The Apostle of Love

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Here he was to stay for seven years. During this time, he did little other than eat his meals and listen to the other patients speak—about art, history, religion, and war; about the inevitable decline of the body and the enduring mysteries of the soul. Their talk seemed to swirl around him faster than the snow that fell into the valley below; he listened, dizzy and enrapt. Yet their words had nothing to do with why he could not leave. The magic that bound him to the mountain was as ordinary as he was. He believed that the woman he loved would return and that when she did, she would gaze upon him with her blue-gray eyes and reach for him with her beautiful arms and release him from his terrible longing. Time, having stood still, would once again begin to pass. She would free him from death into life. At long last, he would be cured.

It has been one hundred years since Thomas Mann told this story, or a version of it, in The Magic Mountain, and twenty years since John E. Woods published its definitive English translation. While critics have typically described it as a novel of ideas, Mann first offered it to his readers as a fairy tale, albeit a modern, melancholic, ironic one. Its plot is a quest, a search undertaken by our hero, Hans Castorp, who desires to abandon the world of work, of exams and apprenticeships that leave him pale and trembling, for a utopia of eating, smoking, arguing, and having love affairs. Hans Castorp may strike us as a naïf, but among the fastidious German middle class, this confers upon him a paradoxical nobility; he is a modern knight errant, a young man at leisure to seek his paradise on earth. His wanderings lead him to the Kirghiz-eyed Clavdia Chauchat, as haughty as any lady of medieval romance. He shapes his initial infatuation into love, with a solipsism that is as scrupulous as it is severe. All around him, meanwhile, lovers and patients, living and dying, become enveloped in their own mysterious realm, which is as astonishingly beautiful and original as it is perverse, disproportionate, farcical, and forbidden.

“But is not the pastness of a story that much more profound, more complete, more like a fairy tale, the tighter it fits up against the ‘before’?” Mann asks in his foreword. “And it may well be that our story, by its very nature, has a few other things in common with fairy tales, too.” To paraphrase the first half of The Magic Mountain in the language of the fairy tale is to make visible the anatomy of the novel. The romance is the skeleton of the book, executing the essential movements of the plot. The ideas are its flesh, concealing these movements. They lend an air of secular respectability to what would otherwise be legible as a tale of enchanted love, of “Longing—Sehnsucht!” Mann wrote in a letter to his then fiancée, Katia Pringsheim: “It is my favorite word, my holy word, my magic formula, my key to the mystery of the world.”

Many layers are necessary for the concealment of this magic to succeed. We endure monologue after monologue: from Dr. Krokowski, the earnest psychoanalyst; from Settembrini, the Enlightenment “organ-grinder”; and from Naphta, the authoritarian Jesuit. Their long, dense, overelaborate, and largely impersonal speeches impart to the novel an educative function that stands as the pride and the privilege of the humanist tradition. “One should not deny the humanist his position as an educator—indeed it cannot be denied to him, for he alone preserves the tradition of man’s dignity and beauty,” Settembrini proclaims to Hans Castorp. “Absolutely no other type of educator has ever emerged.”

Yet if criticism is to serve as an X-ray, it must not be used diagnostically to separate the novel’s intellectual surfaces from its emotional depths, to distinguish what is diseased from what is healthy. Our X-ray should be read dialectically to reveal how the novel’s distinct genres struggle with and bleed into each other, how they overlap and interpenetrate to make up the magical formula of its emergent world. Only then can we appreciate how the supreme brilliance of Mann’s prose lies in his disciplined, almost fanatical, commitment to the entanglement of everything, even things that might normally be assumed to rebuff each other—illness and health, waking life and dream, love and pedagogy.

Still, it is difficult to think of two words that rebuff each other more forcefully than “love” and “pedagogy.” To speak the words aloud, in either English or German, is to hear the awkwardness of their pairing. To listen to a person who attempts to discuss love pedagogically is to grow immediately suspicious of their intentions, to become disenchanted by their clinicism or disgusted by their mawkishness. It is precisely these feelings that stir in Hans Castorp on his first Monday at the sanitorium. After spending the morning walking in the woods, he attends Dr. Krokowski’s lecture “Love as a Force Conducive to Illness,” an attempt to discuss to love pedagogically. What he hears from the lecturer—Freud’s theory of sexual repression and the “bizarre, agonized, eerie” symptoms that arise from it—bores, then distresses him. In Krokowski’s mouth, the word love conjures up “images of watery milk—something whitish-blue and insipid.” It is incapable of transmitting nourishment to our hero.

Distracted, Hans Castorp’s thoughts turn from Dr. Krokowski’s words to Clavdia Chauchat’s hand, reaching behind her head to tuck her hair into her braid. “A vague, halfhearted recollection passed through his mind of something Dr. Krokowski had said about corrective bourgeois forces that counteracted love.” Yet this idea is co-opted by the arm, concealed in a gossamer sleeve, which makes him feel the force of Krokowski’s idea, even if the doctor’s psychoanalytic language fails him. Motivated by Clavdia Chauchat’s arm and its movements, Hans Castorp considers the relationship between concealment and repression and pieces together a theory of repression in his own unpracticed, desultory way. It is as if the arm in the sleeve teaches Hans Castorp how to read it—how to notice, to reason, to synthesize, to abstract.

certainly, the method by which Clavdia Chauchat’s unspeaking and impassive presence instructs Hans Castorp bears no resemblance to the protocols of the official “pedagogues”—Settembrini and Naphta. Her genre is not, like theirs, the lecture, with its finely wrought, self-satisfied performance of reason, delivered in an unbroken stream of words and with an air of perfect surety. When these men speak, everything is already known in advance. Their ideas are fixed, and the words that they use to express them, however passionately or eloquently formed, only make their fixity more pronounced. Clavdia Chauchat’s method, by contrast, is one in which speech as a medium may be entirely superfluous. Indeed, Hans Castorp’s reluctance to address her proceeds from “the feeling that social contact with Clavdia Chauchat—a civilized relationship, with formal pronouns and bows and conversation in French perhaps—was not necessary, not desirable, not the right thing at all.” She communicates silently to Hans Castorp—through the smile, the scowl, the sidelong glance, the gaze, the stare. As the narrator puts it, Clavdia Chauchat’s face, without speaking a word, “spoke to him like nothing in the world.”

What does Hans Castorp learn from the looks of love? He learns to look himself, to pay attention: in one extraordinary passage, as he looks at Clavdia Chauchat, he counts, or imagines that he could count, the strands of her hair; measures the handbreadths that separate their faces; classifies her features; describes their proportions and relations to one another in the language of plane and volume. And he learns how to make things speak that remain silent. How to enchant what is inscrutable, forbidden, and unyielding yet inviting to him. The objects of scientific study, the human face and body, become tinged with the supernatural. At the same time, the magic of romance is enhanced and even disciplined by study. Hans Castorp’s medium is his imagination, the most invisible and unalloyed medium there is, and one eager to absorb new theories and apply them to his heated perceptions. In one of the novel’s most involved interludes, “Research,” Hans Castorp first reads a scandalous pagan pamphlet called “The Art of Seduction,” then procures several volumes on anatomy, physiology, and biology, perusing them “with burning interest about life and its sacred, yet impure mystery” and contemplating the great transformative question of modernity: What is life? As the novel repeats this question, it summons Castorp’s textbook knowledge but in the language of the pamphlet, of the evolution of life as a process of “sweet, painful precariousness,” of “lust and revulsion,” “furtive, lascivious, sordid.” Science—atoms and anatomy, organic and inorganic matter, health and disease—becomes arousing, while arousal becomes organized, systematic. At the climax of the chapter, its dissection of molecules, tissues, and organs coheres into “the image of life, its voluptuous limbs, its flesh-borne beauty,” an embodied vision that embraces and kisses Hans Castorp. The novel reclaims the magic of life and death from evolution and pathology while insisting that this magic can be a learned art.

The pedagogical plot of the magical romance, then, tracks the movement from feeling to thought, from the involuntary reactions of the body to the voluntary motions of the mind, which in turn, Mann suggests, make us feel more deeply and intensely. The novel’s enchantment accretes slowly, almost uneventfully, but with a steady rhythm and logic. To learn from it, to cultivate an intimacy with it, one needs to examine its words in the same fascinated way that Hans Castorp examines Clavdia Chauchat. To develop a knowledge of its fairy-tale morphology, its delicate balance of its many moving parts, and to indulge in the singular, sensual illusions that it creates. “Let me smell the odor of the skin on your knee, beneath which the ingeniously segmented capsule secretes its slippery oil!” Hans Castorp implores Clavdia Chauchat. It is an ungallant appeal, as well as a seemingly anti-humanist one—a rejection of the “beautiful forms” that Settembrini has extolled as inculcating courtesy and nobility in the critic or lover. There is nothing noble in begging to sniff the skin of a lover’s knee. Yet as Clavdia Chauchat tells Hans Castorp, Settembrini’s humanism is inhumane in its abstraction, its indifference to the actual people around him. His morality is immoral in its refusal to see evil. Her silent glances, by contrast, have taught Hans Castorp at least as much as Settembrini’s words have. “If your teachers could only see you—” she exclaims as he babbles on about how much he loves her.

“the mingling of longing and contempt, ironic love, had been my most characteristic emotion,” Mann wrote to Katia. He was speaking obliquely about the men whom he had tended to fall in love with, and the way of loving—“nostalgically, mockingly, and hopelessly”—that he had bequeathed to his characters. He knew that in literature, as in life, ironic love tended to set emotion and story at cross-purposes. There was a necessary, and perhaps even a desirable, incompatibility between the ability to cultivate an intense erotic attraction and its resolution in a stable and socially accepted relationship. In The Magic Mountain, this tension is strained until it simply breaks. On Walpurgis Night, Hans Castorp’s love is consummated, his lady conquered, and afterward—nothing. The old agon of romance dissolves, revealing that ironic love’s pedagogy is defined by its purposelessness. It is unconcerned with progress, with plot, with arriving at an ending, happy or not. It has neither the inclination nor the ability to move the story along. It repeats itself; Clavdia Chauchat, as we learn early in the novel, inspires the same obsessive feelings in Hans Castorp as his schoolboy crush, Pribislav Hippe, whose Kirghiz eyes and broad cheekbones seem to have seeded his attraction to Clavdia long before he left for the sanitorium.

Yet ironic love establishes a mood, a state of being, a world of people and places that are experienced differently than they were in the world as it was before. Against the backdrop of this world, contrasts can be drawn—other ways, and other people, to love. Indeed, once ironic love stops pricking at Hans Castorp’s senses, his brotherly love for the dead cousin, Joachim, “good, patient, honest Joachim, a man totally given to service and discipline,” quietly gains heft and weight in Hans Castorp’s mind. It is Joachim whom he thinks of when he plays the intermezzo from Gounod’s Faust, a prayer sung by a dying soldier. It is Joachim who appears in the empty chair at the séance and observes his cousin with “the tenderness of the gaze that came from those beautiful, large, dark eyes, directed in friendly silence at Hans Castorp, at him alone.” Hans Castorp’s love for Joachim is not grotesque but ghostly, not sensual but charitable. It does not seek to profane, to transgress. Rather, it asks forgiveness for his “betrayal, desertion, and faithlessness”—his abandonment of Joachim for Clavdia Chauchat. “Forgive me!” Hans Castorp whispers to the ghost of Joachim. The genre that brotherly love courts is not romance. It is elegy.

The generic transformation effected by the second half of The Magic Mountain sees Hans Castorp metamorphose from a conqueror into a mourner. His metamorphosis, prepares the reader to mourn, in turn, the waning of the novel’s magic. Like Joachim’s death, the end of The Magic Mountain arrives slowly, then all at once, like the sound of thunder after lightning. “Where are we?” the narrator asks in “The Thunderbolt,” the final chapter. “What is that?” We are in the middle of the Great War, watching Hans Castorp struggle through the trenches, slipping, stumbling, shielding his eyes. Bombs fall. Fires rage. The human body—the arm in the sleeve—is no longer concealed. Its innards are exposed, its surfaces ravaged. Death, which Hans Castorp had learned to sublimate, to convert into the beauty of his imagination, brooks no magical transformations.

“And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round—will love someday rise up out of this, too?” the novel asks in its final line. Amid the shame and the depravity of war, amid the ritualized mass murder that modern nations claim as lawful and just, how sinful can the desiring hero or the lady of fairy-tale romance be? How can the touch of the body ever compare to the blast of the bomb, the “howling hound of hell,” which “like the Devil himself” descends to earth, spewing “fire, iron, lead, and dismembered humanity?” The flames engulf both the heat and the frost in Hans Castorp’s heart. The war reveals that what we accepted as the climactic struggle for his bourgeois soul—the battle between instinct and reason, the whole realm of forbidden love—only appeared climactic when set above and apart from the evil of the everyday world.

This is the greatest spell, the awesome mystification, enacted by The Magic Mountain. His fairy-tale romance needed a setting where the violent forces of love and death could appear as external to him—a vast white emptiness onto which he could project his mythic visions of heaven and hell and claim to conquer them. Yet in the modern world, hell is all around. The evil that stalks the earth regularly sends man to do its bidding. It conscripts him to fight, to maim, to kill, and, finally, to die on a battlefield that teems with the bodies of his kin, the soldiers whom he sometimes calls his friends, other times, his enemies. The battle for the soul was fought and lost long, long ago. The desire to believe otherwise, the desire to create a magical place apart, is a refusal to mourn its loss.