomposes and he receives a vivid account of the bursting of the guts, and the process of ‘stinking yourself out’—after which you become innocuous, dry and elegant. The magic mountain has its own grim realism.

This is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing.

A. S. Byatt

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY THOMAS MANN

There are two good German editions of Mann: the East German Aufbau Verlag edition in twelve volumes (Berlin, 1956), long out of print; and the more complete Stockholmer Ausgabe, published by S. Fischer Verlag, in twenty volumes (Frankfurt am Main, 1965). For dates of first publication, see the chronology.

Most English editions of Mann date from his lifetime, when the author made Mrs Helen Lowe-Porter the exclusively copyrighted translator of almost all his works. Over the past thirty years, and especially within the last decade, new editions of Mann’s earlier works have appeared, most notably the four principal novels,
Buddenbrooks
,
The Magic Mountain
,
Joseph and His Brothers
and
Doctor Faustus
, translated by John E. Woods. The works listed below, with dates of first publication in English, are still in print:

Royal Highness
, 1916

A Man and his Dog
, 1923

Buddenbrooks
, 1924

The Magic Mountain
, 1927

Death in Venice
,
Tristan
,
Tonio Kröger
, 1928

Disorder and Early Sorrow
, 1929

Mario and the Magician
, 1930

A Sketch of my Life
, 1930

Joseph and his Brothers
, 1934–44

Lotte in Weimar
, 1940

The Transposed Heads
, 1941

Essays of Three Decades
, 1947

(includes ‘Goethe and Tolstoy’ and ‘Freud and the Future’)

Doctor Faustus
, 1948

The Holy Sinner
, 1951

The Black Swan
, 1954

Confessions of Felix Krull
, 1955

Last Essays
, 1959

Stories of a Lifetime
, Vols I and II, 1961

Letters to Paul Amann
, 1961

The Letters of Thomas Mann
, Vols I and II, 1970

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man
, 1983

Thomas Mann Diaries, 1918–1939
, edited by Hermann Kesten, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (André Deutsch, 1983). Fragmentary but still eloquent testament of Mann’s inner life.

Thomas Mann: Pro and Contra Wagner
, translated by Allan Blunden, introduction by Erich Heller (Faber & Faber, 1985). Documents the lifelong obsession of an imperfect Wagnerite.

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

BLACKBOURN, DAVID and EVANS, RICHARD J., eds,
The German Bourgeoisie
, Routledge, 1991. Historical essays on Mann’s milieu.

BRUFORD, W. H.,
The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation. ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann
, Cambridge University Press, 1975. Chapters on
The Magic Mountain
and ‘The Conversion of an Unpolitical Man’ by a great scholar.

CARNEGY, PATRICK,
Faust as Musician: A Study of Thomas Mann’s Novel ‘Doctor Faustus
’, Chatto & Windus and New Directions, 1973. Subtle investigation of Mann and music by a leading opera critic and producer.

DE MENDELSSOHN, PETER,
Der Zauberer. Das Leben des deutschen Schriftstellers Thomas Mann
, Frankfurt, 1975. The standard German biography.

GRAY, R. D.,
The German Tradition in Literature 1871–1945
, Cambridge University Press, 1965. A highly critical account of Mann’s contemporaries and their ideas.

HAMILTON, NIGEL,
The Brothers Mann
, Seeker & Warburg, and Yale University Press, 1978. A biographical study of Thomas Mann and his elder brother Heinrich, an eminent novelist in his own right.

HARPRECHT, KLAUS,
Thomas Mann: Eine Biographie
, Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1996.

HAYMAN, RONALD,
Thomas Mann: A Biography
, Bloomsbury and Scribner, 1995. Reliable life and times by the author of biographies of Kafka, Brecht, Nietzsche and Proust.

HEILBUT, ANTHONY,
Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature
, Macmillan and Knopf, 1995. Revisionist biography, emphasizing links between Mann’s homosexuality and his works.

HELLER, ERICH,
The Ironic German. A Study of Thomas Mann
, Secker & Warburg, 1956, Little Brown, 1958. This remains far and away the best book on Mann. Heller’s best-known book,
The Disinherited Mind
, Bowes and Bowes, 1975, gives the intellectual background to Mann. His German collection,
Die Wiederkehr der Unschuld und andere Essays
, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, contains three essays on Mann. One of them is ‘Thomas Mann in Venice’, published in
The Poet’s Self and the Poem
, Athlone Press, 1976. Heller, who died in 1991, also wrote an introduction to the earlier Everyman volume of
Thomas Mann: Stories and Episodes
, Dent, 1960.