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The Magic Mountain
I’m looking forward to this as it will be my first reading since reading Goethe’s Faust and the famous waterfall scene there. (Nope. Nothing about the sun or sunlight. I’ve got nothing.)
And what to think of Peeperkorn’s exit? I guess a part of his fondness for the simple pleasures of life was a determination not to outlive a vigorous life. He wanted to die with his boots on. We don’t learn Clavdia’s side of it. Was there an ED problem. If there were a contemporary film made of this part of the book would there be a scene in which Peeperkorn was reviewing a pamphlet with “Ask your doctor if Viagra is right for you”?
Here’s a good Modernist analysis of TMM.
P747 ...It seemed to Hans Castorp that not only he had come to this dead standstill, that the world, all of it, the “whole thing,” was in much the same state... it had seemed to the young man as if there were something uncanny about the world and life. As if there were something peculiar, something increasingly askew and disquieting about it, as if a demon had seized power, an evil and crazed demon, who had long exercised considerable influence, but now declared his lordship with such unrestrained candor that he could instill in you secret terrors, even prompt you to think of fleeing. The demon’s name was Stupor.
...
P755 ...Hans Castorp... sat for a long time at the table... brooding, gripped by the horror of the eerie and skewed state in which he saw the world entrapped, by the grinning demon and monkey-god in whose crazed and unrestrained power he now found himself -- and whose name was “The Great Stupor.”
...He was afraid. It was as if “all this” could come to no good end, as if the end was surely a catastrophe, a rebellion of patient nature, a thunderstorm and a great cleansing wind that would break the spell cast over the world, wrench life for its “dead standstill,” and overturn the “doldrums” in a terrible Last Judgment. He longed to flee...
Fullness of Harmony
Valentin is the brother of the girl Faust seduces and leaves with a child. Faust kills Valentin in a dual and Marguerite (Gretchen) is condemned to death after she kills the baby. This sequence somehow leads to Faust’s being “saved” at the very end.
P774 Now we come to the most important of the musical offerings, Schubert’s “Lindenbaum.” This, again, goes back to Goethe, only it’s The Sorrows of Young Werther this time.
P775 ...But it is, we must admit, a very tricky task to explain what this last work... this old “linden tree,” meant to... [Hans], and the greatest care must be given to nuance, if we are not to do more harm than good.
... an object created by the human spirit and intellect, which means a significant object, is “significant” in that it points beyond itself, is an expression and exponent of a more universal spirit and intellect, of a whole world of feelings and ideas that have found a more or less perfect image of themselves in that object... Moreover, love for such an object is itself equally “significant.” It says something about the person who feels it, it defines his relationship to the universe, to the world represented by the created object and... loved along with it.
P776 Does anyone believe that our ordinary hero, after a certain number of years of hermetic and pedagogic enhancement, had penetrated deeply enough into the life of the intellect and the spirit for him to be conscious of the “significance” of this object and his love for it? We assert, we recount, that he had. The song meant a great deal to him, a whole world -- a world that he evidently must have loved... We know what we are saying when we add -- perhaps somewhat darkly -- that his fate might have been different if his disposition had not been so highly susceptible to the charms of the emotional sphere, to the universal state of mind that this song epitomized so intensely, so mysteriously...
...What was this world that stood behind it, which his intuitive scruples told him was a world of forbidden love?
It was death.
...
...behind this sweet, lovely, fair work of art stood death. It had special ties with death, ties one might indeed love, but not without first “playing king,” [taking stock] not without intuitively taking into account a certain illegitimacy in such love... to feel spiritual and intellectual sympathy with it was to feel sympathy with death... in its train came the workings of darkness.
P777 What was all this he had himself believing? He would not let any of you talk him out of it. The workings of darkness. Dark workings. Torturers at work, misanthropy dressed in Spanish black with a starched ruff and with lust in place of love -- the outcome of steadfast, pious devotion.
...Hans Castorp’s sweet, lovely, fair song of nostalgia, the emotional world to which it belonged, his love for that world -- they were supposed to be “sick”? Not at all. There was nothing more healthy, more genial on earth. Except that this was a fruit -- a fresh, plump, healthy fruit, that was liable, extraordinarily liable, to begin to rot and decay at that very moment, or perhaps the next... It was a fruit of life, sired by death and pregnant with death. It was a miracle of the soul -- the ultimate miracle, perhaps, in the eyes of unscrupulous beauty... Both a miracle and, in response to the final compelling voice of conscience, the means by which he triumphed over himself.
P778 ...In the solitude of night, Hans Castorp’s thoughts, or intuitive half-thoughts, soared high as he sat before his truncated musical coffin . . . ah, they soared higher than his understanding, were thoughts enhanced, forced upward by alchemy. Oh, it was mighty, this enchantment of the soul... the song’s best son may yet have been the young man who consumed his life in triumphing over himself and died, a new word on his lips, the word of love, which he did not yet know how to speak. It was truly worth dying for, this song of enchantment. But he who died for it was no longer really dying for this song and was a hero only because ultimately he died for something new -- for the new word of love and for the future in his heart.
Those, then, were Hans Castorp’s favorite recordings.
Up to that last paragraph I thought I knew what Mann was doing. This song is a wonderful expression of the German death-wish and we’ve been cultivating this passion from those early chapters describing the deaths of Hans’s parents and grandfather. (I wonder if TMM is at all popular in Japan? Japanese culture puts Germany to shame when it comes to the death-wish.) But he lost me with the new word of love. No clue what he has in mind.
After "Snow," I think this section may be the most important of the book. At least I think Mann would have felt that way. And with that in mind I'm going to make this a short post.
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