Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Chap. 1-3
The Magic Mountain
Satana Makes Shameful Suggestions
P107 ...there was one dream that Hans Castorp dreamed twice that night, and it was exactly the same both times. It came the second time toward morning. He was sitting in the dining hall with its seven tables when the glass door banged shut louder than ever, and in came Madame Chauchat, wearing her white sweater, one hand in her pocket, the other at the back of her head. Instead of proceeding to the Good Russian table, the ill-mannered woman walked soundlessly up to Hans Castorp and silently extended her hand for him to kiss -- not the back, but the palm. And Hans Castorp kissed her hand -- her unrefined, slightly broad hand with its stubby fingers and jagged cuticles. And once again he felt sweeping through him, from head to foot, that sense of dissolute sweetness that had risen up inside him when he had tried out what it must be like to be free of the pressures of honor and to enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace -- and he experienced that sweetness again in his dream, except that it was overwhelmingly sweeter.
I thought this would come much later, but perhaps this is the time to mention Thomas Mann’s actual visit to his wife, while she was at a sanatorium because it was believed she had tuberculosis. The story is that Mann, as Settembrini suggests here and as Hans’s Uncle James does much later, bolts the place in fear. Perhaps what we’ve just read explains what it was that frightened them off.
The great kicker to this story is that after their deaths it was revealed that while Mann’s wife’s lungs showed no sign of tuberculosis, Mann’s lungs revealed a brush with the disease in the past.
Chapter 4
I wonder if this is aimed at Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov? George Gissing’s Henry Ryecroft also has argued something similar, that intellectual achievement goes with ill health and is not to be found united with good health.
P115 [Settembrini corrects Hans:] “...Illness is definitely not elegant, and certainly not venerable -- such a view is itself a sickness, or leads to it. Perhaps I can best arouse your abhorrence of that idea by telling you that it is outdated and ugly. It comes from an era of superstitious contrition, when the idea of humanity was demeaned and distorted into a caricature, a fearful era, when harmony and health were considered suspicious and devilish, whereas infirmity in those days was as good as a passport to heaven. Reason and enlightenment, however, have banished those shadows, which once lay encamped in the human soul -- not entirely, however, for even today the battle is still being waged. That battle, however, is called work, sir, earthly labor, work for the earth, for the honor and interests of humankind. [For this life instead of for the next. Though there is also an unfortunate hint here of "Arbeit macht frei"] And steeled by each new day in battle, the powers of reason and enlightenment will liberate the human race entirely and lead it forth on paths of progress and civilization toward an ever brighter, milder, and purer light.”
...
P116 “Backsliding,” Settembrini began again... “intellectual backsliding, a return to the views of that dark, tormented age -- and believe me, my good engineer, that is itself a sickness, a sickness that has been abundantly researched and for which science has provided various names -- one from the language of aesthetics and psychology, another from that of politics, both of them academic terms of no consequence, which you may happily eschew. But since in the life of the mind all things cohere and one idea emanates from another, since one cannot give the Devil an inch but that he takes a mile, and you along with it -- and since, on the other hand, a sound principle can give rise to sound results, no matter which sound principle one may begin -- for all such reasons, then imprint this on your minds: illness is very far from being something so elegant, so venerable that it may not be associated with stupidity, even in passing. Illness is, rather, a debasement -- indeed, a painful debasement of humanity, injurious to the very concept itself. And although one may tend and nurse illness in the individual case, to honor it intellectually is an aberration -- imprint that on your minds!...
P118 [Settembrini:] “...If for his part our good engineer has already voiced analogous opinions, that only confirms my surmise that, like so many talented young men, he is playing the intellectual dilettante, temporarily experimenting with possible points of view. The talented young man is no blank page, but is rather a page where everything has already been written, so to speak, in appealing inks, the good with the bad. And it is the educator’s task explicitly to foster the true -- and by appropriate practical persuasion forever to eradicate the false when it tries to emerge...”
Now with both The Brothers Karamazov and Doctor Faustus behind me, I can’t help noticing how our Erasmus is still actively engaged with the Devil. And this is true to the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation. And, of course, this is a subject of interest to Mann. Like Settembrini, I’m not fond of this association as an absolute rule, but I do see some truth in it.
We will return to this subject later.
Excursus On the Sense of Time
P121 - [Hans:] ...For he was a patient man by nature, who could spend long hours doing nothing in particular and loved, as we recall, his leisure time, with no numbing activity to demolish, banish, or overwhelm it. At four there would be afternoon tea with cake and preserves, followed by a little exercise outdoors, and then he would come back up here to rest in the lounge chair again, with supper at seven -- which, like all the meals, brought with it certain sights and tensions that he looked forward to...
...P122 - ...We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time -- and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air, for the trip to the shore: the experience of a variety of refreshing episodes. The first few days in a new place have a youthful swing to them, a kind of sturdy, long stride -- that lasts for about six to eight days. Then, to the extent that we “settle in,” the gradual shortening becomes noticeable. Whoever clings to life, or better, wants to cling to life, may realize to his horror that the days have begun to grow light again and are scurrying past; and the last week -- or, let us say, four -- is uncanny in its fleeting transience... The first few days at home after a change of scene are likewise experienced in a new, broad, more youthful fashion -- but only a very few, for we are quicker to grow accustomed to the old rules than to their abrogation. And if our sense of time has grown weary with age or was never all that strongly developed -- a sign of an inborn lack of vitality -- it very soon falls asleep again, and within twenty-four hours it is as if we were never gone and our journey were merely last night’s dream.
From this perspective, Marcel, in In Search of Lost Time, was the perfect traveler, as he felt the change of place so acutely.
P132 - [Settembrini on music] “...Music . . . there is something only semi-articulate about it, something dubious, irresponsible, indifferent. You will object, I presume, that it can also be quite clear... It is not true clarity, but a dreamy, empty clarity that demands nothing of us, a clarity without consequences, and therefore dangerous, because it seduces us to take our ease beside it. But, if you like, let music assume its most high-minded pose. Fine! And then our emotions are inflamed. And yet the real point should be to inflame our reason. Music, it would appear, is movement for its own sake -- although I suspect it of quietism. Let me overstate my case: my distaste for music is political.”
This is basically a Platonic position. And the best example I can think of for what Settembrini is saying are those show stopping numbers in the play Titus!, delivered after the singer loses her tongue. We are stirred and all but compelled to rise and give her a standing ovation even though we can understand not a single syllable of her song. Music is about emotion, not meaning.
...
“...Music is invaluable as the ultimate means for awakening our zeal, a power that draws the mind trained for its effects forward and upward. But literature must precede it. By itself, music cannot draw the world forward. By itself, music is dangerous. And for you in particular, my good engineer, it is absolutely dangerous. I read that at once from your face as I arrived just now.”...
That’s a comment that doesn’t really pay off until the final chapter, if memory serves -- and again, this brings us to the musical reference to The Sorrows of Young Werther. Though I have to say that that really works better with the next war, the Götterdämmerung War. Shit! If Mann had handled the aftermath of Peeperkorn just a little bit differently, you would have to consider the love triangle here in terms of the triangle in Young Werther. Unless we are to think of the personalities as subsumed by their national identities. This is getting as ridiculous as Goethe’s Faust. I’ll be discovering a Marxist reading next.
P134 [Joachim on music and time in general and the fortnightly concert in particular] “...it is an enjoyable change. It fills a few hours for us so nice and properly, I think. It divides them up and gives some content to each, so that there’s something to them after all -- whereas normally the hours and days and weeks hang so awfully heavy on one’s hands. Such an unpretentious concert piece lasts perhaps seven minutes, am I correct? And each piece is something all to itself, has a beginning and an end, stands out in contrast to the rest, and that is what keeps them, in some sense, from being swallowed up in the general routine. And, besides, each is then divided up into several parts itself -- into melodic phrases, and those by the rhythm itself -- so that something’s always going on and every moment takes on a certain meaning that a person can hold on to, whereas otherwise -- I don’t know if I’m putting it right, but . . .”
“Bravo!” Settembrini cried. “Bravo, lieutenant. You have described very nicely an indubitably moral element in the nature of music: to wit, that by its peculiar and lively means of measurement, it lends an awareness, both intellectual and precious, to the flow of time. Music awakens -- and in that sense it is moral. Art is moral, in that it awakens. But what if it were to do the opposite? If it were to numb us asleep, counteract all activity and progress? And music can do that as well. It knows all too well the effect that opiates have. A devilish effect, gentlemen. Opiates are the Devil’s tool, for they create dullness, rigidity, stagnation, slavish inertia. There is something dubious about music, gentlemen. I maintain that music is ambiguous by its very nature...”
P135 He went on speaking in these terms for a while, and Hans Castorp listened, too, but was unable to follow the argument very well -- not only because of his weariness, but also because he was distracted by the conviviality among the flighty young people down on the steps... They were ill, both of them -- all the same, it certainly showed what peculiar social customs young people had up here. The band was playing a polka.
This comment more properly belongs with chapter 2, but it’s a little surprising that Hans seems to have no religious context at all.
I will continue with Chapter 4 next time.
Jump to Next: TMM - Chapter 4
No comments:
Post a Comment