I’m just back from a week in the Lake District in the north of England -- it’s become something of a yearly ritual to go up to the hills, sit by a lake and try to read. I also, just before leaving, decided to delete the twitter app from my phone which is on the surface a genuine very silly thing to do. After all, as has been the cultural orthodoxy for the best part of the last decade, social media incentivizes your engagement and the promise of constant visibility is the ground upon which you're supposed to build a profile as a writer. In the current iterations of Twitter this is provably untrue, (and isn’t true of all social media generally, as this essay usefully points out) the site being awash in neo reactionary propaganda and gambling adverts and the drive to constantly get verified in order to see fewer adverts and irrelevant dehumanizing nonsense is simply depressing.
For myself It had become a time sink and a means of generating depressing, a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop of being unable to do anything other than scroll. Anyway, I deleted it and am trying to use instagram and bluesky to try and keep some thoughts public and will be there more for the foreseeable future. So, instead of spending the last week on Twitter I spent it reading while out in the countryside. The result was wanting to write more so, to that end I’m going to keep this series as a notebook -- what I’ve been reading, listening to, thinking about etc. This is less for an audience, but rather more to encourage a sense of writing as a practice - I’ve another book to try and write this year and less time than ever before, so I want to try and build a relationship to writing that is more regular, and maybe less ambitious. Perhaps I’m simply looking to put a pseudo-intellectual veneer onto “what I read on my holidays” but even so, here’s some of what I read.
Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep (2024). There’s something very classically gothic about this novel - shortlisted for both the Booker and The Women’s Prize for Fiction. The gothic is full of houses, from the madwoman in the attic in the nineteenth century to the libidinally obsessive Mrs Danvers of Manderley. Domesticity in Gothic writing is both the sphere of autonomy and the horizon beyond which autonomy cannot be exercised - one can run the home but can't go outside it and thus to lose the house is to lose oneself. The Safekeep, set in 1961, introduces the controlling, isolated and aloof Isabel, living in a large country house. She has inherited the house, but does not own it yet relates to it and it’s content with an obsessive control. Property has become a fetish for the lost love object of her relationship with her mother and as a result, her relationships with her siblings are strained. The eldest, Louis will inherit the house when he has a family, and Isabel will be left with nothing. Louis drops his rather graceless, declasse girlfriend Eva at the house to spend the summer.
To say more would spoil things but while the surprise isn’t as completely unexpected as some may think it is extremely well constructed and the third act reveal is really emotionally powerful. In essence, property and the possession of property is always about a regime of complicity with violence - in the wake of the book's ultimate revelation there’s something insightful in the way in which the novel acknowledges the aporia of laws, the silence into which guilt remains unspoken. Or, to phrase things another way, legality does not absolve any of us and even the most beautiful domestic facade can’t conceal the legacy of violence and dis-possession which is the fundamental ground of property relations (particularly in the context of the European twentieth century).
Susan Barker, Old Soul - Another gothic success borrowing heavily from Faust, Melmoth the Wanderer and the ghost stories of Japan. I think the closest point of reference in recent Gothic film is David Robert Mitchell's It Follows (2014)and in writing is Sarah Perry’s Melmoth (which I talked about on this excellent podcast). Like Melmoth, (a book I liked a great deal) Old Soul is a book about witnessing and memory but it takes on in different ways the role of guilt - a theme which also connects it to The Safekeep. Guilt is both a burden and a compulsion - catalysing the following of a narrative. Sometimes the very worst thing is to want to know what happened. The book serves as a compendium of survivors in a way, expertly moving across different registers, histories and contexts. It’s a fantastic piece of literary Gothic that builds expertly to a nightmarish conclusion. The violence, when it comes, is sharp, brutal and very quick. At the very end, when the cosmological stakes have been fully revealed, there’s something of a Lovecraftian note to the conclusion, not in the sense of tentacles or Elder Gods, but temporal collapse in which eternity becomes the vanishing point of human subjectivity and even comprehension can only lead to the worship of madness.
Roisin Lanigan, I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There -- Can you tell I’m working on a book about property? This debut haunted house novel has been getting a lot of buzz but it helps that the book itself is very impressive. It follows a couple, forced through the necessity of the rental market to move in together. There’s something very attentive about how the London rental market specifically is a kind of engine for producing alienation. It alienates the main character from her wider support network, her dearest friend and ultimately from herself. There really isn’t a ghost per se -- I mean there is but what’s more impactful is how the haunting contributes to an accretion of petty indignities. Shitty work, a family that is too far away and poor enough that getting a good job in the city is important, a relationship that is fine and will maybe be okay if you can perform the required social gestures and finally a crappy apartment that you need to take because if you don’t someone else will, especially at that price. All of this is narrated from a perspective that is sharp enough to see the compromises economic survival necessitates as well as the political impotence that means there’s nothing to be done. It’s a haunted house story that argues what was needed wasn’t an exorcist (they, after all, can be pretty good for property valuations) but a rental union and a universal basic income. I found this infinitely sadder and more frightening than Rivers Solomon’s Model Home which I also read over the last week. It works far better than that novel because it understands the ways in which homes are not just sites of social reproduction but of capitalist production too. The ending of I Want To Go Home is one of the most boldly bleak things I’ve read in a British horror novel since the work of someone like Alison Rumfitt, creating a crushing sense of existential despondency. You can’t make a home in London - but it will always make one within you, and that can be so much worse.
I also read John Berger’s Understanding A Photograph and the reissue of his first collection Permanent Red - there will be more on that soon I think but both confirmed that he’s a writer who I genuinely and sincerely love. Coincidentally I decided to order my first film camera tonight. Perhaps more on that soon too.
“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, volume II-2, p. 446 (Frankfurt, 1977).
The Haunt is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The previous two pieces - on approaching the novel and the idea of the critical realist tradition serve as context for this piece on the details and relationships of the novel. Principally, there are five key figures - our central protagonist, Hans Castorp and four points surrounding him. First, his cousin Joachim Ziemssen. These two form an immediate duality - Joachim being everything that Hans Castorp is not and, at the same time, the model of what Castorp could easily (and will) become. Joachim is a soldier, a dutiful Prussian, not overly fond of abstract thought but a stolid bourgeois sort who is most motivated by the idea of duty and responsibility. When Hans Castorp arrives he is extremely keen to leave whereas Joachim is far more sanguine. They gradually take on opposing points of feeling with Joachim desperate to rejoin his troop and Castorp happily allowing the days, weeks and months to drift along as he eventually falls under the spell of the magic mountain.
Then there is Settembrini - Hans Castorp encounters him as a strange and unsettling presence, a spectre haunting Europe: internationalist, pacifistic, humanist and determined to create a future free from things like nations, war, and the superstitions of religion. His dismissive attitude towards ideas of tradition means that Hans Castorp is at first rather suspicious of him but the crux of the dramatic arc between the two is Castorp gradually coming to recognise Settembini’s “pedagogical soul.” Politically Settembrini is something of a liberal or social democrat - the kind of romantic and bourgeois utopian that Marx so roundly criticised. In the novel it’s exemplified in a wonderful detail through Settembrini’s excitement at the possibility of contributing to a work designed to eliminate all human suffering. In short, Settembrini functions as the model par excellence of the Zivilisationsliterat cosmopolitans that Mann lambasted in his reactionary wartime writings.
Settembrini is the counterpoint to Leo Naptha - the Lukacs stand in who is both Jesuit and communist, an extremist who is opposed to all of the Italian highfalutin prognostications on progress, and instead believes in revolutionary terror and the imposition of obedience. These differences don't disguise the fact though that the long conversations between Naptha and Settembrini (in which Hans Castorp is often bystander) are the key to why the novel has attracted such a reputation for being complicated or difficult. Hans Castorp’s reaction from the chapter “The City of God” is one almost certainly shared by a host of first time readers: “Hans Castorp stood with bent head and burrowed with his stick in the snow, pondering the vasty confusion of it all”
But, as Karolina Watroba points out in an excellent essay for The Point magazine, the difficulty and apparent erudition of the arguments within the novel generally inspire two responses from readers. For some, the book become a codex and reading it means decoding a network of references and quotations (the standard academic response). Alternatively, it can be the starting point for something else. As Watroba puts it,
When I think back to my first experience reading him, I remember skipping or skimming whole passages and feeling like I was reading it wrong, thinking that my reading needed to be urgently fixed through explicit instruction and education. It did not occur to me then that instruction and education—valuable and mind-expanding as they are—could also take something away from me. And I do not mean joy: learning about the more obscure references in Mann’s work, penetrating dense scholarship on his writing, noticing and tracking down allusions that others had missed have their own peculiar joys. What I mean is knowledge generated outside of protocols of academic reading.
There’s an interesting and important counterpoint here with Jameson’s thought in his essay on Mann in The Modernist Papers. Crucially for Jameson The Magic Mountain is in many ways a novel about reading.
To identify what is “modernist” in Thomas Mann here, in this process of substituting a primary experience indissociable from the book or work itself for its representational contents—for its “narrative,” which is simply the pretext for the deployment of that more concrete reality of the experience of reading, and of extended, indeed dilated, reading time—is structurally accurate, provided we add to this canonization the ambiguity of its popular success, which tends to draw Mann’s work in general from the high modern over into the middlebrow category, and which can at this point be accounted for by the relative naivete of this very systematic utilization of reading itself, tending as it does to mobilize some mid-cult pride in getting through long and difficult books, staying the course, and carrying off a more advanced reading certificate. But it would be wrong to think that reading is here a particularly abstract or elite starting point, or even a rarefied and specialized experience: for in order to be foregrounded as such, and to become audible as the very ground bass of our time with these pages, the body must be awakened as a participant in the process, indeed the only participant.
The novel is about formation and, like the other great monument of literary modernism, Joyce’s Ulyssess, it forms its readers in turn allowing us to create our own knowledge and insights through the process of coming to recognize and confront the limits of what we already know.
This is why I keep coming back to the fact that the grand ideas, the paraphrased and summarized Dante, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Goethe, the large questions of time, death, sickness and duty are not simply matters of intellectual speculation but lived questions. And this extends not just to the novel’s content but its form too. If you’ve never read the book, you might find, like many readers, that these chapters are boring but that boredom is not necessarily a flaw on the part of the novel and your own feeling here is not a mistake or a shortcoming. We become like Hans Castorp ourselves, overwhelmed by the density of argument, of reference, and of information - and rather than seek to dispel that feeling of being overwhelmed we have to stay with this problem - a problem of information overload only more pressing in the time since Mann’s novel was originally published. Just follow how these intellectual debates form Hans Castorp - he arrives baffled and intrigued by Settembrini, before becoming an autodidact and then, as the novel concludes, heading back out into the world. Take the rather beautiful chapter “Research” in which he sits reading and looking at the view as the sunlight turns to dusk is maybe one of my favourite moments in the whole novel - like him, we too are reading through unfamiliar words before we come to the very end of the novel. In other words, and again, forgive me for repeating myself, the novel has a participatory anthropology, necessitating not just an intellectual engagement but an existential one.
The debates and struggles over these grand ideas are not only key to the novel’s form and structure but are exemplified and embodied within the novel by Hans Castorp’s relationship with the next key character, Claudia Chauchat. If we were to try and diagram this out, Claudia represented the opposite side of the Settembrini-Naphtha axis. Those two are intellectuals but Claudia is entirely not. In the novel’s perspective she is heard before she is seen - regularly slamming the heavy doors in the dining room. This occurs
while they were having the fish course. Hans Castorp gave an exasperated shrug and angrily resolved that this time he really must find out who did it. He said this not only within himself, his lips formed the words. "I must find out” he whispered with exaggerated earnestness. Miss Robinson and the schoolmistress both looked at him in surprise.
The relationship (for want of a better word) between Hans Castorp and Claudia is perhaps not really love - which, after all, both implies and necessitates a reciprocity. Rather, she is an almost unbearable sensory stimulus upon Hans Castorp’s formation just as Settembrini is the intellectual stimulus upon that same process.Hans Castorp is intrigued by her, not just by the noise she creates but her eyes, and the ways in which she is a catalyst for memories of desire (the link between his memories of his school friend and Claudia is rendered explicit through the shared act of exchanging a pencil with them - the Freudian symbolism barely subtextual). This all comes to a head roughly halfway through the novel on Walpurgis night, as Hans Castorp celebrates a year’s residence on the mountain. At the celebratory party, Hans Castorp confesses his love to Claudia in a flurry of poetry and untranslated French. Thematically, the influence is from Goethe’s Faust as through the opening half of the novel Settembrini has been warning Hans Castorp about this “Lillith” figure who offers the seductions of death and, here on the feast of St Walpurga, Hans Castorp throws himself at Claudia’s feet. Her response is to gently and not unkindly refuse him, telling him that she’s due to leave and will perhaps return later. In waiting for her return, Castorp now has additional motivation to stay on the mountain, and thus stay with the intellectual debates of Settembrini and Naptha. Hans Castorp’s whole arc through the course of the novel is to try and resolve the choice between the call of thanatos on the one hand and life on the other - a struggle that doesn’t reach a conclusion until the very final chapters of the novel and Castorp’s beautiful vision that he experiences after the snow-storm.
How then to make sense of this grid of relationships? It requires a mediating factor - something that can hold the social field together and give the reader some greater steer in navigating the various layers of sociality the novel unfolds. The question is: what binds the social field in this particular setting - and the answer is very simple. Death. All of the residents of the sanatorium are ill, all of them are dying. Even Hofrat Behrens describes himself as a bureaucrat in the service of death. As Paul Ricouer puts it in his magisterial Time and Narrative [quoting here from Volume II]:
“First, the line separating “those up there” from “those down below” separates at
the same time the world of sickness and death from the everyday world—the world of life, health, and action. In fact, at the Berghof everyone is sick, including the doctors, the specialist in the treatment of tuberculosis as well as the charlatan psychiatrist. Hans Castorp penetrates a universe where the reign of sickness and death is already established. Whoever enters there is in turn condemned to death. If someone like Joachim leaves this world, he returns to die there. The magic, the bewitchment of the magic mountain is the bewitchment of death, of the death instinct. Love itself is a captive of this charm. At the Berghof, sensuality and putrefaction go hand-in-hand. A secret pact links love and death. This is also, and perhaps more than anything else, the magic of this place outside space and time. Hans Castorp’s passion for Madame Chauchat is wholly dominated by this fusion between sensual attraction and the fascination with decomposition and death. Madame Chauchat is already there when he arrives. She is part, so to speak, of the institution of death. Her sudden departure and her unexpected return, accompanied by the flamboyant Mynheer Peeperkorn—who will commit suicide at the Berghof—constitute the major peripeteia in the Aristotelian sense of the term.”
All of them are dying. Settembrini and Naptha with their intellectual debates, the solid soldier Joachim, Claudia and the rest are all sick and recovery is, at best, not a given. The ritual of the thermometer and diligently recording one’s temperature is not necessarily a record of recovery but about the quantification of disease. The problem for Hans Castorp - in fact a moment of great disappointment for him - is that death does not carry with it any special significance. In the first half of the novel Settembrini tries to dissuade him from thinking of death and illness as being something edifying or grand in some way, that ‘illness makes one refined, clever or unusual.” Take the chapter “The Dance of Death” in which Hans Castorp goes to visit the ordinary inhabitants of the Berghof as they reach their end. He becomes a moralistic voyeur, eternally disappointed that even at the very end of life none of the people he visits are free from the petty, small quotidian concerns, frailties and failings which have marked their lives. “None of this is really serious” he grumbles. Ultimately to live is to reckon with finitude - it would be easy to trot out the Heideggerian platitude that we should all spend more time in graveyards, but there’s an old clip from a 1969 interview with Paul Ricoeur that’s worth bringing up instead. The interviewer asks Ricouer what eternal life is to him. The philosopher responds:
It would certainly be a myth, if we thought of it only as "after", as "beyond". It is first of all a category of the present. I think that we create experiences of eternity, every time we live an experience where we have the impression of” founding.” That is, how should I say, a kind of point where all is entwined in our existence, where a large slice of life is decided, where a relation with beings is formed, is enjoined. And there are instants of a quality so intense, that are grains of eternity in a time that passes.
The Haunt is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Our apparently rather negative conclusion - that non-rejection of socialism is a sufficient basis for realism - Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism
The characteristic feeling that comes from reading a good author: how does he know this about me? A good letter tells of the writer, a good book of the reader - Bloch, LiteraryEssays
The Haunt is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
There are two ways to add some necessary context: the one autobiographical, the other intellectual. Of course, one inevitably presupposes the other. After all, Mann was an integral part of the German and European literary-intellectual culture for most of the twentieth century. But it starts with a story set in the Swiss Alps. In 1912, Thomas Mann went to visit his wife, Katia. She was ill and undergoing treatment at a sanatorium in Davos, so Mann went to stay for three weeks to spend some time with his recovering partner. While there, the doctors at the mountain hospital diagnose, just as they do with Hans Castorp, a “moist spot” on one of Mann’s lungs. Mann details all of this quite charmingly in his essay for The Atlantic, pointing out that he almost certainly caught a nasty cold sitting outside on the balcony, taking in the air. Much of the opening of the novel, particularly the chapter “Arrival” seems to be drawn almost exactly from his initial experiences - from the train ride in, to the sumptuous and plentiful food that the residents of the Berghof enjoy, to the constant obsessions with keeping track of one's temperature. The cure for these kinds of disease was a slow one - Mann, in that essay, jokes that just like Castorp he could quite easily have spent years up there.
Initially it seems like The Magic Mountain was meant to have a very different form. Mann went to visit Katia just after the publication of Death In Venice - his excellent short novella about a writer who goes to the city and falls into an obsession with the beautiful boy, Tadzio. It is, in Mann’s own explanation of the story, about death, decay and inchoate desire. Tonally it is rather bleak - an austere engagement with pessimistic themes. It seems then, that this visit to Katia had inspired a counterpoint to Death In Venice - Mann wanted it to be humorous and lighter: a clash between two points of view. Crucially, he’s on record as saying that it was also supposed to be roughly the same length as Death In Venice. However, a couple of things interrupted this plan. The first was Mann realising that the novel was a far richer and more complex set of ideas than initially expected. Again, his essay touches on the composition process, describing a feeling which will be familiar to anyone with a creative outlet - work takes on a life of its own leaving you as the artist to simply write into the dark, following where the work seems to lead. The second point was the outbreak of the first world war.
This is the point at which biographical context meets intellectual context. Thomas Mann had an older brother Heinrich, also a writer and the two disagreed intensely around Germany’s politics. Heinrich was a socialist, and an admirer of both the novelist Emile Zola and the social-democrat revolutionary Kurt Eisner. Heinrich was also virulently anti-war - in fact, seeing the defeat of Germany as necessary to crush the imperial political project (a position we could term revolutionary defeatism). This is in contrast to his younger brother Thomas - an outwardly respectable bourgeois writer who was both far more successful in terms of readership and finances than Heinrich. During the war Thomas published a book called Reflections of A Nonpolitical Man - he calls this his “intellectual military service.” This was an incredibly long treatise on the rightness of German culture, their position in the war and an attack on what he termed Zivilisationsliterat - a collection of Francophile, progressive writers (including his own brother!) who were pro-democracy and anti-war.
It doesn’t take much to see the philosophical and anti-democratic influence of both Schopehnhauer and Nietzsche, who were, for Mann, as for an entire generation of German intellectuals, writers and artists, deeply formative. Personally I’ve never been particularly interested in Nietzsche - he is, ultimately, a writer for teenagers and the young. Though his historicism is undoubtedly influential, it is in those who put his writing to new uses that allow something interesting to emerge (Delueze’s book, Nietzsche and Philosophy being a good example of what I mean).
In the case of Mann though, the influence of Nietzsche on his thought waned, and in the 1920s and 1930s he increasingly took up pro democratic and liberal politics moving from an older Romanticism towards something less conservative. As T.J Reed, author of Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition puts it, he was a “late adoptive child of the Enlightenment” coming to favour the values of humanism that so much of The Magic Mountain spends detail and time exploring. It would be a mistake and an oversimplification to read Mann’s work as inherently reactionary - even if The Magic Mountain particularly was started at a point wherein he was broadly opposed to any kind of democratic and progressive politics. Georgy Lukacs, easily one of the pre-eminent writers on Mann’s work puts things well:
This is not, of course, to defend Mann's war writings. If, as still happens in England and America, later works like The Magic Mountain are interpreted in the light of the Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, the result will inevitably be a reactionary distortion. The problem is rather to realize that Mann's political aberration in the First World War was no accidental stage in his 'search for bourgeois man', but a necessary phase in the disastrous development of German ideology as a whole. - Lukacs, Essays On Thomas Mann
After all, in 1929, a few years after the publication of The Magic Mountain, and at a far more vulnerable political moment, Mann published Mario and the Magician, an explicitly anti-fascist novel in which an authoritarian leader is assassinated. He was increasingly aware of the risks of fascism too, becoming a defender of the Weimar Republic and making increasingly urgent appeals for voters to rally behind the Social Democratic Party as Germany’s political ideology went through that “disastrous development” mentioned by Lukacs. Mann fled Germany for America during the war, making regular antifascist speeches and radio broadcasts.
The point from Lukacs brings up the crux of the intellectual context I want to get into - the relationship between Mann and questions of politics, which for Lukacs is inevitably mediated through a formal analysis of his style - realism. The relationship between Lukacs and Mann has been much commented on, but it generally stops at the superficial level - something important to correct here. Lukacs is one of the most impressive literary critics of the 20th century (alongside someone like Eric Auerbach) and was also a revolutionary communist, involved in the Bolshevik struggle in Hungary. There’s a somewhat simplistic intellectual biography that’s often trotted out when it comes to talking about his work. He starts as a Kantian, meets Bloch and reads Hegel. Then in the 1920s came his Hegelian Marxist phase and the publication of the landmark History and Class Consciousness. This eventually runs against the orthodoxy of the day and he publishes some self-criticism to keep himself out of jail and makes what he will later describe as “tactical accommodations” to the Stalinist orthodoxies around literature and philosophy. In the 1930s he published his studies on literary realism and he was forced into retirement by the time of the Hungarian uprising in the late 1950s to work on his final works on social ontology.
It would be easy to see Lukacs as essentially a rigidly dogmatic apologist for Stalinism but this is wildly reductive - simply presupposing an (incorrect) interpretation of his politics to which his aesthetic philosophy is entirely subordinate. Firstly, this ignores the fact that he was arrested in the early 1940s on suspicion of being a Trotskyite agent and secondly, flattens the content of his own philosophical writing about literature to the point of absurdity. The two - politics and philosophy - are entirely inseparable and his writing on realism are bound up within a particular conception of politics that is never simply reducible to the crudities of some defence of socialist realism.
All of this may strike you as interesting, in an abstract, academic sense but perhaps a little remote from the actual content of Mann’s work. But in all of Lukacs’s writing he consistently returns to the work of Thomas Mann, praising him as a high point in the development of critical realism - and why would a Leninist, a Bolshiviek and committed revolutionary spend so much time and effort engaging with the writing of a conservative liberal, solidly bourgeois and capitalist writer like Thomas Mann? A suggestive historical detail comes from the letters of their contemporary, Walter Benjamin. In 1925, Benjamin wrote to his friend Gersholm Scholem that he was reading two exciting books: the first was Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, and the other was Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
This connection between Lukacs and Mann brings us back to both Mann’s novel and this broader question of realism. Mann said that he based Naptha on Lukacs - at the very least in appearance. In an interview Ernst Bloch, who was at one point Lukacs’s closest intellectual companion, also confirmed that Naptha was based on Lukacs. To this Lukacs responded “so what if I lent him my nose? He has given so much to me - I am happy I could do that little for him in return!” The two knew of each other very well. Though, as Judith Marcus details in her excellent sociological study of the interactions between the two, Mann seems to have regarded Lukacs with a measure of caution. He details their one face-to-face meeting, describing how while talking to Lukacs he couldn’t help but agree with everything he said, but after the fact was left with a terrible sense of “abstractions”
Perhaps this is a good way of getting at Lukacs’s sense of realism. His studies of the 1930s as well as his debates with Bloch around expressionism were attacks on a modernist writing that he saw as a political and aesthetic dead-end. Benjamin’s astute connection between History and Class Consciousness and The Magic Mountain allow for an exploration of Lukacs’s category of reification and what he means by realism. So, reification. The central chapter of History and Class Consciousness is a long essay on this notion of reification - the process by which capitalism permeates all of human society. Through rationalization, and the transformation of the world into a series of objects with use-value and exchange-value, relations between people become mediated through objects, As he puts it:
The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.
Reification is about the naturalization of a given social structure - solidifying it into something that seems like an inevitable law of the universe. Of course reification is not just something that works on commodities - just as processes of production become ever more rationally calculated, turning humans into mere appendages for the machine, so too the same process is worked out in the superstructures of a given society.
The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of ‘ghostly objectivity’ cannot therefore content itself with the reduction of all objects for the gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of’ like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic ‘qualities’ into play without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process.
The problem here is that reification as imprinted on the whole consciousness of man represents a problem - how does one find a way out? The solution to this problem (and here you can see the influence of Ernst Bloch on Lukacs’s theory of consciousness) is the class consciousness of the proletariat which exists as an objective possibility, produced by the contradictions of capitalist rationality itself.
This is where realism starts to come in for Lukacs as a politically significant form, and his definition is a little different from older definitions. Take George Eliot in Adam Bede, where she details her attempt to “give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.” For Lukacs, this is necessary for realism, but not sufficient. After all, in a reified capitalist society, riven by the antinomies of bourgeois ideology, things as they appear are just that - appearances. Rather, the realist writer is the one who has the ability to reveal the true structures of a society that is invisible to everyday consciousness. In other words, the realist novel takes on the possibility of de-reification. At its very best, realism allows for the grasping of the true historical forces of a given moment. It is here that Mann’s importance as a novelist for Lukacs starts to become clearer.
It was this understanding of realism that motivated his critique of modernism. Take his long essay “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?” For Lukacs, modernist writers like Kafka and Joyce, for all their technical ability, were falling into a trap, namely that “subjective experience constitutes reality as such.” Over the course of many pages Lukacs outlines his position that modernist subjectivism is essentially a mistake of reification, forsaking the shared social world of human beings, and more problematically, forsaking the idea that perspective and characterization are all necessarily informed by the problem of history.
In contrast, critical realist writing (and for Lukacs, Mann is the foremost example) does what the modernist like Kafka and Beckett not only choose not to do, but cannot do - understand subjectivity as a part of a dynamic historical process. For Lukacs, the modernists have made beautiful images in their literature, but they do not move and thus were cut off from both the view of human subjectivity as essentially social, and the concept of historical change. Now, this criticism may strike some as unfair and unreasonable (certainly it did for someone like Brecht) but it’s this that leads to Lukacs to his rather audacious claim, “the proposition that no writer of the past century, asking himself to what goal history is moving, has been able to ignore socialism.” Lukacs is often accused of establishing some fairly simplistic binaries in his argumentation but his point here is not that one can have socialist realism on the one hand vs. decadent modernism on the other. He doesn’t even seem to think that a writer needed to be a socialist at all but simply had to acknowledge and understand socialism as a potential aspect of the historical process into which they wrote.
It is enough that a writer takes socialism into account and does not reject it out of hand. But if he rejects socialism - and this is the point I want to make - he closes his eyes to the future, gives up any chance of assessing the present correctly, and loses the ability to create other than purely static works of art.
So, the obvious question - does Mann acknowledge socialism, does this solid middle class bourgeois writer see it as a possibility or have they too accepted the reifications of a capitalist economy. Well, as Mann writes about his own novel:
Such institutions as the Berghof were a typical pre-war phenomenon. They were only possible in a capitalistic economy which was still functioning well and normally. (my emphasis) Only under such a system was it possible for patients to remain there year after year at the family’s expense. The Magic Mountain became the swan song of that form of existence. Perhaps it is a general rule that epics descriptive of some particular phase of life tend to appear as it nears its end. The treatment of tuberculosis has entered upon a different phase today; and most of the Swiss sanatoria have become sports hotels.
Not only this but so much of the dialogue in the novel is about the economic and political situation - as I’ll get on to in another piece. It also engages with an understanding of history as a dynamic princess and the questions of the future - what a world might become - all of these issues are key to grasping the novel’s importance. Sometimes, the long attention testing digressions and conversations between Settembrini and Naptha, or Hans Castorp’s autodidacticism and research into physiology give the novel a reputation for abstract intellectualism, removed from the passion of human emotion. But Mann is making a serious point: the struggle over ideas is the site of human passions, ideas matter and they are the very stuff for which human beings both live and die.
To describe something as “merely” intellectual is to make a strange split between the various layers of human existence itself. Lest this all get too abstract it's important to emphasize that Lukacs explicitly argues that this point about socialism and a critical realism holds true for certain concrete historical situations. Of course this novel is written in the midst of a great crisis - in short order Europe saw the publication of Spengler’s Decline of the West, Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia, Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness and finally this novel, The Magic Mountain - all of which are wrestling with these questions of a world that is yet to come. It is this struggle within the novel that the next part of this series will cover, as Settembrini argues with Naptha and Hans Castorp falls for the beautiful Claudia.
The Haunt is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Climbing Stories: A Series of Literary Excursions.
Featuring, among others, the following:
The Haunt is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Thomas Mann, Death In Venice, (1912)
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
György Lukács, Essays on Thomas Mann, (1964)
Luchino Visconti dir. Death In Venice (1971)
Ernst Bloch, Michael Lowy and Vicki Williams Hill, New German Critique Number 9 (1976)
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Volume Two (1984)
Fredric Jameson, The End of Temporality (2003)
Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (2007)
Gore Verbinski dir. A Cure for Wellness (2016)
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024)
Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story (2024)
Climbing I - An Invitation To Approach The Mountain
“It is remarkable...A man cannot make general observations to any extent, on any subject, without betraying himself, without introducing his entire individuality, and presenting, as in an allegory, the fundamental theme and problem of his own existence.” - Settembrini
But bear in mind, the mountain’s mad with spells tonight
And should a will-o-the-wisp decide your way to light
As a child, I was often ill. Not in any unique or serious way but the common and all too familiar litany of complaints that make up being young and spending time around the developing immune systems of other young children. Winter colds, summer flu, stomach bugs and fevers or vomiting. Young children are, as every parent knows, just incubators for germs. When I was at my first school - I can’t remember my exact age but I couldn’t have been more than seven years old - I had to go home early. I remember my mother telling me what I said to her when she took back up the hill, away from the small squat buildings of the local primary school towards my childhood home: “I don’t have time for this - being sick is a waste of time.”
This is partly a smart but fairly unhappy child who had internalised that worth depended on work. (I wonder why they grew up and went to graduate school). But thinking about it, there’s something insightful in those words. Being sick removes one from time, from the normative flow of one lesson into another - or, when older - a working day cuts itself short and we become briefly unmoored, the seismic relief of not having anything to do. I remember having my tonsils removed - again, I couldn’t have been older than ten, and it was the first time I expereinced general anesthetic. Count backwards from ten, said the anesthetist. I didn’t make it past eight. I remember wondering when I eventually woke up: where the time had gone? Over the long term, when we are removed from school or work, time bleeds into itself - one day stretches on, the next is just like the one which has gone before it. To be ill is monotonous - but maybe the opposite is perhaps also true? Maybe the day-to-day grind of labor, of unpaid work, of precarity, of the seemingly unconquerable momentum of consumption is the monotony. Maybe that things “just go on” is the catastrophe, as Walter Benjamin said.
Our own perceptions, experiences and memories of time lend themselves well to narrativization - a good story is ultimately an experiment in time, and time is retroactively understood in language. This, of course, raises formal and practical problems of the recounting of experience and narrative, and these then open into the whole complex vistas of both genre and writing more broadly. Just think of the old familiar school exercise when you return from a holiday - “what did you do over the summer, why not tell the whole class?” In that brief question is not only the problem of time, but the problem of narration - and thus, even if only indirectly, the problem of subjectivity. To put this another way, it is through the experience of time - and its retroactive organization into narrative - that subjectivity itself is spotted, flickering past our own perceptions. This is a way of thinking about boredom - I had to stay in hospital after that operation, not for long, but I distinctly remember both the strange and slightly surreal sense of freedom that set in (I could do anything! I didn’t have to be at school!) alongside boredom, which is the friction of subjectivity running up against itself. What did you do with all that time, I was asked, when I went back to school the next week. What could I say: I got bored, and mostly I read books until I got home.
But perhaps even boredom has its own value. Last year, Anna Kornbluh’s book Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism was published to a lot of attention. Like any polemic, it is generative in as much as it creates polemical responses. After all, polemics are essentially about the clarification of differences and the stakes of an argument. The book is heavily indebted to a philosophy of history shaped by, primarily, Fredric Jameson. If, in Jameson’s Postmodernism, he details the ways in which the modernist culture project had fractured into the self-referentiality of postmodernity, thus hollowing out our sense of capitalist history, this has only accelerated in the era of “too-late capitalism”.
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, (Verso Books, 2024).
For Kornbluh, what marks the present is an aesthetics of immediacy - first person, overwhelmingly present tense, and presented as reality. We are all plugged in, online, consistently accessible to our employer. The aesthetics of too-late capitalism links to modes of circulation - the flow of services intensifies, customers are provided their goods immediately and businesses prides themselves on their “just in time” logistics. In an ever more digital world, capitalism moves at the speed of code which seeks to make its own operations as invisible and seamless as possible. Ideally there should be no gap between wanting something (a driver to take you somewhere, for example) and the fulfillment of that desire. The dominance of immediacy means the withering away of mediation (whether temporal or spatial). We are all overstimulated and simultaneously bored - the absence of mediation leaves us trapped within ourselves. Mediation is valuable for Kornbluh because it allows us to break out of and think differently - mediation requires interpretation, or to put things in a slightly wider frame, it requires history rather than simply the perpetuation, looping and elongating of the present. As a correlate mediation is both the ground for theory and the necessary condition of any politics that seeks to grasp the totality of a specific conjunction. As China Mieville put it, capitalism is just too fucking loud. Maybe all of us need to retreat to the mountains, take in the air and the rejuvenating waters as they did at the sanatoria all across Europe throughout the long nineteenth century.
In short, in considering the present, we inevitably come back to the problem of time. I was thinking about this over the last few months because of reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for the first time. I read it at the close last year, spending a few days suffering through a winter cold and needing a novel that could take me out of myself. My hopes were not high, but the process of working through the whole book was one of those reading experiences that become an indelible part of who you are as a person. The three pillars of the novel are time, sickness and the grand historical fate of European culture - all of which are fused into the form Bildungsroman - the novel of education. However, the Bildungsroman doesn’t just detail what happens to the characters. After all, reading is formative too. To engage with it is to allow yourself to become a different person - or, to put this another way, it was Fred Jameson who pointed out that you never read a text fresh for the first time, but are always already reading it through the various ideological and historical layers of association and meaning that we bring to the text. Thus for the reader, the process of formation - of Bildung - is to become attuned to those layers of association, not to strip them away from the text (reading as an act of purification) but rather of coming to see those things as binding and entangling the text (and you!) to the wider structures of ideology, history and politics.
I read the closing pages just before the Christmas season started in earnest and have been re-reading it essentially ever since. This is an attempt to work through it, and perhaps offer some encouragement for people who haven’t read it. I knew, almost as soon as I reached the final pages of the book for the first time that I would have to write about it, but I don’t think I would have tried to write this about it this much if not for Kate Wagner’s excellent essay series over at The Late Review on Wagner’s Ring Cycle. (And, as I’ll get to, there’s plenty of overlap between The Magic Mountain and Wagner particularly). It is a novel of time, illness and experience - the very antithesis of immediacy. It requires mediation - not just in terms of its content, but in its form and the history within which it exists.
The story is on one level very simple and one relatively easy to summarise. In, or about the year 1907, an ordinary young man, called Hans Castorp travels from Hamburg to visit his cousin Joachim who is staying in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland to recover from tuberculosis. Hans Castorp intends to go for a trip of three weeks before descending down the mountain, returning to the “flat land” and taking up his new position as an engineer. He does not stay for three weeks, but only descends the mountain seven years later. In that time, he falls in love, becomes obsessed with music, is involved in a seance and multiple long conversations on philosophy, history and the nature of existence. The book is long - well over 300,000 words and 900 pages across two volumes. If you’ve never read it before, perhaps the initial response might well be something like my own when I had to leave school. Perhaps you too feel like you don’t have the time for this. That is not an unreasonable response, but also it’s a symptomatic one - it’s also the response that Hans Castorp has to the early suggestion that he should stay in the mountains for at least six months but his own sense of curiosity (and the strange hypnotic effect of being there) drive him inexorable towards staying.
I said the plot is easy to summarize - but this is true only if the plot is thought of as an accumulation of events. Rather, what gives the novel its significance is the experience of the formation of subjectivity. Hans Castorp, the ordinary bourgeois Hamburger, becomes someone else in his time on the mountain. His conversations with Settembrini and Naptha on meaning, history, philosophy and existence are not simple intellectual exercises but moments in the construction of a certain kind of subject - in this, as I found out, his experience has something in common with the act of reading itself.
Reading - at length and complexity, with something that demands both attention and interpretation is a time intensive act. It is profoundly unproductive - but that is sort of the point, right? In an era of immediacy the internet is awash with AI powered summaries, of apps that will give you a book in 15 minutes, boiling down language and experience and the transformative power of mediation into thin intellectual gruel - a series of bullet points designed to make you a better, more productive business leader. The point of immediacy is to optimize the effort - and the pleasures - of thought out of existence, freeing you up to be the malleable subject needed by capital.
Yes, the book is long but reading it is no chore. This is not the equivalent of trying to tell people they have to eat their literary greens, to suffer through something dull because it is supposed to be in some way “good for you”. So much popular writing about older literature makes it seem so inaccessible - placing it beyond the reach of new readers and at the same time stripping it of all the joy and pleasure that it can provide. The book does ask a lot but please don’t think you should do anything - Mann himself was well aware of this. As he said in an essay called The Making of the Magic Mountain, and published (of all places) in The Atlantic
A work of art must not be a task or an effort; it. must not be undertaken against one’s will. It is meant to give pleasure, to entertain and enliven. If it does not have this effect on a reader, he must put it down and turn to something else.
And I cannot stress enough that it is a colossal pleasure - Mann’s narrative voice is amusing and wry. He consistently refers to his main character throughout with his full name - no matter how well we get to know him he remains always introduced as “Hans Castorp.” This gently amused narrative voice is something Olga Tokarczuk would refine and build on with her constant use of “We” as the narrative voice of that excellent riposte to Mann, The Empusium.
Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium… (Fitzcarraldo, 2024)
Another detail I really love: Mann has his main character spend much of his time falling passionately for another and not confessing his feelings for half the novel. When he finally does so, he does it almost entirely in French, and he carries around with him a miniature X-ray of her tuberculosis stricken lung.
The novel is strange and is, in places, so beautiful and moving as to render one breathless. It is an insight into a world that was - even in 1924 - something of a ghostly one on the edge of winking out of existence. Jameson, in The Modernist Papers, calls the novel “posthumous.” It is a precisely observed record of a historical moment that was collapsing into something new. An entire century was ending, headed into the charnel house of the first world war. As Walter Benjamin writes in The Storyteller:
A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
To spend some time on the mountain with Hans Castorp and the other inhabitants of the Berghof is to spend time in a world that is rich, thrilling and complex and at the same time, dying. It is the apotheosis of a particular tradition of realism, and the German novel of education, and as a result links all the way back to something like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and forward to the debates on realism and postmodernism that would occupy so much of the twentieth century. In short, the novel stands as a hinge point - the ending of one particular kind of Europe, and thus, one particular kind of subjectivity, and the emergence of something new. Its questions are still urgent I think: What does it mean to try and become a person - to live a life in a world that is, in a way, coming to an end? We don’t have time for that - we have to be productive, we have so much to do. But perhaps this has persuaded you - take a moment. Look upward, and take in the view. You don’t have to climb all that way, and if you do you may find yourself deeply and wonderfully changed by the experience. It’ll take plenty of time, but once you are up there, what does “time” even mean? As Mann closes his forward to the novel, explaining the story he wants to tell:
We shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail - for when did a narrative seem too long or too short by reason of the actual time or space it took up. We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can truly be called interesting.
Part II: Some Necessary Context and the Problem of Realism. Coming soon.
The Haunt is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
