|
Now
what is there that I can say about the book itself, and the
best way to read it? I shall begIn with a very arrogant
request that it be read not once but twice. A request not to
be heeded, of course, if one has been bored at the first
reading. A work of art mUst not be a task or an effort; it
mUst not be undertaken against one's will. It is meant to
give pleasure, to entertain and enliven. If it does not have
this effect on a reader, he mUst put it down and turn to
something else. But if you have read The Alagic Mountain
once, I recommend that you read it twice. The way in which
the book is composed results in the reader's getting a
deeper enjoyment from the second reading. Just as in music
one needs to know a piece to enjoy it properly, I
intentionally used the word II composed tt in referring to
the writing of a book. I mean it in the sense we more
commonly apply to the writing of
music. For music has
always had a strong formative influence
I
upon the style of my
writing. Writers are very often "really tt
,~
. mE-MAGIc
MOUNTAIN 725
something else; they
are transplanted painters or sculptors or architects or what
not. To me the novel was always like a sym- phony, a work in
counterpoint, a thematic fabric; the idea of the musical
motif plays a great role in it.
People have pointed
out the influence of Wagner's music on my work. Certainly I
do not disclaim this influence. In particular, I followed
Wagner in the use of the leitmotiv, which I carried over
into the work of language. Not as Tolstoy and Zola use it,
or as I used it myself in Buddenbrooks, natUralistically and
as a means of characterization - so to speak, mechanically.
I sought to employ it in its musical sense. My first
attempts were in T onio Kroger. But the technique I there
employed is in The Magic Mountain greatly expanded; it is
used in a very much more com- plicated and all-pervasive
way. That is why I. make my presump- tuous plea to my
readers to read the book tWIce, Only so can
one
really penetrate and
enjoy its musical association of ideas. The ;;.~ first time,
the reader learns the thematic material; he is then in a ~~
position to read the symbolic and allusive formulas both
forwards
and
backwards.
I retum to something
I spoke of before: the mystery of the time element, dealt
with in various ways in the book. It is in a double sense a
time-romance. First in a historical sense, in that it s~eks
to present the ~nner significance of an epoch, t~e p~e-war
period of European hIstOry. And secondly, because time IS
one of its themes: time, dealt with not only as a part of
the hero's experience, but also in and through itself. The
book itself is the substance of that which it relates: it
depicts the hermetic enchant- ment of its young hero within
the timeless, and thus seeks to abrogate time itself by
means of the technical device that attempts to give complete
pr~enmess at any given moment to the entire world of ideas
that it comprises. It tries, in other words, to estab- lish
a magical nunc stans, to use a formula of the scholastics.
It pretends to give perfect consistency to content and form,
to the apparent and the essential; its aim is always and
consistently to be that of which it
speaks.
But its pretensions
are even more far-reaching, for the book deals with yet
another fundamental theme, that of .. heightening,"
enhancement (Steigerung). This SteigeTUn,~ is always
referred to as,alchemistic. You will reln.ember that my Hans
is rea~ly a simple- Ollnded hero, the young scion of good
Hamburg society, and an indifferent engineer. But in the
hermetic, feverish atmosphere of the enchanted mountain, the
ordinary stuff of which he is made undergoes a heightening
process that makes him capable of
ad-
726 c7 THE
MAKING OF
ventUres in sensual,
moral, intellectual spheres he would never have dreamed of
in the "flatland." His story is the story of
.
heightening,rocess,
but also as a narrative it is the heightening process itsel
. It employs the methods of the realiStic novel, but
actually it is not one. It passes beyond realism by means of
~ bolism, and makes realism a vehicle for intellectual and
ideal ele- ments.
All the characters
suffer this same process; they appear to the reader as
something more than themselves - in effect they are nothing
but exponents, representatives, emissaries from worlds,
principalities, domains of the spirit. I hope this does not
mean that they are mere shadow figures and walking parables.
And I have been rea.~red on this score; for many readers
have told me that they have found Joachim, Claudia Chauchat,
Peeperkorn, Settembrini, very real people
indeed.
Whilst listening
somewhat breathless to The Other Man. Alizzed had the scribe
take a time out counting names
Number of letters in
the name Joachim 7 Claudia 7 Chauchat, 7 Peeperkorn, 10
Settembrini 11.
THE book, then, both
spatially and intellectually, outgrew the limits its author
had set. The short story became a thumping two- volume
novel- a misfortune that would not have happened if The
Magic Mountain had remained, as many people even today still
see it, a satire on life in a sanatorium for tubercular
patients. When it appeared, it made a stir in professional
circles, partly of approval, partly of the opposite, and
there was a little tempest in the medical journals. But the
critique of sanatorium therapeutic methods is only the
foreground of the novel. Its actuality lies in the quality
of Its backgrounds. Settembrini, the rhetorical ration-
alist and humanist, remains the protagonist of the protest
against the moral perils of the Liegekur and the entire
unwholesome milieu. He is but one figure among many,
however-a svmpa- thetic figure, indeed, with a humorous
side; sometimes a mouth- piece for the author, but by no
means the author himself. For the author, sickness and
death, and all the macabre adventures
his
hero passes through,
are just the pedagogic instrument used
to
accomplish the
enormous heightening and enhancement of the simple hero to a
point far beyond his original competence. And precisely as a
pedagogic method they are extensively justified; for even
Hans Castorp. in the course of his experiences, overcomes
his inborn attraction to death and arrives at an
understandinO' of a humanity that does not, indeed,
rationalistically ignore d;ath, nor scorn the dark,
mysterious side of life, but takes account of it, without
letting it get control over his
mind.
What he comes to
understand is that one must go through the deep experience
of sickness and death to arrive at a higher
sanity
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
727
and health; in just
the same way that one must have a knowledge of sin in order
to find redemption. .. There are," Hans Castorp once says,
.. two ways to life: one is the regular, direct and good
way; the other is bad, it leads through death, and that is
the way of genius..' It is this notion of disease and death
as a necessary route to knowled~e, health, and life that
makes The Magic Moun- tain a novel of
inItiation.
That description is
not original with me. I got it recently from a critic and
make use of it in discussing The Magic Mountain be- cause I
have been much helped by foreign criticism and I consider it
a mistake to think that the author himself is the best jud~e
of his work. He may be that while he is still at work on it
and hving in it. But once done, it tends to be something he
has got rid of, something foreign to him; others, as time
goes on, will know more and better about it than he. They
can often remind him of things in it he has forgotten or
indeed never quite knew. One always needs to be reminded;
one is by no means always in pos- session of one's whole
self. Our consciousness is feeble; only in moments of
unusual clarity and vision do we really know about
ourselves. As for me, I am glad to be instructed by critics
about myself, to learn from them about my past works and go
back to them in my mind. My regular fonnula of thanks for
such refresh-
ment of my
consciousness is: .. I am most gracyul to you for
hav-
ing so kindly
recalled me to myself." I am sure I wrote that to Professor
Hennann Weigand of Yale University when he sent me his book
on The Magic Mountain, the most fundamental and com-
prehensive critical treatment the work has
received.
I read a manuscript
by a young scholar of Harvard University, Howard Nemerov,
called" The Quester Hero. Myth as Universal Symbol in the
Works of Thomas Mann," and it considerably re- freshed my
memory and my consciousness of myself. The author places The
Magic Mountam and its simple hero in the line of a great
tradition that is not only Gennan but universal. He
classifies it as an art that he calls .. The Quester
Legend," which reaches very far back in tradition and
folklore. Faust is of course the most famous Gennan
representative of the fonn, but behind Faust, the eternal
seeker, is a grou
rof compositions
generally known as the Sangraal or Holy Grai romances. Their
hero, be it Gawain or Galahad or Perceval, is the seeker,
the quester, who ranges heaven and hell, makes terms with
them, and strikes a pact with the un- known, with sickness
and evil, with death and the other world, with the
supernatural, the world that in The Magic Mountain is called
.. questionable." He is forever searching for the
Grail-
728 THE MAKING
OF
that is to say, the
Highest: knowled~e, wisd°I?I'. cons:cration, the
philosophers' stone, the aurom potabzle, the elIXir of
life.
The writer declares
that Hans Castorp is one of these seekers. Perhaps he is
right. The Quester of the Grail legend, at the be- ginning
of his wanderings, is often called a fool, a great fool, a
guileless fool. That corresponds to the naivete and
simplicity of my hero. It is as though a dim awareness of
the traditional h~d made me insist on this quality of his.
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister- is he too not a guileless fool? To
a great extent he is identified with his creator; but even
so, he is always the object of his irony. Here we see
Goethe's great novel, too, falling within the Quester
category. And after all, what else is the German
Bildungsroman (educational novel)-a classification to which
both The Magic Mountain and Wilhelm Meister belong - than
the sublimation and spiritualization of the novel of
adventure? The seeker of the Grail, before he arrives at the
Sacred Castle, has to undergo various frightful and
mysterious ordeals in a wayside chapel called the Atre
Perilleux. Probably these ordeals were originally rites of
initiation, conditions of the permission to approach the
esoteric mystery; the idea of knowledge, wisdom, is always
bound up with the" other world," with night and
death.
In The Magic Mountain
there is a great deal said of an alche- mistic, hermetic
pedagogy, of transubstantiation. And I, myself a guileless
fool, was guided by a mysterious tradition, for it is those
very words that are always used In connection with the
mysteries of the Grail. Not for nothing do Freemasonry and
its rites playa role in The Magic Mountain, for Freemasonry
is the direct de- scendant of initiatory rites. In a word,
the magic mountain is a variant of the shrine of the
initiatory rites, a place of adventurous investigation into
the mystery of life. And my Hans Castorp, the
Bildungsreisende, has a very distinguished knightly and
mystical
ancestry: he is the
typical curious neophyte - curious in a high sense of the
word - who voluntarily, all too voluntarily,
embraces
disease and death,
because his very first contact with them gives promise of
extraordinary enlightenment and adventurous ..dvance- ment,
bound up, of course, with correspondingly great
risks.
Young Nemerov's is a
most able and channing commentary. I have used it to help me
instruct you - and myself - about t:ny novel, this late,
complicated, conscious and yet unconscious link in a great
tradition. Hans Castorp is a searcher after the Holy Grail.
You would never have thought it when you read his story - if
I did m~lf, it was both more and less than thinking. Perhaps
you will read the book again from this point of view. And
perhaps
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
729
you will find out
what the Grail is: the knowledge and the wis- dom, the
consecration, the highest reward, for which not only the
foolish hero but the book itself is seeking. You will find
it in the chapter called/" Snow," where Hans Castorp, lost
on the perilous heights, dreams his dream of humanity. If he
does not find the Grail, yet he divines it, in his deathly
dream, before he is snatched downwards from his hei~hts into
the European catastrophe. It is the idea of the human beIng,
the conception of a future humanity that has passed through
and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.
The Grail is a mystery, but humanity is a mystery too. For
man himself is a mystery, and all humanity rests upon
reverence before the mystery that is
man.
- THOMAS
MANN
466 -- THE
MAGIC MOUNTAIN ~
the spirit alone that
distinguished man, as a creature largely di- vorced from
nature, ,lar~efy opposed t<;, ,her in feeli.ng, fr?m all
oth~r. forms o!or~mc ~fe.,In man's spmt, the~, rcslde,d his
true nobility and his ment - In hIS state of disease, as It
were; In a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he
the more man. The genius of disease was more human than the
genius of health. How, then, could one who posed as the
friend of man shut his eyes to these fundamental truths
concerning man's humanity? Herr Set- temb~ni had progress
ever on his li~: was he aware ,that all prog- ress, In so
far as there was such a thing, was due to illness, and to
illness alone? In other words, to genius, which was the same
thing? H~d not the normal, since time was, lived on the
achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and
voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of
knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to
health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be
conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice.
That was the true death on the cross, the true Atone-
ment.
" Aha! " thought Hans
Castorp. " You unonhodox Jesuit, you, with your
interpretations of the Crucifixion! It's plain why you never
bec.ame a priest, jot; jesuite Q la petite tache bumide! Now
roar, lion! "he mentally addressed Herr Settembrini. And the
lion roared. He characterized all Naphta had said as
quibbling, sophis- try, and
confusion.
" Say it! "he cried
to his opponent, .. say it in your character as
schoolmaster, say it in the hearing of plastic youth, say
straight out, that the soul is :- disease! Verily you will
thereby encourage them to a belief in the spiritual. Disease
and death as nobility, life and health as vulgarity - what a
doctrine whereby to hold fast the neophyte to the service of
humanity! Da-vvero, e criminoso! " And like a crusader he
entered the lists in defence of the nobility of life and
health, of that which nature gave, for the soul of which one
did not need to fear. "The Form," he said; and Naphta
rejoined bombastically: "The Logos." But he who would have
none of the Logos answered: "The Reason," and the man of the
Logos re- toned with " The
Passion."
It was confusion
worse confounded.
"The Object," cried
one, the other: "The Ego! " "An " and " critique " were
bandied back and fonh, then once more "na- ture " and
"soul," and as to which was the nobler, and concern- ing the
" aristocratic problem." But there was no oraer nor clarity,
not even of a dualistic and militant kind. Things went not
only by contraries, but also all higgledy-piggledy. The
disputant not only
At this the
meticulous point of another supremly important juncture of
that quintessential moment of the point that never was.
Alizzed and those az always accompanying shadows, once more
surfaced az for that manner matter
born.
PLATO THE
REPUBLIC
Page 306
PART SEVEN [BOOK
SIX]
Visible World
Intelligible World
The JIm The
Good
{growth
and
{reality
and
Sollrce of light,
Sollrce of trllth,
which gives which
gives
visibility to objects
of sense intelligibility to objects of
thollght
and
and
the power of seeing
to the power of knowing to
the eye, the
mind.
The facility of
sight. The .faculty of knowledge.
'I must first get
your agreement to, and remind you
of
something we have
said earlier in our discussion, I
and
indeed on many other
occasions.'
b 'What is it?' he
asked.
1 replied, 'We say
that there are many particular things that are beautiful,
and many that are good, and so on, and distinguish between
them in our account.'
'Yes, we
do,'
, And we go on to
speak of beauty-in-itseIf, and goodness- in-itself, and so
on for all the sets of particular things which we have
regarded as many; and we proceed to posit by contrast a
single form, which is unique, in each case, and call it
"what really is" each thing.'z
'That is
so.'
, And we say that the
particulars are objects of sight but not of intelligence,
while the forms are the objects of intel- ligence but not of
sight.'
'Certainly,'
t 'And with what part
of ourselves do we see what we see?' 'With our
sight.'
, And we hear with
our hearing, and so on with the other senses and their
objects.'
I. Pp. z69-70:
476d.
z. This is a
difficult sentence of which variant translations are
given.
The version above
follows Adam and adopts his emendation
leal
Meav for "aT' ll5eav.
For the last phrase the modem philosopher
might
well say 'what x
really is'..
306
'tHE PHILOSOPHER
RULER
, Of
course.'
'Then have you
noticed,' I asked, 'how extremely
lavish
the designer of our
senses was when he gave us the faculty of sight and made
objects visible?'
'I can't say I
have,'
'Then look. Do
hearing and sound need something of another kind in addition
to themselves to enable the ear
to
hear and the sound to
be heard - some third element without
Ii
which the one cannot
hear or the other be heard?'
'No.'
, And the same is
true of most, I might say all, the other senses, Or can you
think of any that needs anything of the
kind?'
'No, I
can't.'
'But haven't you
noticed that sight and the visible do need
one?'
'How?'
'If the eyes have the
power of sight, and its possessor tries to use this power,
and if objects have colour, yet you know that he will see
nothing and the colours will remain , invisible unless a
third element is present which is
specifically
and naturally adapted
for the purpose.'
'What is that?' he
asked.
'What you call
light,' I answered.
,
True.'
'Then the sense of
sight and the visibility of objects are yoked by a yoke a
long way more precious than any other- jo8 that is, if light
is a precious thing.'
'Which it most
certainly is,'
'Which, then, of the
heavenly bodies' do you regard as responsible for this?
Whose light would you say it is
that makes our eyes
see and objects be seen most
perfectly?'
'I should say the
same as you or anyone else; you
mean
the sun, of
course.'
'Then is sight
related to its divine source as follows?'
'How?'
J, Plato says' gods '
j he believed the heavenly bodies were
divine.
3°7
PART SEVEN [BOOK
SIX]
'The sun is not
identical with sight, nor with what we call b the eye in
which sight resides.'
'No.'
, Yet of all
sense-organs the eye is the most sunlike.' 'Much the
most.'
, So the eye's power
of sight is a kind of infusion dispensed to it by the
sun.'
'Yes.'
'Then, moreover,
though the sun is not itself sight, it is the cause of sight
and is seen by the sight it
causes.'
, That is
so.'
'Well, that is what I
called the child of the good,' I said. 'The good has
begotten it in its own likeness, and
it
I bears the same
relation to sight and visible objects in the visible realm
that the good bears to intelligence and intel- ligible
objects in the intelligible
realm.'
'Will you explain
that a bit further?' he asked.
'You know that when
we turn our eyes to objects whose colours are no longer
illuminated by daylight, but only by moonlight or starlight,
they see dimly and appear to be almost blind, as if they had
no clear vision.'
'Yes.'
a' 'But when we turn
them on things on which the sun is shining, then they see
clearly, and obviously have
vision.'
,
Certainly.'
'Apply the analogy to
the mind. When the mind's eye is fixed on objects
illuminated by truth and reality, it under- stands and knows
them, and its possession of intelligence is evident; but
when it is fixed on the twilight world of change and decay,
it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its
opinions shifting, and it seems to lack intel-
ligence.'
'That is
true.'
I 'Then what gives
the objects of knowledge their truth and the knower's mind
the power of knowing is the form I of
the
good. I~is the cause
9f knowledge and truth, and you
will
be right to think of
it as being itself known, and yet as
being
something other than,
and even more splendid2 than,
know-
I. Idea. z.
Kolos.
3°8
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