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PARTISAN REVIEW
shore with a girlfriend, his lips pressed to his gentle beloved's ear, or in
happy friendship instructing another lad to string a bow. And instead
there they all lie, noses in the fiery filth. That they do it with joy, and
also with boundless fear and an unalterable longing for home, is both
shameful and sublime, but surely no reason to bring them here to this.
This is the war told in a moment or two that deprives it of its reality, the
kind of story he does not tell about the mountain. It is written from the
vantage point of someone who stands upon a hill (a magic mountain?),
observing and not participating-and observing in a very diminished sense
of the word. He unders tands the need to deploy three thousand troops,
because one thousand are sure to fall by the way. Literary memories of epic
wars construct an image of a collective sense of triumph, despite the killing
(no signs of torn limbs or entrails in the description), which even the hero–
ically-minded Homer encompassed in his descriptions. The contrast
between the scene of war and the idyll of the lad and his girlfriend (seen
with "a beatific humanistic eye") is hardly sustained as a contrast; in revert–
ing to the scene of war, the narrator insists that the soldiers lie, noses in the
filth, with joy. Both idyll and war are scenes of joy. (Even if one hears the
note of irony in the juxtaposition of joy and mud, it doesn't overcome the
stronger lyric note in the passage.) Mann acknowledges the horror of war,
but blurs it with aesthetic evocations of the glory of battle. There is a touch
of what Primo Levi, characterizing certain wri ting about World War II, calls
the "lechery of aestheticism." Such a compromised view of the war might
explain Mann's complacent farewell to Hans Castorp: "Your chances are not
good. The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last many a little
sinful year yet, and we would not wager much that you will come out
whole. To be honest, we are not really bothered about leaving the question
open. Adventures in the flesh and spirit, which enhanced and heightened
your ordinariness, allowed you to survive in the spirit what you will proba–
bly not survive in the flesh." Could the "adventures in the flesh and spirit"
in the sanatorium possibly prepare Castorp for the devastations of the Great
War? Those who survived the war, physically unharmed, were often spiri–
tually destroyed. The war with its consequences for nations and humanity
in general was not merely a staging ground for the progress of one particu–
lar soul.
Which returns us to the question of Mann's seriousness in representing
disease and death. One doesn't have to be in a war to have the experience
of being ravaged by a fatal illness. Rarely in the novel, however, do we get a
sense of the terrible ravages of illness, of the devastating loneliness of death.
We do get such a glimpse, more than a glimpse, in Joachim's death: not only
in Joachim's admirable stoicism, but in his mother's and Hans's sense ofloss.
