What It Is
The number that measures the stay of Hans Castorp at the Berghof: seven years, seven tables in the dining room, seven minutes of thermometer, seven chapters. The narrator does not hide it, and in the last chapter he comments on the number itself.
Where It Appears
In Chapter I, the Purpose toys with the length of the narrative and, while denying it, announces the seven years.
Closing the Purpose, the narrator toys with the length of his own narrative and anticipates, even while denying it, the actual measure of Hans Castorp's stay.Surely it will not come to seven years - God forbid!
In Chapter II, Hans's childhood closes with the death of his parents before he turns seven.
His parents die while he is still a child:
Both died in the brief interval between the fifth and the seventh year of his life.
In Chapter III, the dining hall where he eats five times a day has seven tables.
There were seven tables in the room, most of them lengthwise and only two placed crosswise. They were large tables, each with room for ten people, although not all of them were fully occupied.
In Chapter V, the doubt about time is told in sevens, the thermometer marks the smallest unit that still weighs, and Walpurgis Night reaches seven months.
The doubt about the duration is told in sevens:
It seemed to him that the seven weeks he had demonstrably already spent with the people up here were no more than seven days?
The smallest unit of time that still weighs at the Berghof is that of the thermometer:
those seven times sixty seconds, during which the thermometer was held between the lips in order to prolong the temperature curve, had a tenacious life, and their weight was considerable.
The section opens with the count:
A few more days, and seven months will have gone by that young Hans Castorp has spent up here.
In Chapter VI, Joachim Ziemssen goes down to his regiment after observing the sanatorium's rule of "seven times seventy days."
On leaving, Joachim leaves behind an order thathe had observed for seven times seventy days, in all seasons, the reckoning of forgiveness in Matthew applied to sanatorium time.
In Chapter VII, the circle of Hans's friends whom Pieter Peeperkorn takes to the waterfall numbers seven people, him included, and the section on the thunder opens with the narrator's comment on the seven years and the seven tables walked through, one year at each.
The narrator describes the excursion group:
that small circle of friends made up of seven people (himself included).
The narrator comments on his own number of seven years: it isa good number, practical in its way, a mythic-picturesque span of time, one might say, and more satisfying to the soul than, for example, a dry half-dozen. And he closes the cycle with the tables:He had eaten at all seven tables in the dining room, roughly a year at each place.
What It Means
Seven is the unit with which the novel measures a time that has stopped being counted. Down below, time runs in working days; at the Berghof it is counted in weeks that seem like days, in months and in years, and the number that gives shape to this count is always seven, from the thermometer to the whole cycle. When the narrator calls the seven years "mythic-picturesque," he is saying that the stay is not a duration of the calendar but a time of another kind, closed and complete, like that of legend.
Jung gives the key to this legendary time. The Seven Sleepers sleep in a cave and wake transformed, and the number, he says, is the sign that this is a mystery of renewal.
Jung reads the number before the story:
The number of the seven sleepers indicates, through the sacredness of the number seven[...]that these are gods transformed during sleep, and therefore the legend is one of mystery and renewal, not of chronicle.
Hans Castorp also spends seven years outside time, in a kind of sleep on the mountain, and wakes only with the thunder. The difference is that the sleepers return with eternal youth, and he goes down to war.
In the Estonian tale that Jung reads, the Old Sage sends the boy to walk for seven years toward the great mountain, and the mountain is the adult personality.
The Sage's advice is given in time and in place:
The Old Sage advised him to keep walking calmly, always toward the east, where after seven years he would reach the great mountain whose meaning is his good fortune.Jung reads the image:and the height of the mountain allude to adult personality.
Mann's novel of formation inverts the tale: Hans reaches the mountain first and spends seven years there, between two masters, Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta, who vie for the role of the Sage. Whether the mountain has made him an adult the book does not say; it only says that he goes down.
The ages fit the count. Hans arrives in Davos at twenty-two, already in the fourth seven-year span, the third having closed at twenty-one, and the three weeks of the visit are the "twenty-one days" the text names twice. Adding the seven years, he goes down at about twenty-nine, at the start of another seven-year span. The book does not speak of life cycles, and the age of departure is a deduction; the reading belongs to the note-taker, supported by the weight the narrator himself gives to the number.
The narrator gives the age on arrival in Davos once, at the end of the education (in Chapter III Hans himself, feverish, gets the count wrong and tells Settembrini he is in his twenty-fourth year):
When he undertook the journey during which we became acquainted with him, he had not yet completed twenty-three years.He is therefore twenty-two.
The count of the seven-year spans is ancient. Solon divides life into ten periods of seven years, and the fourth, which begins after twenty-one, is that of strength.
τῇ δὲ τετάρτῃ πᾶς τις ἐν ἑβδομάδ’ ἐστὶν ἄριστος ἰσχύν(vv. 7-8), in the fourth seven-year span each man is at the height of his strength.
Philo, who preserves the poem, gives the seven its name: it is the number that "brings to term," because in it all things are brought to completion.
Καλεῖται δ’ ἡ ἑβδομὰς ὑπὸ τῶν κυρίως τοῖς ὀνόμασιν εἰωθότων χρῆσθαι καὶ τελεσφόρος, ἐπειδὴ ταύτῃ τελεσφορεῖται τὰ σύμπαντα.(§ 102), those who habitually use names properly also call the hebdomad "the one that brings to term," because by it all things are brought to term.
And in the same excursus he notes that in ancient medicine the fever is decided on the seventh day, which gives another weight to the seven minutes of the thermometer.
ἑβδόμῃ μάλιστά πως ἡμέρᾳ διακρίνονται· δικάζει γὰρ ἀγῶνα τὸν περὶ ψυχῆς(§ 125), continuous fevers are decided above all on the seventh day, because it judges the struggle for life.
Leviticus counts the time of the land in seven times seven years, and sanctifies the year that follows, the first of the new cycle.
You shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be your jubilee. Each of you shall return to his land and to his family.
The epic model of seven years outside time is Odysseus on Ogygia: seven years standing still beside Calypso, who offers him immortality, and the departure only in the eighth. Hans Castorp spends his seven years waiting for Clavdia Chauchat, who leaves after Walpurgis Night, returns with Peeperkorn and leaves again, and it is war, not an order of the gods, that takes him off the island.
ἔνθα μὲν ἑπτάετες μένον ἔμπεδον, εἵματα δʼ αἰεὶ δάκρυσι δεύεσκον, τά μοι ἄμβροτα δῶκε Καλυψώ· ἀλλʼ ὅτε δὴ ὀγδόατόν μοι ἐπιπλόμενον ἔτος ἦλθεν(7.259-261), there I remained seven years without moving, and I always wet with tears the immortal garments Calypso had given me; but when, the year turning, the eighth year came.
Relationships
- Core themes: Time and Formation.
- Related symbols: the thermometer, the smallest unit of the seven, and the clock, the time of down below.
- Characters: Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen, Pieter Peeperkorn.