EUGENE GOODHEART
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can be cured and ultimately banished from the world. Health is the reason
of the body.
Illness is defini tely not elegant, and certainly not venerable-such a
view is itself a sickness, or leads to it. Perhaps I can best arouse your
abhorrence of that idea by telling you that it is outdated and ugly. It
comes from an era of superstitious contrition, when harmony and
health were demeaned and distorted into caricature, a fearful era, when
harmony and health were considered suspicious and devilish, whereas
infirmity in those days was as good as a passport to heaven. Reason and
enlightenment, however, have banished those shadows, which once lay
encamped in the human soul....
Castorp listens respectfully to Settembrini's eloquent speech ("a regular
aria"), "both bewildered and abashed." In a sense, the argument is out of
place, for it denies what is the pervasive condition of the scene of the
novel-the illness, latent or manifest, of all its residents.
Settembrini's own condition belies the argument, confirming, as it
were, its abstract and utopian character. (We know that Mann was settling
scores with his brother Heinrich, a writer in the liberal Enlightenment tra–
dition, in his satiric though not unaffectionate depiction of Settembrini. In
"The Making of the Magic Mountain," his commentary on the novel
appended to the Lowe-Porter translation, Mann speaks of Settembrini as
"sometimes a mouthpiece for the author, but by no means the author
him–
self." This sounds like a second thought about a character who seems more
clown than spokesman for Mann's ideas.)
Naphta's affinity for illness alone would make him the more com–
pelling figure.
It
is not simply a matter of who is right and who wrong, but
the way the imagination of illness energizes argument, making it more
interesting in its complication. To return man to a healthy nature is to
dehumanize him and turn him into an animal.
Felix culpa.
To fall from grace
is to fall into disease and death, a human condition.
Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately rebutted, because to
be human was to be ill. Indeed, man was ill by nature, his illness was
what made
him
human, and whoever sought to make him healthy and
attempted to get him to make peace with nature, to "return to nature"
(whereas he had never been natural) ...wanted nothing more than to
dehumanize man and turn him into an animal. Humanity? Nobility?
The Spirit was what distinguished man-a creature very much set
apart from nature--from the rest of organic life. Therefore, the digni–
ty and nobility of a man was based in the spirit, in illness. In a word,
