286
PARTISAN REVIEW
the more ill a man was the more highly human a man was and the
genius of illness was more human than that of health.
The Christian doctrine of humility is implicit in this affirmation of
. illness; the sick body is a confession of the body's mortality. Health only
cultivates the illusion that we will live forever, effectively averting our gaze
from the reality of death. In defending the Inquisition, Naphta implicitly
draws an analogy between the use of torture to obtain a confession and ill–
ness as God and nature's way of obtaining an acknowledgment of the
body's mortality. Naphta, less sympathetic than Settembrini, nevertheless
wins the debate. Castorp in his thoughts while lost in the snow reluctant–
ly concedes to Naphta: "You [Settembrini] are a windbag...you mean well
... .I
like you better, although [Naphta] is almost always right."
What accounts for Mann's fascination with disease? Naphta's argu–
ment, powerful as it is, is not the argument that Mann himself would make.
There is no evidence that he would follow Naphta's Christian logic of the
transcendence of suffering through suffering. Though the theme is not
developed
in
the novel, there is the suggestion of a symbiosis between ill–
ness and creativity that would have appealed to Mann, the artist. "Any man
who recognizes an organic symptom of illness to be the product of for–
bidden emotions that assume hysterical form in conscious psychic life also
recognizes the creative power of the psyche in the material world." The
healthy body, unconscious of itself, does not experience its own activity.
Without errancy, it has no story to tell; like the state of innocence, health
is the condition before the fall, before individuation and consciousness. It
offers no challenge to the mind and the soul. It cannot lead to wisdom,
which as the ancient Greeks knew comes through suffering. Settembrini's
Enlightenment view doesn't even acknowledge sickness as a passage to a
regained healthy state, a necessary memory of the susceptibility of even the
healthy body. The Enlightenment will "have banished those shadows."
For Castorp as for Mann, the sanatorium at Davos is not so much a site
of cure as it is a spectacle of illness and the variousness with which its
patients experience it. The sanatorium for Castorp is the place that liber–
ates illness from its repressed or denied condition in the "normal" life he
leads in the flatlands. He breaks the rules of the sanatorium, visiting the
other patients with a combination of compassion and curiosity. The osten–
sible reason for Castorp's visit is to see his cousin Joachim; the real reason
is to discover himself or the fact that he is ill, which may be the same thing.
Like Freud, Mann could respond to the question of what is man with the
answer: "Man is a sick creature." And the discovery is attended with a
sense of liberation, not ,dismay. Castorp revels in it. It becomes his bond
with others.
