THOMAS MANN: MYTH AND REASON*
William Troy
II
I
N
The Magic Mountain
the hero is not an artist but an engineer,
that is to say, a representative of one of the most characteristic and
therefore most honored of the bourgeois professions. And he is even,
by his own admission, a rather mediocre .specimen of his class.
But Hans Castorp is "a delicate child of life" for all of that. By impli–
cation the virus that had attacked Hanno Buddenbrooks, Aschenbach
a'nd all the other members of that allergic crew has now spread by
contagion into every rank and department of the society: the whole
bourgeois world is ready for the sanitarium. In selecting such a com–
monplace figure for the center of his novel, therefore, Mann is not so
much deserting the artist-type of
his
early works as assimilating him
into a more complete vision of the moral and psychological crisis which
Western European man had reached in the years preceding the last
Great War. In the person of Hans Castorp a whole culture makes the
tragic journey upward to the high and lonely place where salvation
is
to be attained only after the most harrowing trials of the body
and the spirit.
The structure of
The Magic Mountain,
it is true, is much com–
plicated by the ambivalent character of its dominating symbol. Every–
thing depends on whether the mountain is taken as a point of culmi–
nation or as a separate object in space. On the one hand, it may be
equated with the spiral, the ladder, or any other of the traditional
symbols of inspiration or attainment, in which case Hans Castorp's
story becomes a parable capable of interpretation on all three planes
of meaning. Allegorically, his ascent of the mountain corresponds to
the arduous quest for certitude through the mind of a world condi–
tioned to an absolute individualism in religion, politics, commerce,
and all the other branches of life and thought. The particular nature
and content of each of these categories are made amply explicit
throughout the narrative. Morally, it provides an example of what
Mann believes to be the proper mode of salvation-not surrender to
• The opening section of this essay appeared in the June issue,
51
