Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  The profound awareness is Mann’s own, and concerns his own enactment of the imitatio Goethe. Subtly echoed and reversed here is Goethe’s observation in his Theory of Colours to the effect that “even perfect models have a disturbing effect in that they lead us to skip necessary stages in our Bildung, with the result, for the most part, that we are carried wide of the mark into limitless error.” This is also the Goethe who celebrated his own originality as well as his power of appropriating from others. Thus he could say, “Only by making the riches of the others our own do we bring anything great into being,” but also insist, “What can we in fact call our own except the energy, the force, the will!” Mann, acutely sensing his own belatedness, liked to quote the old Goethe’s question: “Does a man live when others also live?”

  The Goethe of The Beloved Returns is not Goethe, but Mann himself, the world parodist prophesied and celebrated by Nietzsche as the artist of the future. E. R. Curtius doubtless was accurate in seeing Goethe as an ending and not as a fresh beginning of the cultural tradition. Mann, too, now seems archaic, not a modernist or post-Romantic, but a belated Goethe, a humanist triumphing through the mystery of his own personality and the ironic playfulness of his art. Like his vision of Goethe, Mann now seems a child of nature rather than of the spirit, but laboring eloquently to burn through nature into the transformation that converts deathliness into a dialectical art.

  Defending himself from many characterizations as an incessant ironist, Mann belatedly asked us to think of him as a humorist:

  I always feel a bit bored when critics assign my own work so definitely and completely to the realm of irony and consider me an ironist through and through, without also taking account of the concept of humor.

  (Thomas Mann)

  The author of The Magic Mountain insisted that he wished to draw laughter from his reader’s heart, rather than an intellectual smile. He has provoked so many intellectual smiles in his exegetes that they have bored us all more than a bit. The irony of irony is that finally it defeats not meaning (as deconstructionist critics insist) but interest, without which we cannot go on reading. Thomas Mann doubtless was what Erich Heller called him, “the ironic German,” but rereading The Magic Mountain is much more than an experience in irony. Not that the book ever provokes me to laughter. Mann is hardly S. J. Perelman or Philip Roth. Yet it is now more than ninety years since the novel first was published, and the book clearly has mellowed. The irony of one age is never the irony of another, and The Magic Mountain seems now a work of gentle high seriousness—as earnest, affectionate, and solid as its admirable hero, Hans Castorp.

  That The Magic Mountain parodies a host of literary genres and conventions is finely obvious. The effect of Nietzsche upon Mann was very strong, and parody was Nietzsche’s answer to the anxieties of influence. Mann evidently did believe that what remained to be done was for art to become its own parody. Presumably, that would have redeemed an irony that at bottom may have been mere indecisiveness. Reading the novel now, the common reader scarcely will recognize the parody of Romantic convention, and can afford to bypass the endless ambiguities of Mann’s late version of romantic irony.

  This is not to agree with Erich Heller’s ironic conclusion: “Such is our world that sense and meaning have to be disguised—as irony, or as literature, or as both come together: for instance in The Magic Mountain.” Mann’s story now primarily offers neither “meaning” nor irony but, rather, a loving representation of past realities, of a European culture forever gone, the culture of Goethe and Freud. A reader in 2018 must experience the book as a historical novel, the cairn of a humanism forever lost, forever longed for. Mann’s superb workmanship fashioned the most vivid version we have of a Europe before the catastrophe of the Nazi horror. Where Mann intended parody, the counter-ironies of time and change have produced instead a transformation that today makes The Magic Mountain into an immensely poignant study of the nostalgias.

  Hans Castorp himself now seems to me both a subtler and a more likable representation than he did when I first read the novel, nearly three-quarters of a century ago. Despite Mann’s endorsement of the notion, Castorp is no quester, and pursues no grail or ideal. He is a character of considerable detachment, who will listen with almost equal contentment to the enlightened Settembrini, the terroristic Naphta, or the heroically vitalistic Peeperkorn. His erotic detachment is extraordinary; after seven months, he makes love to Clavdia just once, and then avoids any other sexual experience for the rest of his seven-year stay at the sanatorium. If he has a high passion for Clavdia, it nevertheless carries few of the traditional signs of love’s torments. Whether his detachment has some root in his having been an orphan since the age of seven is unclear, but essentially he is content to see, to be taught, to absorb. It may also be that Clavdia renews his schoolboy relationship with Pribislav Hippe, a homoeroticism never fulfilled with someone whose name is a kind of scythe or sickle in German, an attraction with deathly overtones.

  We do not think of Castorp as weak, and yet his nature seems almost totally free of aggressivity. It is as though the death drive in him does not take its origin in a wounded narcissism. Castorp bears no psychic scars, and probably never will acquire any. Whatever his maker’s intentions, he is not in himself ironic, nor does he seem anymore to be a parody of anything or anyone whatsoever. The common reader becomes very fond of Castorp, and even begins to regard him as a kind of Everyman, which he most certainly is not. His true drive is toward self-education, education sought for its own sake alone. Castorp is that ideal student the universities always proclaim yet never find. He is intensely interested in everything, in all possible knowledge, and yet that knowledge is an end in itself. Knowledge is not power for him, whether over himself or over others; it is in no way Faustian.

  Despite his passion for hermeticism, Castorp is not striving to become an esoteric adept, whether rationalist like Settembrini or antirationalist like Naphta. And though he is fascinated by Peeperkorn as a grand personality and an apostle of vitalism, Castorp is more than content with his own apparent colorlessness, and with his own evasions of his only once fulfilled desire for Clavdia, representative as she is of the dark eros that mingles sexual love and death. Castorp is a survivor, and I do not believe that we are to foresee him as dying upon the battlefields of World War I. Naphta kills himself, in frustration at lacking the courage to kill Settembrini; Settembrini is broken by his contemplation of Naphta’s desperate act; Peeperkorn, too, is a suicide, unable to bear the onset of impotence. Only Castorp will go on, strengthened and resolute, and possibly will complete his self-transformation from engineer to artist, so as to write a novel not unlike The Magic Mountain.

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  —

  What kind of magic is it—what enchantment does the mountain sanatorium possess? At one extreme limit, the book admits the occult, when Castorp’s dead cousin, Joachim, appears at the séance:

  There was one more person in the room than before. There in the background, where the red rays lost themselves in gloom, so that the eye scarcely reached thither, between writing-desk and screen, in the doctor’s consulting-chair, where in the intermission Elly had been sitting, Joachim sat. It was the Joachim of the last days, with hollow, shadowy cheeks, warrior’s beard and full, curling lips. He sat leaning back, one leg crossed over the other. On his wasted face, shaded though it was by his head-covering, was plainly seen the stamp of suffering, the expression of gravity and austerity which had beautified it. Two folds stood on his brow, between the eyes, that lay deep in their bony cavities; but there was no change in the mildness of the great dark orbs, whose quiet friendly gaze sought out Hans Castorp, and him alone. That ancient grievance of the outstanding ears was still to be seen under the head-covering, his extraordinary head-covering, which they could not make out. Cousin Joachim was not in mufti. His sabre seemed to be leaning against his leg, he held the handle, one thought to distinguish something li
ke a pistol-case in his belt. But that was no proper uniform he wore. No colour, no decorations; it had a collar like a litewka jacket, and side pockets. Somewhere low down on the breast was a cross. His feet looked large, his legs very thin, they seemed to be bound or wound as for the business of sport more than war. And what was it, this headgear? It seemed as though Joachim had turned an army cook-pot upside-down on his head, and fastened it under his chin with a band. Yet it looked quite properly warlike, like an old-fashioned foot-soldier, perhaps.

  By thus making the occult prophetic of what was to come—the uniform and helmet are of World War I—Mann essentially chose, all ironies aside, a mystical theory of time. Many exegetes have noted the book’s obsession with the number seven, in all its variants. Others have noted that after Joachim dies all temporal references disappear from the novel. Castorp forgets his own age, and the length of his own stay on the Magic Mountain. He passes into timelessness.

  How long Joachim had lived here with his cousin, up to the time of his fateful departure, or taken all in all; what had been the date of his going, how long he had been gone, when he had come back; how long Hans Castorp himself had been up here when his cousin returned and then bade time farewell; how long—dismissing Joachim from our calculations—Frau Chauchat had been absent; how long, since what date, she had been back again (for she did come back); how much mortal time Hans Castorp himself had spent in House Berghof by the time she returned; no one asked him all these questions, and he probably shrank from asking himself. If they had been put to him, he would have tapped his forehead with the tips of his fingers, and most certainly not have known—a phenomenon as disquieting as his incapacity to answer Herr Settembrini, that long-ago first evening, when the latter had asked him his age.

  The opening words of the novel describe Castorp as “an unassuming young man,” but this fellow who seems the apotheosis of the average is of course hermetic and daemonic, marked from birth for singular visions of eternity. Bildung, the supposed thematic pattern that the book inherits from Goethe, Stifter, Keller, and others, hardly is possible for Castorp, who does not require the endless cultural instruction nearly everyone else wishes to inflict upon him. He need not develop; he simply unfolds. For he is Primal Man, the Ur-Adam of the Gnostic myth that Mann lovingly expounds in the “Prelude” of his Joseph tetralogy. Indeed, he already is Mann’s Joseph, the favored of heaven.

  * * *

  —

  Much of what Mann intended as memorable value in The Magic Mountain has, paradoxically, been lost to time. The social satire, intellectual irony, and sense of cultural crisis are all now quite archaic. Settembrini, Naphta, Peeperkorn, Clavdia, and Joachim all possess an antique charm, a kind of faded aesthetic dignity, parodies of parodies, period pieces, old photographs uncannily right and yet altogether odd. Hans Castorp, as colorless now as he was in 1924, retains his immediacy, his relevance, his disturbing claim upon us. He is not the Nietzschean new man, without a superego, but the Nietzschean will to interpretation: receptive rather than rapacious, plural rather than unitary, affective rather than indifferent, distanced from rather than abandoned to desire. In some sense, Castorp knows that he himself is an interpretation, knows that he represents neither Schopenhauer’s will to live, nor Freud’s mingled drives of love and death, but Nietzsche’s will to power over the text of life. The implicit questions Castorp is always putting to everyone else in the book are: who exactly are you, the interpreter, and what power do you seek to gain over my life? Because he puts these questions to us also, with cumulative force, Castorp becomes a representation we cannot evade. Mann, taking leave of his hero, said that Castorp mattered because of his “dream of love,” presumably the vision of the chapter “Snow.” It was fortunate that Mann, a miraculous artisan, had wrought better than even he himself knew. Castorp is one of those rare fictions who acquire the authority to call our versions of reality into some doubt. The reader, interpreting Castorp, must come to ask herself or himself: what is my dream of love, my erotic illusion, and how does that dream or illusion qualify my own possibilities of unfolding?

  Thomas Mann, in this sense only like Tolstoy, was a dreadful husband and a catastrophic father. He had six children with his wife, Katia Pringsheim, who came from a secularized Jewish family. His deepest desires were homosexual, which became a kind of open secret, and his bisexuality was repeated in his children Erika, Klaus, and Golo. Katia Pringsheim, who had obliged Mann by converting to Lutheranism, was perpetually overworked, not only in caring for him and the six children, but by having to make all the daily decisions that kept the household going. She collapsed from exhaustion, and was sent to a Davos sanatorium to rest and recover. Visiting her there, Mann evidently first conceived of The Magic Mountain.

  Mann’s children slowly learned to weather his egoism and to make their way on their own, but two of them, Klaus and Michael, eventually committed suicide. Erika, surely the most remarkable, in time became the true head of the household and presided over her parents and her siblings, insofar as she could.

  When I was very young, I greatly enjoyed reading two historical novels by Mann’s older brother, Heinrich, both on Henry of Navarre, who was to become King Henry IV of France, first of the Bourbon monarchs. Heinrich Mann seems to me a much more impressive human being than his more gifted brother. Unlike Thomas Mann, he opposed the Nazis from the start and had to go into exile in France, and eventually fled first to Spain, then to Portugal, and finally to the United States, where he did not prosper. His second wife killed herself, and he died in solitude and poor circumstances in California.

  I return to Hans Castorp, whom Thomas Mann ironically deprecated as a perfectly ordinary young man. Castorp is anything but that. Thomas Mann tried to make him superficially drab, but a good reader of the novel learns to shrug that off. Everything and nothing happens to Hans Castorp during his seven-year sojourn on the Enchanted Mountain. He falls in love with the enigmatic Clavdia Chauchat, who grants him only a single tryst. Stubbornly, he retains the passion, if that is the accurate word for a bizarre relationship that is never renewed. Instead, Clavdia returns after a long absence with her new lover, the boisterously Dionysiac Mynheer Peeperkorn, a large Dutch owner of a plantation in Java. Peeperkorn is a manifest parody of Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), a German dramatist and novelist who was rather tainted by Nazi associations, and who preceded Thomas Mann by seventeen years as a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  I think every reader of The Magic Mountain enjoys Peeperkorn, since the polemical humanist Ludovico Settembrini and his antagonist, the Jewish-Jesuit-Nietzschean Leo Naphta, who battle for Hans Castorp’s soul, begin to weary us until their ghastly duel, in which Settembrini deliberately fires in the air, and the infuriated Naphta then shoots himself in the head. Thomas Mann largely based Naphta on György Lukács (1885–1971), Hungarian Jewish literary critic and philosopher who propounded a kind of Romantic Marxism.

  As I have indicated, Hans Castorp seems to me an extraordinary young man and a profoundly realized personality. For all his exquisite diffidence, he is a seeker after otherness, and seems to know that at last he will find it in himself. Moved as he is by Settembrini, and in another mode by Naphta, he finds a culminating figure not in Clavdia but in the burly Dionysiac who so palpably is approaching a terrible end:

  At the mention of the word “knife,” Mynheer Peeperkorn had changed his sitting position in bed somewhat, suddenly edging away and turning his face to search his guest’s eyes. Now he sat up more comfortably, propping himself on his elbows, and said, “Young man, I have heard, and I have the picture. And on the basis of what you have just said, permit me to make an honorable declaration of my own. Were my hair not white and were I not so debilitated by this malign fever, you would see me prepared to give you satisfaction, man to man, weapon in hand, for the injury I have unwittingly inflicted upon you, and for the additional injury caused by my traveling companion, for which
I likewise must take responsibility. Agreed, my good sir. You would see me prepared. But as things stand, you will permit me to make another suggestion in lieu of that. It is as follows: I recall a sublime moment, at the very beginning of our acquaintance—I recall it, though I had copiously partaken of wine—a moment when, touched by your pleasant temperament, I was about to offer you the brotherhood of informal pronouns, but could not avoid the realization that such a step would have been overhasty. Fine, I refer today to that moment, I return to it now, I declare the postponement we agreed upon then to be at an end. Young man, we are brothers, I declare us to be such. You spoke of the use of informal pronouns in their full meaning—and our use of them shall also be in the full meaning of a brotherhood of feeling. The satisfaction that old age and infirmity prevent me from offering you by means of weapons, I now offer you in this form; I offer it in the form of a bond of brotherhood, of the sort that is usually established against a third part, against the world, against someone else, but which we shall establish in our feelings for someone. Take up your wineglass, young man, while I reach yet again for my water tumbler—it will do this modest vintage no further harm—”