Climbing Stories III

Time and Death Atop the Mountain

Wassily Kandinksy “Black Relationship” (1924)

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, volume II-2, p. 446 (Frankfurt, 1977).

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.