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The Magic Mountain
Danse Macabre
I’ve been looking forward to this section. Let’s see what Mann tells us about death and dying here.
The Austrian horseman demonstrates a desperate fear of death through his financially ruinous call for oxygen. This is neither honorable nor spiritual.
Young Leila is quite childish, which is not unreasonable but also fails to hint at any Dostoevskean moral improvement by the confrontation with death.
Fritz Rotbein, the businessman who speaks of the European flower business and considers his own rib resection (as I would) as a doubtful business proposition.
And now for what I think may be the coup de gras for poor Hans,
P362 Behrens:
“...You did a proper bit of courting there at the end -- got in just under the wire, didn’t you? [they are fumigating Leila’s room after her death] I like that about you -- taking on my little lung-whistlers in their cages, seeing as you’re in relatively robust health yourself. A nice trait. No, no -- you cannot deny it, it’s a very pretty trait in your character. Would you like me to introduce you to some patients now and then? I’ve plenty other caged finches here -- that’s if you’re still interested. For instance I’m just about to look in on ‘Lady Overblown.’ Do you want to come along?...”
...
P365 ... He [a doctor in Zurich] had overblown her! [Pneumothorax]... The upshot was that she had come back up here in an overblown state, with constriction of the heart and shortness of breath -- ha! Hee hee hee -- and Behrens had sworn like a trooper and sent her straight to bed. Because she was now seriously ill... Ha ha ha -- look at his face, what a funny face! And pointing a finger at Hans Castorp, she laughed so hard at the face he was making that her forehead began to turn purple... “You are literally hovering between life and death,” he [Behrens] had shouted... What a bear he was -- ha ha ha...
It was not clear why the director’s comments had sent her into gales of laughter. Was it because he had “turned the air blue” and she did not really believe him -- or that she did believe him, as she surely must, but found her state of “hovering between life and death” too funny for words?... [Hans Castorp] sent her flowers all the same -- but never saw the gleeful Frau Zimmermann again... For after being kept under oxygen for several days, she had died in the arms of her husband, who had been called to her bedside by telegram. “A jumbo-size goose,” the director had volunteered in summary when he told Hans Castorp the news.
...
P367 ...Lauro [Tous-les-deux’s surviving son] turned out to be an astonishingly pretty young man with glowing eyes... but he carried on in such a dramatic, boastful way that the visitors -- Hans Castorp no less than Joachim Ziemssen -- were both happy to close the patient’s door behind them again... pretty Lauro had gushed on and on in surging, clanking, and unbearably high-flown French phrases about how he intended to die a hero’s death, comme heros, a l’espagnol, just like his brother, de meme que son fier jeune frere, Fernando, who likewise had died a Spanish hero. And he went on like that -- speaking with broad gestures, ripping back his shirt to expose his yellow chest to the fatal blow -- until a coughing fit stifled his rodomontade, bringing delicate, rusty-colored froth to his lips and giving the cousins an excuse to withdraw on tiptoe.
P368 They said nothing further about their visit with Lauro, and even in the quiet of their own rooms, they refrained from judging his behavior. They both enjoyed, however, their visits with Anton Karlovitch Ferge from Saint Petersburg, a fellow with a huge good-natured moustache and a protruding Adam’s apple that somehow seemed equally good-natured; he lay there in his bed, recovering very slowly and with great difficulty from an attempted pneumothorax, which, Herr Ferge said, had come within an inch of costing him his life. It had been a severe shock to his system, a pleural shock...
I’ve included this introduction because we will see more of Herr Ferge, but he is really not part of this examination of people’s reaction to death, so I won’t include any more. I do like Ferge. He tells interesting stories about his prior life in Russia as a traveling fire-insurance salesman and is insistent that he never speaks about “higher things” but only sticks to the facts.
...
P370 ...From time to time they also visited Teddy, the boy from the Fridericianum, an elegant, refined, blond fourteen year-old, who had a private nurse and wore white silk tie-string pajamas. He was an orphan, but rich, as he himself admitted... on days when he was feeling better he would sometimes leave his bed for an hour, put on a handsome, sporty outfit, and join the social whirl downstairs. The ladies liked to tease him, and he enjoyed listening to their conversations... Then he would go lie down again. And So Teddy idled his time away, elegantly, making it clear that he expected nothing more of life than this.
Frau von Mallinckrodt sounds like Anna K, but worse, and without Anna's good qualities. Also, Mann has a fondness for extreme German names like Mallinckrodt. Doctor Faustus is filled with them.
P371 In room number 50 lay Frau Mallinckrodt -- Natalie was her first name. She had black eyes and wore golden earrings; a flirt who loved her finery, she was nevertheless a perfect Job, a Lazarus in a female body, whom God had visited with every sort of affliction. Her organism seemed to be so inundated by toxins that she was ravaged by numerous illnesses, sometimes alternately, sometimes all at once... In short, the woman’s life was a horror. She was all alone in the world, too, having left her husband and children -- as she freely admitted to the cousins -- for another man (still half a boy), only to be left in turn by her lover. She now had no home, although she was not penniless -- her former husband saw to that... Well aware that she was a faithless and sinful woman, she bore all the plagues of job with amazing patience and poise, with a fiery female’s elemental powers of resistance, she triumphed over the misery of her dark-skinned body, even turning a white gauze bandage, which she was forced to wear wrapped around her head for some awful reason, into a becoming piece of attire. She was constantly changing her jewelry... With golden rings dangling at her ears, she quickly told the cousins what had happened to her: about the respectable, but boring husband, her equally respectable and boring children, who had turned out just like their father and whom she had never especially warmed to, and about the half-grown boy with whom she had run off and whose poetic displays of affection she praised at length...
P372 ...The poetic adolescent’s delicacy only served to spur... [Hans] to take the opposite course, to find occasion for paying frequent visits to unhappy Frau von Mallinckrodt and for performing little nursing services that required no special training... He performed these little services when he would drop by on his way to the dinning hall or after a walk, telling Joachim to go on ahead... and each time he felt his whole being expand with a joy rooted in a sense of helpfulness and quiet importance, but intermingled with a certain jaunty delight in the spotless Christian impression his good deeds made -- an impression so devout, caring, and praiseworthy, in fact, that no serious objections whatever could be raised against it, either from the military or a humanistic-pedagogic standpoint.
Again, we have a not very spiritual response to serious disease by a not at all spiritual woman. One could certainly understand this Natalie throwing herself under a train, while Anna -- besides being a more interesting person -- still had so much more going for her. Though I guess it’s actually more accurate to say that it was Leo Tolstoy who threw Anna under the train.
And I can’t help thinking that Mann, in this section, is really throwing Tolstoy and Dostoevsky under a sort of train.
P373 We have not yet mentioned Karen Karstedt, although Hans Castorp and Joachim took special interest in her. She was one of Behren’s private outpatients, and the director had commended her to the cousin’s charity. She had been up here four years now, was penniless herself and dependent on skinflint relatives... She lived in an inexpensive boardinghouse in Dorf -- nineteen years old, a slip of a thing, with smooth oily hair, eyes that shyly tried to hide a glint that matched the hectic flush of her cheeks, and a distinctively husky but sympathetic voice. She coughed almost incessantly and had bandages on all her fingers, the result of open sores from the toxins in her body.
...
Lengthy description of an outing the three take to see a skating event in Dorf and bobsled races. And there’s a description of attending the “Bioscope Theater”, an early cinema. There they run into Frau Stohr who ends up attempting “to get to the bottom of the relationship of these three young people”,
p378 ...It was true, after all, that for Hans Castorp the relationship with poor Karen was a kind of substitute, a vaguely useful device -- but that was true of all his other charitable enterprises as well. Yet these pious works were, at the same time, an end in themselves, and the satisfaction he found in... seeing poor Karen clap her hands with joy and gratitude... was not only of a vicarious and relative kind, but also genuine and immediate. It arose from an intellectual tradition diametrically opposed to the one represented by Herr Settembrini’s pedagogy, but all the same one quite worthy of the designation “placet experiri” -- or so it seemed to Hans Castorp.
P379 [The three are walking again after breakfast,] ...A cemetery was visible about a quarter of the way up its [Dorfberg’s?] slope: the town cemetery, surrounded by a wall, presumably commanding a lovely view... which made it an obvious goal for a walk. And the three of them did hike up there one beautiful morning... The cousins, one with a brick-red face, the other tanned bronze, walked along without overcoats, which would only have been burdensome in the glaring sun -- young Ziemssen wearing sport clothes and rubber galoshes, Hans Castorp dressed much the same, though in long trousers, since he was not the sort who gave much thought to his physique. It was between the beginning and the middle of February of a new year. Yes, the last number in the date had indeed changed since Hans Castorp’s arrival up here...
P380 And so the trio also walked to the cemetery on Dorfberg one day -- this excursion, too, is recorded here for the sake of rendering a full account... Karen Karstedt did not indulge in self-deception about even the final stages of her illness; she knew only too well how things stood and what the necrosis in her fingertips meant. She knew, moreover, that her skinflint relatives would hardly want to hear anything about the expense of transporting her home after her demise and that she would be allotted a modest plot up above for a final resting place. And so one might very well conclude that, as a goal for an excursion, [Hans had suggested it] it was more morally fitting than many others -- the movie theater or the start of the bobsled run, for instance...
P381 ...Standing there in the snow beside the little stone gate to the cemetery, they took in the view and then entered, swinging aside the unlocked wrought-iron grill hinged to the stone.
...The silence, the solitude, the serenity of the place seemed both deep and secret, in many senses of those words...
...As for the inscriptions, the names came from every corner of the earth, were written in English, Russian or other Slavic languages, in German, Portuguese, and many more tongues. The dates, however, had their own delicate individuality -- on the whole these life spans had been strikingly short, the difference in years between birth and demise averaging little more than twenty. The field was populated almost exclusively by youth rather than virtue, by unsettled folk who had found their way here from all over the world and had returned now for good and all to the horizontal form of existence.
This is also suggestive of all the Great War cemeteries soon to dot Europe. Both the short lifespans and the widespread origins. And weren’t they gathered there at least in part because of the toxins in their bodies politic? If not in their own bodies.
Where have I heard it said about suicide that at some point the question is not, “Why should you kill yourself?” but rather “Why not?” (Perhaps this was that book about Michel Foucault.) Perhaps we should look at the Great War the same way, the question finally was “Why not go off to war?” America, strangely, was really the only nation that failed to see the logic behind that question in 1914.
Since this book is, too a large extent, also about the Great War, it’s worth asking now, a century later, if the Pax Americana is indeed coming to an end after almost seventy years, if this isn’t at least in part because the public -- and this time it’s the American public as well -- is starting to ask itself, “Why not go off to war and death?”
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