Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Magic Mountain Thomas Mann's the Magic Mountain Madame Claudia Chauchat's point-of-view of her ailment -- "no delicate child of life," is she! Thomas Mann as a novelist is uniquely gifted in his ability to convey philosophical insight through the deployment of a different characters' specific perspective in the context of a town, family or hospital community -- even the ailment afflicting the hospital community itself, in the case of The Magic Mountain.

Even when the character in question, such as Claudia Chauchat, herself lacks a level of profound self-knowledge and insight, because of her location in the particular community of the sanatorium in question at the heart of the novel, the reader is still capable of being upon the receiving end of profound insights upon the contrasting nature of health and illness from Mann's point-of-view.

"We don't have much time in life," exclaims the main protagonist at the onset of the novel, but only Claudia, of all of the residents of The Magic Mountain, really lives this truth. (7) The entire community, health and sick, of The Magic Mountain are afflicted by one ailment or another, some physical, other mental. The physically sick, such as Chauchat, are suffering from tuberculosis. However, there are also those who are mentally sick but physically well like Hans.

The contrasting point-of-views of view of health and illness in a community of illness are deployed skillfully by Mann to add additional texture to what could be otherwise a rather mundane collective memoir of illness, or a rather mundane metaphor of the human condition through illness, particularly that of an ailment so common to the 19th century era during which the author wrote.

In fact, rather than giving the quality of the ailment of tuberculosis a singular character, Mann is striking in his ability to give a kind of multidimensional character to the ailment itself, by showing the illness' progression in a multiple of physical bodies and through the point-of-view of contrasting physical characters. Tuberculosis, buy the end of the tale, has a three-dimensional characterization on par with the dramatic personages of the novel.

For instance, the suffering of Claudia Chauchat and her perspective on her body and illness is entirely different and distinct than that of Hans Castorp, the rather weak willed and milksop main protagonist of The Magic Mountain. Consumption is not just a metaphor for death and withdrawal for life, it can imbue one's perspective and point-of-view with a hedonistic and feverish intensity, as it does Chauchat, or illness can also, in the case of Hans, provide an excuse for the withdrawal of an already death-driven and life-avoiding character.

Thus when the perspective or narrative point-of-view of Hans Castorp is contrasted with the hedonistic, married woman Claudia Chauchat, the metaphor of illness merely as an example of something that afflicts the body or the mind becomes something much deeper -- it becomes a metaphor for the outsider condition, an individual whom is estranged from life, and an example, in the form of Claudia, of the ability of the spirit to transcend the limits of the human body.

Hans' cousin at the beginning of the novel speaks of them and us, or the residents of the mountain and the rest of the world, the sick and the healthy. Consumption frequently was though to heighten the senses, and used, particularly in women, as a metaphor for delicacy and early death, an individual too delicate to live. But Claudia's perspective on life, despite her depleted, tuberculosis-ridden body is that of someone who is passionate and loves life, and wishes physically to continue to be part of its ebbs and flows.

This is in contrast with the beginning of the novel Hans tells the reader that he views himself as a "delicate child of life." Hans even says that Claudia reminds him more of a man, of a schoolboy he used to know, whom he was infatuated with as the child he was, not so long ago, given that he is only twenty-three years of age, and has barely finished with exams and university.

In other words, although Hans is first going to visit his cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium, because he seems so afflicted in mind, if not in body at the time, as someone who is too delicate to live in a mental fashion in the harsh currents of the political and social world of his day, tuberculosis becomes a wasting disease for him.

But Claudia, although she has tuberculosis and has a female, sexual body is still living within society and according to societal norms and its frameworks in a passionate and involved way. She says she is an anarchist, and that she is a free spirit, but that very freedom of spirit affirms her perspective as someone of an intense and vital physicality, even when trapped in the body of the ill.

The nature of tuberculosis comes out in its most heated qualities in Claudia, the ailment is entirely colored by the character's psychological perspective. Even though Claudia physically removed from society, her ailment makes her more alive than dying.

Even though tries to bring on Hans' advances in defiance of her married state, which would seem to put her outside of social mores and codes, ultimately her embrace of human, animal passions in a sick body seems more vital than Hans' effete rejection of them when he is in a state of comparative physical health. Furthermore, despite her flagrant social and extramarital sexual transgressions, she still continues to enjoy the social, if not the physical advantages of marriage to a wealthy husband.

For Mann, thus, the mind/body 'problem' or distinction is really no problem or distinction at all. Human beings are not merely minds or bodies, with one dominating the other. Even a highly physical aliment such as tuberculosis affects different individuals in different ways.

Clearly, suffering from an illness can change a person's life -- if it were not for TB Claudia would never have withdrawn from the whirl of her social, aristocratic Russian world, and the nature of the illness seems to heighten her senses at times, as is noted in the chapter when she seduces Hans, entitled "Walpurgis" or "Witches' Night," implying that her sensuality has an almost supernatural level.

But Claudia does not use it as an excuse to withdraw from living a full, human, and physically involved and sexual life like Hans Castorp. Claudia is all that social life should be, as is emblematic of her participation in marriage and love. She would not, if her body had not become open by the caprice of chance, to a pathogen, be where she was, in an asylum for the physically ill.

But Hans, over the course of the novel, despite his intended brevity of stay, remains there for far longer than he intended, even before his diagnosis with the physical ailment becomes apparent. Hans ends up staying there a long, long time, not simply because his cousin Joachim is there, or because he suffers an intense but ultimately unrequited love for this married woman recuperating in the same sanatorium as.