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The Magic Mountain
Highly Questionable
P779 [About Krokowski’s lectures] ... His field of study had always been concerned with those dark, vast regions of the human soul that are called the subconscious, although one would perhaps do better to speak of the superconscious, since there are occasions when the knowledge that rises up from those regions far exceeds an individual’s conscious knowledge, suggesting that there may be connections and associations between the bottommost unlighted tracts of the individual soul and an omniscient universal soul. [Wasn’t I just speculating about this? In my other blog, HERE. (Dually sentient in first section.)] The realm of the subconscious, the “occult’ realm in the etymological sense of the word, very quickly turns out to be occult in the narrower sense as well and forms one of the sources for phenomena that emerge from it and to which we apply the same makeshift term... Any man who recognizes an organic symptom of illness to be the product of forbidden emotions that assume hysterical form in conscious psychic life also recognizes the creative power of the psyche in the material world -- a power he is then forced to declare to be the second source of magical phenomena. As an idealist of the pathological, if not to say a pathological idealist, such a man will see himself at the starting point of a sequence of thought that very quickly flows into the problem of being-in-general -- that is to say, into the problem of the relationship between mind and matter. The materialist, as the son of a philosophy of pure robust health, can never be argued out of his belief that the mind is a phosphorescent product of matter; whereas the idealist, who proceeds from the principle of creative hysteria, will tend to answer, indeed will very soon definitively answer the question of primacy in exactly the opposite terms. All in all, this is nothing less that the old argument over which came first, the chicken or the egg...
I had forgotten about this, though I remembered the story of Ellen Brand. And this, I hardly need to point out at this point, goes back to Goethe again and that tossed off comment of Settembrini’s that he didn’t want to talk about what Goethe had said at the time of the earthquake at Messina.
The Great Petulance
Again, and I think for the last time, I admit I’m not sure if this is about the teens or the twenties. Probably both when it comes to Germany, perhaps more the teens when it comes to Europe as a whole.
I’m tempted to skip over Naphta’s last lecture. It is especially tempting as there is actually some plot in this section. However, as I’m almost certain this will be my last reading of TMM, I want to make sure I’m not missing anything important here. It would be like Mann to toss in something important just where we are most likely to skip over it.
P827 ...the conversation was actually a monologue by Naphta... a monologue of a quite peculiar and antisocial sort... addressed exclusively to Hans Castorp.
P828 ...the topic... was aimed at proving in dismal fashion that all life’s intellectual phenomena are ambiguous, that nature is equivocal and any grand concepts abstracted from her are strategically useless, and at demonstrating how iridescent are the robes that the Absolute dons on earth.
At best one could have seen this lecture as devoted to the problem of freedom, which he treated as the basis for confusion. Among other things, he spoke about Romanticism and the fascinating duality of this early nineteenth-century European movement, before which both reactionary and revolutionary ideas fell, that is all those that were not synthesized to something higher still. [I think of Romanticism as more 18th century.] For it was, of course, quite ridiculous to try to tie the concept of revolution exclusively to progress and a victoriously onrushing Enlightenment. European Romanticism was above all a movement of liberation: both anticlassical and antiacademic, directed against outmoded classicism, the old school of reason, whose defenders it scorned as powdered periwigs.
And Naphta moved on to the German Wars of Liberation, to Fichtean enthusiasms and the delirious, song-singing popular uprising against an intolerable tyranny -- which unfortunately, hee hee, had embodied freedom, that is, the idea of revolution. How very amusing. Bellowing their anthems, they had raised their arms to smash revolutionary tyranny in favor of rule by reactionary princes -- and had done so in the name of freedom.
Sadly (for me, not Europe), I don’t have Pirenne’s notes on this later phase of European history. But this is a period I know a little better, though I hardly recognize it from this “doublespeak” wording. “Wars of Liberation” indeed. This was the period when liberal revolts were repeatedly put down in Germany sending wave after wave of refugees (and rich pastry) to America. Germany was less “liberated” and more “unified” under the worst of the royal houses, the Hohenzollerns. “Reactionary princes” is at least an apt description of the House Hohenzollern. I do suggest you read at least the first paragraph of THIS Wiki entry about Fichte. I had forgotten that he, and not Hegel, is responsible for the thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
His youthful listener was sure to have noticed... the difference, or even contradiction, between external and internal freedom -- and at the same time the ticklish question as to which form of unfreedom was least or most likely... to be compatible with a nation’s honor.
I wish I knew what he means here. Perhaps that “Germans” gained their freedom from France and Austria but at the cost of a loss of personal freedom within the Prussian German Empire?
Freedom was in fact probably more an idea of Romanticism than of the Enlightenment, for as a concept it shared with Romanticism the same complex, never-to-be-disentangled interlocking of the human instinct to expand and the passionate, constricting thrust of the individual ego. The thirst for individual freedom had brought forth the bellicose, cult of nationalism, which humanitarian liberalism called sinister, although it, too, taught the doctrine of individualism, but from a slightly different angle. Individualism was romantically medieval in its belief in the infinite, cosmic importance of each single creature, from which came the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the theory of geocentrism, and astrology. On the other hand, individualism was a matter of liberal humanism, which tended toward anarchy and wanted at all costs to protect the precious individual from being sacrificed to the interests of the whole. That was individualism, one thing and yet another, a word for all seasons.
P829 ...this pathos for freedom had also brought forth shining foes of freedom, brilliant knights of tradition who did battle with irreverent, seditious progress. And Naphta named Arndt, [maybe HERE?] who had cursed industrialism and exalted the nobility, named Gorres, who had written a Christian Mysticism. And did not mysticism likewise have something to do with freedom? Had it not... been antischolastic, antidogmatic, anticlerical? One was compelled... to see the Church’s hierarchy as a force for freedom, since it formed a barrier against absolute monarchy. The mysticism of the late Middle Ages... had demonstrated a liberating tendency by acting as a forerunner of the Reformation... which for its part had been a tangled snarl of freedom and medieval reaction.
Luther’s deed... had the virtue of demonstrating in the crudest, most graphic terms, the questionable nature of any deed, of action in general... A deed... was the assassination of Privy Councillor Kotzebue by Karl Sand, who had belonged to a radical fraternity. And what... had put the weapon in Karl Sand’s hand? A love of freedom... And yet when you looked closer, it wasn’t actually so much that as moral fanaticism and hatred of imported foreign frivolity...
There's a Jane Austen connection to Kotzebue!
I suppose, given what we said recently about the death wish, that Naphta had sought an honorable death in a duel makes some sense. When Settembrini refused to comply, he was forced to take the less honorable route. One almost wonders why Mann didn’t have them both seek this way out of their exile on the Magic Mountain. But then Mann still needs Settembrini for one last thing.
The Thunderbolt
P844 [Hans Castorp] ...no longer carried his pocket watch. It had stopped... and he refrained from having it put into measuring rotation again -- for the same reasons he had long ago dispensed with calendars... for reasons of “freedom,” that is. It was his way of honoring the stroll by the shore, the abiding ever-and-always, the hermetic magic, to which once withdrawn from the world, he had proved so susceptible -- the magic that had been his soul’s fundamental adventure, in which all the alchemistic adventures of that simple stuff had been played out.
...
P845 Then came the rumble of thunder --
...It was... a historic thunderclap that shook the foundations of the earth; but for us it is the thunderclap that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates. There he sits in the grass, sheepishly rubbing his eyes, like a man who, despite many an admonition, has failed to read the daily papers.
...
P848 ...He saw that the enchantment was broken, that he was released, set free -- not by his own actions... but set free by elementary external forces, for whom his liberation was a very irrelevant matter... If life was to receive back her sinful problem child, it could not happen on the cheap, but only like this, in a serious, rigorous fashion, as a kind of ordeal, which in this case did not perhaps mean life so much as it meant three salvos fired in his, the sinner’s honor... [What Joachim had received after his death.]
[Our last glimpse of Hans,] p852 ...What’s this? He’s singing? The way a man sings to himself in moments of dazed, thoughtless excitement, without even knowing -- and he uses what tatters of breath he has left to sing to himself:
Upon its bark I’ve ca-arved there
So many words of love -- [Schubert, of course.]
...
P853 Farewell, Hans Castorp, life’s faithful problem child. Your story is over. We have told it to its end; it was neither short on diversion nor long on boredom -- it was a hermetic story. We told it for its own sake, not yours, for you were a simple fellow. But it was your story at last, and since it happened to you, there surely must have been something to you...
...There were moments when, as you “played king,” you saw the intimations of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round -- will love someday rise up out of this, too?
Finis Operis
I’m still surprised that reading Pirenne has made the most difference to this rereading of TMM. I knew it would be handy, but I hadn’t realized quite to what extent TMM is a survey course in European thought. Yes, it’s about the competing ideas just before and just after the Great War, but it really touches on everything in the Western tradition. Judging by the lack of enthusiasm in my book club, I think Mann failed at making this intellectual review interesting enough, but still it is an admirable attempt. How could you do it better?
I think the book is almost too combative when it comes to the dialectic of Settembrini and Naphta. Would something more collegial have been even better? For example, since I’m just mentioned Pirenne, what if two university scholars had been imprisoned together during the Great War instead of just Pirenne toiling on his own? They would together cover the history of Europe only from somewhat different perspectives. (Pirenne’s Belgian perspective vs either a French or German perspective -- I’m sure there were a few German intellectuals who pissed off the 2nd Reich.) They could bounce ideas off each other. And they would work faster so as to cover all of European history. I would read that.
One of my favorite Medium authors just published a piece on why it isn’t essential to write at book length. Some writers are better with short pieces, either fiction or nonfiction, and some subjects simply don’t require hundreds of pages to cover properly. And I agree with her, but for this project I would actually like to see something closer in length to In Search of Lost Time or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It should take years to read this.
This does, unfortunately, remind me a bit of Settembrini’s Encyclopedia of Suffering. The work I have in mind would say everything there is to say about all the major ideas in European thought. And it would increasingly refer back to itself as it contrasted the latest notion with ideas from the past.
And that, I believe, is the end of both The Magic Mountain and this blog.
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