33 pages • 1-hour read
The Magic Mountain
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Symbols & Motifs
The Sanatorium
The sanatorium is essentially the novel’s sole setting and the environment in which Hans’s education progresses over the years as he absorbs and reflects on the competing philosophies of Settembrini and Naphta and charts his own course through illness, health, eroticism, and knowledge. The sanatorium comes to reflect the early 20th century European environment in which political, intellectual, and spiritual ideologies competed and collided without resolution, setting the stage for the cataclysmic violence of the first world war. As the novel approaches its end, the atmosphere in the sanatorium becomes increasingly intense and violent, mirroring Europe’s headlong slide into violent conflict.
The Inconsistent Landscape
The pathetic fallacy is the mind’s tendency to personify nature; for example, conflating human moods and ideas with the transformations of the weather. As Joachim might point out, the pathetic fallacy is an idea from the flatlands. A mile above sea level, no birds sing. Summer becomes winter, and winter summer. “Hans Castorp took a deep breath, testing the alien air. It was fresh—that was all. It lacked odor, content, moisture, it easily went into the lungs and said nothing to the soul” (9). In other words, Hans finds himself thwarted every time he attempts to locate some analogy for his feelings in the natural world around him.
The mountain landscape maps well to the new disorientations of modernity in which the middle-class lives in removed comfort while the world’s working-class toils in dangerous industrial conditions. Such a strange way of being is only possible for both parties if the rhythms of nature are held at bay or scrambled, replaced by the ideology of the timeclock, of national political destinies, of war by timetable, and of numerically measurable death.
The Production of Art
Director Behren’s attempts to produce an oil portrait of Clavdia Chauchat create a work totally at odds with Clavdia’s mysterious character, yet Hans notes one exceptional quality of the painting. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen skin so well painted. It’s as if you can see the pores,” he says, by way of complimenting the director (254). The painting is technically flawless but spiritually inert.
In order to thrive, capitalism must either make useful what cannot immediately be turned profitable or get it out of the way of something that will. This process of instrumentation is most pronounced in the arts which lose a spiritual, individual quality when they are mass-produced. As an example, Mann points out the subdued mood of the early nickelodeon, a jukebox, for which “there was not even the possibility of applause. There was no one there to thank, to artistic achievement to reward with a curtain call” (311). The contradiction for those who must live within this system is that sometimes art touches them, filling a “nothing” in their days with a type of precious nothing that disturbs and frightens. Occasionally such unhappy and unproductive members of the bourgeois grasp towards such artistic ephemera and produce abominations, such as Behrens has done, or fetishize their systems of delivery, as Hans does with his gramophone.
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