185. The Sorrows of Young Werther

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The Sorrows of Young Goethe... I mean Werther 
--by Goethe 

Book One 


He was a romantic boy of 24 when he wrote this in 1774, before not only the French Revolution but the American one too. It would be most accurate to say that he wasn’t yet “Goethe” at this point. 

This is such a different Goethe than the one I’m used to from Faust. So Romantic it reminds me of Marianne Dashwood.


P32 Describing a drawing he’s made, ...I sat down on a plough across from them, and took great pleasure in drawing this brotherly picture. I added the fence that was near them, a barn door and a few broken cart-wheels, all simply the way it was, and after an hour I found I had produced a harmoniously correct and arresting drawing without putting into it anything whatsoever of my own. This confirmed me in my resolve to keep to Nature alone in future. Only Nature has inexhaustible riches, and only Nature creates a great artist. A good deal can be said of the advantages of rules, much the same as can be said in praise of bourgeois society. A man shaped by rules will never produce anything tasteless or bad, just as a citizen who observes laws and decorum will never be an unbearable neighbor or an out-and-out villain; and yet on the other hand, say what you please, the rules will destroy the true feeling of Nature and its true expression!.. You ask why the torrent of genius so rarely pours forth, so rarely floods and thunders and overwhelms your astonished soul? -- Because, dear friends, on either bank dwell the cool, respectable gentlemen, whose summer-houses, tulip beds and cabbage patches would all be washed away, and who are therefore highly skilled in averting future dangers in good time, by damming and digging channels.

p33 The particular mention of sugar and white bread is interesting. What does this tell us, mid-18th century?

The hero has at last met his soul mate... or, apparently, his second soul mate, as he was missing a previous one a bit earlier. Reading this I get a better idea of why Goethe was so popular in his day. This Romantic (now in both senses) young Goethe is indeed appealing and not as difficult as the Goethe of Faust. I can see that he would have been the Hermann Hesse of his time -- the writer that especially appealed to the young 10%. Especially the ones eager to escape from the bourgeoisie and realize their full artistic/intellectual potential. 

I needed to read Faust, and I’m glad I did, but it’s a mistake to start Goethe with Faust.

P47 [Werther, at a family gathering]... ‘let us consider ill-humor a disease, and inquire whether there is no remedy for it.’ -- ‘I should be glad to hear of one,’ said Lotte. ‘I for one believe a great deal depends on ourselves. That is how it is with me. If something is annoying and dispiriting me, I leap up and sing a few country dance tunes in the garden, and feel better in no time at all.’ -- ‘That is exactly what I was trying to say,’ I replied. ‘Ill-humor is just like indolence; in fact it is a kind of indolence. We are inclined that way by nature, but if we only have the strength to pull ourselves together our work goes wonderfully and we take real pleasure in what we are doing.’ ... 

Does Goethe  mean to be ironic here? I ask knowing how this story will eventually end.

Yes, I keep thinking of Marianne Dashwood and John Willoughby. Marianne, I think, plays the part of Werther in their romance. We’ll see if that observation holds up.


P53 ...There is a melody, a simple but moving air, which she plays on the piano, with angelic skill...

...How that simple song enthralls me! And how well she knows when to play it, often at times when I would gladly put a bullet through my head! The darkness and madness of my soul are dispelled, and I breathe more freely again. 

I think this is the first Goethe has let us see the tortured romantic soul inside our enthusiastic hero. On a whim, I just did a search on “goethe bipolar” and found this:

................................
Goethe: A bipolar personality? Periodicity of affective states in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as reflected by Paul Julius Möbius.

This paper aims to investigate the character and etiological basis of German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's mental disorder. From 1898, German neuropsychiatrist Paul Julius Möbius developed the hypothesis that Goethe's work provided several hints for the notion that the German poet suffered from a distinct bipolar disorder. The paper investigates Möbius's psychopathographic study on Goethe and his hypothesis of a mood periodicity in Goethe against the mirror of modern concepts. Möbius came to the conclusion that Goethe's illness was bipolar in character and became visible at intervals of seven years and lasted for about two years. The majority of Möbius's contemporary psychiatric colleagues (Emil Kraepelin, Max Isserlin, Ernst Kretschmer, Josef Breuer) supported this view which has still not been convincingly challenged. In present-day terms, Möbius's hypothesis can be best mirrored as a subclinical foundation of mood disorder. Furthermore, with his extensive study, Möbius disproved the common notion that Goethe had suffered from an illness as the result of a syphilitic infection.
...........................
...

P55 ...The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs leads him to do so, will always be a fool. 

The Romantic Creed or an 18th century version of “follow your bliss.”
...

P56 Albert, the "intended" of Lotte, has arrived..


P57 ...I cannot help esteeming Albert. His tranquil evenness of manner is in marked contrast to the turbulence of my own disposition, which I cannot hide. He is a man of feeling, and knows very well what Lotte is worth. He seems to be almost free of ill-humor, which as you know is the human evil I loathe above all others.

P61-63 Less than half way in and Werther is having a heated argument with Albert over suicide, arguing for, of course, and making it clear that this is a subject he thinks about a lot. If you view Marianne’s actions while at Cleveland as a suicide attempt, and I think this is how we are meant to see it, she is a perfect example of Werther’s argument for suicide. And since Werther uses illness as his metaphor, Austen does an even better job, as she shows us rather than simply telling us. Except that in Marianne’s case, her reason at last comes to her aid -- if it isn’t merely her animal vitality -- and she finds she does have another option. It would be interesting to know what Goethe thought of Austen and her Marianne.

I now try to keep in mind the Marianne (and the Mrs Dashwood) of the 2008 mini-series, but the written Marianne is a much more annoying creature, and the written Werther is just as annoying. This book needs an Elinor. And I do wonder how close Goethe is to his Werther. Is he exaggerating at all? He at least lived to write the tale, but was he really such a dervish of sensibility? I give the author credit for letting us see that even Lotte seems to find him a bit much at times.

Book Two 

At this point, a little more than half through the book, the story shifts from being a fictionalized account of Goethe’s own experience to being based on the life of someone else -- Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, by name. Or this is partly true as we still are hearing about his love for Lotte. The plot outline is based on Jerusalem but it is filled in with Goethe’s emotion.

P80 Werther has had an embarrassing run-in with the snobbish nobility. They were offended to find a commoner in their company and so demanded that Werther’s noble friends send him away, which they did. This is interesting to me because we see why the bourgeoisie tended to be so careful and correct, in an attempt to blend in with and be accepted by noble society. Or failing that, to show that their bourgeois society was not inferior. Marcel, the protagonist of In Search of Lost Time, is certainly a descendant of Werther (and Goethe?) in this respect. And so is Swann.

P103 Werther, while out for a walk, runs into a man who has lost his senses. After hearing his story from himself and then from his mother who comes to fetch him, “...Dear God in heaven, was this the Fate Thou hast ordained for Man: that he should only be happy before he has yet attained his reason, or after he has lost it again?...” 

Again the notion that it’s reason (individuation) that isolates man from his bliss.


P106 We have come to the exciting (and heavy handedly foreshadowed) crisis of this story. This is signalled by our dropping out of the flow of letters into a passage of narration. But before we get to that, I need to say something about Werther’s passion -- which is so like Hans Castorp’s passion in some ways. It would be strange to mention Lilith here, as this was before Goethe wrote those lines, but one gets the feeling that Werther may as well be the victim of Lilith. Goethe depicts him as being helpless to resist his Lotte. This was just emphasized by the account of the person above who lost his reason, we are subsequently informed that he too developed a passion for Lotte, revealed it to her, lost his position and then his reason. While Werther says nothing bad about Lotte (she is from all we can tell the perfect woman) she seems to have the effect on men almost of the succubus described in Doctor Faustus. The gender-bending surrounding Adrian and Hans makes all this truly confusing, but just at face value, Mann and Goethe seem to be giving “woman” a demonic power over men.

P110 “...his own remarkable sensibility and way of thinking...” is commented on here by the narrator.



P111 Back to his letters, ...”my beloved valley was flooded!... It was a fearful spectacle: the raging torrents were crashing down from the crags in the moonlight, flooding the fields and meadows... the broad valley, upstream and down, was a turbulent lake whipped by a roaring wind!... the flood before me rolled and thundered and gleamed with awesome majesty, a shudder of horror shock [shook?] me -- and then longing seized me again! Ah, there I stood, arms outstretched, above the abyss, breathing: plunge! Plunge! -- and was lost in the joyful prospect of ending my sufferings and sorrows by plunging on with a crash like the waves!... May that rapture not still lie ahead for this imprisoned soul?” 

Again, I can’t help seeing Marianne Dashwood here.


P118-119 We are finally given a peek into Lotte’s mind. Well, we are shown what Werther/Goethe would like to have seen there. It would be hard to say if the reason for this was purely selfish -- like all the love songs that include the “you’ll miss me when I’m gone” line -- or if this is solely to increase the tragedy of our tale. If Lotte and Albert’s feelings at the end are solely relief, then Werther was merely a pest who had overstayed his welcome and made a mess of his exit.

We are given a sample of Ossian here, which brings up another question about translation. Originally, the writings of Ossian were understood to be a translation into English from the Gaelic (in fact they were a contemporary fraud). Goethe translated Ossian into German and here we seem to have his translation translated back into English. (Or did our translator just go back to the “original?” But that would seem to lose whatever tone Goethe gave his translation.) I wonder how many times you can go back and forth like this before the text is reduced to gibberish?

There is a surprisingly lengthy reading, by Werther for Lotte, from Ossian on what is, in the terms of TMM, their Walpurgis Night -- right before his suicide.


Finished! Sensibility run riot. Driven to the grave by sensibility. Anyone blessed with sense would prescribe sense to Werther, as he himself has mentioned, but alas! “Sensibility,” here, also stands for mental illness. Advising someone to be not quite so ill is not all that helpful. At least Goethe had more sense than poor Jerusalem. Goethe lived to write the tale and then so much more besides. 


There are some similarities, I can’t help mentioning, between the final, passionate, meeting of Werther and Lotte, and the Walpurgis Night meeting of Hans Castorp and Clavdia. Though I can’t see all that much similarity in the two relationships -- even including what I know is to come with Herr Peeperkorn. Though, thinking of how that triangle resolves in the end, I may have to return to this in the final chapter of TMM.

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180. TMM Chapter 5. Encyclopedia

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The Magic Mountain 

Chapter 5



Eternal soup...
Sick time. I think this description of bedrest time worked better in the past. I haven’t experienced anything like that since I was a child, maybe with the measles or the chicken pox. I have a very vague recollection of days spent in a darkened bedroom when I was under eight. I take the description here mostly on faith, not really wishing my memory of those times was better than it is. 

There’s been only one time since childhood when I haven’t left my house for a week due to illness. (And even then I wasn’t in bed all the time. Which is good since I lack staff to bring me soup.)

P222 Have I already mentioned my surprise that Hans can understand the native speakers as well as he seems to? From a friend in Basel, I have heard that Germans have a very hard time with the local dialects. Is this perhaps because Hans also is familiar with Plattdeutsch? You would think he would mention that if it were the case.

Time and death (no surprise there) and the cruelty of bourgeois life. It is a little jarring -- though completely justifiable -- that the socialist has to urge on the young bourgeois patrician. Today, at our first book club meeting on TMM, I spoke of the coming duel between our humanist Erasmus (Settembrini) and our spokesman for the Reformation (I may have mentioned Luther and Calvin). But, really Naphta is more of the Counter Reformation -- except that Mann must have made him Jewish for a reason. I think he does speak to that religious fervor that was the origin of the Hussites and the Anabaptists. But Pirenne's dichotomy of Renaissance vs Reformation is so tempting. 

Just as Hans silences Settembrini here with a few questions about the state of Settembrini’s own health -- as much as he doubts the trustworthiness of Behrens, here he sits on the Magic Mountain -- I feel that Naphta would be silenced by the very secular reality of the Catholic world order that the Reformation confronted. 


“My God, I see it!”
Frauleine Engelhart ('angelic strength'): p246 Clavdia’s profile was one of softest, sweetest youth -- though it was, of course, a most interesting profile as well, not that of some healthy little goose...  

This is the romantic equivalent to the notion that illness is a sign of intellect and spirituality. At least a part of her attraction is her illness itself. And this goes beyond the observation that everyone is slightly feverish all the time.


Encyclopedia
Naphta isn’t even introduced yet and already we have a good intellectual debate. And one that touches on both Voltaire and Goethe -- which means so much of European intellectual history.

p287 Settembrini: "...Ah, you prefer oriental metaphors. Quite understandable. Asia is devouring us. Tartar faces in every direction you look... Genghis Khan," he said, "lone wolves on dusky steppes, snow and schnapps, whips and knouts,   Schlusselburg prison and Holy Orthodoxy. They ought to erect a statue of Pallas Athena here in the lobby -- as a kind of self-defense..."

Settembrini's argument about the conflict between the west and the east has been reminding me of something I ran into not too long ago, and, to my amazement I actually found it in my other blog, thoughtfully indexed under "Occident vs Orient." I think I can just paste the whole passage here:

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Vertigo by W.G. Sebald

p117 We finally learn our hero's name, Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, historian, of Landeck, Tyrol. Here's the Wiki entry on the actual person with this name. And that's where I found this, quote from Fallmerayer, 

For nearly eighteen aeons [Äonen], all history has been the result of the struggle between two basic elements, split apart by a divine power from the very beginning: a flexible life-process on the one side, and a formless, undeveloped stasis on the other. The symbol of the former is eternal Rome, with the entire Occident lying behind her; the symbol of the latter is Constantinople, with the ossified Orient.... That the Slavs might be one of the two world-factors, or if one prefers, the shadow of the shining image of European humanity, and therefore that the constitution of the earth might not admit philosophical reconstruction without their assent, is the great scholarly heresy of our time.^[15]

Doesn't that suggest Settembreni's position? Here's something else from Wiki "...in November 1850, the Munich Professor Johann Nepomuk von Ringseis delivered an 'explosive' lecture at a public session of the Bavarian Academy, where he denounced the arrival in Bavaria of a 'philosophical Left' [Fallmerayer], marked by liberalism and irreligiosity, that viewed all religion as a 'pathological condition....'"

Later we are told that,

He is remembered as "a co-founder of Byzantine studies, as discoverer of the divisive Greek theory, as a prophet of the world-historical opposition between Occident and Orient, and finally as a brilliant essayist."^[40]

Fallmerayer's account of the split between "Occident" and "Orient" hinged on his interpretation of the Russian Empire, which he perceived as a powerful blend of Slavic ethnic characteristics, Byzantine political philosophy, and Orthodox theology. Although he initially perceived this constellation  with admiration, and viewed Russia as the potential savior of Europe from Napoleon, his view changed in the mid-1840s, perhaps as a result of his encounter with Fyodor Tyutchev, and he soon came to see Russia as the major threat to Western Europe. By the late 1840s he was convinced that Russia would conquer Constantinople and the Balkans, and perhaps the further Slavic lands of the Habsburg and Prussian Empires. In the mid-1850s he was overjoyed by the success of the European/Ottoman coalition in the Crimean War.^[56]

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p297 Settembrini: "...Do you know about the Lisbon earthquake?"

"No . . . an earthquake? I've not been reading the newpapers here . . ."

"You misunderstand me... the natural phenomenon of which I speak is not a current event; it took place, incidentally, some one hundred and fifty years ago."

"Oh, yes! Wait a moment -- right! I read somewhere that Goethe said something in his bedroom one night to his valet --"

"Oh -- I don't wish to talk about that," Settembrini broke in, closing his eyes and waving one little brown hand in the air. 

"Besides, you're getting your catastrophes mixed up. You're thinking of the earthquake in Messina. I'm talking about the one that ravaged Lisbon in the year 1755."

p298 "Beg your pardon."

"Well, it was Voltaire who rose up against it."

"What do you mean 'rose up'? What did he do?"

"He rebelled, that's what. He would not accept this stroke of fate, the brutal fact of it. He refused to submit to it. He protested in the name of the mind and reason against this scandalous offense of nature, which destroyed three-quarters of a flourishing city and took thousands of human lives... Voltaire's position was that of a true descendant of those ancient Gauls who shot their arrows against heaven. You see, my good engineer, there you behold the mind's enmity toward nature, its proud mistrust of her, its greathearted insistence on the right to criticize her and her evil, irrational power. Because she is a power, and it is servile to accept her, to reconcile oneself to her -- that is to reconcile oneself to her inwardly. There you see the kind of humanism that absolutely does not become ensnared in contradictions, that is in no way guilty of a retreat into Christian toadying, even though it resolves to see in the body the evil force, the antagonist... One must respect and defend it [the body], when it serves the cause of emancipation and beauty, of freedom of the senses, of happiness and desire. one must despise it insofar as it is the principle of gravity and inertia opposing the flow toward the light, insofar as it represents the principle of disease and death, insofar as its quintessence is a matter of perversity, of corruption, of lust and disgrace."

A passage to recall when we come to "Snow" in the next chapter.


Voltaire and the Earthquake in Lisbon
Voltaire certainly rejects the notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds, as directed by God and the Port Royal crowd, but does he reject nature? Cultivating your garden, as demonstrated by both Candide and Voltaire himself, is embracing nature, though rejecting man to a large extent. 

Here's a section from my other blog about Voltaire and the Lisbon earthquake:

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"Gestation: Candide Assembling Itself" - Hayden Mason

Reading page 100 got me interested in the history of Portugal during Voltaire's life and I ran into the very interesting account of the life of Sebastião de Melo (Count of Oeiras after 1759.) He's certainly a mixed bag. On the one hand he seems to be almost a puppet of Voltaire, and yet also an autocrat. Now I'm curious what Voltaire had to say about him.

p100 ...He tells Elie Bertrand (another of the Genevan clergy)... that the myth of the Fall of Man... is more reasonable in human terms than the Optimism of Leibniz and Pope, which beneath the disguise of a consoling name simply removes all hope: 'if all is well, how do the Leibnizians admit of a better?'... It is the fatalistic quality of Optimism that is so cruel, for it invites man to acquiesce and therefore give up all striving for improvement... To Thieriot he makes a touching confession that he is writing about the sufferings of his fellow-men out of pure altruism, for 'I am so happy that I am ashamed of it' (D6875, 27 May {1756}).

I admit that it is something of a problem, if you believe in God, that life can smash you like a bug at any time. And not just you but entire ant hills of people, like Lisbon. But then again, from a devoutly religious position This Life is nothing special in any case. The victims of Lisbon just meet their maker a little quicker and in a large party.

In part of that paragraph I didn't quote, Mason shows that Voltaire quickly moved from Lisbon to the greater evil of war. (I was going to say that the 18th century was a good time to consider war, but then what century isn't?) So Voltaire quickly returns to the evil in man, where I think his opposition to the Optimists is on a surer footing.

p105 Pennsylvania is the model for Eldorado?!

p108 Unless Candide were virtually finished before Voltaire's visit to Schwetzingen, which appears unlikely, one must view it as written not simply in a state of ambivalent feelings about Paris and Geneva nor as a work of detached irony by a happy man but as a composition of someone who was once more plunged into despairing gloom. When he returned to Geneva he received definitive news from d'Argental that Mme. de Pompadour had declared him persona non grata at Court. Besterman rightly notes: 'it is from this moment that can be dated his spiritual severance from his fatherland'...

p109 ...Voltaire is disheartened by the decline of French prestige and influence in the world. Concern is often expressed about cultural and military affairs together... since the battle of Rossbach 'everything has been in decline in our armies, as in the fine arts in Paris'... The philosophe has long been persuaded that belles-lettre in France were degenerating and that the French were living on past credit...


...He has taken a new decision, to renounce urban life... [after buying his estates at Tournay and Ferney] 'I do not know of any situation preferable to mine'... and that he can now cultivate his garden in tranquility.... 

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Goethe and the Earthquake in Messina
A quick search on this topic turned up something a little interesting now, but very interesting for the last chapter. This is from "The Word: A Monthly Magazine Devoted To Philosophy - Science - Religion - Eastern Thought - Occultism - Theosophy and the The Brotherhood of Humanity" Volume 3, April 1906 - September 1906.

p94 Goethe was a freethinker like Kant and Schopenhauer, but he never was one of those narrow-minded materialists who allow free-thinking only in order to prove that matter and force "is the creative power for every existing thing"; that the soul of man is a nursery tale, and that it is a waste of time to attach importance to the claims of occultism.
...

... Goethe himself was certainly a very sensitive man and easily influenced by everything, especially by natural disturbances. As, for instance, by the terrible earthquake which destroyed Messina in 1783, and which Goethe must have felt or divined, although he was at the time in Weimar. On the morning of that day he told his valet: "This is a very important moment, for there is either now somewhere an earthquake, or we will have one very soon." Several weeks later came the news to Weimar which corroborated Goethe's presentment. (I. 69 Discourses with Eckermann.)

The following conversation between Goethe and Eckermann, his secretary, shows that the great poet believed in the occult power of the soul which we now call telepathy. Eckermann tells Goethe of a remarkable dream which he had, and Goethe answers:

"We all are surrounded by an atmosphere which we do not know, but which seems to be in connection with our spirit. It is certain that in special cases, our soul is able to transcend the physical boundaries and to receive a presentment or even a definite picture of future events -- a soul is able to impress another soul by the thought alone...." 

And there are more stories of this sort. Very similar, come to think of it, to the stories in Autobiography of a Yogi.



Mann in Love
I was going to go with Castorp in Love, but I want to mention von Aschenbach from Death In Venice as well. The obsessive love in In Search of Lost Time, both Swann for Odette and Marcel for Albertine, is all puppies and rainbows compared with Hans and Clavdia or von Aschenbach and Tadzio. Mostly this is because Mann’s infatuation is just so internal. Though I can’t dismiss it entirely as I recognize so much of it.

And it’s worth noting, given the self-revealing nature of this kind of love, that Mann got a good deal of grief from his wife’s family after Death in Venice came out. (Ha.) And here he is doing something very similar again. You have to wonder if Mann isn’t getting the same thrill here as Hans as he reveals his secret passion. Even though he follows Proust this time, and gender-bends Pribislav into Clavdia, he still lets us see Pribislav.

Jump to Next: The Magic Mountain - Humaniora

176. Finally, The Magic Mountain

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
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The Magic Mountain 

by Thomas Mann
Everyman's Library 2005 (originally published 1924)

My book club decided to tackle The Magic Mountain. It had become a joke the way I kept bringing the book up in every imaginable context. I'm still not sure how it will go over, but I'm glad to finally be blogging TMM. 

The book I'm just now wrapping up on my other blog, Bloggity-Blog, is A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne. To my surprise, this has turned out to be the most helpful book for understanding TMM. I really should have blogged it here, but it wasn't until I was near the end and started the section on the Renaissance (Settembrini) and the Reformation (Naphta) that I realized the connection. You can follow the book title link above to get to the beginning of my coverage of the book, though, as I said, the relevant part is at the end (HERE).

The books, besides the Pirenne, that I would now recommend to people interested in TMM are already here -- Doctor Faustus and The Brothers Karamazov. I think all three of these titles are better than Goethe's Faust (The Norton Critical Edition) and The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche, though, of course those books are also worth reading.

And so, at last, we get to the point...

Chapter 1

I don’t think I’d ever really noticed how the length of the chapters expands to reflect the changing sense of time. Chapter 1 is 17 pages; chapter 2 is 21 pages; chapter 3 is 64 pages; chapter 4 is 107 pages. And that’s just his original 3 week visit. Chapter 5 is 191; chapter 6 is 231; and chapter 7 (also the number of years) is 213 -- but truncated by the "thunderbolt."

Since "I had Never Really Noticed" is bound to become a theme, let's go with "IHNRN" as an abbreviation.

Even in this first chapter we see that Hans is quick to set aside his copy of Ocean Steamships. In fact he’s already set it aside by the time we first see him. And in the restaurant we note the first of the other residents, not counting his cousin,  the unnamed lady who sets a precedent by spending her entire life in the world of the sanatoriums.

Chapter 2

The Baptismal Bowl

Such an overture of death, I had forgotten that all aspects of his fascination with death are revealed here at the funeral of his grandfather. I wonder if he wrote this later. Maybe even after the rest of the book.

At the Tienappels'
And the overture continues in the second section with Hans’s dreaminess and indecisiveness when it came to his choosing a trade. I would almost bet money Mann wrote this last. Though it could also have been his starting outline. 

And the description of his approach to deciding on a career does sound almost like quantum (Copenhagen Interpretation) superposition. Nothing is determined in advance, it’s all a matter of probability and fate until the wave function collapses.

I do like the light, almost humorous, tone taken by the narrator. We are not going to take our young hero too seriously. I guess there's no getting around TMM being a Bildungsroman. And skimming that Wiki entry, I couldn't help jumping over to Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Goethe. Why has no one mentioned that as a book to read? Now I wonder how much Wilhelm and Hans are alike, though I suspect Thomas Mann may also be the model for student Hans -- though, intellectually, Adrian Leverkühn (in Doctor Faustus) is closer to young Mann. Perhaps Hans is the laid-back student the adult Mann now imagines he could have been. 

And don't I recall a reference to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, perhaps a musical reference? toward the end of TMM. Maybe I need to read some Goethe novels.

And I do like this picture of the world of what Henri Pirenne has taught me to call the patricians of the bourgeoisie. The centuries of bourgeois stability and rectitude; yet with a foot still in the Low German world of the common man. Plattdeutsch or Low German.

Chapter 3

Satana

IHNRN we get our Erasmus even before our first spell on our new chair.

P66 - Minos and Rhadamanthus

P67 - Carducci

P68 - Settembrini: about shipbuilding “... I am a humanist, a homo humanus, and understand nothing of such ingenious matters, however sincere my deep respect for them. But I can well imagine that the theoretical side of your profession demands a clear and keen mind and its practice no less than the whole man -- is that not so?”

P69 “It certainly is, yes, I can agree with you unconditionally there,” ... “Its demands are colossal nowadays -- one dare not be all too aware of just how exacting or one might truly lose all heart. No, it is no fun. And when one’s constitution is not all that strong -- I am here only as a guest, true, but my constitution’s not exactly the strongest, and I would be lying were I to claim that work suits me splendidly. Indeed it rather wears me down, I must say. Actually, I only feel really healthy when I am doing nothing at all.”
...

P70 - [After Hans has complained about his cigar and been informed that Behrens is also a cigar smoker] Settembrini: ...“A devil of a fellow, our Rhadamanthus. And truly ‘always merry’ -- though at times it’s a little forced. He tends to melancholy. His vice is not good for him -- but otherwise, it would be no vice -- tobacco only makes him melancholy. Which is why our venerable head nurse has taken charge of his supply and allows him only a small daily ration...” 

What is the significance of tobacco here? Something I should try to pay attention to this time through. Surely it’s not Freudian?


P71 - “What a windbag,” Hans Castorp thought, and did not change his mind when Settembrini... returned to casting aspersions. His primary object was Director Behrens -- he sneered at the size of the man’s feet and lingered over his title of Hofrat, which had been bestowed on him by a prince suffering from tuberculosis of the brain...

[After talking about the head nurse, Adriatica von Myendonks] Hans: “Ha ha ha. What a sarcastic man you are, Herr Settembrini.”

“Sarcastic? You mean malicious. Yes, I am a little malicious,” ... “My great worry is that I have been condemned to waste my malice on such miserable objects... In my eyes it is the brightest sword that reason has against the powers of darkness and ugliness. Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment.” And all of a sudden he began to speak about Petrarch, whom he called the “Father of Modernity.” 

...

Clarity of Mind

 P75 - [Joachim is taking his temperature] Hans: “And how long does that take?” ... Joachim raised seven fingers.

“Seven minutes must be up by now.”

Joachim shook his head. After a while he took the thermometer out of his mouth, looked at it, and said, “Yes, when you pay close attention to it -- time, I mean -- it goes very slowly. I truly like measuring my temperature four times a day, because it makes you notice what one minute, or even seven, actually means -- especially since the seven days of a week hang so dreadfully heavy on your hands here.”

P76 Hans: ...”There is nothing ‘actual’ about time. If it seems long to you, then it is long, and if it seems to pass quickly then it’s short. But how long or how short it is in actuality, no one knows.” He was not at all used to philosophizing, and yet felt some urge to do so.

Joachim contested this. “Why is that? No. We do measure it. We have clocks and calendars, and when a month has passed, then it has passed -- for you for me and everyone.”

“But wait,” ... “You said that a minute is as long as it seems to you while you’re measuring your temperature, correct?”

“A minute is as long as . . . it lasts, as long as it takes a second hand to complete a circle.”

“But how long that takes can vary greatly -- according to how we feel it! And in point of fact . . . I repeat, in point of fact,” ... “that’s a matter of motion, of motion in space, correct? Wait, hear me out! And so we measure time with space. But that is the same thing as trying to measure space with time -- the way uneducated people do. It’s twenty hours from Hamburg to Davos -- true, by train. But on foot, how far is it then? And in our minds -- not even a second!”

“Listen here,” Joachim said, “what’s wrong with you? I think being up here with us is getting to you.”

“Just be quiet... So then, what is time?” ... “Will you please tell me that? We perceive space with our senses, with vision and touch. But what is the organ for our sense of time? ... You see, you’re stuck. But how are we ever going to measure something about which, precisely speaking, we know nothing at all -- cannot list a single one of its properties. We say time passes. Fine, let it pass... But in order to measure it . . . no, wait! In order for it to be measurable, it would have to flow evenly, but where is it written that it does that? It doesn’t do that for our conscious minds, we simply assume it does, just for the sake of convenience. And so all our measurements are merely conventions, if you please.”
...
P77 - Hans: “And I’ll go now,” ... “My head is full of all kinds of ideas about time -- a whole complex of thoughts, let me tell you. But I don’t want to get you worked up over them, not when your temperature is already too high. I’ll keep it all in mind, and we can talk about it later then, after second breakfast perhaps...”

[Hans’s first time in his chair] ...it was terribly pleasant just to lie there, Hans Castorp discovered at once to his delight -- he could not remember ever having used a more comfortable lounge chair... attached to a string and slipped into an embroidered linen case was a roll for your neck, neither too firm nor too soft, and it simply worked wonders. Hans Castorp propped one elbow on the broad, smooth surface of the chair arm, and lay there blinking, not even bothering to entertain himself with Ocean Steamships...

P78 - ...he went on dreaming. It was already ten o’clock when he lay down. An hour passed. It was an ordinary hour, neither long nor short...

“Well, that felt marvelous just lying there. What sort of chairs are those? If they’re for sale up here, I’ll take one with me back to Hamburg, they’re simply heavenly...

And this is why this book so appeals to me. The whole idea of laying about in comfy chairs, with lovely scenery to look at, and good food, while doing philosophy. What could be better?

Now, to “time.” While Mann is writing this in the teens and twenties, the cousins are still back in 1907. Einstein published his Special theory of Relativity in 1905 and his General theory in 1916. Would a slacker student of engineering have picked up any hint of what was still just Relativity? Seems unlikely. And of course Einstein was not talking about the perception of time. Both cousins would have been surprised by the objective relativity of time that Einstein was discovering.

To Hans’s point, I keep running into articles about how professional athletes and other people in high stress moments experience time quite differently. It would be only a slight exaggeration to describe this as the Matrix effect (meaning the cinematic slow-motion technique, not the phantasm machine idea). For that matter, I just the other day watched a video speculating about why time seems to pass quicker as you age.

Meanwhile, time can also be seen as the greatest offering of the Berghof. At least for Hans, it is giving him time to think... or to do “nothing at all,” as he himself claimed makes him feel the healthiest.

Herr Albin
 P94 ...That comparison taken from life at school had made an impression on him, [Hans] because he had been held back in his sophomore year, and he could recall the somewhat ignominious, but humorous and pleasantly untidy state of affairs that he had enjoyed in the last quarter, once he had given up even trying and was able to laugh “at the whole thing.”... On the whole, however, it seemed to him that although honor had its advantages, so, too, did disgrace, and that indeed the advantages of the latter were almost boundless. He tried putting himself in Herr Albin’s shoes and imagined how it must be when one is finally free of all the pressures honor brings and one can endlessly enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace -- and the young man was terrified by a sense of dissolute sweetness that set his heart pounding even faster for a while.

I'm going to stop here and finish Chapter 3 next time.

Jump to Next: Chap. 3-4 

117. Faust - XII. "F. As Developer"

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Faust - XI. "The Ethics of F.'s Last Actions"

Goethe's Faust

"Faust as Developer" - Marshall Berman 

p 715-6 - “Almost four hundred years after his debut [in “Johann Spiess’s Faustbuch of 1587 and Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus a year later”], Faust continues to grip the modern imagination. Thus The New Yorker magazine, in an anti-nuclear editorial just after the accident at Three Mile Island, indicts Faust as a symbol of scientific irresponsibility and indifference to life: ‘The Faustian proposal that the experts make us is to let them lay their fallible human hands on eternity, and it is not acceptable.’ ...“

“It [Faust] starts in an intellectual’s lonely room, in an abstracted and isolated realm of thought; it ends in the midst of a far-reaching realm of production and exchange, ruled by giant corporate bodies and complex organizations, which Faust’s thought is helping to create... In Goethe’s version of the Faust theme, the subject and object of transformation is not merely the hero, but the whole world. Goethe’s Faust expresses and dramatizes the process by which, at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth, a distinctly modern world-system comes into being.”

p 716-7 - “The vital force that animates Goethe’s Faust... is an impulse that I will call the desire for development... What this Faust wants for himself is a dynamic process that will include every mode of human experience, joy and misery alike, and that will assimilate them all into his self’s unending growth; even the self’s destruction will be an integral part of its development.”

He quotes lines 1765-75 where Faust claims to want to savor the whole of human experience, a passage I was originally excited about but that didn’t seem to go anywhere. 

(Also, let me just note here that it has been hell differentiating between Faust the work and Faust the person for the purposes of italicizing. If you are ever tempted to write an iconic book or poem or play, please don't use your character's name for the title. Thank you.)


“...The only way for modern man to transform himself, Faust and we will find out, is by radical transforming the whole physical and social and moral world he lives in, Goethe’s hero is heroic by virtue of liberating tremendous repressed human energies... But the great developments he initiates... turn out to exact great human costs... human powers can be developed only through what Marx called ‘the powers of the underworld,’ dark and fearful energies that may erupt with a horrible force beyond all human control. Goethe’s Faust is the first, and still the best, tragedy of development.”

This brings us back to the nature vs politics debate: is the volcanic imagery about natural sciences or political-economic sciences? 


p 718-9 - “...Why should men let things go on being the way they have always been? Isn’t it about time for mankind to assert itself against nature’s tyrannical arrogance, to confront natural forces in the name of ‘the liberal mind which cherishes all rights’? (10202-05) Faust has begun to use post-1789 political language in a context that no one has ever thought of as political. He goes on: It is outrageous that, for all the vast energy expended by the sea, it merely surges endlessly back and forth -- ‘and nothing is achieved.’ (10217)... Faust’s battle with the elements appears as King Lear’s, or, for that matter, as King Midas’ whipping of the waves. But his Faustian enterprise will be less quixotic and more fruitful, because it will draw on nature’s own energy and organize that energy into fuel for new collective human purposes and projects...”

That there are currently a multitude of attempts being made to harness tidal and wave energy as the latest form of Alternative Power, only adds to the relevance of Faust and this analysis. 

“...We are witnessing the birth of a new social division of labor, a new vocation, a new relationship between ideas and practical life... The romantic quest for self-development... is working itself out through a new form of romance [Atlas Shrugged], through the titanic work of economic development. Faust is transforming himself into a new kind of man... In his new work, he will work out some of the most creative and some of the most destructive potentialities of modern life; he will be the consummate wrecker and creator, the dark and deeply ambiguous figure that our age has come to call ‘the developer.’”

p 723-4 - “At this point [after line 11272], Faust commits his first self-consciously evil act. He summons Mephisto and his ‘mighty men’ and orders them to get the old people [Philemon and Baucis] out of the way. He does not want to see it, or to know the details of how it is done. All that interests him is the end result: he wants to see the land cleared next morning, so the new construction can start. This is a characteristically modern style of evil: indirect, impersonal, mediated by complex organizations and institutional roles... Faust has been pretending not only to others but to himself that he could create a new world with clean hands; he is still not ready to accept responsibility for the human suffering and death that clear the way... It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works.”

I can’t believe how much this guy is reading into what is presented about Faust’s reclaimed world, though I tend to agree with him. 


p 725 - “For the developer, to stop moving, to rest in the shadows, to let the old people enfold him, is death. And yet, to such a man, working under the explosive pressures of development, burdened by the guilt it brings him, the bells’ promise of peace must sound like bliss. Precisely because Faust finds the bells so sweet, the woods so lovely, dark, and deep, he drives himself to wipe them out.”

“Commentators on Goethe’s Faust rarely grasp the dramatic and human resonance of this episode. In fact , it is central to Goethe’s historical perspective. Faust’s destruction of Philemon and Baucis turns out to be the ironic climax of his life. In killing the old couple, he turns out to be pronouncing a death sentence on himself. Once he has obliterated every trace of them and their works, there is nothing left for him to do. Now he is ready to pronounce the words that seal his life in fulfillment and deliver him over to death... Once the developer has cleared all the obstacles away, he himself is in the way, and he must go... Goethe shows us how the category of obsolete persons, so central to modernity, swallows up the man who gave it life and power.”

p 726 - “...Faust banishes Care from his mind, as he banished the devil not long before. But before she departs... her breath strikes him blind... she tells him that he has been blind all along; it is out of darkness that all his visions and all his actions have grown...”


I only read Faust because my new edition of The Magic Mountain claimed it (along with The Birth of Tragedy) were important influences on Mann. When I finished reading Goethe I have to admit that I was very little the wiser. Mainly I thought that the early nineteenth century must have had better drugs than I had realized because it really is just a crazy series of stories.

But what all these scholars found in Faust was very interesting. Rarely have they agreed with each other, but everyone seemed to find something of value. There has been a bias against the bourgeoisie in most of the books I've written about -- The Brothers K., for example -- and some I haven't quite written about -- like Parade's End -- but keep referring to. Faust has made it much clearer to me what Dostoyevsky and Ford were incensed about and why. But when it comes back to The Magic Mountain, it is not Settembrini but Naphtha who abhors the Mephistophelean world -- this, again, supports my suspicion that it is Naphtha who speaks for Mann in that book.

While Dostoyevsky's The Brothers K. now gets my vote as the most significant book of philosophy from the second half of the nineteenth century, this edition of Faust -- including all the LitCrit -- has probably changed the way I view the world more than any other book. An interesting question is how much of this is Goethe? I really don't know.

Another interesting question is what am I going to blog next. It may finally be time to tackle The Magic Mountain itself. There may be a pause in the posting here.

Jump to Next: Zen Physics - I. Soul and self