The Magic Mountain Read Free Page B

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 .
    Let us put it this way: an object created by the human spirit and intellect, which means a significant object, is ‘significant’ in that it points beyond itself, is an expression and exponent of a more universal spirit and intellect, of a whole world of feelings and ideas that have found a more or less perfect image of themselves in that object by which the degree of its significance is then measured . . .
    Does anyone believe that our ordinary hero, after a certain number of