Patrick Brugh

Research Summary: Zauberberg

9/17/07

 

In her analysis of “Mein Gott, ich sehe” from Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg, KarenVogt underwrites a reading of Zauberberg through “shamanic” visions. These visions, Vogt argues, are mystical and prophetic in nature, thus reinforcing many of the traits Hans Castorp maintains over the course of the novel, including his predilection for “the trance state” (Vogt 68). By reading this chapter (and several others) through this mystical lens, Vogt presents a distinct set of futuristic visions shrouded by images of death as references to the prophetic capabilities of a shaman.

 

Vogt begins by citing Hans’ dream about Joachim’s death on his first night in the sanitarium; this dream, of course, comes to fruition. The vision of Joachim’s death finds its reinforcement in the X-ray visions in “Mein Gott, ich sehe”. Vogt, referring to this scene as a “scientific counterpoint” to the dreamy visions Hans experiences at the beginning of the novel, elicits the notable visions of the “future” which Joachim’s living skeleton connotes (Vogt 68). The skeleton becomes a form of death-in-life, particularly as Hans recalls stories of a distant “aunt who had the affliction that ‘people who were about to die appeared to her as skeletons’” (69). Vogt therefore associates the x-ray machine with “prophetic vision” – that is the x-ray makes possible the vision of the disease that lies in wait for the patient (69).

 

Vogt, however, stretches the x-ray episode beyond prophetic vision to the artistic capabilities of the shaman (“[The shaman] is an artist, a storyteller, a physician, a minister, and a psychopomp.”(67)). In seeing not only Joachim’s skeleton but his own as well, “Hans … becomes for an instant bother the viewing object, alive, and the object of the future a skeleton” (69). This self-revelation smacks of shaman mysticism to Vogt, and though she doubts that Mann had intimate knowledge of shaman mysticism, she notes the possibility that he had at least some access to Knud Ramussen’s description of shamanic experience.

 

Vogt’s reading of Zauberberg as a mystical experience can be set nicely against Eric Downing’s understanding of photography and the x-ray in the novel as Bildung in his book Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung. While Downing recognizes the potential for the x-ray to symbolize “death, disease and Hans’ asocial desire”, he makes a claim for the contribution of x-ray photographs to his aesthetic education, as a counterpoint to the director’s portrait of Clavdia (which makes an appearance in Hans’ mind during the x-ray scene) (Downing 51). Downing thus focuses on Clavdia’s role as symbol of Hans’ desire, referring to her in Lacanian, Freudian, and homosocial terms. Clavdia’s X-ray, only a glimmer of Hans’ imagination as he sits in the waiting room (“He could see her knee, under her skirt, the back of her neck bent forward under the short, reddish-blond hairs … saw the neck bones sticking out …”), and as he leaves the X-ray lab (“Frau Chaunat was now entering the laboratory.”), contrasts sharply with the portrait Director Behrens shows him later in the chapter.

 

Downing writes in dichotomies: “the painting is presented as the opposite of the X-ray, as an ‘outer’ as opposed to the X-ray’s ‘inner’ portrait” (52); Hans brings the portrait “into the light” and imagines Clavdia’s X-ray only in the context of the dark room (52); while the painting “obsessively” portrays Clavdia’s skin, “the X-ray photograph sees through and misses” this object of obsession (52). Downing essentially presents the interiority of the X-ray as most understandable through its contrast with the portrait’s “humanistic” (Plastik) exteriority.

 

Yet Downing allows the X-ray its own scatological meaning. As a symbol itself, the X-ray becomes only death. Without its counterpoint it can only signify an end. X-rays “weaken the common, pictorial faith in the veracity of the evident, in the visible as the privileged site for knowledge, for the determination of truth, and for the manifestation of self-identity” (58). The X-ray “has to do with death, and it has to do with endings” (58). Whereas the portrait allows the expression surface truth, the X-ray exposes (in its voyeurism of the human body) hidden sicknesses – the inevitability of death. It exposes truth from the inside out. Using Benjamin’s “Der Erzähler”, Downing makes the argument that “the moment of truth in an individual’s life was always associated with his or her moment of demise, … the manner in which death presented itself … had a tremendous interpretive, retrospective authority over the meaning or truth of that individual’s preceding life” (59). The vision of the internal through the X-ray, Downing argues, is the preview of this future moment of truth. However well the X-ray can express truth, it is simultaneously unstable. “The truth of an X-ray, far from being able to determine and shape a life, a self, is soon outdated: all the patients on the Magic Mountain need regularly to have their X-rays retaken” (60). This paradox of the X-ray as infinitely revealing and yet instantly obsolete, jives nicely with the X-ray’s equation with death.

 

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Trans. John E. Woods. Vintage International, NY: 1996.

Vogt, Karen Drabek. Vision and Revision: The Concept of Inspiration in Thomas Mann’s Fiction. Peter Lang, NY: 1987.  

Downing, Eric. After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung. Wayne State University Press, Detroit: 2006.