Selected Novels | Jessi Jezewska Stevens on Thomas Mann

On the fourth episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to the novelist and short story writer (and Point contributor) Jessi Jezewska Stevens about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

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Transcript

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Jessica Swoboda  00:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to Selected Novels. So Zach, who do we have on the show this week? 

Zach Fine  00:18

We spoke to Jessi Jezewska Stevens about Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which was first published in 1924. Jessi is the author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q, The Visitors, and the short story collection Ghost Pains. Her fiction, reporting, and criticism have appeared in Foreign Policy, Harper's, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Paris Review, Bookforum and elsewhere. And just a heads up, we recorded this episode shortly after the 2024 presidential election, so you'll hear that shading some of the conversation. 

Jessica Swoboda  00:48

We hope you'll enjoy this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selectednovels@thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you, and also be sure to subscribe to the point the magazine that brings you content like this podcast, you can find a 50% off discount code exclusive to listeners in the Episode Notes. Hey, Jessi, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of Selected Novels. 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  01:24

Thanks for having me. 

Jessica Swoboda  01:25

So you chose The Magic Mountain. And can you tell us a bit why you chose this novel to talk about today? 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  01:32

Yeah, The Magic Mountain has been... I guess the way this was framed, we were thinking of novels that have been an influence on me as as a writer. One way to think about that question is, this is one of the only novels I've gotten into, like a public fight, a bar fight, about. As in screaming match, the only bar fight I've ever been in. Let's call it a bar fight. Sounds better. 

Zach Fine  02:01

Can you set the scene for us? Which bar, which country? What's going on? 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  02:05

Very happy to and it gets even more perfect, because it's a bar in Berlin. So, so in Germany, and I had gone to meet some, some people, a few drinks were had, and it was kind of a literary crowd, and somehow The Magic Mountain came up, which is has been a favorite novel of mine for a while, and for a number of reasons. The question came up whether The Magic Mountain is an ironic novel, and it was me versus like five Magic Mountain haters, Thomas Mann haters. Plenty of reasons to be suspicious of Thomas Mann, but it really came down to this question of—I find the tone in this novel, the irony in which its themes are treated, the history of how Mann came to adopt that tone and the history of writing this book was originally supposed to be a kind of comic companion to Death in Venice, and it grew into this record of his own political transformation in the Weimar years. And that tone, that kind of ironic tone that hovers over the this novel of ideas, which is the way that it becomes a novel of essays as well, is something that is so fascinating to me. And this was the yelling match me on five haters of The Magic Mountain that unfolded that evening in Berlin.

Zach Fine  03:51

And have you been reading the novel over the years, you know, again and again? Has your relationship to it changed? Or was there kind of two major reading experiences? What's the kind of trajectory of your relationship to The Magic Mountain? 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  04:05

Yeah, that's a nice question. I think my first read, I read it really as a writer who is trying to teach myself to write novels, and so it was more of a naive read. Reading novels like The Idiot by Dostoevsky, reading novels like this, the relationship to the novel of ideas was something that was very attractive to me, and I found it to be a very beautiful and sophisticated novel in that way. Since then, I have read and written a lot more about politics, especially about German history and German politics. I recently wrote an introduction to a reissue of a novel by a writer called Ernst Jünger, who was a contemporary of Thomas Mann, and who was one of those German writers who you have to introduce with the kind of "not a Nazi but" qualifier and looking at the ideas that were live at this time in history, the seduction that they held over certain writers and the traces that Mann's own ultimate rejection of those ideas and his embrace of the Weimar Republic and of democracy and humanism—that informs my reading of this book much more now. 

Jessica Swoboda  05:46

You've mentioned "novel of ideas" a few times there. Can you say a bit more about what you mean by that, how you characterize that, and how this novel is a novel of ideas? 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  05:57

Yeah, I guess the argument with "novel of ideas" is always, you know, what is a novel without ideas, in a way. In this book, I think when characters themselves can become vehicles for for ideas, I think is, is one of the simplest ways to define it. We lose some of the realism in that choice, and I think what we gain is a forum and a stage for debate of these ideas, and finding a way to dramatize the debate between different ideas and that we can enter and entertain and be open to in a different way because it is appearing to us in fiction than we can when we debate ideas, their sway over us, the seductions that they hold in other forums.

Zach Fine  06:58

Before we jump into the novel itself, is there anything about Mann's biography that you think is particularly instructive when thinking about this book?

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  

Yeah, I mean, maybe we should have even started with that. So Mann starts this novel in I think 1912. It comes out twelve years later. He starts it after visiting his wife at a sanatorium in Switzerland and being very struck by the absurd nature of that experience. And he stops when the war breaks out, the First World War. And Thomas Mann, at this time, is a nationalist. He is in favor of the war. He describes the war as a fever that will kind of cleanse Europe. He is really a far-right man, and after the war and going into the Weimar years, he writes Thoughts of a Nonpolitical Man, in which he tries to to express these ideas, sort of grapples with them, but in writing it comes out on the other side, and with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party, eventually comes out in favor of the Weimar Republic. And he describes writing Thoughts of a Nonpolitical Man as a kind of transformation that he went through at the time he was returning to The Magic Mountain. So that kind of political transformation to someone who opens themselves to the idea of liberal democracy, especially because he feared and rejected fascism and what the Nazi Party represented, that's a transformation that I think is inscribed in this book. Is there anything you would add?

Zach Fine  09:01

I don't think so. I think it's a great beginning for us.

Jessica Swoboda  09:05

Why don't we go to the passage you selected in "A Stroll by the Shore," and before you read that passage, can you kind of situate us in the novel at this point? What's going on? What's important for us to know before diving into this passage?

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  09:24

Hans Castorp is our protagonist. At the beginning of the novel, he goes to the sanatorium to visit his cousin, who is there for tuberculosis. It's tuberculosis sanatorium. He is going for three-week visit, and he has stayed four years, so time is doing strange things. And during his during his stay there, he comes under the tutelage, so to speak, of a man named Settembrini, an Italian who is also at the sanatorium and who basically represents—we talked about, you know, characters manifesting ideas. He is the voice box of liberal humanism. He has a rival who is also a kind of tutor to Hans Castorp, but also kind of a seductress, and that is Naphta. And Naphta is kind of the reactionary to everything that Settembrini stands for, and Hans Castorp is seduced in turn by one or the other of these men. But it's also a novel about time, and that's what this passage kind of captures. So it's the beginning of the chapter, and it reads: 

"Can one narrate time—time as such, in and of itself? Most certainly not, what a foolish undertaking that would be. The story would go: 'Time passed, ran on, flowed in a mighty stream,' and on and on in the same vein. No one with any common sense could call that a narrative. It would be the same as if someone took the harebrained notion of holding a single note or chord for hours on end—and called it music. Because a story is like music in that it fills time, 'fills it up so nicely and properly,' 'divides it up,' so that there is "something to it,' 'something going on'—to quote, with the melancholy reverence one shows to statements made by the dead, a few casual comments of the late Joachim"—which is Hans Castorp's cousin—"phrases that faded away long ago, and we are not sure if the reader is quite clear just how long ago that was. Time is the element of narration, just as it is the element of life—is inextricably bound up with it, as bodies are in space. It is also the element of music, which itself measures and divides time, making it suddenly diverting and precious; and related to music, as we have noted, is the story, which also can only present itself in successive events, as movement toward an end (and not as something suddenly brilliantly present, like a work of visual art, which is pure body bound to time), and even if it would try to be totally here in each moment, would still need time for its presentation. That much is perfectly obvious, but that there is a difference is equally clear. The time element of music is singular: a segment of human earthly existence in which it gushes forth, thereby ineffably enhancing and ennobling life. Narrative, however, has two kinds of time, first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative's imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches out over light-years. A musical piece entitled 'Five Minute Waltz' lasts five minutes—this and only this defines its relationship to time. 

And then I'll just skip ahead, because there's this dream element: "The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drug person's dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years, or even surpass all limits of man's ability to experience time—dreams, that is, whose imaginary time span vastly expands their actual duration, and which are characterized by an incredible diminishment of the experience of time, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoker puts it, the intoxicated user's brain seems 'to have had something removed, like the mainspring from a broken watch.'" 

Zach Fine  13:58

Can you tell us a little bit about time as a kind of master theme in this novel? And I think when we were talking before the episode a little bit, you mentioned that there were these kinds of, that death and time, you saw them as kind of contrapuntally operative in the novel. And could you say a little bit more about that, about how they're set against each other? 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  14:18

Yeah, so you know, we describe—Hans Castorp arrives, and then he has these tutors of lightness and darkness, Settembrini and and Naphta. And Castorp arrives as someone who is actually a bit seduced by illness and and death itself. He's a bit fascinated by it. But Naphta is sort of seducing Hans Castorp to death is, death is the source of meaning, and Settembrini with his theories of human progress, with his series of building civilization, of reducing human suffering, he says that time is what gives meaning to life, that we try to fill time with progress and with meaning and with action in serving life, in serving humanity. So time is actually on the side of life. Settembrini even says to Hans Castorp, time is a gift. It is something that you can do something with. It is our medium through which to make progress, to improve the world. Elsewhere in the novel, Mann writes—and kind of you know, the author coming through in Settembrini—says that literature is also the spirit of life. And this is a novel. Time is the medium of literature. Stories take place in narrative time. This passage, you know, metafictionally, speaks to exactly that idea, how do you manage the duration of story time? How do you make stories feel like they have duration such that when we do get to the end, it is not the ending that gives a story meaning, it is everything that came before. It is the life of the story that gives the end of the story meaning, in fact. Literature as the medium of time that's elsewhere in the novel. It's really said, you know, literature is the spirit of life, that literature is on the side of life. And I also see that connection there in the way that this is a book that is so devoted to drawing attention to different kinds of time, to the difference between waiting and progress, to the difference between endings and death and life as doing something with time. 

Zach Fine  16:59

I don't know if I'm thinking about it too schematically, but as you're speaking, I'm just realizing, like, all these binaries that are structured the novel, where we have life, the enlightenment, time, progress in one column, literature, and then in the other—

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  17:14

Settembrini. 

Zach Fine  17:15

Yes. And then we have death, romanticism, illness on the on the Naphta side. And then we have Castorp trying to kind of navigate his way between the two. How do you see his—not progress, but his movement between those positions?

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  17:35

Castorp? 

Zach Fine  17:36

Yeah, Castorp. 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  17:37

Yeah, I think that Castorp is a good... Elsewhere, in his later lectures when he's in America on The Magic Mountain, Mann, you know, kind of hints that, oh, every once in a while it's really the author coming through with Settembrini. Not all the time. In describing a bit of Mann's biography going into this conversation, I think that, Castorp is kind of the stand-in for Mann. In Thoughts of a Nonpolitical Man Mann admits that he is, he is a person with a nineteenth-century soul. He is an aesthete, you know, he literally titles it Thoughts of a Nonpolitical Man. He hates the idea at that moment in his life that everything is politics. He is a romantic. We send Hans Castorp in as this, you know, relatively innocent, as an innocent you know, who goes up to the up to the Magic Mountain and is then seduced by these two, by these two ideas. Hans Castorp eventually agrees with Settembrini, but only reluctantly. So I think that his journey shows the seduction of the promise of ideas, of genius, of heroism, of kind of like a metaphysical transcendence, the seduction of, if you're really thinking of it historically, like the seduction of being a hero in war, like dying for for a cause, is also kind of on this side of seduction. And I think that the Settembrini arguments—Hans knows that he's correct, and he kind of eventually agrees with with Settembrini, but throughout, he's also kind of like, Oh, what a windbag. You know, like these arguments that this guy is making, he's, he's making a an Encyclopedia of Social Pathology, where he it's—I wrote it down here—it's twenty or so volumes that will discuss all conceivable instances of human suffering, from the most personal, intimate to the large scale conflicts of groups. And you know, this rhetoric, this rhetoric of progress is in this novel less seductive than the mystical elements that Naphta represents sometimes.

Jessica Swoboda  20:16

Yeah, you seem to have identified one of the political extremes in the novel. So romanticism and then the other seems to be the progressivism and the humanism that you discussed at the beginning. Are those extremes what makes The Magic Mountain so relevant today? Is that why it will it have purchase for contemporary life?

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  20:38

Yeah. I mean I think that's what has made it an enduring novel. I guess we—I think it's okay to say that we are recording this the day after the American election, and I think that we can imagine that this debate will continue to hold relevance leading into this election, also at the time that Mann was writing, probably in a couple of months, when this comes out, we will still be debating the weaknesses of liberalism. We will still be debating, how does liberalism make arguments to people about finding meaning in life, like, how does liberalism make arguments that motivate us? And I guess the other thing that maybe we should think about, that I think is also relevant, both to Mann and to a very contemporary conversation, is like, do we still fear those other forces, you know? And how do we credibly make those arguments? Are we no longer... the weakness of liberalism is, if can be if you are resting on kind of a negative argument of like, we see where the reaction to it leads. And I wonder right now, if you know many nations throughout the West fully have the imagination and the fear of where that leads.

Zach Fine  22:18

You mentioned something in an email correspondence about the stupidity of Castorp. Or, I think I'm thinking that, right, the stupidity, or maybe it was the simplicity. I think it was stupidity, though, and just thinking about, I don't know if we want to take him as a kind of prototypical, kind of liberal subject, but could you say a little bit about why, you know, Mann chooses to—you know, I think in the first line of the novel, he describes him as ordinary, and he's described by Madam Chauchat as bourgeois. Can you tell us a little bit about his political subjectivity as a character? How you see him, whether it's through the lens of the stupid or the bourgeois or the ordinary? Could you kind of help place him a little bit.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  23:01

I love Castorp as as a protagonist. And I think it's so useful for a novel to have a kind of like calibrated stupidity for your protagonist, so they can be accidentally wise. And especially in a novel like this, if we have a novel of ideas, Castorp is someone who's radically open to all points of view. You know, he he comes in, I would say he's polite, you know, like he is the apolitical kind of person who has good manners and and he will listen to someone kind of whatever they're going to say. He'll sort of find something pleasant that that he can say back to them. And I think at least for the first half of the novel, this really describes Hans Castorp. So I don't think that he's really meant—he is—the reason that Settembrini and Naphta are also so interested in debating in his presence and kind of presenting themselves as his tutors, always courting his attention is because he's kind of, he's the swing voter, or, as the the novel continually calls him, one of life's problem children. So Castorp is non-ideological, and that was also how he—that is where his wisdom comes from, or his own kind of genius comes from in in the novel, because he can see the the blind spots or the drawbacks to both of his tutors, you know? Settembrini is a big windbag throughout the novel, and the novel kind of lightly satirizes a lot of Settembrini's rhetoric as well. Both of these, you know, both of his tutors also exist in this kind of ivory tower of The Magic Mountain that is completely divorced from real life below, which is something that the novel, you know, also kind of pokes at. It is a space of ideas, you know, as we're positioning all of these characters, you know in this kind of binary, though, I would say that Hans Castorp is the one who is allowed to float. 

Jessica Swoboda  25:07

I'm wondering if we could go back to our discussion about the novel of ideas. Do you see contemporary fiction as containing novels of ideas, or is it something that's falling away?

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  25:21

Yeah, I would say it's not popular. It's interesting, as I was kind of looking back, I mean, I guess, like American fiction or the Anglophone novel, I wouldn't say, I wouldn't say that it's particularly popular. We're dominated now by documentation, by the play of the fictional and the nonfictional. Novels of ideas are seen as as cold or as challenging, as frankly, unsaleable. I find that interesting because as I was looking at the history of American reception of The Magic Mountain, it was actually kind of popular. Like, Knopf marketed it as, like this modern classic, and people really enjoyed it. Nabokov tried to call it like totally middlebrow and and detract from it. So I find that shift really interesting that I would say that the novel of ideas is is in retreat, in many ways, because it is seen as like too much, in a way, you know? That it's too challenging, like, who would, who would want to engage with that? And I find that a very depressing attitude.

Jessica Swoboda  26:46

Right, because it kind of undersells the intellectual capacity of the consumer as well. It's like assuming that the consumer cannot possibly be smart enough to engage with the novel of ideas, to engage with something that's more philosophically dense and rich perhaps. Or maybe I'm wrong in being too pessimistic here. 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  27:10

No, I mean, I think, that that is definitely the pessimistic read. I guess if we were being more generous, we could say... I mean, I care about, I deeply care about being entertaining, and I care about, like, the absorption model of reading. Like, I want to be transported. I love this book. It is literally magical. You know, you are transported to this magical world. In this passage that I also read in the way that we're dealing with time, I thought it was boring, so I like skipped over a little bit. Which is also a charge that people give against The Magic Mountain all the time, that it's too boring, it's too essayistic. It also talks about this magical element of narrative time, of creating dreams, that there is a magic in putting together a novel or in putting together a narrative, and that that imagination, and that that itself, in itself, is is very delightful and entertaining and transporting. And so I think that the other knock against the novel of ideas is that it's seen as, like, antithetical to plot, or incompatible with the idea of a plot-driven narrative. I don't think that's true. I think it can be divisive. You know, The Magic Mountain is a very divisive novel, and those who find it a total slog, and those who find it one of the greatest novels ever written, and that has all kinds of thrill in the way that it is engaging us, like these are high-stakes debates. There's so much humor and so much irony and the strange things that happen in this world and on this mountain where people go to get better but in fact get sick, where nothing quite seems to work in the way that it should, where no one actually knows what time it is. And maybe that's just a different model of engagement as well. 

Zach Fine  29:18

I'm really struck by how you describe the novel of ideas as cold. I'd never thought of assigning a kind of temperature, or, you know, in terms of the stereotype, stereotype—to be clear, I'm not saying that you're saying that, but it makes me wonder about about this novel and how you think of its temperature. I know that in the little reading I've done about Mann that he was famously, or was reputed to be a pretty cold man, at least as a family man, he was kind of a cold man. But I'm wondering, the tone that kind of emanates from the novel when you're reading it, does it have a kind of warmth to you and a kind of heat and energy, or is there something cold about this particular novel of ideas? 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  29:55

Yeah, I'm really glad that you brought that up, because I do find this to be—and we are on this frozen mountain. But on the other hand, everyone has a fever. And I do actually find it a deep, a very warm novel. I find it to be... there is this ironic tone. I think that there is a deep sincerity to this book, and that there is a kind of warmth in the commitment to its questioning, in the commitment to its ambition to dramatize all of life, like literally everything. Like it is a novel stuffed with ideas. Robert Musil called this book like a shark's stomach. I would have to look into the mechanics of, like, sharks' digestion. But I assume that you know, sharks can, like, throw anything in there and like it can absorb it. There's so much curiosity and there is so much commitment to the idea that these are debates that matter, that are existential. There is so much commitment to, how do I have these debates? How do I rise and address the political questions of my time while also remaining a novelist, while also trying to make art, while trying to create something beautiful. How do I marry politics? How do I marry the rhetoric of a Settembrini who is going to make a twenty-volume encyclopedia of sociological pathology with the will to create something transporting, magical and beautiful? And there's that radical openness to these questions, and that radical, like, curiosity that Hans Castorp that I think, even when he is lost in the snow in this famous chapter on the mountain, you know, freezing on his balcony in the sanatorium, that there is an incredible warmth behind the the curiosity and the commitment to the questions that the novel raises. Life-affirming, it's life-affirming.

Jessica Swoboda  32:17

You mentioned at the start of our episode that you turned to The Magic Mountain to sort of learn how to write a novel, figuring out that. Can you say a bit, then, about its influence on The Visitors, one of your more recent novels?

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  32:33

Yeah. So one thing I really love about The Magic Mountain is that it has all of the texture of a masterpiece of realism, like Buddenbrooks, Mann's earlier novel, and which the Nobel Prize Committee cited, as you know, this is why we're giving you the Nobel Prize. Even though we all think The Magic Mountain is really better, we think that Buddenbrooks will be more popular. But The Magic Mountain, it has, if you've read the book. I mean, we all just reread it. Mann has this incredible specificity. You know, he writes these character sketches, like, he just dashes off entire biographies in a paragraph, like it is so rooted in the techniques of realism. And yet, what creeps into The Magic Mountain, that third-person narrator who has their own personality and distance, the third-person narrator who can kind of draw our attention, who has that sort of ironic distance from Hans Castorp, who appears on the second page of the book with this kind of essay about time, reminiscent of the one that we just read. I think that's something that really fascinates me as a writer, and which is one of the reasons why I don't write... I write a kind of, like, tilted realism. I can't write straight naive realism. Is the question of, like, what is the source of the text, like, who is speaking. And the idea that there's this kind of modernist awareness of the maintenance of the text, but that is especially dramatized in this narrator that has their own personality, was deeply instructive and interesting to me. So The Visitors is written in the third person. I was really wondering and thinking about that very basic question of like, who is narrating this book? Who is speaking in The Visitors? We also have kind of a main protagonist, a sort of apolitical protagonist who becomes exposed to all of these very different ideas. I'm asking kind of different questions. I'm more interested in The Visitors in the question of, what do we do when we sort of lose faith as a public in our ability to shape our political environments, or tangibly reshape our environment. Like, basically, what do you do when modernism is over? Like, what are the ways to communicate the public will when—the novel is set just after Occupy—when forms of public protest fail, in a way? So we have a similar structure there. But I also have a kind of ecoterrorist group that seems to be actually narrating the entire novel. That is both within the novel and also kind of takes on the role of the third-person narrator in a way. The big difference between The Magic Mountain and The Visitors, though—well, there are a lot of differences that are unflattering to me—but Thomas Mann had no idea how The Magic Mountain was going to end, whereas I always knew how The Visitors was going to end.

Zach Fine  35:55

There's a line from Susan Sontag where she describes Mann's narrator in The Magic Mountain—or not the narrator, she describes Mann himself, I think, as an over-cooperative author. And it's something about—I don't remember exactly how she frames it, but something about how he embeds within the novel the instructions for the interpretation of the novel itself. So there's something of the element of over-cooperation there. I'm wondering, in your own creation of a narrator, to what extent you think about kind of leading the reader along, being kind of cooperative in that sense, or over-cooperative, or kind of withholding a little bit more, and its relationship to Mann's narrator. 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  36:40

Oh, interesting. Over-cooperative in terms of how to interpret the ideas? 

Zach Fine  36:47

Yeah, do you find that your narrator has to, how heavy-handed in terms of leading the reader towards a particular interpretation of the novel itself, or whether you find it should be more kind of open ended and generous in terms of the narrator's structuration of the view?

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  37:07

Yeah. I mean, I would definitely say open. I think that the sympathies of the book come through anyway—like, as I just described, from the novel, the reasons why I find this to be a life-affirming novel, I don't think are like marked by the narrator. That's kind of interesting, because you can also flip it around and just say that naive realism, you have an over-cooperative third-person narrator who's just incredibly cooperative and incredibly convenient so that the plot can go forward. So it's really a trade-off in what kind of convenience or cooperation we might be pursuing. I mean, I just reread all of Jane Austen. I love Jane Austen, but, like, at the end of the day, I love Jane Eyre more. And there's this scene in Jane Eyre, where Jane Eyre is at her boarding school, and she needs to, like, send a letter in order for the plot to happen. And you have this limited perspective, there's nothing this first-person narrator can do in order to get her out of this boarding school where she's trapped, to send the letter, or to know that she has to do this. So literally, she says, a little fairy appeared and told me I had to go send this letter to find a post, you know, so that the plot can can continue. And I kind of prefer that, in a way, or I feel closer to it as a writer, that if we're talking about cooperative narrators, that just that little bit of metafictional awareness, that I would rather dispense with those excuses, so that we can arrive at the parts of the book that I and maybe the reader are most passionate about.

Jessica Swoboda  38:58

So we in The Visitors, we have C, the main protagonist, but we also have, I think, like a secondary protagonist in the character of the Gnome, who, in so many ways, I felt like, at moments, the Gnome sort of was speaking or saying, like externalizing anxieties that I have and that I thought C was having. It was like this externalization of all the crazy stuff going on in your head sometimes. But I'm curious, can you say more about why the gnome and, like, why paint this character as a gnome? What is he meant to represent? I was just really fascinated by that figure, and I'm hoping you can say more. 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  39:40

Yeah, I mean, I guess we should maybe just tell readers that The Visitors is set during the Occupy movement in New York, right after the financial crisis, and we have this sort of apolitical character named C who is a textile artist, a kind of failed one, and she's running a craft store in New York. She's in deep debt, and is spiraling and kind of mentally unraveling as well. And she has this visitor appear to her at the beginning of the book, and it is this gnome who seems to know a lot about everything, including a kind of ecoterrorist group that's operating in this alternative history of Occupy. I don't want to give things away, but because I knew the ending from the very beginning of the book, and I was writing this in third person, I was thinking, first, how do I how do I push this kind of apolitical character who doesn't actually want to get involved? How do I expose her and sort of push her to kind of extremes in the ideas that she is exposed to? And I was also thinking about, how do I transfer her perspective in a way, because I know that her perspective is actually not going to last for the entirety of the book. I was also thinking about, like, hacking a realist novel, and that there is this visitor and this kind of perspective, and that, you know, is related to this kind of eco-hacker group that is literally kind of hacking the realist novel that it otherwise might be.

Zach Fine  41:56

Great. Thank you. So part of the reason that Jess and I were excited to start this podcast is to look back at novels that novelists were looking at from the past, but also to think about what the novel can do today. And you know, as someone writing under the current political conditions, I'm curious what you're excited about in the novel for your own work, what you'd like to explore more. And if there's anything that's, you know, that's raised in, for instance, The Magic Mountain that suggests more possibilities for you in the novel form, and what you'll be doing with your own work.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  42:27

I've published three books, and I've had a, like, unsteady relationship to realism, or maybe not unsteady, but I've been asking myself, like, what is my relationship to realism? And I think in all of my my books I've been coming up with—I hesitate to say solutions, because it's not as if I reject the idea of writing realist books, but I am just drawn to something that is a little bit heightened, that is just a little bit magic, a little bit surreal, something that is just a little bit tilted from consensus reality, and I find The Magic Mountain to be an inexhaustible resource, if we're reading from that point of view. Maybe I'm after a kind of world quality, in a way, that I admire so much in this book, and that is maybe still in my mind in terms of the fictions that I create.

Jessica Swoboda  43:42

Well, Jessi, thanks so much again for joining us. It's been really great to talk to you about The Magic Mountain and also The Visitors. 

Jessi Jezewska Stevens  43:48

Thanks for having me. 

Jessica Swoboda  43:54

Thanks everyone for joining us on this episode of Selected Novels. We'd like to thank John Trevaskis for editing the podcast and contributing the original music. As always, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please subscribe to The Point. There's a discount code for listeners in the show notes. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selectednovels@ thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, listeners.