This week’s session was lead by Dr Jennifer Rushworth

The summary of the discussion is written by Chloë Marshall

(Disclaimer: At time of writing, I am only about a quarter of the way through, so this is by no means a comprehensive take-away from the novel, but rather a summary of the book club’s impressions and encounters with the novel.)

“Mann managed to create with his profoundly lucid style and nonchalant irony an allegory that cuts through the reality of his time: that is Post-First World War and Post-Spanish influenza pandemic, and apparently continues cutting through reality until today, since it comes across nowadays as a topical novel; as a resolute scalpel in the hands of a dexterous surgeon.” some wise words from Jennifer’s friend Igor Reyner, the original inspiration for this week’s book choice: The Magic Mountain.

Our discussion this week was so enjoyable, because it was clear we had all felt a personal connection with Mann’s novel, and were able to share our appreciation for what we had read in the context of our collective experience of being forced to stay put for weeks on end due to the pandemic. Much like the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain, we are all sequestered in our own isolated communities around the world, and yet we meet each week to contemplate literature amongst the incomprehensible tangle of code which is allowing distanced communities to congregate.

A striking theme of the novel which we discussed at length was certainly Hans Castorp’s experience of time at the sanatorium, through his discussions about it with Joachim, and how this comes across to the reader through the structure of the chapters, which play with our own experience of time as we read. Time not only appears to be radically decelerated, from the instant Hans Castorp steps off the train, but it seems also have a strange elastic quality. Hans and Joachim discuss the seven minutes it takes to measure one’s temperature with a mercury thermometer and how this can sometimes go slowly or quickly. This causes Hans to start questioning how time, something so measured, can therefore be experienced as going at different speeds. This apparent disjunction between perception of the velocity of time and its ability to be measured in precise and regular intervals contradicts what was hitherto his understanding of the passage of time. He comments “there is nothing ‘actual’ about time as it is not something we sense with any physical organ, it therefore exists exactly how it is perceived: long or short, or not at all”. This led in our discussion to a consideration of “capitalist time” “the time experienced in the flatlands of the novel, or in our world, in “healthy” society. If we conceive time as linear, as measurable, it is necessarily complementary to a capitalist society due to its focus on progression and production. In the sanatorium, however, this ceases to have much meaning: when the only important thing is maintaining oneself, fulfilling the basic needs of one’s body (and in excess: five meals a day and four “rest cures”!), progression of time and productivity within its limits is mostly irrelevant. We felt that this was particularly resonant at the moment as lockdown has forced us all to be more “present”. With no real access to our past through habitual routines, and no defined expectation of the future and what it will look like, the present, and therefore our appreciation of it, has become increasingly important. However, this does come with a certain confusion about what it means to consider the past: is it really accurate to mark it as different from the present, or would it perhaps be more appropriate to say that it is only through the present that we can think about “other” presents which once were? This sort of temporal synchronism takes place in The Magic Mountain; the incredibly slow pace of the novel in the first few chapters is due in part to some of Hans Castorp’s recollections about his childhood (his grandfather and his admiration for Pribislav Hippe). This is turn creates a sort of perpetual present, where past events from Hans Castorp’s life are experienced in great detail, seemingly interacting with the present as he makes connections between them and characters in the sanatorium: Settembrini’s grandfather with his own, Clavdia Chauchat with Hippe. Thus, much as we ourselves considered the blurring effect lockdown has had upon our own lives, this temporal blurring is also taking effect upon Hans Castorp and distorting his understanding of how time passes, or perhaps more suitably, does not pass in a linear fashion but exists as an element of space.

“Hans Castorp was still standing there trying to think what to do next, when quite unexpectedly he had a brilliant insight into what time actually is – nothing less than a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale, for the purpose of keeping people from cheating.”

We recognised that a contributing factor to this distortion of conventional time was the atmosphere of the sanatorium, with its routine and concentration of a social stratum obsessed with their health and gossiping about others’ illnesses. The routine at once lengthens time to the extreme with its regularly structured, seemingly interminable day, but as Hans becomes accustomed, several days are missed in the narration, effectively accelerating time for the reader. This “speeding up” of time, for us and for Hans, is linked to the sickness of the sanatorium’s community due to the imperative of the routine. He enters the community, and shares in their sickness – the effects of which he notices as soon as ascends the mountain: his feet get cold and his face flushes. He also notes the strange quality of Joachim’s reference to the community: “us up here”, which makes him feel anxious: this moment linguistically delineates a distinction, one that is to be short lived, between Hans and the residents of the sanatorium. We discussed this distinction in terms of the thematic opposition between the “flatlands” and the mountain, observing it as a metaphor for the lands of the healthy and the sick. However, we realised that this may not be so clear cut: the difference between health and sickness seemed too arbitrary. This led us to consider what being sick or healthy means, and whether the “healthy” condition might actually be a myth, as the words of Doctor Krokowski suggest: “In that case you are a phenomenon of greatest medical interest. You see, I’ve never met a perfectly healthy person before.” Talking further with another member of the book club afterwards, we began to realise that perhaps the novel is in itself an exploration of the futility of any and all distinctions: there is no true “health” that is not a myth, there is no “actual” time, there is no certain desirable attitude to life; reality exists in the very contradictions we have constructed to understand it. Oppositions such as sickness and health or science and art or technology and morality are actually shown to be imagined, and contrasting concepts are then assimilated we might then understand that they have been as one all along.

“But as he spoke, he brought together, in a single breath, categories that until now Hans Castorp had been accustomed to think of as widely divergent. ‘Technology and morality’ he said.”

Hans is open to the opinions of others such as Settembrini and is not openly hostile to those who differ from him because he views his visit to the sanatorium as just that: a visit. He has the interest of a traveller in a new country, hoping to understand the customs of the native people, with the knowledge that return to one’s own land is possible at any time. In a phrase, and one that Settembrini coins as a sort of epithet for Hans, placet experiri: “he likes to experiment”, “it was pleasant to experiment”. This stresses the nature of The Magic Mountain as a Bildungsroman, Hans’s journey of experimenting with a community in which, due to his self-admittance in the sanatorium and thus belief of free leave, he does not notice himself taking root. We also discussed his journey in terms of the career in shipping that he has left behind, both literally, by ascending the mountain where there can be no seas and ships, and spiritually, as he starts to experiment by philosophising. We noted the tension in his life between the artist and the engineer, exemplified by his potential as an artist that he puts to use for his detailed drawing of ships. While considering this, we remarked a parallel between the characters of Hans and Miranda from Station Eleven, the novel we read the week before. These two characters work in shipping but are both artistic (Miranda’s passion is her graphic novel); their involvement in nautical transport and their more creative tendencies seemed a striking connection, given where they end up at the end of their narrative journey: each facing a global crisis, each somewhat alienated and searching for meaning in their lives.

The discussion also turned towards the issue of translating The Magic Mountain: as well as English, amongst the group were speakers of Russian, Italian, French and Chinese – and of German who had read Mann’s original text. This was really helpful in allowing us to consider the various translations of the title, for example, which was mentioned for the first time in Russian press as the equivalent of “The Enchanted/Bewitched/Charmed Mountain”, before the novel was translated into Russian. Early translations in Italian appear as “La Montagna Incantata”; however, this has since been updated to “La Montagna Magica”. What is the difference between these translations and the original title? What different impressions do these translations have upon the reader? We came to the conclusion that the use of the passive voice in these instances enhances the mountain’s fairy tale quality: the dualities of the text are perhaps experienced more allegorically, and it is perhaps more apparent that Hans is under some sort of spell. To be enchanted as opposed to simply “magic” suggests, more sinisterly, that the mountain has been put under a spell, one which has trapped the residents of the sanatorium in a timeless vacuum from which they can never leave.

Similarities were brought up between this and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” which is also based around enchantment and dualism and what comes between, which the music is able to give voice to a fairy tale dualism of good versus evil, magic versus realism, love versus lust, to name a few.

Finally, one thing which we all agreed upon was the humour of the text. Despite some of the heavier subject matters Mann explores, and the fact of being in a sanatorium where everyone is suffering various afflictions, this novel does not take itself too seriously. Mann’s heavy use of irony through dialogue and characterisation in The Magic Mountain make it incredibly enjoyable to read. Moments like Joachim’s description of the bodies being transported down the mountain in bobsleds and the “half-lung club” are so unexpected and witty in a text many approach with the apprehension of reading such an influential and celebrated work.

We were left questioning the relevance of conventional time and its absence in our lives at the moment, the unavoidable condition of sickness that everyone is forced to confront to some degree, the recurrent question of translating and what this means for readers in different languages, social and spiritual understandings of the symbol of the mountain itself, and the realisation that many dualities we came across in this text revealed themselves to be more ambiguous and even convergent in their nature. Perhaps we can use this novel to consider misconceptions about oppositions in our contemporary world: those of sickness/health, art/technology, reason/irrationality. In the words of Igor Reyner who prompted Jennifer to suggest this wonderful book, “The Magic Mountain is a lesson on how to deal with all sorts of ailments and illnesses; those of the body as well as those of the society. It teaches us how pointless [it] is to fight what happens to us and how to fearlessly engage with the deterioration of life and time that in a way or another will befall upon us all. And all of that with unparalleled sense of humour.”