288
PARTISAN REVIEW
how it is. It came to me on my balcony, and I am delighted to be able to
tell it to you." And Clavdia's response is definitive: "You are a silly philoso–
pher, Hans Castorp." Did Mann mean to represent the mountain as the site
of education or in effect to parody it? His famous irony makes it difficult
to answer one way or the other. Mann suggests that "Hans Castorp would
not have stayed with people up here even this long beyond his originally
planned date of departure,
if
only some sort of satisfactory answer about the
meaning and purpose of life had been supplied to his prosaic soul from out
of the depths of time." He does stay, but it would be hard to say what he
learns about the point and purpose of the business of living.
Castorp acquires a good deal of medical information about the body.
He is exposed to the conflict of ideas, which he struggles without much
success to relate to his own experience. The love affair with Mme.
Chauchat is a brief episode that makes
him
feverish and provides him with
a long memory. It is as hard to make sense of the charismatic effect of
Peeperkorn on Castorp as it is difficult for Peeperkorn to express himself.
Castorp has the air of a serious student, an overachiever, if there was
something to achieve. If he (and the reader) learn anything, it is that the
ideas that occupy such a large space in the novel are untrustworthy and
worse. Settembrini in particular provides no guide even for his own life.
"Ah, this Settembrini-it was not for nothing he was a man of letters,
grandson of a politician and son of a humanist! He had lofty ideas about
emancipation and criticism-and chirruped at the girls in the street."
But the failure of ideas is not confined to Settembrini. In a memorable
passage, Mann describes what happens to ideas as they develop in debate.
"Form!" [Settembrini] said. And Naphta grandiloquently responded,
"Logos!" But he who would not hear of the logos, said, "reason!" And
the man of the logos defended "Passion!" Confusion reigned.
"Objective reality," shouted one; "the self!" cried the other. Finally
one side was talking about "Art!" and the other about "Criticism!"
And both constantly returned to "Nature!" And "Spirit" and to
which of them was more noble, and to the issue of "free aristocracy."
But there was no clarity, no order, not even of a dualistic and militant
sort, for it was all not only contradictory, but also topsy-turvy, and the
disputants not only contradicted one another, but also themselves."
A veritable carnival! Mann is not simply indicating the intellectual inco–
herence of Settembrini and Naphta. His target is the character of ideas per
se. Mann here performs like a deconstructionist
avant la lettre,
dran1atizing the
self-contradictoriness to which all ideas are susceptible.
In his foreword to
VH1men in Love,
D.
H. Lawrence speaks of the strug-
