Six Magic Mountains

I first read Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain when I was living in Berlin a few years ago, and thought I could improve my German by reading it in the original. This lasted until the fourth paragraph, with its em dashes, semicolons, and cul-de-sac clauses. But I kept going in English, and soon enough, The Magic Mountain pulled me under—or hurled me upwards—into its queer alpine air.

For a story set in a Davos sanatorium, The Magic Mountain is remarkably expansive. One of Mann’s big ideas is about the workings of time, and the novel is famous for the chronological tricks it plays on the reader and its protagonist, Hans Castorp. Castorp had intended to visit the Swiss sanatorium only briefly: “It was the height of summer, and he planned to stay for three weeks.” Yet as the novel concludes, we realize that for “seven years Hans Castorp remained amongst those up here. Partisans of the decimal system might prefer a round number, though seven is a good handy figure in its way, picturesque, with a savor of the mythical.”

Even those first three weeks seem to last forever. When I read Mann’s novel, my inconsistent reading habits heightened this effect, as I sometimes put the book aside for a few weeks, then binged over a weekend, while on some late winter nights, I would listen to it on Audible. On more than one occasion, when drifting off to the sounds of the novel, I remember wondering, just as Mann wanted me to, “has it really only been two weeks?”

I was in Berlin to work on a book about how the Babylonian Talmud was composed. It involved reading a fair amount of twentieth-century Talmud scholarship, including Jonah Fraenkel’s “Time and its Role in the Aggadic Story.” Fraenkel, who was one of the first scholars to apply modern literary theory to rabbinic stories, surprised me:

Both contemporary philosophy and the influence of World War I on the nature of time in the novel has brought the time element to the fore in literary studies…it should also prove worthwhile to analyze this element in the specific literary context of the aggadic story…Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain…distinguishes between two literary times—the amount of time that the reader spends reading the story…and the period of time covered by the contents of the story…These terms are useful when examining the form of time in the aggadic story.

Just as the narrator of the The Magic Mountain waxes on about calendrical, physiological, and psychological time, Fraenkel highlights the way Talmudic storytellers used their time markers, for example, the weekly arrival of Shabbat, the halakhic calculation of sundown, and the personal moment of death. Fraenkel was especially interested in the verbal economy of rabbinic stories, where the passage of many years and oceans of feeling are conveyed in just a few, well-placed words.

I’m not sure how much the 300,000 words of The Magic Mountain can teach us about the poetics of talmudic stories, some of which aren’t much longer than a haiku. Indeed, one of the pleasures of spending time with extremely long works like The Magic Mountain comes from the way the text tends to fold back on itself, redeploying images and language that occurred hundreds of pages earlier. Suddenly, we are once again lost in Clavdia Chaucha’s unusual eyes, or the mysterious metaphysics of time.

On the other hand, while rabbinic stories tend to be short, the Talmud itself is enormous, something like six Magic Mountains—1.8 million words. If Hans Castorp had taken up daf yomi, he would have been just finishing his first, superficial read of the Talmud by the end of his seven years in the sanatorium.

Since the early Middle Ages, the Talmud has been compared to a giant sea, into which many streams of tradition flow. While one can read an individual talmudic story in a matter of seconds, studying the entire Talmud takes many, many years. On further thought, the Talmud’s delight in repeating phrases, returning to topics and reopening seemingly settled questions, is not unlike Mann’s whirling preoccupations of The Magic Mountain. Its eternal reoccurrences come to mark its readers’ days, weeks, months, even until the moment of death.