Since we had our last book club meeting, I have been reflecting on what I have learnt from the SELCS Summer Book Club. As I have not just learnt skills for discussions, I have learnt skills for life. A lifelong passion for literature and reading has been further instilled within me.

Communication: The SELCS Summer Book Club has undoubtedly strengthened my communication skills. Initially, the prospect of raising points in front of a wide-ranging virtual audience was quite a challenge to grasp. Yet, with determination and the sheer camaraderie of the book club members, coupled with its more informal atmosphere, I reignited my thrill for literature. It was amazing to embark on a journey alongside fellow readers who too, shared my same yearning for literature and communication. Communication with the book club members helped me to find and present my voice and listen to a broad spectrum of notions and opinions.

Listening: Through this book club experience, my listening skills have also been enhanced. Each book club discussion featured a range of themes and ideas, some of which I was new to. I learnt about new terminology and also about different cultural contexts. Therefore, in the discussions, the ability to listen was strengthened since I became conscious of new ideas and literary references, which I could then apply to my own readings. Possessing strong listening skills enabled me to confidently express my ideas whilst also evaluating other interpretations.

Analysis: Furthermore, my analysis skills have improved as a result of constant collaboration with team members and I had the opportunity to gain insights into world literature on a temporal, cultural and textual level. I encountered the tropes of different genres of literature and synthesised my thoughts effectively to analyse not just one layer of meaning, but several layers of meaning that arose from authorial intentions and political and social contexts. I relished the opportunity to delve into a variety of genres including contemporary literature, dystopian literature, political literature, and the rewarding classical literature.

Awareness of Cultures: One final key skill that this book club has fostered within me is to have an awareness of different cultures. As my chosen language for my comparative literature study is German, I was naturally inclined towards the German texts and references discussed. However, as the discussions progressed, to my delight, I became more enthused with the desire to be open to a range of cultures and to reflect on French, Russian, Indian, Bengali, Chinese and African literature too, that helped to change my perceptions, especially during lockdown!

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.”

This week’s session was led by Dr Tim Beasley-Murray

The summary of the discussion is written by Sophie Smars

In this week’s book-club we discussed Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of Red Death’. An appropriate read considering the current situation of lockdown, where much like the characters of this gothic short story, we too are slowly losing a sense of time, as a pandemic rages on outside.

Indeed, the concept of time and specifically the symbol of the clock was one of the points we focused on. Time appears to be liquid in this story. On the one hand, the guests are taken in the illusion of excess to a point where they lose a sense of this time and awareness of what is happening in the outside world. Yet on the other hand, they are also constantly haunted by the presence of the clock and thus cannot really escape time. It is the device that mediates and organizes everything in the story. The party is constantly marked by the eerie effect of silence and stillness that the ominous sound of the clock creates every time it strikes a new hour, until this tension eventually builds to the fatal rupture the midnight hour brings, when the Red Death is finally among them. The appearance of this figure illustrates how time symbolizes the frailty, futility and illusion of Human control in the face of inevitable death.

The omnipresence of a time that is accelerating towards death is also mirrored by a quickening-pace in vivid descriptions of the environment of excess. Readers had different point of views on what these depictions of the castle meant to them. Some thought it to be a gorgeous, exotic fantasy that is undeniably attractive to its’ guests. Yet others found this surplus to be sickening and oppressive, with an architectural geometry resembling a maze that is purposefully confusing to its’ guests and the readers. The question was thus raised: is something being kept out or are they being kept in? Are these guests even enjoying this party or is it an illusion, like a staged masquerade or similar to a ‘Danse Macabre’? Are these prisoners or guests? These questions about the descriptions of the castle bring about a general feeling of horror, which we compared to HP Lovecraft’s writing of ‘impossible spaces’, or physical dimensions in stories that create horror due to being unimaginable, inhuman, and unknown. This chaotic space is further highlighted by the abundance of colour (red and black being the most significant), with typical gothic images from 19th C literature, like the stained glass, as well as a profusion of sensory impression, that represents the moral decadence of the time. We concluded that red could symbolize death, but also life, vitality, and desire, which we related to the tension of Eros and Thanatos, that is commonly found in literature.

The importance of aesthetic in this story, as well as the indication of Prospero being somewhat of a ‘mad artist’ made us question the role of Art and the Artist. We often associate art, music and dance as things that bring joy, and much like storytelling, activities that put of death. But in this story, it is actually what brings death to them. We also tend to think of the artist as the voice of society’s victims, or as Nadine Gordimer says ‘Art is on the side of the oppressed’. Yet here the figure of the artist also happens to be a controlling and tyrannical one that does not care about those dying outside. This Prospero and his story also have many similarities to Shakespeare’s Prospero in ‘The Tempest’. The latter is a figure of magic and illusion, and the play itself has often been interpreted as a part of Prospero’s dream or a metaphor for the illusion of theatre itself. In Poe’s story we see a similar importance of dreams, magic, and the occult, that is conveyed through the rich sensory images and colours, acting as omens of the approaching death. Sorcery is often seen as a zero-sum game; engaging in magic means winning but necessarily losing something in the process, which we see in the fate of these guests who thought themselves protected. Their illusions and specifically their fantasy of power are eventually caught up by reality. ‘The Tempest’ isn’t the only literary reference in Poe’s work that is unquestionably a mesh of intertextuality, with its masked spectral figure that reminds a reader of ‘Macbeth’ or the mentioned Victor Hugo’s ‘Hernani’, but also made our readers think of later works, such as ‘The Library of Babel’ by Jorge Luis Borges or ‘Cortigiana’ by Miloš Marten.

Lastly, we may be left with questions about the ‘aim’ of this text. Is it didactic and moralizing? Does it resist the idea of a moral, despite the argument that it is hard to write about an apocalyptic scenario without being moralizing (especially considering the time period). Does the presence of Horror prevent a didactic conclusion? What is the allegorical function in this tale? And so on.

By Sophie Smars