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.