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A review by novabird
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
5.0
As the result of a skewed syllogism about love, Mann ends this thought exercise with, “..out of silent regard for the bloody banquet,” and for me this is the key phrase that opens the text for me. The bloody banquet is the human condition and it is also a continued allusion to the maenad’s dismemberment and eating of a child, a very dark Dionysian dream.
"Now it is as if the Olympian magic mountain had opened before us and revealed its roots to us.” The Birth of Tragedy – Nietzsche. If Thomas Mann takes the title for his book from this line, then one need not wonder at his cool approach to death. Mann develops his ideas of the inherent ambiguity of humanity and masterfully unites it with Nietzsche’s concept of Apollonian/Dionysian contrast. (In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche contrasted Dionysus with the god Apollo as a symbol of the fundamental, unrestrained aesthetic principle of force, music, and intoxication versus the principle of form, beauty, and sight represented by the latter. Nietzsche also claimed that the oldest forms of Greek Tragedy were entirely based on suffering of Dionysus.) In fact, he does this too well, as the balance achieved is one of the best representations of ambiguity (and not an unreliable narrator at all) as a narrative technique that I have yet encountered. However this astonishing ability nullifies the overall story that also refuses to be defined because the ending cynically undermines and provides no real end-point.
This Birth of Tragedy effect is accomplished through the constant intoxication of the patients at Berghof Sanitorium as shown by their collective fevered state, which stands in for the Dionysian effect. At the same time, both the narrator and the setting provide the cooling effect of Apollonian rationality. These two opposites collide in many guises, in many polarities as presented within the text, yet most notably in the protracted debates between Septtembrini and Naphta, where reason and emotion verbally duel. Hans finally sees there is no reconciliation between their disparate viewpoints,
In the chapter, ‘Fullness of Harmony,’ page 636-7, Hans is described as having a dream in which he has the legs of a goat, as naïve and goat-footed and as a young faun, this is surely as much a depiction of a young Dionysus as it is of Pan. This to me is a key to understanding the motivation of the Apollonian/Dionysian tale that we find in the chapter Snow in which his hypothermia delusion sees an idyllic scene transfigure into a dark horror. While the philosophical insight that Hans experiences, that of,
In the end the bloody banquet becomes a, where Mann tells us the reader that the tale he has just told is a ‘hermetic,’ one about from which we can’t escape.
"Now it is as if the Olympian magic mountain had opened before us and revealed its roots to us.” The Birth of Tragedy – Nietzsche. If Thomas Mann takes the title for his book from this line, then one need not wonder at his cool approach to death. Mann develops his ideas of the inherent ambiguity of humanity and masterfully unites it with Nietzsche’s concept of Apollonian/Dionysian contrast. (In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche contrasted Dionysus with the god Apollo as a symbol of the fundamental, unrestrained aesthetic principle of force, music, and intoxication versus the principle of form, beauty, and sight represented by the latter. Nietzsche also claimed that the oldest forms of Greek Tragedy were entirely based on suffering of Dionysus.) In fact, he does this too well, as the balance achieved is one of the best representations of ambiguity (and not an unreliable narrator at all) as a narrative technique that I have yet encountered. However this astonishing ability nullifies the overall story that also refuses to be defined because the ending cynically undermines and provides no real end-point.
This Birth of Tragedy effect is accomplished through the constant intoxication of the patients at Berghof Sanitorium as shown by their collective fevered state, which stands in for the Dionysian effect. At the same time, both the narrator and the setting provide the cooling effect of Apollonian rationality. These two opposites collide in many guises, in many polarities as presented within the text, yet most notably in the protracted debates between Septtembrini and Naphta, where reason and emotion verbally duel. Hans finally sees there is no reconciliation between their disparate viewpoints,
“Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the "Critical-Subjective," where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp's civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premises apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphtha's "morally chaotic All.”
In the chapter, ‘Fullness of Harmony,’ page 636-7, Hans is described as having a dream in which he has the legs of a goat, as naïve and goat-footed and as a young faun, this is surely as much a depiction of a young Dionysus as it is of Pan. This to me is a key to understanding the motivation of the Apollonian/Dionysian tale that we find in the chapter Snow in which his hypothermia delusion sees an idyllic scene transfigure into a dark horror. While the philosophical insight that Hans experiences, that of,
“Reason stands foolish before (death) him, for reason is only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust. Lust, my dream says, not love. Death and love – there is no rhyming them, that is a preposterous rhyme, a false rhyme. Love stands opposed to death – it alone and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason yields kind thoughts. And form too, comes only from love and goodness: form and cultivated manners of man’s fair state, of a reasonable, genial community – out of silent regard for the bloody banquet.” 487
In the end the bloody banquet becomes a