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.