The Magic Mountain Read Free Page A

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.
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    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