The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann (1924)
When we talk about the monuments of literary modernism, three titles stand out, towering above all the others. Three massive novels, in three different languages, emerged in the critical decade of the 1920s, all challenging the assumptions of both the style and content of the entire corpus of Western literature and the cultural assumptions upon which it rested. At the same time, each proposed, in its own unique and mind-boggling way, a new alternative, a pathway for perception, in the challenging, even incomprehensible face of a new world order.
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Marcel Proust’s seven-volume A la recherche du temps purdu (In Search of Lost Time, published from 1913-1927) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924) stand as a kind of trio of mind-boggling pyramids of literary summation and definition that still mark the definitive landscape of what would become the true boundary line of the modern era. (I leave out Joyce’s Finnegans Wake of 1939, since it seems situated at the other end of a boundary that challenges not only interpretation and meaning, but even human comprehensibility.)
These are the Big Three of the 20th century, folks, and if you really want to understand modern literature and culture, you’ve gotta eventually come to grips with them.
Now, that doesn’t mean that everybody has to read these books. I happen to know a lot of brilliant folks, and virtually no one I know has tackled them all. To be honest, at this point in history, even the most literary-loving among us can be put off by the sheer intimidation of these extraordinary volumes. They’re the kind of books that everybody seems to wish they had read, but nobody actually wants to read. And let’s face it - all three of these modern classics are difficult (not to mention time-consuming), and life is short. Free time is hard to come by these days, and many of us would prefer to read something short, funny and to the point.
But oh, my friends . . .if any books are worth the time and trouble to burrow down deep inside and lose yourself, these are the ones. These are the true adventures of the modern mind, traveling to the very limits of conceptual experience, and no other books of the modern era have more endless potential for payback for time invested. These books have helped shape and define us, even if we haven’t read them! They are our Homer, our Virgil, our Dante and Shakespeare. (Well, actually Shakespeare is our Shakespeare.) We are all missing so much if we do not delve into their depths - entire worlds of possibilities in the cognitive playing with reality. And believe it or not, all three are funny as hell.
I would say, however, to all my fellow voyagers of the literary life, if you do suffer from big-book, monster-modernist, hard-to-read, too-much-time intimidation, that you go ahead and grab hold of The Magic Mountain and jump right in. I promise, it makes a great winter’s read. And of these three monsters, it is by far the easiest and most fun to get through. Unlike Joyce, Mann writes in a simple, straight-forward style. And though 700 pages may seem like a lot, it’s nowhere near as off-putting as Proust’s 4000-plus.
No, The Magic Mountain is not a book to be afraid of, but rather it is one to savor. If you like dark - and I mean very dark humor (it is a comedy about disease and death, after all) and if you’re even the slightest bit interested in philosophy - or at least making fun of philosophy - this is a book for you.
So don’t worry - Mann’s masterpiece is not hard to read. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard as hell to understand!
See, the whole problem in a nutshell is that Thomas Mann is a royal smart-ass. The guy is brilliant, perceptive and funnier than a bag of nuts. His characters are insane. The situations are absolutely ridiculous. This is a book that is literally built out of irony. There’s really nothing even remotely like it I’ve ever read (though Don Quixote and Catch-22 come pretty close in terms of tone). It’s just so fucking bizarre that it leaves you scratching your head. What the hell is this guy trying to say?
Well, I’ve read it two or three times, and I’m still not sure. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t try to give you my interpretation here in these pages.
No, not all at once. I want you to read it with me as I go through it again. Put down your own comments as we go along. I’d welcome any help with trying to piece together the colossal puzzle that is The Magic Mountain.
Is there a moral? Is there a lesson? Are some of the characters right some of the time, and wrong in others? The whole book seems to be one huge mass of contradictions, and every interpretation seems to have its antithesis written right into the pages.
I’m not making this more attractive to anybody, am I?
Okay, let me just tell you a little about the premise.
The whole book centers around one character: "an ordinary young man" by the name of Hans Castorp. In German terms, the book is what is known as a bildungsroman, that is a story of education. (Or rather, perhaps, it’s a parody of a bildungsroman, since it’s terribly difficult to tell precisely what, or even if, Hans Castorp does learn.)
Hans Castorp is 24 years old, and he’s just finished getting his degree in engineering. He’s going to design ships. He’s fresh-faced, unexceptional and has very few strongly fixed opinions. He’s about to go to work for a local Hamburg company and begin his career, but he’s pretty tired after all of his exams, and he could use a rest. So somebody in his family suggests that Hans go and visit his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, who is spending some time at a sanatorium high up in the Swiss Alps, in order to get over a little touch of TB so he can go off and join the army. Hans would probably benefit from a change of scenery, the air would do him good, and so off he goes on a three-week vacation.
He stays up there seven years.
This is one Magic Mountain! Like some bizarre "other-world" in a fairy tale, the Berghof Sanatorium, so far removed from the world of "flatlanders" below, seems to cast a spell over its inhabitants. This is a wholly different kind of place, completely removed from reality. It has its own rules, it’s filled with bizarre characters and curious events, and perhaps most importantly, time seems to behave differently up here.
In short, it’s a perfect place for "an ordinary young man" to sit and listen to intellectuals argue, to fall in love with a foreign lady, and to ponder the meaning of disease and death for what seems like an eternity. (Hey, it beats working building ships.)
The Magic Mountain is, above all things, an allegory. But an allegory of what?
Well, it seems, at least one one level, to be an allegory about the diseased world of the European capitalist bourgeoise before World War I. There are "guests" (all ill, of course), from all over the continent, and they bring their national prejudices and personal philosophies with them up there, where they can argue, and nothing really matters. (Meanwhile the world down below rolls steadily towards oblivion.)
But that’s just one level of looking at it. On a larger level, this is Hans Castorp’s story. And it seems like Mann is hinting that, in a way, this is Germany’s story as well. This is the story of an education, like I said before. Hans is up here in the clouds, far away from any practical demands. And he is here to listen, to experience, and most of all, to learn.
But what does he ultimately learn? That’s a little harder to say. But, in a way, this is kind of a sneaky a trick on Mann’s part. Because the real education to be had up on The Magic Mountain is our education. We experience what Hans experiences, so we learn what he learns. But do we agree with him about his conclusions? Are we supposed to? Or are we supposed to keep enough distance from him to be able to judge and criticize him? Just what the hell are we supposed to think, anyway?
I really can’t tell you from this level. You’ll have to come with me aboard the little narrow-gauge train that takes Hans Castorp to his destiny way up high on The Magic Mountain for yourselves. The only thing I can promise is that it will be worth the trip. We’ll have a lot to talk about while we’re up there - and perhaps even more when we finally come back down.
There is only one thing I think I can promise for certain, however. When we finally come back down, we will be different.
So if I’ve tickled your interest in taking part in this massive, grotesque and strange journey with me, go pick up the book. (I’ve got the Vintage International edition with the new English translation by John E. Woods, if that matters to you.)
The book is composed of seven chapters. (That’s a magic number in the book.) We’re going to start with Chapter 1.
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