EUGENE GOODHEART
Thomas Mann's Comic Spirit
The narrator of
The Magic Mountain
begins by urging patience in the reader.
The journey to the mountain will be a long one, the stay, though anticipat–
ed to be short, will be much longer (seven years in duration). The eventful
uneventfulness of Hans Castorp's visit to this tubercular cousin, Joachim
Ziemssin, occurs in slow time. The passage of time is of course one of the
great themes of the novel, endlessly and oppressively reflected upon by the
narrator. The reader needs to be patient, if he is to be rewarded. The narrator
remarks "and so this storyteller will not be finished telling our Hans's story
in only a moment or two."
We have lost the habit of slow time. Our attention span, conditioned and
exemplified by television, demands speedy delivery, rapid change, instant grat–
ification.
The Magic Mountain
requires an audience that will find relief from
the speed with which things pass in contemporary society. Slow time is the
time of illness. For the chronically ill, excluded from the pressures of the
workaday world, there are no deadlines to be met, no responsibility to others.
There is only the narcissistic concern with one's own body: the schedule of
doctor's visits and the taking of medicine, the routine of meals. The sick per–
son must learn patience. In the Berghof sanatorium, the site of the novel, one
aspires to be a patient.
It has been often said of the novel that the illness of the residents of the
sanatorium
(drawn
from a cross-section of Europeans: Germans, Italians,
Austrians, Russians, etc.) reflects a civilization in crisis. The novel is set at a
time immediately before the Great War. At the end, the residents leave the
sanatorium as the alarms of war are sounded, and the last view we have of
Hans Castorp is in battle fatigues trudging through the mud in a hail of fire.
The publication date is 1924, three years after the publication date of
Civilization and Its Discontents.
The ending of the novel has an uncanny resem–
blance to the ending of Freud's essay. "And out of this worldwide festival of
death, this rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all around-will
love someday rise up out of this too?" Freud writes: "And now it is to be
expected that the other of the two 'Heavenly Powers: eternal Eros, will make
an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary
[Thanatos]. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?"
Editor's Note: From
A Companion to Thomas Mann's
Magic Mountain, edited by
Stephen Dowden. Forthcoming from Camden House,july 1998.
