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.
