Realism, for or against: but as opposed to what? At this point the list becomes at least relatively interminable: realism vs. romance, realism vs. epic, realism vs. melodrama, realism vs. idealism, realism vs. naturalism, (bourgeois or critical) realism vs. socialist realism,realism vs. the oriental tale, and of course, most frequently rehearsed of all, realism vs. modernism. As is inevitably the case with such a play of opposites, each of them becomes inevitably invested with political and even metaphysical significance, as, with film criticism, in the now somewhat antiquated opposition between Hollywood "realism" and formal subversions such as those associated with the nouvelle vague and Godard. Most of these binary pairs will therefore arouse a passionate taking of sides, in which realism is either denounced or elevated to the status of an ideal - Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism
This series of pieces on The Magic Mountain has essentially revolved around the problem of realism and it was revisiting Jameson’s work on realism that brought up the potential trap that writing about the book can easily fall into. One ends up rehearsing the argument from various of the binaries that he outlines in the quote above, but all things considered the one I’m probably most prone to is the debate between realism and modernism. This is, partly, due to Lukac’s still unsurpassed writing on Mann and the problem of realism, and partly because of the influence on me of the expressionism debate between Adorno, Brecht, Bloch and Lukacs. Put crudely, the problem is that realism - particularly the nineteenth century realism favoured by Lukacs - could easily be dismissed as traditionalist, conservative and aesthetically insufficient when contrasted to modernism. Lukacs the realist prefers Mann, Bloch the modernist prefers Joyce. As Jameson pointed out this dualism inevitably spirals outward, moving beyond the text to stand in judgement over an epoch. Yet the great joy of writing about this novel has been the way it consistently works against these binaries and thus, requires a rethinking of the relationship between them. Both realism and modernism are in a sense, attempts to reckon with history. This is key to Lukacs’s writing on the novels of Tolstoy and Zola, and more foundationally, key to what the novel as a form might even be for. However, even to periodize the relationship between the two (realism as the form of the nineteenth century and modernism as the form of the twentieth) is to inevitably raise wider questions about more than just the nature of literary texts. Jameson, in the introduction to The Antinomies of Realism, puts the problem well:
Whether such a focus on periodization necessarily leads out of literary history into cultural history in general (and beyond that to the history of modes of production) probably depends on how one situates capitalism itself and its specific cultural system in the sequence in question. The focus, in other words, tends to relativize realism as one mode among many others, unless, by the use of mediatory concepts such as that of modernity, one places capitalism uniquely at the center of human history
Perhaps this doesn’t need to be a universal move but The Magic Mountain functions as both apotheosis of a particular form and a particular configuration of capitalism as both go through crisis. As Colm Toibin details in his fictionalised biography The Magician (as well as Mann’s other, more traditional biographers) Mann’s work was the economic product of a particular mode of German capitalism - chauvinistic, politically sclerotic and governed over by institutions either powerless or unwilling to respond to the extent of the crisis. If realism was the narrative form most suited to the development and spread of capitalism as it moved through industrialisation and imperialism, then the realist novel was - at its best and as Lukacs would argue in The Theory of the Novel - the form by which human consciousness would be reintroduced to the dynamics of history, and thus become participants within it. Or, to put this in slightly less cheerful terms, the realist novel was the not simply the representation of the bourgeois but a sign of their coming to consciousness of themselves as a class. But still, all of this to say that this gets additionally complicated by the crisis represented by the two world wars. The first half of the twentieth century was not just an economic and political crisis but was an aesthetic and philosophical one too - and as a result, the novel changed. As I’ve written about in previously, Mann’s control of temporality, his participatory anthropology and ultimately, the novel’s ending, show that one can only think of realism and modernism, or experimentation and continuity as dialectically interrelated.
All of this is to say that the end of The Magic Mountain blows apart the idea of realism being somehow realistic. After long stretches of philosophic conversation and very little by way of plot the ending speeds up . The narrative voice, so removed and impartial, closes back in again and the reader is left with the impression of history itself inexorably accelerating. As Mann knew all too well, things sometimes end very quickly. For all the sheer heft of The Magic Mountain, the ending is a slide into nightmares. The beginning of the end starts with death, or maybe to be a little more precise, it starts with the appearance of a ghost from the future.
Let me explain. Settembrinin and Naptha, after their long Faustian wrestling for the soul of Hans Castorp, finally tire of slinging insults at one another. The challenge of a duel is laid down, and in a moment of courage Settembrini refuses to shoot Naptha, firing his pistol well over his head. Incensed by his opponents, Naphtha screams, raises the gun to his own temple and shoots himself in the head, a bloody metaphor for Mann’s own view on the end to which all fantaticism will ultimately lead. The final sections of the novel are soaked with death. Joachim is dead. Naptha, dead. The ridiculous Mynheer Peeperkorn also dead. Shortly before the duel there is a seance of sorts. Asked to whom he and the rest of the audience would like to speak, Hans Castorp said that ‘I would like to see my departed cousin, Joachim Ziemssen.”
Much of the seance is scored by music and Castorp makes a suggestion that they might listen to a certain song, “from Gounod’s Faust, Valentine’s Prayer, baritone with orchestral accompaniment.” The aria, sung by the soldier Valentine, is a prayer to heaven, an appeal to God to watch over his sister, Marguerite.
“I shall seek glory in the enemy’s ranks,
The first, the bravest, in the thick of the fray,
I shall go and fight for my country.
And if God should call me to his side,
I shall faithfully watch over you”
In this recording from the Royal Opera House back in 2004, featuring the enormously talented British baritone Simon Keenlyside, Valentine sings overshadowed by an enormous crucifixion. The prayer is an admission of impending death - and so perfect for the seance. Hans Castorp gets his wish and his dead cousin appears. Yet the cousin doesn’t appear as he did in life. He wears a strange uniform with no colour or decoration. There is an iron cross, low down on the breast, “and what was it, this headgear? It seemed as though Joachim had turned an army cook pot and fastened under his chin with a hand. Yet it looked quite properly warlike, like an old-fashioned foot soldier perhaps.”
The ghost is almost always read as a figure from the past, but here the specter of Castorp’s already dead cousin appears not wearing the uniform of a cavalry officer but the uniform of the German army in world war one which is only a few months away. He is both a vision of the future and revenant of the past. Time is out of joint. The history of the twentieth century was for Mann the reappearance of a kind of disorder. No wonder Bloch wrote that we do not all live in the same Now. As he put it, “needs and elements from past ages break through the relativism of the general weariness like magma through a thin crust.” We live in worlds conditioned through a certain relationship to history. This was what he termed nonsynchronous contradiction - this idea that history itself was not a unified field but one riven by contradictions and tensions, that the past was not finished and the future was all too often impeded. The ghosts and superstitions of the past were a useful resource for a fascistic politics that could appeal to superstition and old modes of belief but the job of the left was in Bloch’s words to be attuned to the objective synchronous contradictions of the present moment, As he put it:
The subjectively nonsynchronous contradiction is pent-up anger, the objectively nonsynchronous one is unsettled past; the subjectively synchronous one is the proletariat's free revolutionary act, the objectively synchronous contradiction is the impeded future contained in the Now, the impeded technical benefaction, the impeded new society, with which the old one is pregnant in its productive forces.
For all Hans Castorp has been evangelized on the cause of life by Settembrini throughout the novel, death continues onward. The news comes that his old guardian, Counsel Tienappel, has died and like an old-fashioned religious epiphany, Hans Castorp decides to finally rejoin the flat-land, the world of the living. The last conversation between Castorp and Settembrini is both deeply moving, and an admission on Settembrini’s part that the old humanist project is about to fail. “Go then, it is your blood that calls. Go, and fight bravely, more than that can no man.” The final moment of Settembrini is him wiping a tear from his eye as the young man, along with countless others leaves the world of the Magic Mountain behind.
The final pages of the novel are an exercise in compression, a scant few pages that are some of the finest in the whole novel and a hellish depiction of war. The narrative perspective is at first is far wider than before until Hans Castorp is spotted. “He is running, his feet heavy with mould, the bayonet swinging in his hand. Look! He treads on the hand of a fallen comrade with his hobnailed boots, he treads the hand deep into the slimy branch-strewn ground, But it is he. What, singing? As one signs unaware, staring straight ahead, yes, thus he spends his hurrying breath, to sign half soundlessly.”
What does he sing, running through the mud of Europe, while stamping on the hands of his now dead comrades? He sings an old Schubert song from happier times called “The Linden Tree.” It’s a song that combines a longing for a simpler time with a deep fear of death that lurks as the inevitable undercurrent of all subjectivity. There’s a wonderful performance of the song here and the juxtaposition between its rather sweet nostalgia for a lost past cuts against the horror that Mann narrates. The tale is done - the mountain ascent has found its descent. Hans Castorp has moved from the realm of the living flat land to the inverted underworld of the mountain before coming back to the world of the living that is now a maelstrom of death. The final paragraph of the novel is a narrative farewell to this rather ordinary young man and at the same time, a sweeping indictment of an entire continent.
“Farewell - and if thy livest or diest! Thy prospects are poor. The desperate dance in which thy fortunes are caught up, will last yet many a sinful year; we should not care to set a high stake on thy life by the time it ends. We even confess that it is without great concern we leave the question open…Moments there were, when out of death, and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to thee, as thou tookest stock of thyself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day will mount?”
Right at the beginning of the piece, I quoted Settembrini: “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.” In a sense this is still why the Magic Mountain fascinates - the world of twentieth century Europe is still so deeply present, a ruin from the past which structures the environment of the present from our sense of history and politics, to the wreckage of our shared culture. An era of colossal wealth inequality, governed by a necrotic political system unable to manage its own internal contradictions. Reports of a world so unequal as to effectively be different kinds of history itself, and a culture obsessed with death. We are still atop the mountain and the final question of Mann’s epic is one that remains still to be answered. Mann’s characters, for all their ordinary nature are also historical types, his realism is not just that of straightforward representation but of the unfolding forces of history itself. Within the confines of the sanatorium we don’t just find types or characters, but we find ourselves, still irreducibly formed and reformed by the same forces that Mann presents within his novel.