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The Magic Mountain
Hippe
And another overture. Another “little phrase” that will be repeated.
Analysis
Mann is having a lot of fun with Dr Krokowski.
This is an interesting subject -- love/sex and illness -- when we’ve so recently been talking about the value, intellectual or otherwise, of illness. If one must be ill to be truly intellectual or holy, then apparently one must repress one’s sexuality.There are some jokes at the expense of the Catholic priesthood here that I will let slide.
Also, isn’t it a little odd that “bourgeois forces” are an integral part of this mechanism that leads to holiness and artistic creativity?
Table Talk
Really wonderful how Mann demonstrates, in Hans, manifestations not unlike what Dr K was just lecturing about. How his interest in Madame Chauchat is revealed in his tremor.
Growing Anxiety
P170 - Hans’s crush here is so much like a school crush. School could almost have been designed with romance in mind. College and high school are bad enough, but grade school, where you spend the entire day with the same small group of students is in some ways the worst.
P183 - 1830 in Paris, July Revolution again. I forget what an effect it had. On Goethe as he was ending Faust; for Dostoevsky at the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov; and now here for Mann.
P185 - [Settembrini] ...There was no doubt which of these two forces [Asiatic (tyranny, superstition, the law of obduracy) and European (freedom, knowledge, the law of ferment, change and progress)] would gain the victory -- that of enlightenment, or reasoned advancement toward perfection. Because human progress was always gathering up new nations in the course of its brilliant advance, conquering new continents -- indeed all of Europe itself -- and had even started to press on into Asia. Yet there was much to be done before total victory... But that day would come, [when monarchies and religions would at last collapse in the more backward European nations] Settembrini said, smiling delicately beneath his mustache -- it would come, if not on the feet of doves, then on the pinions of eagles, and would burst as the dawn of universal brotherhood under the emblem of reason, science, and justice; it would bring about a new Holy Alliance of bourgeois democracies, the shining antithesis of that thrice-infamous alliance of princes and ministers whom Grandfather Giuseppe had declared his personal enemies -- in a word, the Republic of the World. But to achieve this goal, it was necessary above all to strike at the Asiatic principle of bondage and obduracy at its vital center, at the very nerve of resistance -- in Vienna. One must deal a fatal blow to Austria and crush her, first to avenge past wrongs and second to open the way for the rule of justice and happiness on earth.
This is interesting. (Hans doesn’t care for it, by the way.) Since I just left off a history of Europe just at the point where the Habsburg cancer had metastasized all over Europe, I feel a deep sympathy for Settembrini’s position here. While for him Vienna primarily represents the oppressor of Lombardy-Venetia, and to a less emotional degree the oppressor of the Slavs and other nations of the Balkans and eastern Europe, for me they represent the absolute worst of the dynastic system that even now continues to rule in parts of Europe, like Britain. Pirenne’s little rant against Charles V, as ruler of Spain, is an excellent expression of the problems inherent in this system of rule.
That said, it’s hard to see what even Crown Prince Rudolf could have done had he inherited the empire instead of shooting himself at Mayerling. With the Ottomans to the south and the Romanovs to the east and the troublesome House of Hohenzollern to the north, I’m not sure what even a philosopher king could have done with that situation. How many good years were there between the fall of the House of Habsburg and WW2 and then the Cold War? Were people really better off? Was nationalism a panacea?
If you give Gavrilo Princip credit for ending the Habsburg reign, has that actually improved people’s lives? Granted, this means imagining an alternative timeline in which The Great War never happens, which quickly gets too difficult to even attempt. Someone has put together a very convincing argument in favor of Canada’s relationship with Britain as opposed to our, American, revolutionary relationship. I found it very difficult to argue against -- which is unusual for me. Nationalism is a great reason to kill people, but beyond that it’s hard to see any real benefits.
Now I’m remembering a similarly convincing argument for Persian governance over Hellenic “freedom” in BCE Greece. Would Europe have been better off in a Continental Habsburg Empire? Would the world have been better off? That's even harder to imagine than a Habsburg Empire in Central and Southeast Europe surviving far into the 20th century... or beyond.
Nationalism is such an odd concept anyway, take the German Empire in the Great War, which lies in the near future for our characters here. “Germany” was hammered together through a series of wars in which the Prussians compelled the cooperation of a variety of states that, while speaking some version of the German language, had no particular interest in the “Nation” being created. And the same was true in the past for France and England -- though in England the smaller nations didn’t even speak the same language. Actually that’s true for parts of France as well.
But to get back to Settembrini -- and Mann -- we are intended to see here the bourgeois/socialist ideal of a border-less world-state based on science and reason. But, and this is a huge but, we are reading this after 1924 (the year it was published), which is just after 1922 when Mussolini and the Fascist party came to power in Italy. There is more than a little in common between Settembrini and pre-war Mussolini. I don't know that Mussolini was a model for the character, but he could have been. Both were socialists with nationalistic tendencies. It is not hard to imagine Settembrini making the same choices Mussolini made during the war. The road to national socialism was paved with good intentions.
[Settembrini continues about his father:] ...what was humanism? Love of humankind, nothing more, and so it, too, was political, it, too, was a rebellion against everything that had soiled and degraded the ideal of humanity. Humanism had been accused of exaggerating the importance of form; but it cultivated beautiful form purely for the sake of the dignity of man -- in brilliant antithesis to the Middle Ages, which had sunk not only into misanthropy and superstition, but also into ignominious formlessness. From the very first, his father had fought for the cause of humanity, for earthly interests, for freedom of thought and the pursuit of happiness, and had firmly believed that we can leave heaven to the birds. Prometheus! He had been the first humanist and was identical with Satana, whom Carducci had apostrophized in his hymn...
I’ve never bothered to look into this Satana, strangely, but now I have and found THIS. Here’s my understanding: I think by “Satana” Carducci means, not the Devil or even Mephisto, but the opposite of Christ -- the anti-christ, as it were. (But not the “Antichrist.”) This is why Settembrini can toast to him while at the same time worrying about giving the Devil an inch. And while I’m at it, his invocation of Prometheus is one of the reasons I love this author.
...
P188 ...And he spoke now about the “Word,” about the cult of the Word, about eloquence, which he called the triumph of humanity. Because the Word was the glory of humankind, and it alone gave dignity to life...
I originally skipped this passage, but I kept thinking about it because it is language, or the choice of words, that often most attracts me to either prose or poetry. (Again, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," by James Agee comes to mind.) But what’s interesting here is that you can also say what Settembrini said against music against beautiful language. Ugly ideas can be expressed in moving words. Beauty is not truth, truth is not always beauty.
P189 Young Hans Castorp found all this well worth listening to... he listened to him politely and attentively and tried to be fair, compensating for or suppressing feelings that he felt rising in opposition to his mentor’s opinions and characterizations. For it cannot be denied that opposition was stirring in his soul -- both the sort that had always been there naturally from the start and the sort that arose specifically from the present situation, partly from indirect observation, partly from personal experience among the people up here.
What a piece of work is a man, and how easily conscience betrays him. He listens to the voice of duty -- and what he hears is the license of passion... With the best of intentions he tested the man’s views on reason, the world republic, and beautiful style -- and was prepared to be influenced by them. And each time, he found it all the more permissible afterwards to let his thoughts and dreams run free in another direction, in the opposite direction... And what or who stood on the opposing side of patriotism, the dignity of man, and beautiful literature -- the side toward which Hans Castorp believed he should direct his thoughts and deeds? There stood . . . Clavdia Chauchat...
The Thermometer
P190 This scene with Hans calculating his cousins bill for a year but including cigars and suits is so clever. Hans almost reminds me of Adrian Mole here in his obvious obliviousness.
P215 - I wish there were some way of knowing how much of this about the air being “good for illness”, about creating “a revolution in the body,” about the “intoxicating effects” of “soluble toxins” is true, or at least what was believed at the time; and how much is invention of the novelist? It sounds plausible enough, but then again Mann’s wife spent a fair amount of time at a place like this and they never noticed she wasn’t tubercular at all. And if this scene is a close approximation of what Mann himself was told on his visit, which wouldn’t surprise me at all, then his Hofrat Behrens was dead on. Though fleeing to the Flatlands doesn’t seem to have caused Mann any permanent damage.
I’m trying to think of another case were the treatment has the potential of making the condition worse, or of bringing it on. I’m sure there must be something similar.
And this brings to a close our hero's visit to the Magic Mountain. From here on he will be a resident, not a visitor.
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