Christmas Food-in-Media: Advent #1
Welcome to the first in a series of short posts about Christmas and eating in film and literature. [This essay contains spoilers.] I will be sending these out every few days, a few will be paywalled, and you should think of this series as a kind of literary advent calendar.
#1 The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.
For snowbound wintry reading, little beats Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, set in a tuberculosis sanatorium during the years immediately before the Great War. It is a novel that attempts to portray how illness was experienced by a group of people living at a particular time. There are parallels with now and not only because of its frosty setting, but because I feel a little as if I am out on a limb too, facing a cold winter and distracting myself with food, trying to keep safe from the effects of a virus whilst Having A Life, and coping with the feeling that when it comes to time, the laws of physics appear to have changed.
When Hans Castorp, a young engineer, travels to the International Sanatorium Berghof high up in the Swiss Alps to spend time with his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, we’re not clear whether he develops a form of Stockholm Syndrome which sees him identify to the point of displaying symptoms of illness himself. He intended to stay a few weeks and ends up remaining there for years as he is diagnosed with TB and assumes his rightful place on the veranda, coughing up his lungs in the face of magnificent Alpine sunsets. “Like Hans Castorp upon his magic mountain, our stay in the sanatorium is not limited to a brief and terminable episode of illness,” the sociologist Nikolas Rose said. “It is a sentence without limits and without walls, in which, apparently of our own free will and with the best of intentions on all sides, our existence has become bound to the ministrations and adjudications of medical expertise.”
This is “a place of tremendous meals” where Castorp is served asparagus soup, roast meat and vegetables, stuffed tomatoes, cheese and fruit, pudding and a bottle of Bordeaux Gruaud Larose at the start of his visit. Each night he would take to his room with a pile of books and a glass of creamy evening milk with a shot of Cognac to live a dream-like life where absence from the everyday human trials and responsibilities is a given. He hears of them at a remove, via whispered confidences, letters from home and newspapers bought from ‘below’.
There is much talk of snow, the start of the ski season, and the onset of Christmas in the sanatorium dining room, which startles Castorp. It is not quite Advent. His habit was to spend it with loved ones and so tries to cheer himself up: “He said to himself, think of all the places and conditions in which Christmas had been celebrated before now!” Quite.
“The arch of the loggia, which framed a glorious panorama of snow powdered forest, softly filled passes and ravines, white sunlit valleys and radiant blue heavens above all”, the crystal and diamond world that lay near the black and white forest under the night skies embroidered with stars, all conspired to seduce patients into seeing Christmas as a state of grace and a short interlude from reality, full of frost and fire like their own fevered state.”
Castorp had not yet developed the habit of using Christmas as a pole to vault over the endless days of confinement. He could appreciate how the accelerated metabolic effects of TB might affect the way one viewed time itself, and the snow-upholstered, frozen landscape, which causes one’s breath to burn in the throat, is a perfect metaphor for the febrile thinness of the consumptive.
There is tension between small acts of self-determination, the less rational side of the human psyche, and the slow churn towards medical institutionalisation. Mann’s narrative messes with time too: as the book progresses, the narrative speeds up, condensing six years into the last two chapters. The patients debate whether "interest and novelty dispel or shorten the content of time, while monotony and emptiness hinder its passage”, and at the end of the novel, Castorp’s fate remains unclear. Timelessness is no longer enchanted, nor what the narrator calls the “magic during a vacation”.
Back in the sanatorium, mail grew heavier as the festive season drew closer; marzipan, Christmas cakes, apples and spiced nuts, all “carefully packed remembrances from home”. The dining room tree crackled in the firelight and spread its fragrance, and these distressingly ill people wore their jewels, cravats and evening coats to dinner in a poignant facsimile of joyful life back home in the grand cities and towns of Europe. They were “gay at the Russian table” where the first Champagne corks popped, and Clavdia wore a Balkan style dress with tinkling ornaments on the bodice. The meal ends with cheese straws, bonbons, coffee and liqueurs. The food is titbits, little morsels that are more easily consumed by illness-affected appetites.
As the room dies down and the tree candles burn to stumps, there is an air of letdown as Christmas Day dawns misty and then, was over, leaving the holiday in the past. The sumptuous breakfasts served in the sanatorium, “pots of marmalade and honey, basins of rice and oatmeal porridge, dishes of cold meat and scrambled eggs; a plenitude of butter, a Gruyere cheese dropping moisture under a glass bell. A bowl of fresh and dried fruits stood in the centre of the table” and a “thick, dark, and foaming brownly Kulmbacher beer” aren’t mentioned on the holiest day of all. Mann draws parallels between waiting and gluttony, “because it devours quantities of time.”
Further reading:
The Alpine sanatorium immortalised in Thomas Mann's classic novel is about to close its doors after 150 years (written in 2004).
To The Magic Mountain (The New Yorker)
Illustration by Bernard Caleo for Chapter 1 of ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann.