What Sort of Man Is This?

Thomas Mann, Hugo, and the Revelation of Character in Literature

There is a temptation, particularly among modern readers, to remember novels by the ideas they contain. We speak of The Magic Mountain as though it were principally about the great intellectual controversies of the early twentieth century. We recall Settembrini's liberal humanism, Naphta's revolutionary mysticism, and the debates over science, religion, progress, and civilization. Yet when one closes the novel and revisits it years later, something curious has occurred. The arguments have faded, but Hans Castorp has not.

This is not to say that Mann's philosophical conversations are unimportant; on the contrary, they comprise some of the finest pages in twentieth-century literature. However, these debates endure primarily because they illuminate a human being. Mann's deepest concern is not about the victory of one idea over another but rather the slow revelation of character in literature—the man who listens to them.

On the surface, Hans Castorp appears an unlikely protagonist. He is neither a genius nor a reformer, nor is he particularly courageous or ambitious. He is an engineer of respectable upbringing whose visit to a Swiss sanatorium unexpectedly extends into seven years. Nothing in his background suggests that he embodies the spiritual condition of pre-war Europe. Yet, it is this very ordinariness that makes him indispensable. Mann does not begin with an exceptional man because extraordinary figures tell us little about ourselves. He starts with someone sufficiently ordinary that the reader may quietly recognize themselves.

In much the same way, the Hugo novel analysis reveals a similar protagonist. He is not a soldier, politician, or resistance leader but a syndicated newspaper columnist whose articles focus on refrigerators, department stores, amusement parks, and the pleasant novelties of post-war consumer life. He is intelligent, articulate, and professionally successful, yet nothing in these early chapters suggests he is destined for moral heroism. One might wonder if there is anything especially remarkable about him at all.

The resemblance between the two novels is, I believe, more than coincidental. Both Mann and Hugo refuse to commence with extraordinary men because they are asking the same question. It is not, as modern fiction often probes, 'What does this man believe?' Nor is it, 'Which side of history will he choose?' Their question is older, quieter, and ultimately more demanding: 'What sort of man is this?' 

This distinction is significant because it alters the function of history itself. We have grown accustomed to describing historical catastrophe as something that alters people. Wars, revolutions, and political upheavals are said to transform ordinary citizens into heroes, cowards, opportunists, or saints. While there is truth to this observation, it does not encompass the whole truth. Mann seems to suggest something subtler, and Hugo, though written from a different historical perspective, appears to pose the same question.

Does history really create character? Or does it simply reveal what has always been present?

Hans Castorp arrives at Davos carrying within himself possibilities that neither he nor the reader fully perceives. His intellectual curiosity, sympathy, susceptibility to beauty, and capacity for moral seriousness do not descend upon him from the mountain air. Instead, this strange suspension of ordinary life allows his latent qualities to gradually emerge. Experience indeed enlarges him, but it magnifies something that is already there.

Hugo's development takes a different route, yet I find the underlying movement remarkably similar. History does not educate him through philosophical conversations but through exile, displacement, love, and responsibility. However, the question persists: Has Hugo become another man, or has life finally presented him with circumstances worthy of the man he always possessed the potential to be?

His career serves as an instructive example. At the novel's beginning, his talents are directed toward trivial topics. He writes gracefully about consumer comforts and everyday pleasures. While there is nothing contemptible in such work, it does not engage his deepest capacities. The intelligence required to describe a new refrigerator is not fundamentally different from that needed to investigate an unjust imprisonment. What varies is not the man, but the object toward which he directs himself.

When Hugo ultimately shifts his focus to Hermann's imprisonment, the reader witnesses not the creation of a new character but the fulfillment of the one he has always been. His compassion has not suddenly appeared; his moral seriousness has not been manufactured by history. Rather, history has finally confronted him with something truly deserving of both.

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