EUGENE GOODHEART
293
The main spirit of the novel I think is elsewhere-in a kind of theatrical
display of symptoms, of the knowledge of the etiology of illness and of
political, moral, and religious ideas. The magic mountain is an ivory tower
of virtuosos, displaying their talents, sometimes pedantically, at other times
brilliantly, but in a comic spiri t. The contemptible Frau Stohr may be close
to the spirit of the novel in her unwitting puns, for instance when she mis–
takes "deceased" for "diseased" and "premises" for "primroses." Doesn't
the novel itself identify disease with death? And doesn't one vacate the
primroses in vacating the premises? Frau Stohr gives us the comedy of the
perishing body. Even Joachim, perhaps the most serious character in the
novel, refuses to take life on the mountain seriously: "I sometimes think
that illness and death aren't really serious matters, that it's all more like
loafing around, and that strictly speaking, things are serious only down
below in real life."
Reviewing
Death in
~nice,
a young
D.
H. Lawrence (age twenty-four)
saw the novella as a work at the end of a line. Mann was "the last sick suf–
ferer from the complaint of Flaubert," resisting life's "disordered
corruption" with "his fine aesthetic sense, his feeling for beauty, for per–
fection." Though
The Magic Mountain
does not contain an artist figure
comparable to Aschenbach, it represents the bourgeois values that
Aschenbach embodies before his "fall." The world of Mann's characters is
an achieved world. The ideas that circulate in it represent forms of existence
for which there is no real future. The irony of Settembrini's progressivism
is that it has become an obsolete idea with no prospects, whereas Naphta's
outlook is openly reactionary. The world of the novel is poised on the brink
of disaster, and yet the narrative seems oddly insulated from it-as if Mann
simply refuses to allow anything to disturb his equilibrium. Published in
1924, the novel comes across as a retrospective celebration of a world that
had already passed away. Once upon a time....
Mann's attraction to the Dionysian is evident throughout his work. We
find it in the dream of the Bacchantes in
Death in
~nice,
in the
Walpurgisnacht in
The Magic Mountain,
and briefly in his evocations of the
Great War. But his sensibility is Apollonian. He is the ironic master of
extreme situations, experiencing danger at a safe distance. This reading of
The Magic Mountain
goes counter to its gravitas, though it is consistent
with its irony. It is very much in the spirit of Mann's own comment upon
his intention. "[The novel] was meant as a humorous companion-piece to
Death in
~nice
[the work that immediately preceded it] and was to be about
the same length: a sort of satire on the tragedy just finished. The atmos–
phere was to be that strange mixture of death and lightheadedness I found
at Davos."
