To the bunkers!
nuclear bunkers, ideological warfare, & a magic mountain reading guide
Hello!
The end of this post contains a reading guide to The Magic Mountain. But first, a few announcements.
Bookforum & Bunkers
I have a few new pieces out, the first being a review of a career-spanning collection of short fiction by the legendary Lynne Tillman in Bookforum.
It starts like this, a lede I stand by:
“AMERICA IS A LAND OF BEGINNINGS, impatient, virginal, suspicious of foreplay. Sales are clinched on first impressions; books judged by covers; presidents, on their first one hundred days.”
You can read the rest here.
And for The Dial, I went underground to visit the largest civilian nuclear bunker in the world, located in Luzern, Switzerland. The article is also an investigation of how Switzerland came to have more bunkers per capita than anywhere else on Earth, and why in these uneasy times other European countries are beginning to emulate its policy of “total defense.”
A podcast on possibly my favorite novel ever, The Magic Mountain
The morning after the US election, I found myself on a podcast run by
called Selected Novels, where novelists discuss a book that has had a profound impact on their own work. The hosts were the first people I’d spoken to since seeing the results (and I live 6-9 hours ahead, which is to say I’d been stewing all afternoon).It felt especially appropriate, then, that we discussed Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which had its 100th anniversary last year, and which I’ve always read as an epic battle between reactionary romanticism and an embattled liberal humanism. I don’t need to tell you how relevant that battle still is today, a century later.
This is how The Point summarized what I had to say, and which I also to stand by:
“On the third episode of Selected Novels, we talked to novelist (and Point contributor) Jessi Jezewska Stevens about The Magic Mountain and what about it shaped her as a writer: its surprising warmth and magical sense of narrative time, its use of a “stupid” protagonist. This, as Jessi points out, is a useful feature for a novel of ideas, as it lets the narrator be radically open to all points of view. In this novel of ideas in particular, it means being open to a seemingly endless debate between romantic reactionaries and hapless liberal humanists—a binary that felt particularly relevant when this episode was recorded in November.”
We also discussed the influence of MM on my second novel, The Visitors. You can listen to the whole episode here.
I really do love The Magic Mountain. It is also an especially rewarding novel to read, or reread, in a moment caught in the crossfire of two blustering ideologies famously dramatized in the characters of Naphta and Settembrini.
One is a reactionary and death-worshipping romanticist; the other, a liberal humanist whose idealism, at times, lacks the persuasive power of the dark, seductive glory romanticism seems to promise. In the middle stands their “pupil” Hans Castorp, the German everyman, who would like very much to ignore them both, and even to avoid politics all together. The problem is, he can’t.
It’s a beautiful, funny, and also difficult novel to (re)read, and so I thought I’d also share the notes I took to prepare for the episode as a kind of companion to anyone interested in (re)reading The Magic Mountain just in time for its 101st birthday this November. Notes below.
A promise
But before I drop in those notes — I know I’ve been a bit silent on here (I’ve been writing a lot, see above & stay tuned). I haven’t always been the kind of newsletter writer who chases headlines, especially not when they move so fast (and when the nonsensical speed of destruction and vandalism is part of the insidious game).
However, I’m planning on sharing more soon. In the meantime, while I know that The Magic Mountain does not capture all the pressing questions of our current moment—for example, what is the effect of runaway capitalism and Silicon Valley’s logic of “creative destruction” on the state of affairs; whether the collapse of the stock and bond markets & the general market uncertainty will actually decrease support for Trump; or, When does the United States become Hungary—if we haven’t already?; or how long will the consequences last; or if there’s any chance it will ever stop; or if now is a good time to look into moving permanently into a nuclear bunker—I hope to address some of these concerns, which are also my concerns, soon.
And now, a very unofficial guide to The Magic Mountain (i.e., my unedited notes for the podcast linked above…)
**HISTORY / QUOTES FROM MANN ON MM:**
Note Mann begins novel 1912 as a warmongering man of the right; finishes 1924 in support of Weimar Republic.
“All positions have become insecure” / “A very serious jest.”
Was once a bestseller in America. Mann on his expectations: “Would anyone expect that a harassed public, economically oppressed, would take it on itself to pursue through 1200 pages the dreamlike ramifications of this figment, of thought? Would, under the circumstances then prevailing, more than a few hundred people be found, willing to spend money and time on such odd entertainment, which had realty little or nothing in common with a novel in the usual sense of the word?”
More Mann on MM: “A work of art must not be a task or an effort; it. must not be undertaken against one’s will. It is meant to give pleasure, to entertain and enliven. If it does not have this effect on a reader, he must put it down and turn to something else. But if you have read The Magic Mountain once, I recommend that you read it, twice. The way in which the book is composed results in the reader’s getting a deeper enjoyment from the second reading.”
More Mann: “[Castorp’s] story is the story of a heightening process, but also as a narrative it is the heightening process itself. It employs the methods of the realistic novel, but actually it is not one. It passes beyond realism by means of symbolism, and makes realism a vehicle for intellectual and ideal elements.”
Fascination with death as the source of beauty and life…so Settembrini’s encyclopedia to “end all human suffering” is a humanistic good, but an aesthetic nightmare (to Mann once).
**INFLUENCE ON ME**
originally fascinated by the source of the text – who is speaking. And the MM is very unique in that way, this bridge between 19thC realism – Buddenbrooks – and the modernist novel of ideas, the novel of essays.
That subtle irony of the opening completely captivated me.
And I’m also drawn to something that’s not quite realism—but also not what I would call science fiction. Is it surreal? Is it lightly magical? Is it psychological realism? That touch of exaggeration here makes for a place literally removed from reality, from the flatlands – the MM is an ivory tower of sorts – and it was also the kind of slightly tilted realism that I like best.
One difference between MM and my own novel (lol) is that I knew how Visitors was going to end from the beginning, whereas Mann labored for a whole decade on what was supposed to be a novella, a comic pairing to Death in Venice, struggled 2 find end.
A satirical tone - the irony of the Bildungsroman - and of narration itself. And it’s there to earn too maybe the sense of retreat from the world - everyone is taking their 19thC ideas (form, manners, forms of address, fascination with death and honor) up to this hermetic space, away from the onset of 20C ideas of progress, equality, liberal democracy.
**THEMES**
ROBERT MUSIL: MM IS A “SHARK’S STOMACH” - HE DIGESTS EVERYTHING
BATTLE BETWEEN DEATH V TIME AS SOURCE OF BEAUTY AND GIVING MEANING TO LIFE
BATTLE BETWEEN REACTIONARY 19C ROMANTICISM (HONOR CULTURE AND ORDER AND HIERARCHY OVER ENLIGHTENMENT LIBERALISM, NAPHTA/SETTEMBRINI WORSHIP EACH, RESPECTIVELY…
TIME IS ON THE SIDE OF LIFE (NOT DEATH/ETERNITY)
CASTORP: TRYING TO ESCAPE TIME! (BUT ALSO TO FIND DEATH) …AND MANN IS CASTORP (TRYING TO ESCAPE THE - AESTHETICALLY ANATHEMA 2 HIM AT THE TIME- PROGRESSIVISM THAT HE EVENTUALLY KNOWS HE MUST SUPPORT TO DEFEAT FASCISM)
**QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL**
“We have as much right as anyone to private thoughts about the story unfolding here, and we would like to suggest that Hans Castorp would not have stayed with the people up here even this long beyond his originally planned date of departure, if only some sort of satisfactory answer about the meaning and purpose of life ahd been supplied to his prosaic soul from out of the depths of time.” (226)
Settembrini: “Time is a gift of the gods to humankind, that we may use it—use it, my good engineer, in the service of human progress” (240) / “If there were no time there couldn’t be any human progress, and the world would be just an old water hole, a stinking pond.”
P 242 - Left pedant - Settembrini being right (but insufferable!) - “...all sufferings of the individual are illnesses of the social organism. Fine! This is the purpose of our Sociological Pathology, an encyclopedia of some twenty or so volumes that will list and discuss all conceivable instances of human suffering, from the most personal and intimate to the large-scale conflicts of groups that arise out of class hostility and international strife…Literature is to have its own volume, which is to contain, as solace and advice for those who suffer, a synopsis and a short analysis of all masterpieces of world literature dealing with every such conflict.” (To the aesthete, banishes all mystery from all pursuits and in particular from the mystical suffering that so attracts Castorp…)
“What all Europe refers to as liberty is, perhaps, something rather pedantic, rather bourgeois in comparison to our need for order–that’s the point!” p 329…”I don’t care about Carducci and the republic of eloquence and human progress over time, because I love you!”
P 452 - Naphta - “Whereupon “youth in search of light was forced to watch as Naphta took each argument, one after the other, and wrung its neck. He ridiculed the philanthropists reluctance to shed blood, his reverence for life, claimed that such reverence for life belonged to only the most banal rubbers-and-umbrellas bourgeois periods, but that the moment history took a more passionate turn, the moment a single idea, something that transcended mere ‘security,’ was at work, something suprapersonal, something greater than the individual [re: metaphysical]—and since that alon ewas a state worthy of mankind, it was, on a higher plane, the normal state of affairs—at that moment, then, individual life would walays be sacrificed without further ado to that higher idea, and not only that, but individuals would also unhesitatingly and gladly risk their own lives for it.”
P 486-487 - Politics - (On Castorp trying to find a middle road between N & S) “What a fine and gallant conclusion for them to draw!...Love stands opposed to death–it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death.” … P489: “And by bedtime he was no longer exactly sure what his thoughts had been.”
P 581 “They were undoubtedly at a disadvantage when Word and Spirit were no longer at issue, and the topic turned to facts, to earthy, practical affairs, to those questions and things where masterful natures truly prove themselves.”
P 531-532: (Opening to ‘A Stroll by the Shore’] “Can one Narrate Time—time as such, in and of itself…like the mainspring from a broken watch.”
P 589 “[Mardi Gras] was an evening outside any schedule, almost outside the calendar, an hors d’oeuvre, so to speak, an extra evening, a leap-year evening, the 29th of February.”
…THE NOVEL ENDS IN ACTUAL DEATH - “NATURAL” (TK*) - SUICIDE (TK*) - DUEL (TK*) - GHOSTS (TK*) - WAR … BUT IT WAS TIME THAT GAVE IT MEANING….DID CASTORP PROGRESS? IMMUNE TO PROGRESS? HE’S A TOURIST
*[Redacted character names to avoid spoilers].