Right at the turn of the century, at least on the calendar, Thomas Mann published his hit debut novel Buddenbrooks, then dropped his famous novella Death in Venice a couple years later. He started work in 1912 on another story that was meant to be of similar length, and comedic in tone. But it grew and grew, till by 1924 it was The Magic Mountain (one of the greatest novels of the 20th century). MM is a strangely written book, supersaturated with irony, and it continues to befuddle up to the present. But Mann would tighten up the techniques employed there to his next four-volume project, first appearing in 1933, called Joseph and His Brothers (one of the greatest novels of the 20th century). And then Mann’s entire fiction apparatus, for a story that’s fully aware of its nature as storytelling, was perfected in 1947’s Doctor Faustus (one of the greatest novels of the 20th century).
This novel has such a critical aura around it that it’s difficult for someone in literary studies to approach this text without a lot of pre-existing impressions. It’s a retelling of the famous Faust legend, sure, and it’s about modern classical music like Schoenberg and Webern and Berg; and it’s written as a rambling account of an avant-garde Kunstler hero by his friend Zeitblom, a stuffy and kind of neurotic guy. There’s not a little bit of homoerotic energy in Zeitblom’s contemplations. In the critical consensus, it’s a high modernist novel disguised as a conventional realistic one. Zeitblom tells us of how Adrian Leverkühn quite possibly sold his soul to the Devil in order to become a classical composer super-genius.
The modernist stamping is apparent in many of the chapter openings. The novel takes the form of Zeitblom’s reminiscences, and like Tristram Shandy his prose at moments reflects on its own composition in real time.
Here are the opening lines to some of the early chapters:
— With utmost emphasis I wish to assert that it is not out of any desire to thrust myself and my circumstances into the foreground that I offer a few words about myself and my circumstances in preface to this account… (I)
— My name is Dr. Serenus Zeitblom, Ph.D. I am unhappy myself with this odd delay in the presentation of my calling card, but as things turned out, the literary current of my disclosures constantly held me back until this moment. (II)
— Since the preceding section has swelled to excess as it is, it is best I commence a new one so that I may also pay honor in a few words to the image of the mistress of Buchel… (IV)
— The section just concluded also swelled much too much for my taste, and it would seem only too advisable for me to ask myself whether the reader’s patience is holding out. (V)
— I shall not glance back—far be it from me to count how many pages have piled up between the last Roman numeral and the one I just wrote. A mishap—a totally unexpected mishap, to be sure… (IX)
It’s an amusing way to be led through the childhood and education of the prodigious Leverkühn. It’s also recognized today as one of the trademark gestures of modernist fiction: the beginning is obsessed with beginnings, where to begin? how to begin?
Zeitblom’s awkward self-consciousness fills in the details of the life of his childhood playmate: he’s writing this testimony during Germany’s Nazi period—at the beginning of the end of WWII—and when he’s not reminiscing on intellectual culture of the preceding decades in Germany—after Wagner’s death and the publication of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy—he’s reflecting on his nation’s immediate historical path.
If you didn’t already know about the basic allegory at work here, you’ve likely already sniffed it out. Leverkühn’s pact with the devil to become the greatest composer of his age—if that’s indeed what happened—parallels Germany’s destiny under Hitler’s direction. But what corresponds to the Devil’s contract at the historical level (aside from perhaps Versailles 1919)?
The problem seems to be central to the study of modernist aesthetics: how do we go from the triumph of humanism, rationality, and Enlightenment to the profound and ferocious dissatisfaction with everything those words stand for, a dissatisfaction that has now persisted in our culture for more than a century?
Doctor Faustus is Mann’s aesthetic lecture toward addressing that question, and it’s probably one of the best responses in western bourgeois letters this side of The Destruction of Reason by Lukács.
A foundational experience for both Zeitblom and Leverkühn occurs in their boyhoods, when Leverkühn’s father shows them a container of liquid with diluted sodium silicate. From the bottom “rose a grotesque miniature landscape of different colored growths…” The sight is “remarkable” and “deeply melancholy” for the narrator. They look like “algae, fungi, rooted polyps, of mosses, too, but also of mussels, fleshly flower spikes, tiny trees or twigs, and here and there even of human limbs…” But these structures are “purely of inorganic origin and arose with the aid of chemicals…”
In this great passage, the seed of aesthetic destruction has been planted. Art is stepping away from being a reflection of nature into something diametrically against nature and the organic. Now is the time of cubist painting and twelve-tone serialism.
Then it’s on to high school, where a famously massive chapter relates the lectures given by an eccentric pianist from Pennsylvania named Kretschmar. In great detail we learn about four key lectures: on Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 111, on Bach and the fugue, on “music and the eye,” and the metaphysical beginnings of music. The content of these talks is a fusion of both Adorno (who would have spoken on music theory in Mann’s person often) and the Nietzsche of Birth of Tragedy.
Zeitblom also gives many pages over to Eberhard Schleppfuss the theology teacher, in the ominous chapter XIII. This is a monumental and mystical discussion toward the vindication of God—known as theodicy, a core current of western literary history—from Augustine all the way up to Martin Luther.
Here young Adri is exposed to some frightening yet tantalizing dialectics of good and evil:
Evil contributed to the perfect wholeness of the universe, and without the former the latter would never have been whole, which was why God permitted evil, for He was perfection and must therefore want what is perfectly whole—not in the sense of perfect goodness, but in the sense of omniformity and the mutual reinforcement of existence. Evil was far more evil when there was good, and good far more beautiful when there was evil, yes, perhaps (there could be disagreement on this) evil would not be evil at all were there no good—and good not good at all were there no evil.
Adrian is well on his way into becoming an artist, and at that a modernist one of the purest water. In a letter quoted by Zeitblom he says, “Dear friend, why does this make me laugh? …Why must almost everything appear to me as its own parody?” Parody is precisely the mode of modern art, when everything’s already been done and there can only be self-aware imitations.
There is a long chapter containing a theological debate among some students including Adrian. I wish I had the time to read this more closely and unpack all the strange arguments here about economics and existentialism, nationalism and socialism, among other things.
And then—finally—we come to the crucial piece of correspondence that Zeitblom holds. When the friends go their separate ways into their adult lives in 1905, Zeitblom to Naumberg and Adrian to Leipzig, the latter sends a very strange letter, written in a deliberately archaic German. “We are obliged and grateful for your perturbation and epistle and for having given us lively and most comical tidings of your present dapper, dull, and demanding state, of your caperings and curry-combings, our polishings and musketings.”
In this arcane register he relates sleeping with a prostitute in a brothel, fully aware that she had syphilis. This encounter may very well be the pact made with the Devil. At least that’s what is indicated by another bizarre manuscript by Leverkühn from his time in Italy, when a Devil figure seems to visit him in his room. This is really dense writing, but the Devil implies that for a stipulated length of time Leverkühn will create great music and never experience love. Or could it be symptoms of the venereal disease Leverkühn has contracted? “You have there the spinal sac,” the Devil says, “a pulsing column of liquor within reaching to cerebral regions, to the meninx, in whose tissue the furtive venereal meningitis goes about its soft, silent work.”
(At one point the Devil offers Leverkühn a concrete description of hell, which involves both extremes of hot and cold, with souls shuttling between both forever.)
After this long dialog in the center of the novel, we’re propelled into Leverkühn’s musical career, his time spent among German bohemians, as well as the experience of the First War. Here is how the narrator describes some of these roundtable discussions amongst the intelligentsia:
Good God!—science, truth! That exclamation echoed the predominant tone and spirit of these small-talker’s dramatic fantasies. They found no end of amusement in the desperate assault of critical reason against an invulnerable belief that reason could not even touch, and they joined forces to place science in the light of an impotence so comical that even the “handsome princes” could enjoy themselves splendidly, in their childish sort of way.
I have essentially run out of time with this letter (and I didn’t even talk about Leverkühn’s own body of work). This reading was actually meant to be part of the Solenoid Notebooks series, but I didn’t appreciate how long the book is. The basic parallels are clear, however: the mellifluous if a bit antsy first-person prose relating the becoming of an artist (a negative process in the case of the Cărtărescu). This rich novel by Thomas Mann could be used in a single seminar that would also function as a bootcamp for studying western humanities from Dante onward. We’ll finish with some lines from Zeitblom late in the novel that may cut to the heart of this text’s meditations on German history.
Of course, the giddy and perverse anti-rationalist themes of the bohemian intellectuals above offends Zeitblom’s humanist and liberal sensibilities, but “I dare not play the spoilsport and allow my revulsion to show, but had to join in the general merriment as best I could.” His idealism is “banal.”
It was an old-new, revolutionarily atavistic world, in which values linked to the idea of the individual (such as, let us say, truth, freedom, justice, reason) were sapped of every strength and cast aside, or, by having been wrenched free of pale theory, had at least taken on a very different meaning from that given them over the last centuries and, now relativized and red-blooded, were made applicable at the much higher levle of violence, authority, the dictatorship of belief—not in some reactionary way that looked back to yesterday or the day before, but in a way that was tantamount ot humanity’s being transferred, along with all these new ideas, back into the theocratic situations and conditions of the Middle Ages.
The most refined of accumulated human erudition, along with the most unprecedented acts of violence, as barbaric as they have been cavalierly justified.
Sounds like the history of imperialism in the 20th century!
Mann was not only inspired by Adorno’s work in the area of classical music, but even wrote in a homage toward the Frankfurt School thinker and famous jazz hater in one the physical descriptions of the devil figure. He “has a white collar and a bow-tie, spectacles rimmed in horn atop his hooked nose, behind which somewhat reddened eyes shine moist and dark; the face mingling of shparness and softness; the nose sharp, the lips sharp, but the chin soft, with a dimple in it, and yet another dimple in the cheek above; pale and vaulted the brow, from which the hair indeed retreats upward, whereas that to the sides stands thick, black, and woolly—an intellectualist, who writes of art, of music, for vulgar newspapers, a theorist and critic, who is himself a composer, in so far as thinking allows.”
Remember when I asserted in a previous letter that in western literature the devil is just a guy? There you go.