Pistols at dawn; or, some literary duels
Two words that Thomas Mann uses in the famous duel scene between Settembrini and Naphta sent me down a rabbit hole looking for other literary duel scenes – preferably ones with pistols. Those two words were "Kartellträger" and "Barrieren".
That search took me to Joseph Conrad's "The Duel" (and Ridley Scott's film adaptation "The Duellists"), Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Demons" and Joseph Roth's "The Radetzky March" as well as to a "Code of Honor" held in the rare books section of the US Library of Congress.
First, though, an explanation of how the narrative of "The Magic Mountain" reaches this climax. It is 1914 and tensions have been rising at the Berghof, an international luxury sanatorium where people of all nations rub shoulders. An obsessive indulgence in idle pastimes has given way to growing friction in the chapter "The great tetchiness", in which a brawl breaks out between Wiedemann, a proud anti-Semite, and Sonnenschein, a Jewish patient.
A different affair of honour, inspired by a real-life scandal, foreshadows the coming duel: a ridiculous public 'slap-battle' between some Polish gentlemen over a slur on a wife's reputation. This business captivates the Berghof residents, but Hans Castorp is amazed to find that Settembrini and Naphta are also mesmerised by the gossip.
This Polish to-and-fro is typical in the sense that a). the dispute is over a woman; b). seconds are designated and a message-bearer named ("Kartellträger", literally "the bearer of a cartel", a "cartel of defiance" being a 16th-century term for a written challenge); and c) there is an attempt to settle it through negotiation, but it ends in slapping because the alleged perpetrator is considered insufficiently honourable to grant satisfaction.
This is the precursor, then, to Settembrini accepting Naphta's challenge to fight (they have been referred to several times already as verbal "duellists"). But Hans Castorp points out, intellectual disagreements cannot be considered grounds for a duel: 'If one had dragged the name of the other through the mud, if it were over a woman or some such tangible high stakes for which no one could see any possibility of reconciliation! [...] The intellectual can never be personal––" To which Settembrini responds: "Anyone unwilling to defend an idea with his body, his arm, his blood, is not worthy of that idea, and the priority, whatever one’s intellect, is to remain a man."
And so a time is set, seconds are determined and Castorp is permitted to attend only as an observer, a capacity in which he nevertheless tries to engage a doctor, arranges pistols and also suggests a place for the lethal rendezvous.
This is where delving into the literature becomes interesting. The academic Ruth Gutiérrez Delgado analysed the background to Joseph Conrad's "The Duel" (1907), the 19th-century affairs that inspired it and its subsequent movie adaptation by Ridley Scott as "The Duellists" (1977). She writes about the trope of the 'field of honour' – often situated in a clearing in the woods, sometimes near some old building or landmark...
In "The Magic Mountain", Hans Castorp puts forward his personal secluded dell as a location for his two friends to settle their scores. It is seven o'clock, "the sun was still a long way from showing its face, but the dawn was just about poking through the mist when Hans Castorp left the Berghof after a restless night and headed out to the rendezvous spot". The conditions are icy, he passes through the woods.
Compare this with the set-up in Joseph Roth's "Radetzky March" (1932) which tracks the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the fortunes of Baron Lieutenant Carl Joseph von Trotta, the "grandson of the hero of Solferino". Trotta has escorted his friend the regimental physician's wife home at night and an observer, the drunk Count Tattenbach, has cast aspersions that Demant - Jewish, like Naphta – has been forced to counter with a challenge. The duel takes place at 7.20 am, the protagonists dismount just before a clearing, proceed to their marks on foot to fire their simultaneous shots at ten paces on the count of three. Demant has removed his glasses in order to miss his target, but his vision unfortunately remains sharp . . .
Reading the chapter "The Duel" in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's 1994 translation of Dostoyevsky's "Demons" (1873; translated by Constance Garnett as "The Possessed" and otherwise variously as "Devils" or "The Devils") I found the translation of "Barrieren" – "barriers", the inner limits before which the duellists must have fired their guns. (Duelling language is remarkably international and codified, it would seem.)
Let's now turn to the outcome of all these duels.
Joseph Roth's account is remarkable in that we don't witness the result of the mortal combat. It occurs out of frame because the focus has shifted to Lieutenant Trotta's reception of the news on the parade ground: a major "half turned in the saddle and said, 'Both!'" The chapter ends with a laconic decription of the duty corporals reading out Captain Kovacs's report that cavalry captain Tattenbach and regimental pyhsician Dr Demant had come to a soldierly death for the honour of the regiment. Ha! The absurdity of military honours for two men quarrelling over whether one's wife might walk home in the company of a friend! The absurdity of it all!
Dostoyevsky describes the decisive third shot after two failed attempts:
"They were placed for the third time, the command was given; this time Gaganov walked right up to the barrier, and from there, from twelve paces, began taking aim [...] this time the white beaver hat flew off Nikolai Vsevolodovich's head. [...] Stavrogin gave a start, looked at Gaganov, turned away, and this time without any delicacy fired off into the woods. The duel was over."
Settembrini and Naphta are also allowed three shots from a minimum of fifteen paces. The commentary of my edition of "Der Zauberberg" suggests that Thomas Mann would have been familiar with Dostoyevsky's novel when he wrote the following description:
"‘Let us begin!’ Naphta declared. ‘You go first, sir, and shoot!’ he called to his opponent and started to walk forward himself, the pistol in his outstretched hand levelled at Settembrini’s chest . . . An unbelievable sight. Settembrini did the same. At his third stride—the other had by now reached the barrier without firing—he raised the pistol high in the air and pulled the trigger. The report produced multiple echoes. The mountains sent it rebounding back and forth, the whole valley reverberated with the sound, and Hans Castorp imagined that folk must be rushing towards them.
‘You shot into the air,’ Naphta said with great self-control, lowering his weapon.
Settembrini replied, ‘I shoot wherever I please.’
'You will shoot again.’
‘I have no intention of doing so. It is your turn.’"
And then . . . Well, that'd be telling, so you'll have to read the novel to find out.
This act of deliberately wasting the first shot was, I have learnt, known as "deloping"; the term was first coined in "The Art of Duelling" in 1836 and is "of uncertain origin", according to the OED. It was apparently customary to fire the shot into the ground. Game theory apparently considers deloping a rational choice in a "truel" or "triel" – meaning a three-person duel, aka the Mexican standoff trope portrayed in "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly". William Pitt the Younger allegedly deloped. Alexander Hamilton did so too in his duel with Aaron Burr, but there was a mix-up or shots were fired simultaneously and Hamilton was mortally wounded.
As the "Code of Honor" pictured above confirms, duelling survived in the southern states of the United States until the War of Secession. In Europe, duelling fell out of favour in the mid-19th century as a result of public condemnation, and some scholars have linked the waning of a practice of armed "satisfaction" between individuals of equal social standing to an increase in state capacity. The last known fatality in a duel between Englishmen in England was in 1845, although a Frenchman was killed by one of his countrymen seven years later near Runnymede.
Duels had been outlawed during the Napoleonic Wars, although they were clearly still fought for the next thirty years or so. Ruth Gutiérrez Delgado writes that they were "in contrast with Bonaparte's regimented system, a paradigm of Enlightenment rationality".
The duel in "The Magic Mountain" is therefore clearly an anachronistic literary device. Settembrini embodies enlightened reason and remains true to it by deloping. Naphta is of course an advocate of terror and chaos – in his speeches and, finally, with his lethal intellectual challenge.