But just for that reason, it may be unfair to the single work to look at it. In a broader sense, the whole lifework of the author has its leading motifs, which serve to preserve its unity, to make that unity perceptible to the reader, and to keep the whole picture present in each single work. The leitmotif is the technique employed to preserve the inward unity and abiding presentness of the whole at each moment. He tries to produce himself completely in each thing he writes, but only actually does so in the way The Magic Mountain does it I mean by the use of the leitmotif, the magic formula which works both ways, and links the past with the future, the future with the past. He strives, that is, to overcome the laws of time and continuity. And not only his lifework, but actually his life itself, his personality. But there are others - and I must count myself among them - whose single works do not possess this complete significance, being only parts of the whole which makes up the author’s lifework. Dante is the Divina Cammedia, Cervantes is Don Quixote. There are authors whose names are associated with a single great work, because they have been able to give themselves complete expression in it. “Parler français,” he says, “e’est parler sans parler, en quelque manière.” In short, it helps him over his inhibitions - and an author who feels embarrassed at having to talk about his own works is in the same way relieved at being able to talk about them in another language. and helps him to say things he could never have dared say in his own language.

Chauchat, the Kirghis-eyed heroine, veiling its strangeness in the garment of a foreign tongue. At the end of the first volume, he makes an extraordinary declaration of love to Mine. I am reminded of the hero of my novel, the young engineer Hans Castorp. Oddly enough, it is not a difficulty for me, but rather the reverse, that I have to discuss The Magic Mountain in English. Likewise, when I tell you freely of the book’s genesis and my experiences with it, I am relying on the healthy and sympathetic attitude of the American mind toward the personal, the anecdotal, and the intimately human. In selecting my Magic Mountain for discussion, I base the choice on the sympathetic interest which this one of all my books received in America. Furthermore, since my work is still in the making and, I venture to hope, still reflects the present and its problems, it would be rather difficult, if not impossible, to criticize it with scholarly detachment - even if the critic were not, at the same time, the author. For, the thought of acting as my own historian I find a little confusing and, you know, there are few impartial historians anyway. SINCE it is certainly not customary for an author to discuss his own work, perhaps a word of apology, or at least of explanation, should occupy first place.

The magic mountain novel