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The Magic Mountain · Chapter V

Humaniora, the Analysis and Walpurgis Night

IllnessFormationDeathPassionTime

Chapter summary

This is the chapter in which Hans Castorp ceases to be a visitor and becomes a resident. He truly falls ill, sees his own skeleton on an X-ray plate, begins to study anatomy and biology on his own during the winter nights, takes on the task of visiting the house's dying and, on the Walpurgis Night of the Carnival, declares his love for Clavdia Chauchat entirely in French. The thread that runs through the nine sections is always the same: the body has ceased to be a neutral datum and has become the object of all thought, whether in the mouth of Lodovico Settembrini, who treats it as the evil principle against the spirit, or in that of Dr. Behrens, who paints it and dissects it in the same gesture, or in the anatomy books that Hans Castorp reads alone until the reading turns into delirium. The final declaration of love is not a detour from this thread; it is its point of arrival: the body, love and death, said in a language that is not Hans Castorp's, because only in it can he say what he feels.

Eternal Soup and Sudden Clarity

FormationTime

Section summary

Hans Castorp has been in bed since Saturday, by order of Dr. Behrens, and the days of bed rest blur into an eternal soup: massage, medical rounds, Joachim's walks, and full meals served in bed. On Sunday Joachim Ziemssen presses the family for action, but Hans prefers to wait for the X-ray, and on Tuesday he writes to his uncles that he has the flu and a fever; days later a second letter says that Behrens's opinion extends the stay. Joachim tells him about Dr. Krokowski's lecture on the body's autointoxication, and Krokowski himself comes in through the balcony, calls Hans "comrade," treats his flu as a "phenomenon of the third order," and includes him in the rounds as a patient.

About ten days later, Lodovico Settembrini appears at night, turns on the ceiling light, laughs at the "refectorium," and calls Hans a little nun, "bride of Christ, newly tonsured." He tells the story of a German-Russian woman whom Behrens, in her fifth month, told only that perhaps she could not bear the climate, and he admits that his own X-ray shows spots and that he is quite ill. Hans, lying down, says that the atmosphere of the plains, where people ask whether someone "still has money," is cruel, and that contact with death makes one sensitive to that cynicism. Settembrini responds with the story of a husband who, on returning to his family, spoke only of thermometers and called the sanatorium "our homeland," warns against "losing oneself to life," and teaches that death is part and condition of life, not an argument against it.

Hans falls silent, like someone who has been rebuked, until Settembrini asks leave to assist him in his "experiments" as a corrective, and he accepts; the Italian jokes about the "sine pecunia." Joachim returns from a game of bridge, and Hans, alone with him, calls Settembrini a humanist pedagogue. Meanwhile time passes in sleep and routine, with good late-summer days, until, at the end of three weeks, the fog and the snow return and Behrens, reminded by Hans of the deadline, has him get up, promising soon a portrait of his interior.

Analysis

Hans writes twice to his uncles that the flu and the doctor's opinion prolong the stay: what he says is true, but it is not the whole reason, because the bed, the blankets and the thermometer have already given him the routine of the sick before he decided to stay. The narrator sums up three weeks in a few pages because the decision does not happen on stage; it happens through habit.

The opening section formulates, before any scene, the thesis about the time of the bedridden patient that dominates the whole chapter. It is the same day that repeats itself again and again; but, precisely because it is always the same day, the term "repetition" seems at bottom ill-suited; better to speak of monotony, of a now that has stopped, or of eternity. They bring you the soup at lunchtime, just as they brought it yesterday and will bring it tomorrow. And at the same time you feel yourself in the grip of a singular sensation [...]: you find yourself overcome by a kind of vertigo, as the soup draws near; times become confused, mingle in your mind, and what reveals itself to you as the true form of existence is a present without extension, in which the soup is brought to you eternally.

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"My God, I See!"

IllnessDeath

Section summary

A week passes before the head nurse summons Hans Castorp to the radiology laboratory. The sanatorium fills with new guests, and Hans Castorp learns the house's scale of values: whoever has little illness counts for little, and so, with a mild case, he keeps discreet, though he adds tenths of a degree to his temperature when asked. He resumes his routine beside Joachim, and at table almost no one notices that he spent three weeks in bed; only Clavdia Chauchat, late as always, looks at him and smiles over her shoulder. Her image occupies him day and night, between sweetness and alarm, and Joachim's disciplined presence, who never speaks of Marusja, keeps him from speaking of her or attempting any approach.

Mrs. Engelhart, his confidante at table, tells him that Clavdia receives a Russian compatriot who lives in Davos-Platz in her room in the afternoons, and that she poses almost every day, in Dr. Behrens's private apartment, for an oil portrait he is painting. The news makes him rise to 37.7 and leaves him suspicious. He also notices a sick young man from Mannheim, devout and shy, who gazes at Clavdia with canine sadness, and in the lad he sees the mirror of his own intoxication.

Eight days later, Hans Castorp is called to the fluoroscopy room together with Joachim, who is also to have a new X-ray. In the waiting room, the queue delayed, Clavdia comes in, sits down with them, and asks Joachim, who hides his face behind a magazine, what time the examination is; Hans Castorp hears her voice as in a dream, without daring to speak. In the laboratory, in the gloom, Behrens shows his collection of radiographs and photographs the chests of the two cousins amid electrical discharges. Afterwards, in the dark, he lets Hans Castorp look through the luminous screen at Joachim's skeleton and his heart pulsing; Hans Castorp repeats "My God, I see!" and recalls a female relative who saw skeletons in people who were about to die. Finally he sees his own hand, the skeleton within the wasted flesh and the grandfather's signet ring floating, and understands for the first time that he is going to die. Behrens says the plate confirms the examination and recommends patience; as Hans Castorp leaves, he sees Clavdia enter the laboratory.

Analysis

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Freedom

ReasonTime

Section summary

September comes to an end, and Hans Castorp, with seven weeks on the mountain, no longer knows whether time seems short or long to him. On leaving lunch, Hermine Kleefeld and the young men of her circle lament that their lives have been stolen from them, and Settembrini warns Hans never to give them credence, because illness and despair would be forms of licentiousness. Hans contests this, recalls Krokowski's analysis and defends Behrens against the "diabolical fellow," and the Italian takes his leave with a jab about the "Parthians and Scythians" with whom he shares the rest hour, who are, he explains, Russians, men and women. Irritated, Hans writes his third letter home, asks for winter clothes and eight hundred marks a month, and the thermometer rises to 37.8.

Analysis

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Caprices of Mercury

Passion

Section summary

October begins as cold as September, but then a late Indian summer of two and a half weeks breaks out, with blue skies and strong sun. Hans Castorp, intoxicated with passion for Clavdia Chauchat, admits nothing that weakens this intoxication: he avoids looking at her in profile, which flatters her less. He stops judging her by Settembrini's criterion, which condemns her carelessness and calls the Russians "Parthians and Scythians," that is, barbarians; he begins to think that her illness is moral and inherent in her, and he imitates her manners, sitting relaxed at table and slamming doors. The narrator says that this passion is feverish, directed at her sick body and a vague dream, and that Hans Castorp perhaps would not have prolonged his stay had he found some answer about the meaning of the craft of living.

Small gestures fill him with joy. Upon entering the dining room, he yields her the way and receives a "merci"; in the evening, on seeing a ray of sun strike Clavdia's head, he rises, crosses the room and closes the curtains, and she thanks him with a smile, while Joachim looks at his plate and Mrs. Stöhr laughs with her neighbors. Then, at the gathering in the sun after lunch, Hans Castorp, to draw her attention, talks loudly with Joachim and with the pneumothorax patient Hermine Kleefeld; Clavdia turns, looks at his yellow shoes with almost disdainful indifference and turns her face away.

For two days he is downcast, not understanding why she despises him, and his temperature stays almost normal. On the third day, a lovely autumn day, he and Joachim extend the morning walk along the forest path, they spot Clavdia dressed in white, and Hans Castorp quickens his pace, catches up with her and greets her with a "good morning," which she returns in German, smiling with her eyes. Redeemed, he goes on exultant; the cousin falls silent, offended, and the mercury climbs again, almost to 38.

Analysis

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Encyclopedia

FormationReason

Section summary

Hans Castorp does not hide that he is in love with Madame Clavdia Chauchat: he improvises speeches about her face to a group of patients who laugh at him, and many gather, on Sunday afternoons when the mail is distributed in the vestibule, to watch the obsessed young man. He waits all week for that hour, when once she gently pushed him and said "Pardon!", and he replied "Pas de quoi, madame!". The narrator notes that waiting is devouring time without living it.

In this same vestibule, Lodovico Settembrini approaches him and asks to see the X-ray he carries in his wallet, like a passport; he hands it back, saying that spots are usually of physiological origin and that not even doctors base a diagnosis on that plate alone. On hearing that Hans Castorp is thinking of buying a fur sleeping bag to spend the winter, and speaks lightly of months, he rebukes him: time is a divine gift that the European, unlike the Russian, must manage economically, in the service of progress. He takes him to the reading room and shows him the letter of the League for the Organization of Progress, which has commissioned him to write, for a twenty-volume encyclopedia on human suffering, the volume on belles-lettres. He says he did not go to the League's congress in Barcelona because the doctor forbade it, threatening him with death, and he urgently advises Hans Castorp to leave, because only on the plains can one be a European, fight suffering and make the most of time.

Hans Castorp replies that the doctor told him it was not worth returning, and that Settembrini, who likewise did not go to Barcelona out of fear of death, is more prudent with himself than with others. Settembrini says that if he wished to compete, he would answer that he is much more ill and that he submitted to the prohibition under protest of the spirit. Hans Castorp asks what a humanist has against the body, and Settembrini answers that he honors it in the beauty and freedom of the senses, but despises it when it represents illness and death: nature is evil before the spirit, which must not resign itself to it, just as Voltaire protested against the Lisbon earthquake. The conversation is interrupted by Joachim's entrance with two postcards.

Analysis

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Humaniora

FormationDeath

Section summary

On a hot October day, after lunch, Hans Castorp and Joachim are sitting in the garden, and Hans smokes a Maria Mancini cigar, whose flavor he has recovered. Dr. Behrens crosses the garden, nervous, and the two of them trade cigars; they talk about how cigars are kept, and Behrens recounts how two strong Havanas nearly killed him one night, with fear and joy mixed together, until the head nurse rescued him. Hans Castorp then asks whether he paints; Behrens, flattered, confesses that he does, and invites them to see the paintings and to drink Turkish coffee in his private apartment.

In the apartment, the cousins see alpine landscapes, still lifes and portraits of the doctor's late wife, and among them the oil portrait of Madame Clavdia Chauchat, which Hans Castorp pretends by chance to recognize; Joachim, who only now understands his cousin's maneuver, agrees in a low voice. The portrait is weak, but Hans Castorp praises it, especially the skin. Behrens explains the anatomy that guides his brush: the epicanthic fold that gives Clavdia's eyes their slanted look, the layers of the skin, the fat that forms feminine curves. Hans Castorp, animated, takes the picture off the wall and declares that medicine, law, theology and painting are humanistic professions, variants of the same interest in man.

They drink Turkish coffee from a brass tray whose obscene ornaments, a gift from an Egyptian patient, Hans Castorp remarks, blushing, were something sacred to the ancients too. With the portrait on his knees, he asks Behrens to talk about the skin, the lymph and the blood; the doctor explains why the skin flushes and gooseflesh rises, that lymph is the "milk of the blood," and that its glands can swell from tuberculosis. Hans Castorp then asks what the body is, and Behrens replies that it is water and protein, that living is a combustion in which form is preserved, so that living, at that point, is dying. Hans Castorp says that form is nonsense; Behrens grows melancholy and ends the visit.

Analysis

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Research

IllnessFormationThe Meaning of Life

Section summary

The Alpine winter arrives, milder than Hans Castorp feared. The snow begins to fall around All Souls' Day and accumulates for days under a constant cold, until the sky opens onto a limpid splendor of white valley and shimmering moonlight. In the dining room people talk only of tourists, skis, the toboggan run and Christmas, and Hans Castorp realizes, alarmed, that he too will spend Christmas there, far from his family. The old patients treat dates such as Christmas as footholds for leaping over empty stretches of time; they arrange a collective gift for the chief, Behrens, and Mrs. Stöhr, who advanced ten francs to Mrs. Iltis, ends up collecting them from her through the administration.

Hans Castorp stays on the balcony until after midnight, bundled in a fur sleeping bag, blankets, coat and gloves, with a glass of milk and brandy beside him, weary in body and agitated in spirit, his temperature high. While the other patients read novels or a pamphlet on the art of seduction that circulates through the sanatorium, he sets aside his naval engineering books and begins to read weighty works of anatomy, physiology, biology and embryology, which he ordered on his own from the bookseller, and Joachim is astonished to see him cutting the pages. The question that occupies him is what life is. According to the books, nobody knows: consciousness is a function of organized matter that ends up turning against its own bearer, and between the living and the inanimate there is an abyss that theories of spontaneous generation cannot bridge.

The answer that comes to him is that life is heat, a fever of matter, a phenomenon sustained by an instability that preserves form, neither matter nor spirit, yet sensual to the point of voluptuousness and disgust. He follows the body as a multiplicity of cells, the development of the embryo from the fertilized egg, the structure of the bones as a work of engineering, and the gaps in science concerning metabolism and memory. Following the units of life smaller and smaller, he reaches the atom, which seems to him a miniature solar system. Pathology, as he reads of how the tuberculous tumor and the toxins of the bacilli intoxicate the organism, leads him to think that disease is the licentious form of life and that life itself may be an ill of matter, an impudent step of the spirit. He falls asleep on the book and dreams of the image of life, a feminine figure with slanted eyes who bends over him and kisses him.

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Danse Macabre

Death

Section summary

Christmas passes without altering the Berghof's regime: Behrens's son, Knut, arrives for the holidays, Clavdia Chauchat appears in an embroidered dress of rustic air, Settembrini toasts "individualist democracy," and there is a recital of songs on the first day of the feast. Soon after, the Austrian aristocrat dies, kept in his last days with forty oxygen balloons. Hans Castorp, whom Mrs. Stöhr had already rebuked for mentioning death at table, drags Joachim into a conversation with his sister Berta and then to the mortuary chamber, where he speaks with the widow about her husband's martyrdom and the transport of the body to Carinthia. Back outside, he explains to his cousin that there are two inclinations, the pious one of the Spanish ruff and the free one of Settembrini, and announces that he will visit the seriously ill and the dying of the house, with flowers sent in the name of "two companions," in protest against the concealment of death.

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Walpurgis Night

DeathPassion

Section summary

A few days remain before Hans Castorp completes seven months at the sanatorium and Joachim one year, and it is Carnival. Lodovico Settembrini warns, ironically, that the party will be a masked ball for patients. Hans Castorp says he thinks it right to mark the dates in order, Christmas, Carnival, Easter, and that Dr. Behrens, who added four more months to Joachim's stay, has not yet set any deadline for him. On Shrove Tuesday, the dining room fills with horns, streamers, paper caps, and champagne mixed with wine. Boarders dress up as men, women, a beggar, and a Pierrot, and Mrs. Iltis and Mr. Albin come in as the "Silent Sister," a deaconess covered in thermometer marks, and "Blue Johnny," all in blue, which Settembrini observes with pursed lips. Clavdia Chauchat arrives in a new dress of dark silk, with bare arms and a white paper cap, and Settembrini says she is Lilith, Adam's first wife, dangerous to young men.

With his head hot from burgundy and champagne, Hans Castorp addresses Settembrini with the familiar "thou," and the Italian reprimands him, considering it a barbarism against civilization. Hans defends the familiar form, thanks him for what he learned in seven months, and asks forgiveness for having been a poor student, a "sickly child of life"; Settembrini finds this odd, since it sounds like a farewell. In the salon, Dr. Behrens, wearing a Turkish fez, hands out punch and proposes the game of drawing little pigs with their eyes closed, and everyone laughs at the monstrosities that come out. Hans Castorp, who can get only a stub of pencil, throws it into the punch and crosses the hall shouting for another, ignores Settembrini's call as the Italian leaves the party, and asks Clavdia for a pencil, calling her "thou." She takes from her bag a thin, fragile silver propelling pencil and explains how to screw in the lead, while the others begin to dance, out of sight of the doctors.

The two sit in a small room and talk alone, switching from German to French and addressing each other as "tu." He speaks of dreams and eternity, and she calls him a bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet. Suddenly Clavdia announces that she will leave the next day, after dinner, for far away, perhaps Dagestan, because Behrens thinks nothing more can be done for her there and she loves freedom; perhaps she will return, but by then he will already be far away. Hans Castorp asks whether, on the day of the first examination, she knew where he was going, and she answers that it was by chance. She also says that Joachim is sicker than he imagines and may die if he tries to become a soldier again, and Hans Castorp, to whom the idea of death no longer frightens him, replies that Joachim is dying and he is in love. He also asks about the Russian patrician who visits her, and she says that the two of them philosophize, and that for them morality lies in sin and in surrender to what consumes, not in virtue. When the room empties and she says the party is over, Hans Castorp kneels and declares that he has loved her forever. Mixing the memory of his schoolmate Pribislav, from whom he once asked for a pencil, with her, he says that the body, love, and death are one thing. She calls him "Petit bourgeois," predicts a bad fever for him, places the paper cap on his head, and leaves, asking him to return her pencil.

Analysis

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