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English Studies Forum The Forum Reviews |
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American Mann M. ElizCurtis White. America’s Magic Mountain. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2004. 231 pp. Paper, $13.95 By Kiki Benzon
Thomas Mann said that his ponderous, meditative novel Magic Mountain should, ideally, be read twice. Well, here’s your chance. Kind of. Curtis White has gone to the trouble of rewriting Magic Mountain in a mercifully condensed form—with just a few minor alterations. Transposing the action from an alpine tuberculosis clinic circa 1920 to The Elixir, a contemporary alcohol rehab/detox facility in central Illinois, White’s American’s Magic Mountain, like its parent text, traces the progressive deterioration of one unremarkable Hans Castrop. Fresh from passing his final college exams and short on worldly experience, Hans is sent by his aunt to assess the recovery of his cousin, who is an inmate at the facility. Where, in Mann’s novel, Hans slowly integrates with the others at the clinic, audits Professor Krokowski’s lectures on the physiology of love, and falls hard for the delectably crude Madame Chauchat, White’s protagonist is browbeaten by the perversely-precocious inbred child, Teddy, indoctrinated by Reverend Boyle’s “discourses” on “Family Ritual” (i.e. the Father’s right to “booze,” fart and control the television), and aroused/repulsed by the middle-aged-librarianesque Cecile. Mann’s elegant dining hall and flavorsome cuisine become a defunct Daffy’s Restaurant and microwaved condiment packets; epiphanic strolls along serene mountain paths become toxic schleps through “fresh garbage and discarded junk” (112); and Rest Cure becomes Flask Meditation (read: retreating to one’s room and getting blind-drunk). What’s preserved in America’s Magic Mountain is the internal vacancy of the ever-impressionable everyman Hans, who, in his “half-mortified blankness” (118), comes to discover that he too suffers from the same affliction that plagues residents at the clinic. But what, precisely, is this affliction? From a (considerable) distance, one would reasonably suppose that the treatment offered at The Elixir—a private establishment and “blue-collar (if also laughable) equivalent” (3) of the modern spa—is designed primarily to counteract substance abuse; Professor Feeling explains to the inmates’ children: “Little Jennifer, you and your mommy dig barbiturates. Jamal’s mother snorts concoctions of heroine and crack. And Winnifred, oh honey, it’s strange I know, your daddy likes the rush of mainlining environmental hormone mimickers” (120). But, rather counter-intuitively, clinic administrators like Feeling not only sanction drug use but adamantly encourage addicts to “Dope the Flame” (120); the idiotic Mayor Jesse pronounces alcohol integral to maintaining social structures: “It helps families, man. It’s part of the Ritual of Family Life and has been for some time. Without alcohol, I don’t expect you could even recognize an American family. It is now a hallowed tradition. It helps grease decision makin’. Danged if it don’t” (155). Hardly a venue in which to confront and overcome addiction, The Elixir—as its name suggests—facilitates anaesthetization from a life that is pained and hollow. And as Hans becomes better acquainted with residential attitudes and routines, the crippling fondness for drugs and alcohol is revealed to be but symptomatic of a deeper malady—one which permeates populations both in and outside the clinic and (or so we are made to suspect) may be causally linked to “the New Global Order’s tendency to rub humanity raw” (2). Rather than trying to define a particular “cultural disease” by developing social critiques about spiritual vacuity, sexual creepiness, epidemic consumerism and filial atrophy (though all of these phenomena appear in the novel), White represents the American condition (American because the title specifies it) as something much more amorphous, a kind of constellation of general problems like apathy, hypocrisy, selfishness and willful ignorance. White proposes no particular antidote, either, depicting instead the eerie signs of an insidious malaise: six-year-old porn connoisseurs, firearms fashioned from licorice, and “philosophical leaders” who call themselves Toxic Adult Children. The Elixir, a ramshackle amalgam of disused buildings, becomes an objective correlative for a culture that is all veneer and little substance; the clinic’s campus, a kind of sad, no-budget parody of the already parodic Vegas strip, is composed of a Quonset hut, a Farmer’s Bank of Pontiac—1886, a Victorian era farmhouse covered in aluminum siding, a Spee-D-Lube, a 7-11 medical center, an abandoned Mr. Donut, and a grain elevator. Only the husks of things remain, and the smell of boiling tennis balls wafts relentless. Hans, weak-willed and pathologically susceptible to influence, functions as a kind of barometer in this setting, as he tends to assume the manners and values of his current environment. Hans’s degree in Industrial Psychology, for example, renders him a mouthpiece for asinine, dehumanizing corporate logic. “The truth we must acknowledge,” Hans informs Cecile, “is that large, complex organizations of ideas, money, physical plants, police infrastructure, and what we once called human practices (or behavior) generate activities that we now refer to more accurately as ‘meat tendencies’” (89). Using phrases like “industrial neurotic intensity” and “industrial anhedonia” (91) as if they actually meant something,, Hans speaks with gravity about the “clinical and chronic disinclination [of workers] to participate” (91). When dropped in the midst of the Lynchian disquiet of the rehab clinic, the impressionable Hans “begins to suspect that the not-so-elaborate construct of his own personality could melt down’ . . . [and that he] is being saturated by something other” (16-7). The ludicrous doctrine of Industrial Psychology is thus replaced by that of The Elixir: Ask him about ‘group conflict resolution in an industrial setting.’ He’ll claim never to have heard of it. Now ask him about the bloody handprint on Teddy’s back. By God, he is a genius of that mystery. He can read the future in the whorls of the fingerprints. That thumbprint, for example, is a terrifying journey into the beyond. He wanders its swirling patterns. . . He recalls that, in another life, he wandered from star to star. And now he knows that that life was simply a preparation for this journey into the bloody handprint on the white cotton t-shirt of a small boy. (139) Unreflectively moving between disparate environments, Hans becomes cautionary figure for the precariously constructed self whose lack of personal substance and conviction renders him/her a instrument of larger, indifferent systems. For White, reckless, abstractionist thought is a most despicable crime, especially when it turns into speech that is (by way of some institutional affiliation) accepted as morally or politically important. As White says in The Middle Mind (2003), “we are free to think whatever we want so long as what we think and say doesn’t matter, doesn’t threaten state/corporate/military narratives (22). So many characters in American’s Magic Mountain exercise this freedom-to-speak-and/or-think-without-consequence—from the bevy of “Aunt Pearls” at Caring Caravan International, who “have responded to the pervasive loneliness of our times by creating a telephone service whereby a corporate representative will call twice-a-day at appointed hours just to let you know that we care” (97) to Mayor Jesse, whose dream analyses invariably conclude “[t]hat your father was an alcoholic, that he neglected you, and that you have the hysterical belief that someone borrowed and then misplaced your genitals” (54). Hot air of this type may not undermine the “state/corporate/military narratives” to which White refers in The Middle Mind, but its effects upon individuals who (even passively) inhale it are much more sinister. At the Elixir, Mayor Jesse is said to be in charge of patients’ “boundaries,” “themes,” and “place in history” (54)—concepts so ambiguous and loaded that even Dr. Phil would steer clear of them. Professor Feeling, however, takes the cake for empty grandiosity, referring to himself as a “conduit” [which is, in case you’re wondering, “a high-grade channel of energy” (117)] and donning a crystal pendant—his “key to the eons”—that looks like “a calcified lime Jell-O within which a human embryo floated, curled like a pinkie finger” (118). As if subliminally transmitting Feeling’s pseudo-wisdom, the “amulet twinkle[s] and move[s] among the children” who gather to listen to his stories “on summer nights, around a campfire of scrap particleboard and chunks of PVC outside the Quonset hut” (120). What the charismatic Feeling relates to his young audience is both idiotic and irresponsible, amounting to a form of mind abuse: When you’re lit, when you’re burning bright, when your veins are incandescent with Substance, you can get right through one life, torch it like an arson accelerating through a cheap apartment complex, and get on with the next one. Because we’ve got thousands of them to burn, children, till we can get to the Pure Flame, the Flame which leaves not the slightest ash. So, best to Dope the Flame, children, put something in the blood to make it burn bright. As for the tears, if you’re really blessed, they’ll ignite, too, and run like torchbearers down your face. (121) Drenched in fantastic and dangerously abstract rhetoric, Feeling’s words are as poisonous as the drugs he is pushing. The dire developmental effects of such poisons are alluded to when, walking along the perimeter of The Elixir grounds, Hans and Ricky encounter a plot of mature oak trees; because of “trace toxins from the old mines, and the frequent acid rain” (113), the trees’ growth has been severely impeded. Theirs is, Ricky explains, “an environment ideal for these stunted but, I think you will agree, charming little trees.” Sensing a backwardness in Ricky’s appreciation of the mutant oaks, Hans thinks, “But these are no adequate replacement for proper trees.” Through this thought, White is critiquing the passive acceptance of injured lives for which we are in part responsible (in particular, the lives of children) and the twisted cynicism which allows us to perceive these injuries as somehow “charming.” Psychological, habitual and ideological trends within families figure prominently in White’s fiction; Memories of My Father Watching Television (1998), depicts a sad father-son relationship through the lens of TV shows, their one remaining site of shared experience; in Requiem (2001), a father finds it “horrible to imagine what the inside of [his son’s] head is like” (6). Characters in America’s Magic Mountain are living the fallout of ugly childhood experiences that have been forgotten, rationalized, ignored or defiantly embraced: using Elixir-prescribed “self-parenting techniques” (149), Teddy re-enacts a scene of sexual abuse from his aggressor’s—his father’s—perspective; Hans consciously steers away from contemplating his early life because he “always felt a curious numbing sensation whenever he tried to think, however vaguely, about his parents” (44). When he does contemplate his father, a “disinfectant technician,” the memories emerge as troubling mixtures of actual events and imaginative distortions, indicating as much about Hans’s lingering confusion as the paternal relationship itself. He pictures his father smoking, crying, drinking vodka, and sifting through boxes of broken glass; the tears and smoke fuse with the shards to produce “grotesque animal shapes” (46).
Of course, the passage is a Freudian’s wish fulfilled—from the psycho-architectural metaphor of the house to the bloody “creature” that is both a tumor/death and a flower/birth—but this is not to say that White is advocating psychoanalysis per se. On the contrary, such an enterprise would amount to yet another form of “self-knowledge twice-removed” (176), merely adding to Hans’s sense that “everyone around him understood him in a way that he could never understand himself.” White seems to be promoting, rather, levels of self-consciousness and critical thought that would obviate the need for places like The Elixir and the supplementary theories/politics/dope they sell. Producing a society that is not “stunted,” ignorant or warped, White suggests, requires that individuals be prepared to suss out their own warpèdness without simply subscribing to the ready-made “solutions” of the Industrial Psychologists and the Toxic Adult Children. Most impressively (and refreshingly), White manages to advance these suggestions without resorting to new age self-helpery or left wing dogmatism. In America’s Magic Mountain—as in White’s other novels—social and moral appraisals come to light through a narrative that is as funny as it is horrific, as absurd as it is realistic, and as particular as it is universal.
Works Cited White, Curtis. America’s Magic Mountain. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2004. ---. The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think For Themselves. New York: Penguin, 2003. ---. Requiem. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2001. |
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