Where to find my Magic Mountain review:
1. http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/13219-2/
2. http://expenscusil.wordpress.com/594-2/
3. http://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/191-2/
4. http://nullimmortalis2010.wordpress.com/231-2/
5. http://weirdtongue.wordpress.com/436-2/
6. http://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/485-2/
7. http://etepsed.wordpress.com/346-2/
8. https://weirdmonger.wordpress.com/186-2/ (this one)
Thomas’s Mann’s THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN – my real-time review continued from HERE.
This is Part Eight of my Review.
Any commentary from my reading will eventually appear below in the comments to this post as and when I have read each chapter or section.
Mynheer Peeperkorn (Concluded)
‘Concluded’ indeed. In fact, I originally sensed that the trip to the waterfall, a ‘Picnic at Hanging Water’- type vanishment into retrocausal non-existence, was to be his mysterious mine-not-heer, the dislocation of his soul into nothingness, a dislocation from within this new (renewed?) hero of mine as created in the last few days by my (re-)experience of such great literature as ‘The Magic Mountain’ — but in actual fact he utilised a mad-scientist’s deadly ‘Yesterfang’-contraption instead!!!!
“A turn in the path revealed the bridge and the rocky ravine down which the torrent poured. At the moment their eyes perceived it, their ears seemed saluted with the maximum of sound—for which infernal was the only right word. The volume of water fell perpendicularly in a single cascade, perhaps nine or ten feet high, and of considerable breath, and foaming white shot away over the rocks. The frantic noise of its falling seemed to mingle all possible intensities and variations of sound—hissing, thundering, roaring, bawling, whispering, crashing, crackling, droning, chiming—truly it was enough to drive one senseless. The visitors went very close, on the slippery rocks at the bottom of the chasm, and stood looking, bespattered with its spray, enveloped in its mist, their ears stopped by its insensate clamour. They exchanged glances and head-shakes and rather intimidated smiles as they stood regarding this spectacle, this long catastrophe of foam and fury, whose preposterous roaring deafened them, frightened them, bewildered their senses of sight and hearing, so that they even imagined they heard above, below, and on all sides, cries of warning, trumpet-calls, hoarse human voices.”
“Such words as they were accustomed to hearing from him, they could read on his lips or divine from his gestures: “Settled” and “Absolutely!”—but that was all. They saw his head sink sideways, the broken bitterness of the lips, they saw the man of sorrows in his guise. But then quite suddenly flashed the dimple, the sybaritic roguishness, the garment snatched up dancewise, the ritual impropriety of the heathen priest. He lifted his beaker, waved it half-circle before the assembled guests, and drank it out in three gulps, so that it stood bottom upwards. Then he handed it with outstretched arm to the Malay, who received it with an obeisance, and gave the sign to break up the feast.”
My underlining. Set-tled – ABSOLUTELY! Cf My story ‘Uncle Absolutely’ (now seen as a variation of Peeperkorn?) in the book ‘Weirdmonger: The Nemonicon’ (2003).
“He was built on such a grand scale,” Hans Castorp began again, “that he considered it a blasphemy, a cosmic catastrophe, to be found wanting in feeling.”
image by Tony Lovell
The Great God Dumps
A seeming delightfully yet darkly absurd or absurdist interlude, worthy of Aickman, whereby the Chauchat has now left the sanatorium again (unexplained as a throwaway line), and the Hofrat seems to have coddled a cure for Castorp related to cocci, a prospect of his own departure that is taken languidly by the patient, while others around him, as part of some entropy of soul called Dumps, seem to be trying to shake off such Dumps with obsessive hobbies or games, such as calculating the area of a circle without pi, the taking of photographs, a game of consequences involving the Devil wearing a nightcap or something.like that, the speaking of Esperanto (cf some of the poets in ‘Star Kites’) and, most peculiar of all, the playing of cards in games of Patience all over the place. This whole chapter I find weirdly unsettling. Still, I am a ‘delicate child’ myself, but I am now bemused that Peeperkorn is no longer mentioned (even if with a throwaway line) and bemused, too, if not astonished, that the means for Peeperkorn’s end in the previous chapter was a contraption that I have long called Yesterfang without realising it!!
Some remarkable prose, obsessively driven, a bit like Proust on speed or some sort of drug for blood clearance so as to get to the bottom of his own streptococci, perhaps!
.
.
Fullness of Harmony
The WHOLE of this important musical chapter (and my highlighting of two of its passages) is shown HERE.
Then, please return to this page for the remainder of my real-time review below.
And in connection with my reading of the previous chapter about music, I think I should remind myself that I earlier referred in this review to a ‘Schubertian Winterreise’ during Hans’ SNOWY rite of passage, pursued by or actually become Blackwood’s Centaur…and now much has now been made of a Schubert ‘lied’ in connection with Death and with Death’s palliative music simultaneously engendering and staunching such Death. I can’t help but think of Aickman’s Hospice ‘patients’ if they had heard music artificially reproduced for the first time on a gramophone. Indeed, the Sanatorium itself, rather than being that erstwhile cruise ship, is a gramophone itself, its needle that of another Yesterfang toward the heart of Disease, like Peeperkorn’s Yesterfang, amid the music such a needle also scratches from between the grooves of the body … And soul.
Highly Questionable – up to “thorough-paced impostor.”
Krowkowski’s lectures continue, now with more of a leaning toward the occult, or to the mysterious gestalt-from-leitmotifs processes that seem similar to the real-time reviewing processes I have undergone for the last five years, where there also seem to be occult audit trails that would not otherwise have existed without those processes. Parallel to these lectures, a young 19 year old girl arrives as a patient among the other Aickmanites of our Sanatorium-Hospice, someone who seems to wield occult or predictive or mediumship powers (powers soon banned by Krowkowski other than for his own research purposes) – but the Aickmanites, including Hans, conduct a weird-surreal private seance with this girl whose apparent spirit-contact, Holger, a poet, at first behaves with a tranquil ‘hastening while’, but ends with clownish activities after Hans enquires of ‘him’ the length of his, Hans’, stay in the Sanatorium, and there emerges from the moving seance-glass a typically Aickman-like word-reference to ‘slanting’ regarding his, Hans’, room no. 34.
Aickman’s tropes are always slanting… Hmmm.
[The sudden inexplicable appearance of Clavdia’s X Ray Plate in Hans’ hand gave me a decided frisson.]
This is a genuinely frightening, disturbing, seance scene of telekinesis and so forth, with Ellen Brand the girl medium, and, despite being absurd-surreal / Aickman-like, or BECAUSE it is all those things, this, for me, non-didactic HORROR STORY segment (note that Peeperkorn’s upper-case character is creeping back into this review) will be something, I suggest, that you need to read if you are a Horror genre fan, but IN THE CONTEXT of the whole book heretofore for full effect. To absorb ‘the familiars of the uncanny’.
“They had discovered that the process was facilitated by music; and on these evenings the gramophone was pre-empted by the circle and carried down into the basement.”
“He talked to them about biopsychical projections of subconscious complexes into the objective; about transactions of which the medial constitution, the somnambulic state, was to be regarded as the source; and which one might speak of as objectivated dream-concepts, in so far as they confirmed an ideoplastic property of nature, a power, which under certain conditions appertained to thought, of drawing substance to itself, and clothing itself in temporary reality. This substance streamed out from the body of the medium, and developed extraneously into biological, living end-organs,…”
“Hans Castorp, for his part, was quite satisfied. He liked the darkness, it mitigated the queerness of the situation. And in its justification he recalled the darkness of the x-ray room, and how they had collected themselves, and “washed their eyes” in it, before they “saw.””
“What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.”
For Ellen Brand, all this is tantamount to a violently physical childbirth confinement-of-fleshy-spirit so as to allow Hans to meet someone he knew from the dead….in tune with the ‘serendipitous’ availability of Valentine’s Prayer music on the gramophone (in the dark light of ‘Fullness of Harmony’). This is strong, but puckish stuff, and I am pleased that the climax of this novel turns out to be a non-didactic feat of Horror Literature. But I could be wrong. This whole book is often gutted by literati for philosophical messages, but perhaps after all it is simply and delightfully l’art pour l’art. But there are still two chapters to read and to review!…. I am guessing that they will be twin codas for this whole book’s symphony.
[[ In ‘Residents Only’, which is, in my opinion, one of Aickman’s very best stories, there’s a line that goes, “Few transactions, in this world or any other, are more personal than a mediumistic séance. With great good fortune, the seeker may be told where to find the lost key to the medicine chest. He will not learn the secret of the universe…”]]
— Quentin S Crisp in his interview today HERE
That ‘mountain’ interview and the Mann novel in *mutual* synergy, too!
Hysterica Passio – up to “tale we have to tell.”
Aggravations, even shrieking, violent squabbles, in the House Berghof sanatorium, as the Aickmanites aickmanise. And Mankind splits the atom between God and Nature, factored into by racial antipathies, by the almost Alternate World onset of the First World War and even by the sinking of the ‘Titanic’, as we stare non-judgementally (well, I thus stare) at the argumentative Monism and Pluralism respectively of Naphta and Settembrini.
I prefer Stockhausen’s musical PLURA-MONISM, and I think that is what this novel was then prophetically about: its ‘Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction’.
Not only Aickman-like but also Cathrian / Ligottian.
“…and made the sound as though he sneezed with his lung, a short high-pitched, uncanny sound.”
[[The skeleton clock, in daylight, was threatening to a degree its oddness could not explain. Looking through the glass at its wheels, cogs, springs and tensions, and at its upraised striker, awaiting with a sensible quiver the finish of the hour that was in force, Clara tried to tell herself that it was, only, shocking to see the anatomy of time. The clock was without a face, its twelve numerals being welded on to a just visible wire ring. As she watched, the minute hand against its background of nothing made one, then another, spectral advance. […]
‘I’ll tell you something, Clara. Have you ever SEEN a minute? Have you actually had one wriggling inside your hand? Did you know if you keep your finger inside a clock for a minute, you can pick out that very minute and take it home for your own?’ So it is Paul who stealthily lifts the dome off. It is Paul who selects the finger of Clara’s that is to be guided, shrinking, then forced wincing into the works, to be wedged in them, bruised in them, bitten into and eaten up by the cogs. ‘No you have got to keep it there, or you will lose the minute. I am doing the counting – the counting up to sixty.’ . . . But there is to be no sixty. The ticking stops.]]
From ‘The Inherited Clock’ (1944) by Elizabeth Bowen
Regarding Thomas Mann’s TIME, I have decided, after all, to transcribe the whole of that earlier chapter entitled ‘By The Ocean of Time’ HERE. The temptation grew too strong against not doing so, Star-Kites, notwithstanding!
Then please return to this page for my conclusion of the real-time review below.
Hysterica Passio – from “One afternoon in February,” up to end.
A pleasure excursion into the mountains (for Hans, Ferge, Wehsal, Naphta and Settembrini) turns into a bitter argument between N and S, and then a deadly duel of honour, where the other three rattle around in chance’s dice throw to wield neutrality or secondment. Hans of course is neutral as this book’s innocent(?) catalyst. The outcome, during two competing orchestras in a Charles Ives work (as I perhaps alone see it), is where honour outdoes honour self-destructively. And you shall need to read it to find out how — with the dual duel shots of Yesterfang?…
“Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.”
Regarding my theory of PLURA-MONISM (see Stockhausen here), is it a coincidence that PLURA is similar to PLEURA, as in Ferge’s Pleura-Shock?
Me as Hans Castorp in 1967:
The ‘slanting’ on the balcony outside Room 34.
The Thunderbolt
“They let him be. He was like the scholar in the peculiarly happy state of never being “asked” any more; of never having a task, of being left to sit, since the fact of his being left behind is established, and no one troubles about him further—”
Like Peeperkorn, he is “settled”. With his ‘brand’ of ‘Maria’ (or memory of Clavdia, rather than Ellen’s ‘child’?). But…
“His watch had fallen from his night-table; it did not go, and he had neglected to have it regulated, perhaps on the same grounds as had made him long since give up using a calendar, whether to keep track of the day, or to look out an approaching feast: the grounds, namely, of his “freedom.” Thus he did honour to his abiding-everlasting, his walk by the ocean of time, the hermetic enchantment to which he had proved so extraordinarily susceptible that it had become the fundamental adventure of his life, in which all the alchemistical processes of his simple substance had found full play.”
The cruise-ship Berghof becomes indeed the Titanic, as flat-land becomes War, and we lose our hero amid its congestivities of human infamy.
“…their wild, chaotic contents pressed up out of the depths to his very balcony,”
“…laden with death, slopes earthward thirty paces in front of him…[…] Your tale is told. We have told it to the end, and it was neither short nor long, but hermetic. We have told it for its own sake,”
And thus my real-time reviewing reaches Hiraeth.
END
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PS: Regarding AickMANN –
Having completed my month-long real-time review of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann, I am convinced that it must have been an enormous influence, outweighing any other influence, on the fiction of Robert Aickman. This is not only because of the similarity I seem to be the first to observe between The Hospice and The House Berghof, and their residents, and their meals, but also because of many other factors, including tone and beguiling disarming undercurrents and tropes, an absurd-weirdness that borders on nightmare as well as rationality.
I am now revising my thoughts on the AickMANN story ‘Into The Wood’ and I shall report back in due course below in the comments.
Into The Wood by Robert Aickman
This novella seems to house a balustraded Sanatorium equivalent to that in ‘The Magic Mountain’ (except it is for the Half-Sleep not the Half-Lung Club!) where Mann’s ‘horizontals’ have become Aickman’s ‘uprights’, ritually walking off into the benighted wood, much like Hans Castorp once tried walking off into the white-out of snow. Mann’s sanatorium conveys tropes for the First World War, and Aickman’s for the Second World War. Both ‘rest cures’ of encroaching death-luxury… Both sleep and hunger unpredictable quantities.
Lord Rosebery we’re told in this novella never got any sleep, and our female protagonist here, Margaret (another politician like Thatcher?) gradually loses the need for sleep as she approaches her own ritual withdrawal from life or her own Strindbergian Dance of Death… Within Mrs Slater’s ‘didactic stare’.
“…a faint mistiness, a clammy softness; […] When the sun did strike, the vague mist seemed to make it still hotter.”
“She had noticed before that a person’s troubles, the pity the person has for those troubles, and the pity a second person feels for the first person, are all independent from one another.”
“Losing one’s way was largely an act of intention.”
“So eat up your mört, Margaret, and take no notice of all these gloomy thoughts.”
A reference in the Aickman to Casanova who is another Italian Freemason like Mann’s Settembrini.
“It is a little like the Italian parable of the onion: skin after skin comes away, until in the end there is nothing — nothing but a perfume that lingers a little, as the dead linger here a little after death, perfuming the air, and then are gone.”
————————————-
And my final word on ‘The Magic Mountain’ – I have just read Mann’s own afterword to the novel for the first time and its following passage seems very relevant to this having been my SECOND reading of the novel (having first read it in 1970) and ALSO relevant to my real-time reviewing for the last five years being described as garnering a gestalt from leitmotifs!
“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. Just as in music one needs to know a piece to enjoy it properly, I intentionally used the word “composed” in referring to the writing of a book. I mean it in the sense we more commonly apply to the writing of music. For music has always had a strong formative influence upon the style of my writing. Writers are very often “really” something else; they are transplanted painters or sculptors or architects or what not. To me the novel was always like a symphony, a work in counterpoint, a thematic fabric; the idea of the musical motif plays a great role in it.
People have pointed out the influence of Wagner’s music on my work. Certainly I do not disclaim this influence. In particular, I followed Wagner in the use of the leitmotiv, which I carried over into the work of language. Not as Tolstoy and Zola use it, or as I used it myself in ‘Buddenbrooks’, naturalistically and as a means of characterization—so to speak, mechanically. I sought to employ it in its musical sense. My first attempts were in ‘Tonio Kröger’. But the technique I there employed is in ‘The Magic Mountain’ greatly expanded; it is used in a very much more complicated and all-pervasive way. That is why I make my presumptuous plea to my readers to read the book twice.”
PPS:
Meanwhile, some of you may remember the Aickman and Cannibalism thread that John Magwitch broached some time ago. I recorded it for posterity HERE
Well, you may not be surprised to learn that there is a significant cannibalistic dream scene in Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ that, during my real-time review, I recorded at the start of the page HERE
But only those with strong stomachs should look at that!
I have just discovered my old reading copy of ‘The Magic Mountain’, so I needn’t have bought a new one! It seems to prove that I must have read it no earlier than 1973. Also someone has now drawn to my attention that the novel seems to follow the ‘rite of passage’ of Wagner’s PARSIFAL (my favourite opera).
And someone else has just given me this quote from Robert Aickman’s THE MODEL: “It has been always in the mind of time.”
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Later footnote:
I have learnt, since writing my Magic Mountain review, that Aickman himself is reported to have said that Mann was a big influence on his work. For example this article here. And if you click on ‘influences’ on the right hand side of the Aickman Wikipedia.
I know none of that is categorical, especially to someone like me who has lived with ‘the Intentional Fallacy’ since I was a youthful reader, but the correlations between ‘The Magic Mountain’ and Aickman’s work I found astonishing when I carried out my recent marathon Mountain review above..
….and for those who can access the All Hallows forum, an interesting reference by someone else to ‘Death in Venice’ vis-a-vis Aickman here.
A remarkable quote from DR FAUSTUS by Thomas Mann:
http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/jules-verne-in-thomas-mann/
A strong comparison of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN with ANCIENT SORCERIES by Algernon Blackwood:
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/ancient-sorceries-and-other-chilling-tales-by-algernon-blackwood/