The Magic Mountain (83 page)

At this, Anon Karlovitch Ferge flared up to defend his pleural shock against such sneers and slanders. What—taken his pleural shock too seriously? Well, thanks very much, but beg your pardon! His large Adam’s apple and his good-natured moustache bobbed up and down, and he demanded some respect be shown for what he had gone through. He was just an ordinary man, a traveling insurance agent, and higher things were utterly foreign to him—this conversation, in fact, was far beyond him. But if Herr Settembrini presumed to include pleural shock, for example, in what he had said—that ticklish hell with its sulfur stench and faints in three colors—then all he could say was thanks very, very much, but beg your pardon. There had not been a trace of diminished senses or merciful self-narcosis or failures of imagination, but only the biggest, crudest piece of filth on God’s green earth, and anyone who had not undergone that beastly experience as he had could not even begin to—

“Oh my, oh my yes,” Settembrini said. Herr Ferge’s collapse was growing more and more glorious as time went on, until it had become almost a halo around his head. He, Settembrini, had little respect for sick people who felt entitled to other people’s admiration. He was himself more than a little ill; but without any affectation, he could say he was more inclined to be ashamed of the fact. In any case, his remarks had been impersonal, philosophical, and what he had said about the nature of the sick and the healthy, about the difference in their experiences, was a solid argument. The gentlemen had only to think of the mentally ill, of hallucinations, for example. If one of his companions, the good engineer or Herr Wehsal, for example, should happen to see his dead father sitting in the corner of his room at dusk that evening, see him look up and hear him speak—it would be absolutely horrible for the beholder, a dreadfully shocking, distressing experience, so disconcerting that he would doubt his own senses, his very reason, and feel he had to vacate his room as soon as possible and put himself under psychiatric care. Was that not so? But the joke was that this could not happen to any one of these gentlemen, because their minds were healthy. And if it ever should occur, then they would not be healthy, but sick, and instead of reacting like a healthy person, that is, turning tail and running in horror, they would think it quite normal, join in the conversation, the way people who hallucinate did. The belief that one would be healthy enough to regard one’s hallucination as a horror—that was the failure of imagination of which healthy people were guilty.

Herr Settembrini spoke very graphically, very drolly, about the father in the corner. They all had to laugh, even Ferge, although he was still offended by the disparagement of his infernal adventure. The humanist then took advantage of this animated mood to explain further about how one ought to pay no attention to those who suffered from hallucinations, to
pazzi
in general, advancing the proposition that such people let themselves get carried away, quite illegitimately, and often had it within their power to control their madness, as he had himself observed on several visits to madhouses. Because whenever a doctor or a stranger appeared on the threshold, the hallucinating patient would usually cease grimacing, talking, and gesticulating and behave himself, as long as he knew he was being watched, letting himself go again only afterward. Letting oneself go, in fact, was doubtless a definition of madness in many cases, inasmuch as it was a way of fleeing from great affliction and served weak natures as a defense against the overpowering blows of fate, which such people felt they could not withstand in their right mind. But then anyone could use that excuse, so to speak; and he, Settembrini, had brought many a madman back to reality, at least temporarily, by confronting his fiddle-faddle with a pose of unrelenting reason.

Naphta laughed scornfully, whereas Hans Castorp stated he believed every word Herr Settembrini had said. When he pictured him with his moustache, smiling and staring some feebleminded fellow directly in the eye, he could well understand why the poor man would have pulled himself together and given reality its due, however unwelcome a disturbance Herr Settembrini’s visit must have been for him. But Naphta had also visited madhouses, and he recalled having entered a “violent ward,” the kind of place that offered scenes and images for which, good God, Herr Settembrini’s reasonable stare and decorous influence would hardly have been a match. Grotesque images of horror and torment straight out of Dante: naked madmen living their lives squatting in tubs of water, in every pose of mental anguish and terrified stupor, some screaming aloud in lament, others with arms raised and mouths gaping as they burst with laughter—all the ingredients of hell merged in one.

“Aha!” Herr Ferge said, and took the freedom of recalling the laughter that had burst from him as he had blacked out.

And in short, Herr Settembrini’s unrelenting pedagogy could have packed its bags when confronted with those faces in the “violent ward,” on which a shudder of religious awe would have had a more humanizing effect than the sort of arrogant moralizing about reason with which this Most Worthy Knight of the Sun and Vicar of Solomon here had chosen to combat madness.

Hans Castorp had no time to concern himself with the titles Naphta had bestowed upon Herr Settembrini. He hastily promised himself to probe the issue at the first opportunity. At the moment, however, their current discussion consumed his total attention, because Naphta now went on to discuss in caustic fashion the general biases that induced humanists to honor health on principle and dishonor and belittle sickness whenever possible—a position, however, that revealed a remarkable and almost praiseworthy self-abnegation on Herr Settembrini’s part, since he was himself ill. Such an attitude, which was no less faulty for all its dignity, arose from a regard and reverence for the body, which could only be justified if the body still existed in its original God-given state, rather than in a state of humiliation (
in statu degradationis
). For although created immortal, it had become subject to decay and abomination as part of the general impairment of nature brought about by Original Sin, was now mortal and corruptible, and should be regarded merely as a prison, the stocks in which the soul was entrapped, its sole purpose being to awaken within us a feeling of shame and confusion (
pudoris et confusionis sensum
), as Saint Ignatius had put it.

The same feeling, as was well known, that the humanist Plotinus had expressed, Hans Castorp exclaimed. But flinging his arm high above his head, Herr Settembrini demanded he not confuse the two points of view, adding that the engineer would do better to remain receptive to ideas.

Naphta now proceeded to prove that the awe in which the Christian Middle Ages had held the suffering human body was derived from religious affirmation in the face of the afflictions of the flesh. For festering sores were not only conspicuous reminders of the body’s sunken state, but also, in reflecting the venomous corruption of the soul, they awakened a desire for edifying spiritual compensation; whereas the bloom of health was a deceptive phenomenon, an offense to the conscience that it was best to disavow by bowing low in profound humility before human frailty.
Quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius
? Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? That was the voice of the Spirit, and it would be the voice of true humanity for all eternity.

No, that was a benighted voice, in Herr Settembrini’s opinion—which he delivered with much emotion. The voice of a world upon which the sun of reason and humanity had never risen. Yes indeed, his own body might be venomous, but he had kept his mind healthy and uninfected enough to defy Naphta’s priestly views concerning the body and to ridicule what he called the soul. He went so far as to celebrate the human body as the veritable temple of God, whereupon Naphta declared our stuff to be nothing more than a curtain between us and eternity, which resulted in Settembrini’s forbidding him ever to use the word “humanity” again—and so on.

Faces numbed with cold, heads bare, but feet in rubber galoshes, they moved along the sidewalk, its deep layer of snow strewn with ashes and crunching underfoot, or plowed through looser mounds of snow in the road—Settembrini in his winter coat, its beaver collar and lapels worn so smooth and hard that it had a rather mangy look, though he wore it elegantly all the same; Naphta in a black, ankle-length coat that buttoned to the neck, fully lined with fur, but not so that anyone could see it. And as they moved along, they argued their principles with great personal urgency, although frequently they did not speak to one another, but instead each would turn to Hans Castorp to deliver his views, lecturing him, while pointing a head or thumb at the real opponent. Hans Castorp was trapped between them; turning his head back and forth, he would agree first with one, then with the other, or he would come to a stop, bending his body backward and gesticulating with a hand inside its fur-lined goatskin glove, and offer some opinion of his own—some highly unsatisfactory comment, of course; meanwhile Ferge and Wehsal circled the three of them, now walking in front, now behind, now forming a single row, until oncoming traffic broke the group up again.

Inspired by some casual remark, the debate turned to more concrete subjects, moving quickly with the growing interest and participation of all through a series of issues: corporal punishment, cremation, torture, and the death penalty. It was Ferdinand Wehsal who brought up the subject of flogging, and one could read the excitement on his face, or so Hans Castorp thought. It was not surprising that Herr Settembrini, invoking the dignity of man in sterling words, spoke out against the brutal practice, both from a pedagogic and juridical point of view; nor was it any more surprising, though perhaps it was astounding simply because of the gloomy brazenness of his words, that Naphta spoke out in favor of the bastinado. According to him, it was absurd to jabber on about the dignity of man in this instance, for our true dignity was based in the Spirit and not the flesh, and since the human soul was only too inclined to suck its entire love of life from the body, the administration of pain to the body was a highly commendable means by which to spoil the soul’s desire for sensual pleasure and, as it were, drive it back out of the body and into the spiritual realm, thereby restoring the latter’s dominion. How foolish to object that there was something particularly ignominious about blows administered as corporal punishment. Saint Elizabeth had been disciplined by her father confessor, Konrad von Marburg, until he drew blood, “transporting her soul,” as legend put it, “to the third choir of angels,” and she had herself laid the rod to an old woman who was too sleepy to make her confession. Would anyone venture in all earnestness to declare as barbaric and inhumane the self-flagellation practiced among members of certain orders and sects, and in general by people of more profound capacities, in order that they might strengthen their own spiritual principles? Nations that considered themselves genteel may have abolished corporal punishment, but the belief that its abolition was a mark of true progress was only the more comic for being so unshakable.

Well, in any case, Hans Castorp remarked, it was absolutely certain that within the polarity of body and mind, the body doubtless embodied—ha ha—embodied the evil, devilish principle, because the body was part of nature, naturally—naturally part of nature, that wasn’t bad, either—and nature, in contradistinction to the mind, to reason, was doubtless evil—mystically evil, one might say, if one dared employ a little of one’s education and knowledge. And having once established that point of view, it was only logical, then, to treat the body accordingly, to bestow upon it certain disciplinary methods, which, if one dared take another risk, might likewise be called mystically evil. Perhaps, if Herr Settembrini had had a Saint Elizabeth at his side back then, when the infirmities of his body had prevented him from attending the convention for progress in Barcelona, why then . . .

They all laughed, and before the humanist could fly off the handle, Hans Castorp quickly told about a thrashing he had once received—a punishment still administered sometimes in the lower grades of his high school, where there had been riding crops in every room; and although social disparities had prevented teachers from laying a hand on him, he had once been thrashed by a bigger classmate, a lout of a fellow, who had applied the supple switch to his thighs and calves, right through his thin stockings, and it had hurt something awful, he would never forget, it had been beastly, almost mystical, and to his shame he had heaved great sobs and hot tears of rage and agony had flowed—and here Hans Castorp begged Herr Wehsal’s pardon for using the obscure word “
Wehsal
” for “agony.” He had also read that even the strongest cutthroats, when they were flogged in prison, blubbered like children.

And while Herr Settembrini hid his face in both hands—revealing very shabby leather gloves—Naphta asked in a chill, statesmanlike voice how else intractable criminals should be handled if not with stocks and cudgels, which were very stylish furnishings for a prison in any case. A humane prison was a half-measure, an aesthetic compromise, and although Herr Settembrini was a master of beautiful rhetoric, he understood nothing about aesthetics. And as for pedagogics, the conception of human dignity that sought to ban corporal punishment had its roots, to hear Naphta tell it, in the liberal individualism of the era of bourgeois humanism, in the Enlightenment’s absolutism of the ego, which was about to atrophy and be replaced by a wave of newer, less namby-pamby social concepts, ideas of submission and obedience, of bridles and bonds, and since such things were not to be had without holy cruelty, flogging would thus be regarded with quite a different eye.

“Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience,” Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body’s receiving an occasional beating—which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation.