EUGENE GOODHEART
289
gle for verbal consciousness as "a very great part of life." "Any man of real
individuality tries to know and to understand what is happening, even in
himself, as he goes along." "Verbal consciousness" (Lawrence means by that
phrase ideas that one has about oneself and the world) may be false as well
as true. It should not be the "superimposition of a theory," but rather "the
passionate struggle into conscious being." How do the ideas of Mann's char–
acters measure up to the Lawrentian standard?
One certainly hears in the impassioned debates between Naphta and
Settembrini the sounds of "passionate struggle." But they are not "strug–
gl[ing] into conscious being." They have already achieved it--and their
intellectual passion is, so to speak, the epiphenomenon of their achieved
beings. Passion is partly in their beliefS and partly in their scorn for each
other's views. For Lawrence, ideas must be tested by experience and there–
fore are open to refutation. Neither Settembrini nor Naphta tests ideas: they
inhabit closed systems to be fought for and defended. If there is a testing, it
is in the relatively open mind of Castorp, and presumably in the mind of the
sensitive reader. Who then is in the right, Settembrini or Naphta? Neither–
though, as I have already said, Naphta is the more compelling figure. Neither,
because their ideas do not survive the test that the novel itself provides: the
mortality of the body. Settembrini's Enlightenment optimism is useless
against the facts of disease and death. The technological advances in medi–
cine, which have effected so many cures (and in particular for the diseases that
affiict patients of the Berghof sanatorium) do not confirm that optimism.
The whole panoply of antibiotics, it appears, cannot ultimately outwit the
cunning of viruses capable of transmuting themselves into even more formi–
dable antagonists of the body. We
in
the developed world may have become
healthier and longer lived, but there is still the ineluctable prospect of bod–
ily deterioration and death. The future of mankind contains the proliferation
of sanatoria for the elderly. Our defenses against disease and death may be
only in degree more effective than our efforts to create lasting peace in the
world.
Naphta may have come closer to surviving the test, because he embraces
disease, suffering, and death, but he too is finally the captive of a faith that is
immune to testing: the homeopathic belief that one can transcend suffering
through suffering. Naphta's doctrine of suffering applies only to himself; it is
a retrograde vision of the world, undesirable as an ideal and realizable only
as oppression. It is finally the dream of the torturer and self-torturer. What
would Naphta had made of modern totalitarian societies?
It
is at least a ques–
tion of whether he would have found them congenial. As Alexander
Nehamas remarks, both Naphta and Settembrini reject the "low, material or
anirnal"-Settembrini in the name of reason, Naphta in the name of faith.
The philosophies of both men lead away from reality or to a destructive
