Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The hero of The Magic Mountain — the perfectly ordinary, blond, blue-eyed Hans Castorp —  is the typological bourgeois male. I spent seven years writing a book about the novel of which he serves as protagonist and in that time I wondered often what possessed me to devote so much energy to him and to it. At a certain point, I rather tragically resigned myself to the obvious answer that I have a deplorably bourgeois soul. The Magic Mountain is one of the great novels about the bourgeois soul. It challenges Joseph Schumpeter’s idea that the bourgeois is a fundamentally unheroic narrative type. “The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail,” Schumpeter wrote. Yet, rather ironically, the poet Howard Nemerov interprets Hans Castorp’s quest for knowledge as precisely a quest for the Holy Grail. Thomas Mann would have approved of Nemerov’s interpretation.  Hans Castorp, significantly, is from Hamburg, the merchant city of the middle classes, a city whose center is dominated by that most bourgeois of German buildings, the Rathaus, or Townhall. As the novel opens, he is about to join the ship-building firm Tunder and Wilms, and seems to everyone around him “an honest, unadulterated product of the local soil, superbly at home in it.” And yet as we read on, we learn that the family doctor suspects Hans Castorp of being anemic and has prescribed him a daily glass of robust porter — intended to help build his blood, but which Hans Castorp enjoys for its soothing, dozing effects. We also learn that although he is a decent tennis-player and oarsman, Castorp prefers sitting on a terrace of the boathouse with a drink in hand, “listening to music and watching the boats as they drifted among the swans.” Hans Castorp is not especially interested in exerting effort, in working, that supreme of bourgeois activity. Effort strains his nerves and exhausts him. He prefers it when time passes “easily, unencumbered by the leaden weight of toil…” When he first meets the shrewd, intellectually active Ludovico Settembrini, Castorp declares: “I only really feel healthy when I am doing nothing at all.” Hans Castorp resists our understanding, he is difficult to know — perhaps because he is insubstantial. (Though maybe not! Hard to say.) When asked by the director of the Berghof why he chose to become an engineer, Castorp claims he did so purely by chance, and that he could just as well have become a doctor or a clergyman. Similarly, when local citizens of Hamburg wonder if Hans Castorp will ever seek a career in politics, given his good family name, they cannot decide if he would stand as a conservative, like his grandfather, or as a progressive, as he has entered the fields of commerce and technology. “That was quite possible – but so was the opposite.” The narrator hypothesizes that Hans Castorp may be suffering from the nihilistic condition of his age, from the hollow silence with which the universe around him responds to the question of meaning. It is above all this question that Hans Castorp is confronted with during his seven years at the Berghof, where his latent sympathy with death is awakened and aroused by Clavdia Chauchat, who teasingly calls him “my little bourgeois.” And indeed, what could be more bourgeois — as Thomas Mann understands the term — than Hans Castorp’s celebrated epiphany in the famous “Snow” subchapter, that “man is the master of contradictions.” The coexistence of apparent opposites is characteristic of the bourgeois. Werner Sombart, in his The Quintessence of Capitalism, makes the Faustian claim that “two souls dwell in the breast of every complete bourgeois: the soul of the adventurer and the soul of the respectable middle-class man.” A claim that sounds quite a bit like Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, who, in the eponymous novella, cries out: “As an artist I’m already enough of an adventurer in my inner life. So far as outward appearances are concerned one should dress decently, damn it, and behave like a respectable citizen…” Thomas Mann offers the image of the writer as someone who keeps his office hours and dresses appropriately, whose writing is characterized not by the heat and flame of inspiration but by the cold comfort of thoroughness and industry. “There is much to be said for a wife and children,” Thomas Mann wrote in his diary in 1919, “but given my nature, the decisive consideration for me is that it allows me to hide in the bourgeois realm without actually becoming bourgeois.” As the French writer Bernard Groethuysen observed in 1927, “the bourgeois likes to keep his incognito.” It was Flaubert who originally formulated the contradictory character of the bourgeois when he observed, in a letter, that “one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god.” But it was Thomas Mann in whom this dialectic, the yes and the no of bourgeois culture, found its most prophetic repository. “I have become what I am,” Thomas Buddenbrook, the good bourgeois, tells his brother, Christian, the failed artist, “because I did not want to become like you.” Many years after writing those words, Mann described his enemy Adolf Hitler as “a brother, a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother,” by which he meant that Hitler, like himself, was an artist, only he was an artist gone astray, a good-for-nothing who believed himself “reserved for something else — as yet quite indefinite, but something which, if it could be named, would be greeted with roars of laughter.” Significantly, Mann titled his essay “A Brother,” as though aware that he and Hitler represented two paths for Germany. I have become what I am, because I did not want to become like you. A few weeks after the war, Mann, ever the conscientious artist, confessed: “it is all within me, I have been through it all.”