28
PARTISAN REVIEW
on the evening before. He had got free of it in sleep, but the blush
had made it set again."
The mere thought of love is enough to call forth the sign of
mortality, in Castorp or anyone else. The only individual difference
is in the degree of resistance to this "vice."
Again-Woman, Love, Lassitude, "The Orient," enter, in the
person of Frau Chauchat, the room where Castorp is breakfasting:
"Hans Castorp gave a sudden angry start. A door was slammed
-it was the one on the left, leading into the hall,
and someone had let
it fall shut, or even banged it, a thing he detested; he had never been
able to endure it. Whether from his upbringing,
or out of natural
idiosyncrasy,
he loathed the slamming of doors, and could have struck
the guilty person.
In this case, the door was filled in above with small
glass panes, which augmented the shock with their ringing and rat·
tling.
'Oh come,' he thought angrily, 'what kind of damned careless–
ness is that'?"
I have italicised the details added for the purpose of "naturalis–
ing" the incjdent and, by increasing the solidity of the scene, prevent·
ing Castorp's experience from disclosing itself as a stage in an abstract
process. But the action itself and Castorp's response to it are wholly
schematic, like--shall we say-the confessions ·in certain notorious
trials. Castorp's fury has no
depende~e
upon or relation to a particu·
lar individuality; it is obviously-even satirically- disproportionate
to the occurrence (this mildly moody young gentlemen "could have
struck the guilty person"?). The conflict between convention and
self-abandonment is reflected in the angry opposition to the careless
newcomer; but this general hostility has entered the larger context
of the "Principle" of Love and Death. The sound of the banging door
pierces Castorp like the arrow of Eros, though he has not even seen
the shocking Russian at whose feet he is destined to fall.
The masked episode, introduced with exaggerated though
in–
auspicious effect, is passed over; after a few hours, however, have
permitted Castorp's disease to ripen, the detail is picked up again
and played for the full significance of its love-symbolism:
"At that moment the glass door on the left slammed shut, with
rattle and ringing of glass; he did not start as he had on the first
OC·
. casion, but only made a grimace of lazy disgust; when he wished
to
tum his head, he found the effort too much for him- it was really
not worth while."
Already in an advanced state of abandonment, and still no sight
of the charmer. Metaphysical propaganda lifts the action into a fahu·
lous world of moral necessity, to which an appearance of reality
is
supplied by the repetition of physical details-"the rattle and
ringing
of glass." No scientific law could more perfectly exclude the possibility
of spiritual liberty.
