Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, which belongs to our own time, roughly conforms to the type. Like The Magic Mountain, it takes place in a sanatorium, where patients who have come to be cured have little else to do after their treatments and medical examinations than muse and argue. Isolation is crucial to this type of novel: the characters are on an island, out on a limb, either of their own choosing—Peacock’s crotchety castles, Huxley’s grand country house presided over by Mr. Scogan (Crome Yellow)—or by force majeure, as in a hospital or a prison (Solzhenitsyn’s The Third Circle). Or the island may be moral, self-constituted by a literary clique (Point Counter Point), by a group of like-thinking, semi-political Bohemians (Les chemins de la liberté), by a cell of revolutionaries (Man’s Fate). What is involved is always a contest of faiths. The debates on the magic mountain between Naphta and Settembrini oppose nihilistic Jesuitry to progressive atheistic humanism but also pan-Germanism to pro-Russian entente-cordiale doctrine, prophecies of war to firm belief in peace, repose to work, in other words, you might say, night to day. Beneath the circus-like confrontation of current creeds lies a clash between very ancient faiths. Settembrini is a monist, Naphta a dualist. Settembrini, asked to choose, exalts mind over body: “...within the antithesis of body and mind, the body is the evil, the devilish principle, for the body is nature.” It is like a game of preferences with the aim being self-definition, which no doubt is why young people are dazzled by it.
On a simpler level and without encyclopedic pretensions, Cancer Ward presents us with various naive faiths—from faith in Stalin to faith in the healing properties of radioactive gold to faith in the mandrake root—sometimes peacefully coexisting, sometimes at odds with each other. It is natural that in a hospital the belief in a cure, in sovereign remedies, should dominate every mind. It becomes vital to have a theory, and world theories, global diagnoses of the body politic or the human state generally, take on, as though of necessity, an importance not usually accorded them by the healthy. The pressing need to have faith, i.e., grounds for hope, gives an urgency to the abstract disputes of both The Magic Mountain and Cancer Ward. Here ideas of any and every kind become, as if by contagion, matters of life and death. It is also true that in these narratives no idea can win out over another. Nobody is convinced or persuaded. The excited debates between patients or between doctor and patient end up in the air. Hans Castorp, whose young mind has been the salient contested for by opposing forces, leaves the sanatorium and returns “down below,” to the plains, which should be the level ground of sound, commonplace reality, except for the fact that there he dies as a soldier in the general reasonless catastrophe of the First World War. In Cancer Ward, Kostoglotov, too, leaves his sanatorium, having been let out as cured, which should be a happy ending, except for the fact that the cancer ward whose gates close behind him has been a species of sanctuary; he is slated to return to his real down-to-earth life of penal exile. One kind of death sentence, in both cases, has been exchanged for another.
It is not especially uncanny (or no more than any resemblance or twinning) that this pair of novels, so widely separated in space and time, so widely divergent in manner, should match in a number of respects. Sanatorium life is much the same, I suppose, everywhere and always. But sanatorium life, as such, did not dictate the ending; a positive conclusion would have been possible if the novel were only about sickness and recovery. The ending is imposed not by the particular case—cancer ward or tubercular clinic—but by the fact that in general the so-called novel of ideas (at least the kind I have been describing) does not allow of any resolution. Nothing decisive can happen in it; it is a seesaw. Events that do occur in it are simply incidents, sometimes diverting, as in Peacock. A real event, such as the death of Hans Castorp, is reserved for a postscript; it does not belong to the text proper. The same with Kostoglotov’s re-shouldering of his penal identity. We do not see it happen; in fact it may not happen “for good,” since when he goes to register with the NKVD in the town outside the hospital gates, the Komendant speaks cheerfully of an amnesty in the offing. But Kostoglotov cannot make himself believe him—he has heard of amnesties before and nothing came of them—and the reader knows no more than he. It is left in suspension, like the arguments between the sick men, which never “get” anywhere.