Aside from Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann is my favourite German author. He had written difficult books which had been rewarding to read if you persist, such as The Magic Mountain; difficult books on touchy subjects such as the love of an old man to a young child, in Death in Venice, and a family saga which echoes the slide of the aristocratic fortune of the Buddenbrooks. Doctor Faustus is the story of a man who sold his soul to become a musical genius, as told by his friend.
Mann himself compared his book to Joyce’s Ulysses, and I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Doctor Faustus may not have reached the same heights as it has done if it weren’t for Mann’s reading of Joyce. It is ironic in a way, as Mann had trouble reading Ulysses in the original language as admittedly, most English speakers like myself would as well. At first glance, the ambitions of Doctor Faustus may not be as apparent as the verbose Ulysses, but Mann is right, there is a lot to uncover here.
Although there are bundles of essays trying to connect the two, the two works are very different. Arguably, Mann’s Doctor Faustus is a more subtle work than Ulysses, though it may match it for its ambitions of the depiction of the frailty of the human condition. We can also see Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn as we see Joyce’s Leopold Bloom — a tragic hero who’s a victim of his own times.
Leverkühn’s deal with the devil
Although Adrian Leverkühn is the supposive central figure of the story, we see him through the eyes of his oldest friend, Serenus Zeitblom, depicting Adrian’s life in detail. Yet, Adrian does not feature in all of Zeitblom’s lenses — the cast of the other supporting characters are treated with the same gravity as Adrian. Zeitblom’s memory is selective, jaded, and hazed through the lens of sentimentality. But we must rely on him as the only guide who’s trying to justify the existence of Adrian Leverkühn.
Born into a humble farming family, Adrian picked up music easier than most of children his age would, to the point that he was referred to the local composers to attend music lessons. After giving up studying theology, he took refuge into a small town to become a full time composer, but his talents and successes were not entirely owed purely from his own abilities.
In a scene where the devil visited Adrian, we find out that despite his talents and the results from his talents, he’s barred away from experiencing love, a term that he must accept. The Mephistopheles that came to Adrian’s chambers is comparable to Goethe’s Faust: a shape shifter, changing his positions without moving, eloquent. Though he is a social recluse, he was able to feel attached to some of his closest friends, fall in love, and love his family deeply. But somehow, those who he feels any affinity to were either unable to reciprocate this love, or taken away from him by ways of tragedy.
Zeitblom’s vision also encompassed those around him who may have indirect influence to Leverkühn’s life — the Rodde sisters (a mini Sense and Sensibility dynamic within the novel); Rudolf Schwerdtfeger, a young violinist who enjoys the privilege of lending his strings to Leverkühn’s compositions; and a wealth of other bourgeois characters, each a representation of the decay of German bourgeoisie at the epoch.
Doctor Faustus is probably gonna be one of the hardest books you read all year.
The novel was published in 1947, two years after the Axis defeat by the Allies. But in 1943, when Mann started to write the novel, Germany was in the thick of things. Mann exiled himself out of Germany, being outright against the Third Reich and by that time, at the same time Zeitblom voiced the memoirs of Leverkühn, Germany herself was falling apart.
In Doctor Faustus, the concept of Germany is pivotal and thus, what it means to be a German. Coupled with Mann’s humanism, the two many not be complementary and perhaps contradictory:
And yet there is something else — some of us fear it at moments which seem to us criminal but others quite frankly and steadily — something we fear more than German defeat, and that is German victory.
But why? The thought of German victory is daunting for those living outside her borders, but equally for some who are within. Does German victory imply the loss of the privileges previously enjoyed? Or maybe something far more sinister? I would ask Thomas Mann himself but he’s not around. Though it is difficult not to draw analogies, Adrian Leverkühn’s pact with the devil can be paralleled to Germany selling away her humanity, as Adrian lost his.
Adrian Leverkühn though isn’t the representation of Germany one to one; we can’t forget the supporting characters and Zeitblom himself, who is quite transparent with his opinions. At first reading, my thoughts of Zeitblom was that he was everything that represents German beliefs, but the fact that he is an intellectual and a humanist mean that he does not necessarily represent this. I believed that Zeitblom was one of those who would fall in line with Hitler’s beliefs, caught in the euphoria of German progress — not just in words, but by tangible conquests: The Western Front, new leaps in music (such as those birthed by Leverkühn in the novel via Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, to the composer’s dismay as he felt Mann appropriated his method).
However, like the other characters in the novel, Zeitblom is multi-faceted and complex. He claims to be Leverkühn’s closest friend, but he lived to tell the tale, which means that Adrian Leverkühn did not love him enough as a friend to lose him, as Rudolf had gone. It is in some ways, a tale of an imbalanced friendship, of a fanboy who claimed the friendship of a genius. Zeitblom is as reliable as a narrator as Charles Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. We see only through the lens of a much biased man — biased mainly to his friend (or the idea of his friend) and his quite proud German identity. This led to an existential crisis and shame on the impending German defeat:
“How will it be to belong to a land whose history witnesses this hideous default; a land self-maddened, psychologically burnt-out, which quite understandably despairs of governing itself and thinks it for the best that it become a colony of foreign powers; a nation that will have to live shut in like the ghetto Jews, because a frightfully swollen hatred round all its borders will not permit it to emerge; a nation that cannot show its face outside?”
The question of Germanism is everywhere and runs through the veins of almost every page — what is the German identity? And the same question runs in every page of other German works from Nietzche’s Birth of Tragedy to Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolfe. All these works explore the concept of the Dionysian and Apollonian, the German temperament and the need for laughter as an offset and of course, German music. It is in German music that the German identity is the most transparent. It is in German music that German literature praises its litanies and the colossus writers such as Nietzsche, Hesse and Mann himself vie for definition of living.
Then Doctor Faustus is the perfect vehicle for this discussion: a man who sold his soul for music. It is a chilling thought to sell your soul for anything — so that he loses his humanity. But it is in German music that definition of art is complete — Gesamtkunstwerk, an idea propagated by Wagner’s music and finds its parallels to Adrian’s music. In his early days, Adrian had also converted works of literature into symphonies — such as Shakespearean plays. In Doctor Faustus, the forms of art is complementary to each other. Where one falters, the other takes the slack. Where words falter to describe music, we must imagine the beauty of the Leverkühn’s music inadequately but beautifully written by Mann:
“Never had I felt more strongly the advantage that music, which says nothing and everything, has over the unequivocal word, yes the saving possibility of all art, compared with the bareness and baldness of unmediated revelation.”
The book itself is a symphony. The conductor, Zeitblom, selects the sections which lends the highest volume. The university friends can be percussion, the German aristocracy strings, and Adrian Leverkühn remains of course the composer. Leverkühn is not always in the spotlight and each of the characters play their own symphony, as framed by Zeitblom. What can we do as an audience but only to listen?
And to be frank, this symphony is not for everyone. And it is a piece of work that is better enjoyed with deeper reading of the context and the materials of those who had tried to decipher the novels themselves. For most, this book may be a bit of all over the place, but the mess is measured, there is purpose to the cacophony and seen as a whole, it is undeniably wonderful.
