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The Magic Mountain · Chapter VI

Naphta, the Snow, and Joachim's Death

FormationDeathReasonThe Meaning of LifeTime

Chapter summary

Chapter VI is the longest in the novel and its intellectual center: here Leo Naphta enters, the second pedagogue, and the book stops being a duel between Lodovico Settembrini and the world and becomes a duel between Settembrini and Naphta, with Hans Castorp in the middle as audience and prize.

Transformations

Passion

Section summary

The narrator opens with a meditation on time, which seems to have no nature of its own, and Hans Castorp also begins to question it, while Joachim, who thinks only of returning to the plain and being a soldier, will have none of it. Six weeks have passed since Carnival, and winter still dominates the valley. Clavdia Chauchat left the next day for Dagestan by sled, accompanied by a fellow countryman, saying that the departure is temporary and that she may return, but that Hans Castorp would be "far away, long since." He keeps over his heart the memento she asked for in exchange for the pencil: the X-ray plate of her chest, which shows the skeleton wrapped in transparent flesh. Adapting to the place without her is quicker than he expected, and there is no longer any slamming of doors at meals; time there seems designed to produce habits, even if the habit is that of never getting used to things. He kisses the plate many times and thinks of her future return, without waiting for letters.

Joachim rebels against the "Gaffky scale," with which the laboratory measures the infection of patients: after going from index 2 to 9, he threatens to return to the plain on his own. Hans Castorp, with a high temperature, begins receiving injections twice a week, and Dr. Behrens tells him he is more intoxicated than expected. When he asks about Clavdia, he hears that she writes to no one and comes back now and then, and that if Joachim leaves now, Hans Castorp will still be there to witness his return. Dr. Krokowski, who calls him "comrade," spends a few weeks talking with him at each round, and Joachim discovers by chance that Hans Castorp goes to the assistant's analysis office after the injection, which he takes as a new disloyalty.

Lodovico Settembrini, who went weeks without speaking to Hans Castorp after Carnival, approaches him again with a mythological allusion: whoever has tasted the food of the kingdom of shadows (the pomegranate) belongs to it forever. On Easter Sunday, seeing the sugar eggs and rabbits in the sanatorium, he compares life there to that of a ship in a salt desert, and announces that he is leaving the Berghof (see the Berghof) to live in the house of the tailor Lukacek, in the village, because the doctor has sentenced him to "life imprisonment." Spring struggles against winter, with snow, the föhn wind, thaw, and white crocuses that look like snow. Dr. Krokowski continues the fortnightly lectures, now on love and death and on mushrooms, among them one whose shape recalls love and whose smell recalls death. Many boarders leave on a "false start," like Mrs. Salomon; Dr. Blumenkohl dies; Mr. Ferge takes Settembrini's place at the table; and the Russian great-aunt leaves with Marusya, who has tumors in her chest, promising to return in the autumn, which leaves Joachim dejected.

Analysis

Settembrini leaves the Berghof for the village because, with the verdict of life imprisonment, he gives up waiting for a return to the world of work and prefers to choose how he will stay. The tailor's house is that of someone who accepts living there without being treated there. Joachim, by contrast, threatens to leave anyway, because the Gaffky scale takes away the date he was counting on.

Joachim, who discovers that he has gone from Gaffky 2 to 9 in fourteen days, loses the composure that always characterized him. Leave me alone with Gaffky! I am going to put an end to this; I am going home, even if it costs me my life!

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Someone Else

FormationReason

Section summary

On the summer solstice, Hans Castorp gathers flowers and studies botany, with an herbarium, a magnifying glass, and a manual, and at night he contemplates the stars and tells Joachim about the zodiac and the Chaldeans. He reflects that the year is a circle of turning points and that eternity is a carousel, not a straight line. Joachim, who prefers Russian grammar, grumbles that these are outlandish matters and says war is necessary, because without it the world would rot.

On the main street, on the way to the village, the cousins run into Lodovico Settembrini, who is with a stranger and seems to want to avoid them, but is obliged to introduce him: it is Naphta, the Italian's neighbor at the tailor Lukacek's house, a teacher of ancient languages and a former seminary student, a small, thin, ugly man with a cutting way of speaking, who has lived in Davos for five years because of illness. The four walk side by side, and the two men begin their first argument in front of the cousins. Settembrini defends nature as spirit, reason, work, progress, and democracy; Naphta defends the Middle Ages, the separation between God and the world, the monks' labor as ascetic exercise for salvation, and the "bed of rest" as the highest degree of contemplative life. Hans Castorp intervenes: he says that ten months on the deck chair have given him more ideas than the "mill" of the plain, and he praises the military class for its asceticism and its contact with death. They then talk about Turkey, Russia, and the Balkans. Naphta says the bourgeois world system is heading toward a catastrophe that will come and must come, and Settembrini defends arbitration and peace. Hans Castorp recalls that Settembrini had said the universal republic would come "on the wings of eagles" and that Austria should be annihilated, and he observes that every movement is circular.

In front of the little house where both of them live, Naphta invites the cousins to visit him, and Settembrini raises objections, so that everything hangs in the air. On the climb to the Berghof, Joachim says that he does not like Naphta, that he finds him suspicious, and that the story of the bed of rest is risqué. Hans Castorp answers that they will visit him, because Naphta interests him, and that nothing but confusion came from the two of them, but that, being a civilian, he feels responsible for understanding the matter.

Analysis

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On the City of God and Redemption Through Evil

DeathReason

Section summary

Hans Castorp, who has already stopped taking injections because they gave him headaches and did not lower his fever, goes to the bench by the stream where he had the vision of Hippe and there "reigns": he meditates on the human form, the body, time, freedom, and death, his chin resting on the knot of his tie, as his grandfather did, looking at the glass plate with the inner portrait of Clavdia, which he keeps in his pocket. He calls the sublime form he sees "Homo Dei," an expression he heard from Naphta, and so he decides to visit Leo Naphta with Joachim, on a Sunday afternoon, even though Lodovico Settembrini disapproves. In the house of the tailor Lukacek, Naphta's study is lined with silk and has in one corner a Gothic wooden pietà, so ugly and so beautiful that Hans Castorp is impressed. Naphta calls it "signum mortificationis" (sign of mortification), an anonymous, collective work in which the Middle Ages do not soften the suffering of the flesh.

Settembrini comes down from the attic for tea and, with his back to the pietà, has the great debate with Naphta. He defends nature, reason, the Renaissance, and the free search for truth. Naphta replies that pure knowledge does not exist, that faith is the organ of knowledge, that truth is whatever serves man's salvation, and that the Church is right to prohibit unconditional natural science. If the world is finite, as Scholasticism held, God is transcendent and man is divided between senses and spirit; if it is infinite, the State becomes the moral law. Settembrini protests in the name of democracy and the rights of the individual, and Naphta retorts that bourgeois freedom is dead and that true pedagogy demands obedience and discipline: what the age calls for is terror. He then explains that men lived in a primitive state without State or property, that the State was born of sin, that since Gregory the Great the Church has wanted to lead them to the City of God, that the Fathers condemned property, profit, and interest, and that modern communism takes this up: the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the sign of the cross, is the passage to the Kingdom and will not spare blood. Settembrini, shaken, accuses him of defending the blackest reaction and rises, saying "Addio, padre," and takes the cousins to his cubicle in the attic, where the chairs of his grandfather the Carbonaro and his father's writing case are kept.

On the way back, Settembrini warns the cousins against contact with Naphta, whose form is logical but whose nature is confusion, and he admits that he visits him almost every day because he needs the friction. He reveals that Naphta is a Jesuit: he completed the novitiate and first vows, but illness prevented him from becoming a priest; he is poor, but the order supports him, and hence the silk. Hans Castorp remarks that Naphta is also a "sickly child of life." Settembrini defines him as a voluptuary: when the spirit isolates death as a principle, death redeems not from evil but through evil, and frees one for voluptuousness. That is why he urges them to armor their hearts and intellects. The cousins make two or three more visits, and Hans Castorp borrows a treatise by Pope Innocent III on the wretchedness of man.

Analysis

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Irascibility. And One More Very Embarrassing Thing

Time

Section summary

The anniversary of Hans Castorp's arrival passes in silence, as is customary there, and early in the month the weather turns bad, with snow in the middle of summer and the heating turned back on. Joachim, taciturn and in constant correspondence with the plain, loses patience when Hans Castorp explains that winter depresses them because there time is not new, and he storms out, slamming the door, his eyes brimming with tears. Hans Castorp fears that his cousin will actually leave and abandon him alone on the mountaintop, from which he would never find the way back on his own.

At the monthly examination in September, Dr. Behrens, depressed by a scandal in which a patient, Ammy Nölting, was caught at dawn with a Greek, remarks that tuberculosis goes hand in hand with concupiscence. Joachim, stiffly, announces that he is leaving in eight days to report as an officer candidate to the regiment on October 1, because he has already spent a year and a half there. Behrens calls him a deserter and presses him, and, seeing that he will not yield, discharges him with a half approval, at his own risk. When Hans Castorp says that everything depends on the doctor's opinion, Behrens declares him cured and, at his astonishment, explodes in anger, shouting that he is not the owner of a bawdy house but only a doctor, and slams the door.

Hans Castorp takes his temperature, 37.8, and concludes that leaving would be a desertion of the isolation in which he meditates on man, which he calls "reigning." Joachim imagines that he told Behrens he will stay until he is fully detoxified, and that the doctor approved. Joachim, agitated and happy, bids farewell to everyone, including Naphta and Settembrini. On the sunny morning of departure, at the Davos-Dorf station, where Hans Castorp had arrived more than a year earlier, Joachim calls him by his first name for the first time and asks him to come soon, since he too is leaving. The train departs, and Hans Castorp returns alone to the sanatorium, by the same route.

Analysis

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The Assault Repelled

Section summary

In October, two weeks after Joachim's departure, Hans Castorp starts eating at Settembrini's table, between Ferge, the brewer Magnus and his wife, the Czech Wenzel, and Ferdinand Wehsal, who carries his overcoat and gets him to tell something about the Carnival night. Then a telegram arrives: his uncle James Tienappel, the family's emissary, is coming to fetch him. Hans receives him at the station without hat or overcoat and answers his uncle's chill with "We don't feel the cold." When the uncle speaks of taking him back, Hans says that Behrens has given him six more months, and James asks whether he has lost his mind. At dinner Hans explains the pneumothorax and the pleural shock, and the uncle, after hearing about a Scotswoman with pulmonary gangrene, bursts out laughing without meaning to.

In the days that follow, the uncle is gradually absorbed by the regimen. Behrens declares him anemic and orders him to rest on the balcony like his nephew, Hans teaches him the art of wrapping himself in blankets, and Mother Superior Mylendonk makes him wait in line to see the doctor and says he does not look "very clean." In Hans's room, James sees a negative of a female torso and is told that it is "a keepsake." On the sixth day he has the interview with Behrens and comes back asking whether Hans has ever heard anything like it. From then on he looks obliquely upward and becomes enchanted by Mrs. Redisch's breasts, whom he begins toasting at the table.

At a meal where Behrens sits with them, James asks what happens to a man when he rots, and Behrens replies that first the belly bursts and then one stops stinking, "the most important thing." The uncle thanks him and, the next morning, vanishes on the first train, with the bill paid and his bags packed in secret. Hans smiles with melancholy, receives a card from Lake Constance claiming urgent business, and understands that the plain's attempt to recover him has ended in defeat, which, for him, means complete freedom.

Analysis

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Operationes spirituales

IllnessReason

Section summary

Naphta was born near the border between Galicia and Volhynia, son of the schochet Elia, a ritual slaughterer with "starry eyes," who was crucified at his door after a popular uprising over two dead Christian children. His consumptive mother flees with the five children to Vorarlberg and works in a spinning mill. Leo, frail and brilliant, is expelled by the rabbi who had been teaching him, just as she lies dying. At sixteen, Father Unterpertinger, of the Jesuit college Stella Matutina, approaches him in a park and is impressed when the boy calls Hegel a "Catholic thinker." Naphta converts, leaves his brothers to public charity, and enters the novitiate at Tisis, where he hounds the director of the exercises with his dialectic, and then goes on to Falkenburg, until a hemoptysis makes him return as prefect and teacher. He does not get beyond the subdiaconate, and he has lived in Davos for more than five years, teaching Latin at the gymnasium for the sick. Hans Castorp puts together this story in visits to his silk-lined cell, sometimes with Ferge and Wehsal, and sees in Naphta's order and in Joachim's trade the same military estate.

Near Christmas, on a walk in the snow to Davos-Platz with Settembrini, Ferge, and Wehsal, Hans recalls Karen Karstedt, who had just died, and Settembrini mocks his flowers. The discussion moves from the "Christian reverence before misfortune," which Naphta illustrates with medieval princesses kissing wounds, to the hygiene and science that Settembrini opposes to it, and from there to illness. Settembrini says the sick person has a different sensibility and does not deserve veneration; Ferge defends his pleural shock; and Naphta, who has visited asylums for lunatics, sees in the body a prison "in statu degradationis."

The five move on to corporal punishment, which Naphta defends with Saint Elizabeth, and Hans contributes the story of a schoolboy beating; then to cremation, which Settembrini wants to promote at a congress and in a "precinct of life"; to torture, which Wehsal enjoys; and to the death penalty, which Settembrini wants abolished and Naphta defends by speaking of guilt and "voluptuousness." Naphta asserts that "the sicker one is, the more human one is," and Settembrini replies that this is criminal. They reach the question of nobility, which Settembrini defines as being "worthy of life" and "worthy of love." Form and logos, reason and passion, nature and spirit are swapped between the two until they are confused, and Hans returns to the balcony with the tumult of the "dos banderas" in his ears.

Analysis

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Snow

FormationDeathReasonThe Meaning of Life

Section summary

In Hans Castorp's second winter the sun barely appears and snow falls in quantities never seen before, which restricts everyone's walks except the skiers'. To be alone with his thoughts, he buys skis, with Settembrini's applause. One afternoon a storm catches him far from the valley, and he only returns to the Berghof after falling asleep in the snow and dreaming.

Analysis

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Like a Soldier, Like a Brave Man

DeathReason

Section summary

Joachim sends happy cards from the regiment: the swearing-in ceremony, which Hans compares to a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, his promotion to sergeant at New Year and to lieutenant in April, never mentioning his health, until he falls ill again in June. At the end of July a telegram arrives from Aunt Luise Ziemssen asking for two rooms, and Behrens remarks that it is what he always predicted. Joachim returns at the beginning of August with his mother, who is struck by his high spirits and says that she has seen him like this only since his promotion, which leaves him silent, eyes lowered and filled with tears. Mrs. Ziemssen mentions that she met Clavdia Chauchat in Munich, on her way to Spain for the autumn and back in the winter. Behrens imposes four weeks of bed for a "small supplementary treatment," with a vague deadline that the mother suggests is October, and the mother leaves eight days later.

In separate conversations, before Joachim's return, Naphta and Settembrini talk to Hans Castorp about Freemasonry. Naphta speaks of silence and obedience, the tomb and alchemy, and mocks the "Prince of Jerusalem." Settembrini, with the Rivista della Massoneria on the table, lists the twenty thousand lodges and brothers, among them Voltaire, Garibaldi, and Washington; says that everything is politics; argues that the future universal league should have as its creed "Écrasez l'infâme!"; and cites the Grand Orient of France, which struck God from its documents. To this Hans replies that it is "extremely Catholic." In October, in front of the Casino, the two argue about Virgil, classical culture, and whether literature is humanity or rhetoric, while Hans Castorp notices Joachim's hoarseness and a new light in his eyes.

Joachim's hoarseness and choking fits lead Mother Superior Mylendonk, and then Behrens, to examine his throat. Hans, who has looked for him in vain for four days, finds him in the garden. Behrens rebukes him for wanting everything harmless, reveals laryngeal tuberculosis, and asks that Joachim be treated gently in the weeks that remain. In November, on the eve of taking to bed for good, Joachim has a last conversation with Marusya, and Hans writes to Aunt Luise, who arrives in the snow. Joachim grows a warrior's beard, receives a pastor, talks about asking for an extension of his leave, and dies at seven in the evening. Hans closes his eyes and weeps. Behrens remarks that he "slipped off to the field of honor," Mrs. Stöhr weeps "A hero!", Settembrini is moved, and Naphta provokes him. Hans kisses the dead man's forehead, and on the plain three rifle salvos echo.

Analysis

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