EUGENE GOODHEART
287
In
Intoxicated by
My
fllness,
Anatole Broyard writes oflus affinity for
The
Magic Mountain,
"the grand definitive romance of illness, a portrait that, I
would say, speaking as a connoisseur now, will never be equaled. His
description of life itself showed how precarious it was: 'a form-preserving
instability, a fever of matter...the existence of the impossible-to-exist, of a
half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing, this restricted and
feverish process of decay and renewal, upon the point of existence.'" For
Broyard, dying is a creative, voluptuous, and even hilarious experience. Like
Castorp in
The Magic Mountain,
he is filled with a perverse excitement at
the discovery that he is ill, the condition for all sorts of discoveries about
himself.
The novel has been read as a
Bildungsroman,
the sanatorium being a sort
of university with a varied curriculum. Castorp becomes a student not only
of Naphta and Settembrini, who is relentlessly described as a pedagogue,
but of the Drs. Behrens and Krokowski, who represent different views of
the relationship between the flesh and the spirit, body and soul or nUnd.
(Behrens is a materialist, discovering causes in the soma,whereas Krokowski
is a psychoanalytic idealist looking to the psyche for explanations.) The
inarticulate but impressive Mynheer Peeperkorn and his lover Mme.
Chauchat are teachers of Eros and feeling, a love for life beyond ideas.
Castorp comes across as the eternal undergraduate who would prolong his
stay indefinitely in the hermetically sealed world of the mountain, if it
weren't for the war, which forces him to return to the flatlands, where he
will presumably be educated in other ways.
TlUs is a familiar and attractive reading of the novel, but I confess to
sharing Jill Anne Kowalik's skepticism about the significance of Castorp's
education. What does he learn from his mentors? As Kowalik remarks, he
does not seem to achieve "an increase in moral consciousness." She also
notes an absence of "acceptance and appreciation of the seriousness of suf–
fering." If anything, in the climactic chapter "Snow" there seems to be a
rejection of what he is being taught. "My two pedagogues! Their arguments
and contradictions are nothing but
guzzabuglio,
the hubbub and alarm of
battle, and no one whose head is a little clear and heart a little devout will
let lUmself be dazed by that." The curriculum at Davos engenders confu–
sion rather than clarity, which some would say is what a curriculum should
do: create
guzzabuglio
(a favorite word in the novel, meaning mess or mud–
dle) to unsettle the student in all his views. Whenever Castorp
philosophizes on his own he deservedly encounters ridicule and not only
from his philosophical mentors. Here is Castorp on love and death: "But
irrational love is a mark of genius, because death, you see, is the principle of
genius, the
res bina,
the
lapis philosophorum,
and it is also the pedagogic prin–
ciple. For the love of death leads to the love of life and humanity. That is
