On December 28, 1949, a precocious 16-year-old University of Chicago student, along with two companions, visited Thomas Mann in his Pacific Palisades home. Mann later noted in his diary: “Afternoon, an interview with three Chicago students about The Magic Mountain.” The student, Susan Sontag, wrote that same evening in her diary: “I interrogated God this evening at six.” To be sure, Sontag later shed her adolescent idolatry, but Thomas Mann’s great novel of 1924 nonetheless remained a source of inspiration for her, as her book Illness as Metaphor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978) richly illustrates. But what can Mann’s encyclopedic account of European culture, fictionalized as his hero’s seven-year sojourn in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, tell us today? This lecture offers an answer to that question by exploring three leading themes of the novel: morbidity, paternity, and eros.
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