Descending the Mountain

As "The Magic Mountain" approached its end, we book clubbers had expected--as our sixth grade teachers' trusty plot diagrams had taught us to expect--some kind of culmination. Maybe a synthesis of Hans Castorp's intellectual education; perhaps a climactic, decisive moment in our hero's obsession with Clavdia Chauchat, or a satisfying resolution to his long narrative of illness.

But we didn't get any of those things. Instead, the book becomes a series of episodes in the life of the Berghof's slow cultural decay: touristic dalliances with modern technology and passing fads; dilettantish intellectual trifles; absurd social scandals; temporal "stupor"; parapsychology. "The Magic Mountain" does not culminate, it unravels. To the extent that it has a narrative destination, that destination is simply the apocalyptic catastrophe that awaits at the book's end.

But I think what we found most striking was not "Magic Mountain's" lack of narrative resolution but instead its ironic, noncommittal tone. Throughout the book, Mann's narrator raises a number of seemingly intractable oppositions: Settembrini's progressive humanism versus Naphta's radical conservatism. Scientific materialism versus a romantic idealism that appeals to our sense of "a universal spirit" and brings Hans Castorp visions of metaphysical babes. Perhaps most importantly: the value of bourgeois order, stability and duty versus the pulls of freedom and decadence, the allure of physicality and the decay of time.

But our narrator refuses to commit to any of these dogmas. Sometimes he maintains an ironic distance, as with his use of Mynheer Peeperkorn, whose charismatic personality acts as a foil to Naptha and Settembrini's self-regarding pedantry. Other times, as with Hans' struggle between freedom and duty, he complicates the binaries, using each to critique the other, betraying sympathy in both directions and, maybe most strikingly (as with his accounts of illness and health), infusing descriptions of one with the other's language.



In the end, we readers are left not with answers, but with questions--and questions based on those questions. But here's what's great: those questions are deeper and graver, more nuanced and complicated than the ones we began with, weeks ago. And this, I think, is what keeps a book like this one--so seemingly antiquated, so dorkily preoccupied with Big Ideas--gnawing at your insides long after you put it down, inspiring troubled daydreams and awesome conversations. How does a person nourish the needs of the self and also fulfill her duty to her community? Are the benefits of liberalism worth its spiritual cost? What brought European culture to (and past) the brink of suicide? Why is the modern world so fucking lonely sometimes? These, like all the best questions, have no satisfying answer.

Touching the Void: Deeper into "The Magic Mountain"

In many ways, The Magic Mountain is a great winter book. The snowy mountain setting; the vivid descriptions of things like wrapping oneself in blankets and eating jaw-droppingly rich food; the book's density and mood of solitary contemplation--all these things mesh well with our current, dark season. On the other hand, the endless discussions of cold and snow, not to mention our hero's deep, lingering isolation and loneliness is enough to make a fella feel a little cold and lonely himself. Take it from me, it isn't easy reading this chilly thing on a drafty, crowded bus as yet another snow falls and an early gray dusk settles on your city.

And so, the relevance of alcohol: ruby port, scotch (not actually consumed by anyone in the book so far, but probably ought to have been), as many kinds of porter as you can find. These are things a serious person needs to warm the bones and fill that tummy. Haven't even mentioned all the ridiculous food we ate.

We talked about the book too. We talked a little about illness and death. We checked out the map of interwar Europe and wondered about nationalism and the birth (and rapid, violent decay) of the idea of the nation-state. We discussed the Berghof's cosmopolitan decadence and its double relevance: to the pre-Great War European era in which the book is set and to Mann's own rapidly imploding (but vibrant and artistically fertile!) Weimar Germany. We talked about Hans Castorp's two teachers, Herrs. Settembrini and Naphta, the former a progress-obsessed secular humanist, the latter a proto-Stalinist Nietzschean Jesuit (I know, right!?) with a serious taste for terror and suffering (in the abstract at least). And we wondered just how seriously to take their bullying, self-contradictory battles for Hans Castorp's undergrad intellect and malleable soul.

It all seemed to lead us to Herr Castorp's fateful mountain ski, his blizzard-and-port-induced inner voyage, and his twin visions: one a paradise, the other a nightmare. Was this a meditation on life and death? a premonition of the utopian dreams and bloody catastrophes of the coming decades? Hans musters an epiphany: "For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts." And then he wakes up. By dinner that evening "he was no longer sure what his thoughts had been." Neither were we.

Most important, though, were dirty, dirty pictures we drew and the magically stupid laughter that ensued. Herr F___ and Fraulein S___ were particular stars; their renderings of gothic, sexually transgressive alien/zombies (and other intense, awesome stuff) were well worth the time we spent waiting for their completion. Thanks friends, for everything.

Eternal Soup and Sudden Clarity: Discussing "The Magic Mountain," Eating Some Brunch

What we ate (this is important):

• quiches
• frittatas
• fruit and yogurt
• baked french toast
• biscuits and jam
• cupcakes
• banana bread
• sweet potatoes and brussel sprouts
• breakfast porter

What We Talked About:

Thanks perhaps to the icy air permeating our twin cities recently (good for the circulation!), we transformed our gathering into something of an alpine sanatorium of our own. We sequestered ourselves from the world; we breezily discussed ideas; we ate immodestly (see above). As it turns out, porter does go nicely with french toast. I had no idea. (We did only manage a single breakfast, but give us time. We'll be putting away five meals a day like aristocratic, fin-de-siecle tuberculars soon enough.)

But the similarities ended there. We still considered ourselves part of the world. The presence of a certain chuckling, big-eyed baby was a constant reminder that, y'know, there is such a thing as the future; bodies change; time is real.

Not so at the Berghof. On the one hand, the sanatorium is a last refuge for the remnants of a dying Continental aristocracy, who live in a state of obscene comfort and near-total inertia. Isolation and alienation are the watchwords; the place is defined by its remove from the social upheaval and political chaos of the actual world below. This remove, both geographical and conceptual, seemed to us to be what lends the Berghof its fairy-tale quality. Familiar modes of expression wither away and are forgotten. Illness and decay are the dominant metaphysical conditions. Time expands and contracts in unfamiliar ways. It snows in August.

On the other hand, the residents and administrators are in thrall to some perfectly modern bourgeois obsessions: scientific measurement and classification; organized, mechanistic bureaucracy; the pristine regimentation of daily life. Drs. Krokowski and Behrens' decrees of illness and health, reached through studious attention to the various rattles and wheezes of the human lungs, plus a strict regimen of temperature-taking, are more than simply medical diagnoses: they are statements of being. A patient's existential status is a function of her physical health. And likewise, her interior world, her desires and urges, are just as subject to medicalization as are the machinations of her thorax.

Which makes it a perfect place for our friend Hans Castorp, an un-serious, mediocre fellow if ever their was one. Much like the Berghof itself, young Herr Castorp seems to be suspended between two worlds. His instinctive political view is an inherited aristocratic conservatism; why change the world, after all, when everything works so well? when the world is so comfy and nice? His lack of self-awareness is definitive and total. Hans, says the narrator, "tended to believe in the infinite duration of the state and mood in which he happened to find himself at any given moment."

At the same time, though, he is a blithe champion of progress and modernity, of the rational ordering of society, of the bourgeois comforts. Needless to say, this perspective is no less conservative than his unearned noblesse oblige, and leads the narrator to quip that Hans Castorp and his cousin Joachim had long been "accustomed...to equating patriotic feelings with preservation of the established order." Not exactly a revolutionary, in other words.



We are beginning see, though, how Hans' predispositions have left him alienated from his emotions, a stranger to his own inner life. His lusts and yearnings, for the young "Kirghiz-eyed" Polish boy and for frail, dissolute Frau Chauchat, come to him as mysterious, nameless visitors from some far, dark shore. As we leave Hans, three weeks (?) into his stay, these funny feelings inside are almost as troublesome to him as his rattling chest and permanently flushed cheeks.

There is so much more. The Berghof's reflection of Mann's Weimar-era milieu; the bluff Settembrini and his high-volume humanism; zombies and automatons; decay, decay, decay. We'll meet again after three-hundred slow pages and untold years.

What We Referenced:

Thomas Mann's pal, Arnold Schoenberg and twelve-tone composition

The Frankfurt School

Der Blaue Reiter

Otto Dix

Anna Karenina

Ishmael and his coffins

poutine

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other Weimar-era zombie movies

Concentric Circles: A Discussion of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

What we ate:

• Crackers and cheese (obv.)
• A tremendously delicious sesame mock duck noodle salad, prepared by Ms. Anders
  
• Some killer bars, made by Ms. Jones
  
• Cheese puffs, with chopsticks

What we listened to:

• Can-Soundtracks
• Beach House-s/t
• Portishead-Third
• Lavender Diamond-Imagine Our Love

Some of what we talked about:

Narrative Structure--"Cloud Atlas'" most noticeably weird trait is its strange structure: six seemingly unrelated (in both content and genre) novellas--"The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," "Letters from Zedelghem," "Half Lives: the First Luisa Rey Mystery" "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish," "An Orison of Sonmi 451" and "Sloosha's Crossin' and Everythin' After"-- that, in the book's first half, proceed in chronological order, each story abruptly cutting off in midstream. The process is repeated in reverse in the book's second half, when each novella is resolved.

I said "seemingly unrelated" because each of the novellas leave some residue in the one that follows: journals found in an old bookcase, forgotten music remembered, magically shared birthmarks. In the second half of the book, we discover that these novella's actually frame one another. Zachry's children (of "Sloosha's") watch Sonmi's orison as the reader does; Sonmi watches the film of Cavendish's ordeal as we read, and etc. Which is particularly strange considering that at least one of the novellas purports to be a fiction. Um, by the way, why should anyone give a shit about this?

Time/History--Because it turns out that "Cloud Atlas'" narrative structure is a metaphor for a circular interpretation of time and history. Time's essential circularity is played out in a number of ways in the book--in reflections, refractions and rebirths of each story within the others--but most obviously in the Valleysmen of "Sloosha's" belief in reincarnation.

But it shows up elsewhere, too, in subtler, more complex forms: the dissolute English dandy Frobisher's obsession with Nietzschean eternal return; the metaphor of nested matryoshka dolls; the expansion and contraction of an accordion. Actions and events occur and recur, dissolve and reconstitute at harmonic points on the various layers of concentricity. The book is particularly concerned, though, with the way in which events travel through these rings of time (or the future), gathering layers of interpretation and myth, slowly morphing from actuality to belief, from fact to faith.

Morality/Faith/Progress--As you might've figured, the book's discussion of time and history takes on a distinctly moral color. Most of us found some the more strident articulations of this morality a little heavy-handed. Which is too bad (the heavy-handedness), because there was also some pretty subtle, powerful stuff in there.

The progressivist, linear view of time is particularly associated with a real host of evils: 19th century messianic English imperialism; indifference to and consumption of nature; blind, crass faith in technology; terrible cruelty. Linear time seems to inexorably lead, both narratively and causally, to the apocalyptic catastrophe that looms and lingers around the book's every corner. In this narrow view there is no rebirth, no renewal, no salvation, just death.

It is the ability to see one's own life as interdependent, one's own truth as contingent, to live in community--in short, to summon up the imagination to believe in something outside of and beyond ourselves (as many of the characters come, in various ways, to catch a glimmer of life in the book's other fictional worlds)--that allows humanity to renew itself.

Language--To his credit, Mitchell never lets us rest too easily in our cozy reveries. Yes the above obsession with destiny and progress leads to an apocalypse, but violent catastrophe is portrayed as an inextricable facet of human life, no matter what the era. We might well live more happily in a communal, technology-free, nature-revering culture (as do the Valleysmen in "Sloosha's"). But that culture might also have an average lifespan of about thirty, live in fear of more powerful neighbors, and remain relatively defenseless against disease and death. Humans will always hunger for more. Terrible disaster awaits around every corner. There is no golden age.

Luckily, a corollary to that hunger is a tendency to nearly magical linguistic invention. Every main character in the book speaks a florid homemade language, dependent on its ancestors, sure, but also beautifully, radically new. Some of us were put off (especially at first) by Adam Ewing's pseudo-Melvillian floridity, others by the mystery novel boilerplate in "Half-Lives," but all of us recognized that we had a work of serious linguistic imagination on our hands. People allow words and ideas and even whole cultures to die away all the time. But we also can't help ourselves from reconstituting them in fantastic, unheard-of new ways. It's one of the best things we do.


Melancholy Feelings--From the destruction of nature, to minor, tragic human cruelties, "Cloud Atlas: sure could leave a lady or fella feeling a little blue. Luckily, it also leaves us with some good stuff to fall back on: the solace of good friends; people and the amazing things they say and do; the mellow Fall sun, the pretty leaves.

How David Mitchell is Sort of Foxy and Seems Like a Nice Guy--We decided it would be nice to be his friends. And maybe more than friends?

What We Referenced:

The Paris Review: "David Mitchell, the Art of Fiction, No. 204"

Books about the sea, for instance:

Richard Henry Dana, "Two Years Before the Mast"

and

Herman Melville "Moby Dick or, The Whale"

The Matrix (a movie about philosophy)

Lost

Friedrich Nietzsche (esp. the idea of eternal recurrance)

Toshi Ichiyanagi, "Cloud Atlas for Piano"

Vladimir Nabokov, "Lolita" and "Pale Fire"

and other stuff I can't remember now