The Magic Mountain A trick of self-development

Theodor W. Adorno recommended that readers of Mann's novel should forgo the arduous task of deciphering symbols, forget the author and read the work three times instead. The author Katarzyna Trzeciak writes about why it is worth considering this suggestion. 

‘Understanding the work of Thomas Mann’, Theodor Adorno wrote in 1962, ‘a true discovery of his writing, only begins when we stop paying attention to what they write in the Baedeker guide’. This German philosopher, who was important to Mann as a scholar of Arnold Schönberg’s music, encouraged readers of The Magic Mountain to skip the onerous job of decoding the symbols and uncovering the philosophical influences meant to display the writer’s intention. Instead, he urged the reader to go over the book three times and to forget about its author; about what he wanted to say and buried in the work. Why is this suggestion, which now sounds like an ivory-tower approach, worth considering? Recommending multiple readings of a novel that is weighed down not only by academic footnotes, but also often frustrates the reader? And ought we even to trust the remarks of the philosopher so demanding as Adorno?

A higher sort of trick

The work begins where the authorial intention ends, Adorno tells us, somewhat in opposition to Mann’s own ideas. Except that Thomas Mann himself, in the course of a lecture introducing The Magic Mountain to Princeton students in 1939, wrote flat-out that a work holds its own ambitions, ones that go significantly further than those of the author himself. Mann thus approached art in much the same way as his intellectual partner; his essay sought to disentangle literature from its concrete human author. There are more such peculiar similarities. In Aesthetic Theory, the Adorno’s monumental work, we find interjections on Mann, who saw art as a higher sort of trick. Adorno does not give an exact quote or provide any sources, though he does cite Mann both directly and deftly, for ultimately he is interested in the ideal of the circus artist, creating art as a ‘magic trick’, wherein the apex of the form is the circus stunt. Mann took a similar approach to Adorno when he presented the crux of The Magic Mountain to an American audience. He then invoked Goethe’s formula (‘Goethe once said’) of a ‘very serious joke’, as the latter once apparently called his Faust, and as Thomas Mann liked to see The Magic Mountain. And finally, while Adorno encourages us to read the novel three times over and forget the author, the author himself issues the arrogant demand that we read the adventures of the young Hans Castorp twice, owing to the novel’s unusual technique, its musical composition. In other words, for precisely the reason Adorno advised abandoning. The two intellectuals were thus joined by a kind of kinships of illusionists in a game of differences and unexpected similarities: a kind of humour appearing where the tradition of reception and, to some degree, the history of literature and philosophy compels us to see only gravity and the weight of literary/intellectual undertakings.

Placet experiri

And yet, what if we see The Magic Mountain as the art of illusion, a trick of sorts? Placet experiri, as Settembrini liked to say, foisting this Petrarchian maxim upon Hans Castorp. Our unpretentious protagonist applies it subversively, however, to a situation against which his ideologically implacable mentor would have adamantly objected. In the ‘Highly Questionable’ chapter, Castorp takes part in a spiritualistic experiment, aimed at ‘the tourist thirsty for knowledge’.1 Placet experiri – ‘it is good to try’. The main protagonist of this experiment is the young Ellen Brand, whom the (rather contrary) narrator patronizingly calls ‘a sweet young thing of nineteen’. The girl has talent as a medium, which serves as the basis for ‘spiritualistic parlour game’, organised in a circle of confidants, joined by Hans Castorp. Mann strews the scene of this entertainment (as the narrator calls it) with all the familiar props – we have moving wineglasses for communicating with spirits; a speaking ghost; and finally, we have the ‘joyful fright’ of the séance participants. Castorp also makes contact with a spirit, and decides to ask it how long he will remain at the sanatorium. His answer is an enigmatic command – ‘go across the room’ – which causes no small consternation in him and in the gathered company. As if this were not enough, an object appears on his lap a moment later; our protagonist had not brought it to the séance and its discovery prompts general astonishment. Castorp quickly hides it, however. What has truly happened to the protagonist at this juncture? When he tells Settembrini about the séance, the older mentor rails against this hoax. Yet the narrative, which has been unwinding in what is outwardly reported speech, tells us that Castorp disagrees with this conclusion. For it is now, after the trial of the spiritualist seance, that Castorp comprehends the semantic potential of the word ‘illusion’: ‘a state in which elements of dream and reality were blended in a way that was perhaps less foreign to nature than to our crude everyday thoughts. The secret of life was literally bottomless, and it was no wonder, then, that occasionally there rose up out of it illusions that – and so on and so forth, in our hero’s amiably self-effacing and exceedingly easy manner’. The protagonist’s thought about the potential of illusion are pacified in the narrative, with the narrator, as usual, indulging the character’s possible development. It is only when Castorp might emerge as gaining a greater awareness that the narrator immediately dismisses this possibility. The trick or illusory event in the world of the novel are presented here as pranks of the highest order, mocking the development and education of the young protagonist. 

Hans Castorp attempts to take part in the experiment, but – contrary to the reader’s intuition – the author denies us the consequences of his attempt. Although the chapter is long and detailed, it does not develop to lead us to a conclusion, to the protagonist’s spiritual/intellectual transformation. The Latin word experientia, from the verb experior, to be subjected to a trial, more brings to mind constant activity than ongoing cognition. And Hans Castorp tries, experiences, but also always remains the same, a hero upon whom the narrator looks down, a compromise.

Repeated reading

In his Princeton lecture, Mann argues that The Magic Mountain is quite separate from real, active life, and the novel itself is a swan song for the sanatorium way of life. Indeed, Mann makes his protagonist quite passive; through his unexpected seven years’ stay at the International Berghof Sanatorium, he practically undergoes no change at all. And yet, over the course of the book, we constantly have the sense that the events, trials, existential and spiritualist experiments will come in handy, however they affect him. We want a bildung, but ultimately we get a prank – a novel whose resolution is baked into the start, though we only see this upon a second reading, noting the details and techniques the novel uses to tell us its story.

A constant lesson in laughter and deception

Tricks and pranks organise The Magic Mountain on many levels – they emerge in the peculiar montages of speech, made up of hidden quotes and borrowings; they reveal themselves in the narrator’s voice, often disarming the pathos of the characters’ thoughts. Yet on the highest possible level, the whole novel proves itself to be a trick, as a collection of incompatible narrative techniques that serve to describe the seven-year stay of our protagonist, who remains a blank page; a protagonist who is perfectly objectified, as objectified as the world views and ideas from which we might expect some efficacy – the ability to transform the world, or at least to affect its present course. The paradox is (here is another deception) that, as readers, we get attached to these ideas and to the objectified protagonist and, right to the end of the novel, wait in suspense for change and progress. This is why it is only Mann’s arrogant recommendation, supported by Adorno, to reread the book in full, that opens us up to the nuances of the novel and to the narrator’s consistency in describing Hans Castorp’s thoughts, as he keeps trying new things and is never altered by their newness. In this sense, The Magic Mountain is not just a document of its time, a requiem for pre-war sanatorium culture, as Mann suggested; above all, it is an antidote to fantasies of constant bildung, of development through mentorship, authorities and ideological abstractions. Read several times, it shows its multilayered deviousness and merciless laughter, undercutting all seriousness. This is a laughter that concerns and disarms hierarchies, but also the laugher himself. It is just like what happens to Hans Castorp when, having barely left the train at Davos-Dorf station, he hears of the custom of transporting corpses by bobsleigh. Hearing this news, Castorp is wracked by an uncontrollable fit of laughter, that Goethean ‘very serious joke’ that Thomas Mann recalled. Reading The Magic Mountain remains a constant lesson in laughter and deception as ways of dealing with the dead, objectified ideas and the equally dead dogma of progress.