What It Is
The fluoroscopy in the laboratory of Dr. Behrens, in the section "My God, I See!" of Chapter V, in which Hans Castorp first sees Joachim's heart and then the skeleton of his own hand.
Where It Appears
In the fluoroscopy room (see the X-ray), Behrens first shows Hans Castorp Joachim's own skeleton, which he examines in the dim light through the luminous screen.Good heavens, it was the heart. Hans Castorp was seeing Joachim's honorable heart. - I see your heart! - he said in a strangled voice.
It is at this moment that the narrator evokes, for the first time, the relative of the Tienappel family who saw the dying as skeletons: Hans Castorp is seeing, with instruments of physics and optics, what that woman saw as a gift or a curse, and the novel makes it clear that the difference between supernatural vision and scientific vision, at this point, is minimal.
Once Joachim's fluoroscopy is over, Behrens allows Hans Castorp to contemplate his own hand through the screen, and it is here that the chapter reaches its strongest scene.And Hans Castorp saw what he ought to have expected, but what in truth is not granted to man to see, and what he would never have believed he could see: he cast a glance into his own tomb. He saw, anticipated by the force of the rays, the future work of decomposition; he saw the flesh in which he lived, dissolved, annihilated, reduced to an insubstantial mist, in the midst of which stood out the finely formed skeleton of his right hand, and around the first phalanx of the ring finger hovered, black and faint, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him [...]. With the eyes of that relative of the Tienappel family, he contemplated a familiar part of his body [...], and for the first time in his life he understood that he was destined to die.
On Walpurgis Night, Hans Castorp links the marks that Behrens found in his body to the schoolboy love for Pribislav Hippe.
It is also in French that Hans Castorp explicitly links the present passion to the school episode of the previous chapter, the request for a pencil from Pribislav Hippe.Une fois déjà, lorsque j'étais collégien, je t'ai demandé ton crayon [...] parce que je t'aimais irraisonnablement, et c'est de là, sans doute, c'est de mon ancien amour pour toi que ces marques me restent que Behrens a trouvées dans mon corps, et qui indiquent que jadis aussi j'étais malade
What It Means
The same instrument that proves Hans Castorp is ill is the one that gives him the first visual certainty that he is going to die, before any diagnosis in words; and the marks it shows turn, on his lips, into the mark of an old love. The X-ray joins, in a single object, the illness, the death and the passion that Chapter V is going to declare in French.
Relationships
- Core themes: Death, Illness, Science and Technology.
- Characters: Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen, Dr. Behrens, Clavdia Chauchat.