284
PARTISAN REVIEW
This may be taking the novel more seriously or rather with a different
kind of seriousness than intended. Certainly the characters themselves seem
not to sense crisis or take their illness as an omen of impending catastrophe.
Castorp explains to his uncle,James Tienappel, who on a visit to the sanato–
rium cannot understand Hans's infatuation with it. The "first effect of [the
mountain air] was greatly to enhance illness to exuberant eruption, so to
speak....Had he never noticed that there is something exuberant about the
eruption of illness, as if the body were celebrating?" The narrator's view is
by no means certain, but Castorp's self-possession in the scene and his uncle's
bewildered retreat (he arrives with confidence that he can take Castorp back
with
him
to the flatlands and departs alone in haste) suggests the narrator's
complicity with Castorp. Reading The
Magic Mountain
is like the experience
of the patient who awaits the diagnosis of the doctor as he probes the body
and listens for symptoms of disease. And it is, curiously enough, free of anx–
iety. Both the reader and the patient perversely do not want to have a clean
bill of health, for illness as it turns out is a sign of vitality.
The concluding sentence about love rising up is suspect-and not sim–
ply for its sentimentality. The opposition between love and death in the last
sentence is belied by the narrative, which identifies love with disease and
death. Castorp falls passionately in love with Clavdia Chauchat, the fascinat–
ing "Asiatic" woman with the Kirghiz eyes. She embodies "the genius of
illness;' which confers upon her a "freedom" to be herself. Illness is not a
misfortune that befalls Mme. Chauchat, but her very essence. "For she is a
woman of genius," [Hans Castorp said], "and her husband has. . .granted her
freedom to make use of her genius, either because he is very stupid or very
intelligent, I cannot say, not knowing the fellow. In any case, it was wise of
him, for it is her illness that confers such freedom on her, it is the genius of
illness that she serves." In falling in love with her, Castorp must overcome a
revulsion that he ini tially experiences from her bad manners (she slams the
door on entering the dining room). And he can overcome it only when he
accustoms himself to the sanatorium as the habitation of illness. Castorp not
only has to accept the fact that he is ill (he resists the diagnosis in the early
days of his visit), he has to experience it as a celebration of his body. The ill–
ness arouses his desire for Clavdia, whose presence makes him feverish. Mann
is, of course, exploiting familiar knowledge about the erotic effects of tuber–
culosis. We know that the feverishness of the imaginations of Keats and
Lawrence, for example, owed a great deal to their tubercular condition.
Illness, like everything else in the novel, becomes an idea. It figures
prominently in the philosophical debates between Settembrini, the exponent
of Enlightenment, and Naphta, the Jesuitical exponent of a paradoxical com–
bination of medievalism and communism.
As
one might expect from an
Enlightened reasoner, Settembrini views illness as a form of irrationali ty that
