A Companion to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain

Abstract

Dowden, Stephen D., ed.A Companion to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999. xix + 250 pp. $65.00. In Pilgrimage (1987), only essay not written expressly for this volume, Susan Sontag recounts her first encounter with Magic at impressionable age of fourteen: for first few nights [I] had trouble breathing as read. For this was not just another book would love but transforming book, source of discoveries and recognitions. [...] After finishing last page, was so reluctant to be separated from book that started back at beginning and, to hold myself to pace book merited, reread it aloud, chapter each night. (227) In short, in Sontag Thomas Mann had found his ideal reader, reader who had heeded arrogant request he had made in his lecture The Making of Magic Mountain that book be read not once but twice. same cannot be said of everyone who contributed to volume under review. Karla Schultz's conclusion to her fine contribution, a writer shouldn't be blamed for his (171), crossed my mind repeatedly as was reading some of these essays. Is Mann to be blamed, for example, when one of contributors asserts that Hans Castorp-in his Walpurgisnight conversation with Clavdia Chauchat-speaks mainly about language and pigs (126), or when another contends that Castorp's attempts to be English are prefiguration of naval aspects of Anglo-German competition which was to ignite World I (187)? According to editor's preface ten essays written expressly for this volume should suggest new paths in understanding (xix) of both Thomas Mann and of literary modernism. For most part they are centered on issues that have preoccupied critics and readers of Magic since its publication in 1924: what does Hans Castorp achieve during his seven-year sojourn on enchanted mountain, what is significance of his amorous encounter with Clavdia Chauchat, how are we to read ending of novel? Given controversies surrounding these questions in earlier Mann criticism, it is hardly surprising that contributors to this volume arrive at very different, often contradictory answers. Whereas Joseph P Lawrence, for example, interprets Castorp's achievement in very positive lightaccording to him, Castorp is true genius (11) whose is growth into silence (4)-Stephen Dowden argues that Castorp is a mass man ineluctably attracted to mass death in First World War (36). Olker Gokberk, commenting on ending of novel, writes, the sum of depictions and commentaries [in The Thunderbolt] betrays profound ambivalence toward (62), but Eugene Goodheart claims that both idyll [in Snow] and war are scenes of joy (50). …