Mann's Magic Mountain by Karolina Watroba

Author:Karolina Watroba [Watroba, Karolina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192699855
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

There are two important differences between the lines from Shakespeare and Haydon’s misquotation. First, Haydon has changed the quote from the third person—in Shakespeare’s play, it is Kent’s commentary on Lear’s suffering—to the first person, as though it were Lear who is repining over his own situation. Haydon’s self-dramatization aligns him with ‘tous ces gens qui font des mots historiques en mourant’ decried by Montherlant. In contrast, Paul—and Ellis—see Shakespeare’s Lear as a figure who confronts the reality of his own suffering, rather than putting on a mask of heroism. The second difference between Shakespeare’s original and Haydon’s misquotation is that, as Paul realizes, Haydon ‘forgot the rack’ (p. 414)—which allows the reader of The Rack to finally make sense of the novel’s title.

A meta-narrative frame emerges at this point, linking ‘the rack’ on the novel’s cover with ‘the rack’ on its last page, quoted from the last page of King Lear. Ellis’s novel reaches its conclusion with intimations of Paul’s impending death, be it suicide or a lethal bout of tuberculosis, thus connecting the end of the narrative with the end of Paul’s life. The text has been preparing us for Paul’s death from the very beginning, and with each severe relapse the reader has been led to ask herself, like Kent in King Lear, ‘is this the promised end?’38 But then each time Paul survived: to quote Kent again, ‘the wonder is he hath endured so long’.39 The effect of a painfully deferred ending, which tortures the reader nearly as much as it tortures the protagonist, is present in both The Rack and King Lear: in his famous interpretation of Shakespeare’s play Stephen Booth argued that ‘not ending is a primary characteristic of King Lear’, and that the last lines of the play ‘come close to pointing out the audience’s parallel ordeal: King Lear is too long, almost unendurably so’.40 The Rack thus ends with an evocation of Shakespeare’s most dramatic enactment of protracted suffering, which retrospectively legitimizes the novel’s own obsessive focus on Paul’s torment by identifying its source at the heart of the English—or even, as for Harold Bloom—Western literary canon.41

Just as Hans finds solace in Aida, Carmen, and Faust, Paul finds it in King Lear. But neither Paul nor the narrator of The Rack seems to realize that the cultural text Paul feels drawn to is just one possibility among many. Paul is particularly receptive towards King Lear because he is a young man educated at Cambridge in the 1940s, and as such is trained to appreciate and revere Shakespeare. It is telling that Paul, even on the verge of suicide, is so invested in correcting a misquotation of the Bard’s words: he treats Shakespeare’s play as a sacred text, a grounding cultural convention that one can rely on in the face of death. One thinks here of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), another twentieth-century British novel that borrowed its title from Shakespeare; John, one of the main characters, is brought up in a

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