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• 1 2020-09-18T16:45:46-04:00 A Cover for The Magic Mountain 4 plain 2020-12-13T17:45:55-05:00 BACKGROUND ON MY UNESSAY
  Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a landmark piece of literature. It is the bildungsroman of its time, an ideological zeitgeist, and a final ode to the romanticization of tuberculosis. Having tasked myself with creating cover art for this story, I worked to incorporate insights of illness and metaphor discussed in this course while remaining true to the semiotic standard, faithfully capturing Mann’s key ideas while retaining visual aesthetic and flow.
  For my Unessay, I primarily used pencil and pen – I found some charcoal in the house which I also used to deepen some tones, and make the cover stand out a bit more. I used these materials because they were the ones available to me; I didn’t really look into relevant mediums during my research, since I suspected that that might require using specialized/unknown tools. I’m fairly comfortable with the pencil, so I thought it would be best to stick with it.
  I chose to create this piece in large part because The Magic Mountain really stood out to me this semester – it was a deep and thorough dive into a sickness experience that captured a zeitgeist I would have otherwise been unfamiliar with. It also was a surprisingly revealing window into our own times; confinement, infection, and philosophizing have become central tenets of my daily existence as I work from a childhood bedroom during a pandemic.
  MY RESEARCH PROGRESS
  I began my process by familiarizing myself with the art of book cover making. In my search, I came across literature that gave me my goals for a cover’s standards. First, my cover should draw reader’s attention to the book – it should be eye-catching, yet including enough discrete and provocative elements that the beholder would want to find out more about the contents. Second, I need to translate the book’s message into a non-verbal sign system of culturally-encoded images. Finally, I need to focus on a core topic – this was the trickiest part of my process. Sonzogni recommended thinking of one’s audience in this scenario (2011). Thus, I had to consider: what kind of audience do I want to read this book? My hope is to attract a group who can relate to Castorp’s stage in life (essentially, at the precipice of self-determining adulthood), as well as fans of the story, who could appreciate the references incorporated in my design.
   Next, I got some additional practical direction on my cover’s composition and content using a text concerning medical semiotics. One of Tobin’s ideas stood out to me particularly: “when literature portrays medicine, it analyzes a system of signification that performatively constructs the social reality in which we live” (189). Reading this reminded me instantly of the X-ray in Mann’s work; despite being a medical tool, it is packed with implications, of fragility and openness, exposure and love. Its use may be medical, but it has figurative utility. I also reference this concept in the general setup of my cover, which is meant to evoke a bildungsroman-type elevation of the mind in action. After all, the sanatorium context provides the escape, the separation from culture, that enables Castorp to cast off his comfortable and expected societal role as a capitalist bourgeoisie., and dive into a bizarre journey.
  At this point, I’d developed some structural ideas for how I should approach cover designing. The remainder of my process involved gathering and incorporating more specific information about different features and symbols of my work. While it felt tempting to go all out and include all of the ideas and metaphors I liked best from the story, I worked to remain faithful to the semiotic standard, and to Mann, by focusing on 4 primary themes that guided my final design. These themes were obtained through inquiries into medical metaphor literature, as well as compelling analyses of the book’s meaning. Where possible, I tried to center illness motifs and metaphors, and interplay them with a cultural context, in homage to the ideas we’ve developed in this seminar.
  Next, I sought info on how to best represent some obviously important aspects of the book, beginning with tuberculosis. I started with Chalke’s treatise on the history of TB in art. Throughout most of its history, TB has been a terror so ubiquitous it rarely needs to be referred to by name. In fact, as this article points out, it has gone by many pseudonyms. In accordance with this tradition, Mann rarely, if ever, explicitly names the disease – the reader is expected to understand through shared experience/culture what our protagonist is experiencing. This suggestion is reflected in the cover, where Castorp appears moderately healthy – only the presence of an X-ray suggest a medical issue, or something amiss with his person.
  Chalke also explains that, while epidemiologists and health professionals have the tools to create cures and document the ravages of a disease, it is up to story tellers to breathe life into this narrative. Particularly, in the case of TB, this task has been a method of teaching hope: creative minds have the power to contextualize a brighter today with a darker yesterday. Thus, they serve to remind people of the profound personal impact of TB, thereby educating and informing our collective experience as generations descended from this history (1962). Mann choices strongly reflect this spirit in his work; he intentionally writes his protagonist as a generic young figure of his time. Most readers can or have related to being in Castorp’s transitory period of life, standing on the precipice of real adulthood. This aspect of his character can help immerse even the modern-day reader into his sickness experience, humanizing what might otherwise feel like an irrelevant footnote in history. I will note that Castorp’s bourgeoisie roots distinguish him considerably, particularly in the illness and treatment experience he receives which would have been inaccessible to most during his time. Thus, while I kept only vague suggestions of facial features on my central figure, I was careful to dress him in clothing indicative of his status and time – a proper German gentleman of the 1910s, if not a little ruffled by his out of context environment (Tobin 2000).
  Scaff analyzes Mann’s use of modern mythology, which he describes as a method of making sense of contemporary, and sometimes scary, ideas through connection to past motifs. Generally speaking, his work is best encapsulated by the shadows of men arguing at the fore of the cover. They are purposefully abstracted – it is unclear if these men are Settembrini and Naphta having a heated philosophical discussion, perhaps the German anti-Semite and the Jewish man, seconds before their undignified brawl. In either case, there is a sense of tension between two parties – ideological, potentially based in identity - which foreshadow the upcoming devastation in Castorp’s life, and to Europe generally. Scaff also describes how Mann’s many characters serve as microcosms of European society, reinforcing the irony of their shortcomings through mythologically-inspired tales. In short, modern characters are explored through mythological allegory to unpack the failures and holes in contemporary modes of thought (2009). This idea was incredibly interesting to me, and I hope to convey it in the abstracted but removed and ineffectual figures before Castorp.
  The Magic Mountain as an example of the German bildungsroman, a novel about a person’s formative years and spiritual education. According to Bartram, Mann’s aim in this novel was to “inquire into the possibility of culture and Bildung, despite the carnage of war, in the same sense that beauty and death can coexist, however tenuously” (2012: 90). I appreciated Batram’s less cynical take on the book’s purpose, particularly after reading Scaff. Finding harmony in and growing while perceiving tension – this is a wonderful takeaway of the book, and is well-encapsulated by Castorp’s dream in Snow, where he perceives utopia and dystopia coexisting. I pay homage to this dichotomy idea (lightly, so as not to overwhelm the photo) with the suggestion of snowfall in the cover’s background.
  One of my biggest sources of inspiration for this cover was Susan Sontag’s Illness Metaphors, which compares perceptions of TB and cancer over time to make sense of how these diseases became what they were culturally.  A fascinating aspect of Sontag’s analysis is the concept that sickness isn’t just a state of being; it’s an entire world, separate from the world of the healthy, into whose realm we pass temporarily throughout our lives. In Mann’s book, this idea is taken literally, with patients residing in a remote mountain sanatorium with customs alien to the people below. In my cover, I attempt to convey this impression of an alien world by placing Castorp out of context; his environment is a featureless void, and it’s even hard to tell what time of day it is, since this windowless space casts incohesive shadows on his figure.
  Sontag also discusses TB as a disease of “extreme contrasts,” given its symptoms (paleness and red flush, vitality and languidness, etc.). In The Magic Mountain, this dichotomy is made metaphorical in the contrasts of passion and scholarship, as well as passion with sickness. In Castorp’s X-ray, I’ve drawn an abstracted heart on his breast, where a real heart would be. I meant it to point to the abstracted but intense love he experiences despite (or perhaps because of?) his and Clavdia’s sickness. Along with its extremes, TB is considered a misleading disease; the sufferer can appear vigorous despite their suffering. On my cover, Castorp appears the picture of health; his pose and demeanor signal robustness, even virility, but the X-ray exposes him. He clutches it needily to his breast, and in doing so reveals himself both figuratively and literally – we see inside, to the heart that ravages and the boned cage holding lungs that destroy him. Thus, TB may conceal, but it also makes the body transparent, through its visible and tangible symptoms.
  Sontag describes how, in literature, TB’s symptoms are often portrayed as “nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love”; the takeaway, she explains, is that “all disease is only love transformed” (20). This idea solidified my decision to use the X-ray, and gave it additional meaning; it now reveals both a lung problem and the vulnerable beating heart, meshing  love disease together, making them product of an unacted on passion which Hans suffers for at the sanatorium.
  CONCLUSIONS
  Based on the concepts I outlined above, I decided to narrow my thematic vision down to the following concepts: expressed secret love, bildungsroman, the archetypal journey, and separation (from health, reality, and norms). I added elements which I discussed, trying to keep the picture focused but interesting. I finished off my design with the title, in German. “Der Zauberberg” is written in austere, blocky letters; this was more design choice than something I found in my research – I think the steely blockiness of the font I’m using contributes to the alien, non-warm air of the cover. 
  Designing this cover required stepping out of my academic comfort zone. However, it gave me the chance to synthesize scholarship with visual creativity, which is something I’ve rarely done before. I enjoyed creating my finished product, and I look forward to seeing if my intentions show through.
  
  
  
  REFERENCES
  Bartram, G. (2012). ‘Modernism and the Bildungsroman: Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. The Cambridge Companion to The Modern German Novel. Cambridge [eng.: ProQuest LLC.
  Chalke H. D. (1962). The Impact of Tuberculosis on History, Literature, and Art. Medical history, 6(4), 301–318. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025727300027642
  Kurzke, H., & Willson, L. (2002). Thomas Mann: Life as a work of art : a biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  Mann, T., & Woods, J. E. (1995). The magic mountain: A novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  Scaff, Susan V. "The Meaning of Myth in Ulysses and The Magic Mountain." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11.2 (2009): https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1473
  Sontag, S. (2013). Illness as metaphor and aids and its metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  Sonzogni, M. (2011). Re-covered rose: A case study in book cover design as intersemiotic translation.
  Tobin, Robert D. “Prescriptions: The Semiotics of Medicine and Literature.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 33, no. 4, 2000, pp. 179–191. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44029715. Accessed 24 Nov. 2020.