Reproduction in Mann's *The Magic Mountain*

July 14, 2009 10:09 AM

This question is about the depiction of the sexual reproduction of animals in Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain (1924). People with knowledge of biology, as well as people with knowledge of Mann's writing, may be able to give good answers.

I'm reading Mann's The Magic Mountain (the English translation by John E. Woods), and have reached the section titled "Research," in which the protagonist Hans Castorp has developed a sudden, obsessive interest in biology, and spends as much time as he can reading textbooks on the subject. In the following excerpt, Mann describes two species that Castorp reads about in a book on embryology:

In its serious pursuit of variations on this standard procedure [of sexual reproduction], nature had employed every conceivable farce and grotesquerie. In some animal species the male was a parasite in the intestine of the female. There were others where the male placed his arm down the gullet of the female to lay his sperm inside her; the arm, bitten off and vomited back up, now ran away on its fingers, long fooling scientists into believing it an independent life-form deserving a Greek and Latin name of its own. (p. 331 of the Everyman's Library edition)

Now, from what I've read of Mann (this is my second time through The Magic Mountain, and I've also read Joseph and his Brothers), he is many things, but not a fantasist. So I'm assuming for the moment that he's not pulling my leg, and these animals actually exist in some form or other, though their descriptions might be distorted through the lens of Castorp's misunderstanding. It's probably also worth noting that this book was first published in German in 1924. All that said: what animals might Mann be describing?

posted by Prospero to media & arts (7 answers total)

If I'm not mistaken, squids' sperm-depositing arms are (often) torn off in the process. And there's one mollusk, I can't remember which, that mates by literally injecting the sperm into the female's flesh with a needle-like appendage. I'm sure those tentacles will wiggle around a bit after use.

And I have some vague recollection of a fish where the male is a permanent parasite to the female. I can't at all recall which one, though.
posted by Netzapper at 10:18 AM on July 14, 2009

Possibly the green spoon worm?
posted by DarkForest at 10:24 AM on July 14, 2009

And I have some vague recollection of a fish where the male is a permanent parasite to the female. I can't at all recall which one, though.

Anglerfish.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:26 AM on July 14, 2009

The parasitic male definitely sounds like the anglerfish, except I'm not sure if it's actually in the intestine of the female.
posted by Midnight Rambler at 12:21 PM on July 14, 2009

From the anglerfish article:

When it is mature, the male's digestive system degenerates, making him incapable of feeding independently, which necessitates his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent his death...The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads

If you turned into a pair of gonads would you consider that preventing your death? The enzyme that dissolves the male mouth and the female skin is pretty sweet though. I wonder what it's made out of?
posted by scrutiny at 12:57 PM on July 14, 2009

As for a species where the "the male [is] a parasite in the intestine of the female," one might be a wasp species that injects its eggs into whitefly aphids, where they grow by eating the whitefly from the inside out. Not the same species, but I guess the female wasp could deposit its egg into a female, and the male eats its way out. This is according to Ridley's The Red Queen, page 15. Not elegant, but it kind of fits.

Here's pretty disturbing description: Eretmocerus eremicus

Some days, it's good to be human.
posted by LolaCola at 4:26 PM on July 14, 2009

Thanks, all, for the interesting answers. I also spoke to an evolutionary biologist about this, who also suggested the angler fish as sort of but not quite right, but was baffled by the description of the creature whose arm was severed during the process of mating, as it seemed to her to imply that the creature's reproductive system isn't separate from its digestive system.

At some point I may try to dig up the old Porter-Lowe translation of The Magic Mountain: it could be the case that it says something completely different.
posted by Prospero at 6:32 AM on July 15, 2009