A funny thing happened while reading Thomass Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. I will need that subtitle soon. Near the end of the book, I was looking up I do not remember what when I discovered that after four hundred dense pages I was reading the novel wrong, completely against decades of interpretation.
The novel is supposedly about an avant-garde German composer
who makes a deal with the devil, symbolically, presumably, although his biography
is full of curious devil figures. Adrian’s
artistic career, which ends tragically in madness, parallels the rise of German
fascism in various ways that are not at all far-fetched. The narrator, Zeitblom, usually calls his
friend “Adrian,” so I will do the same.
The narrator, yes, right there in Mann’s subtitle. The novel is a fictionalized memoir, not a
biography, of a man who was lifelong friends with an important composer. He finds devil figures throughout Adrian’s
life; he thinks Adrian made a pact with the devil; he thinks Adrian’s music, which
often makes him deeply uncomfortable, somehow parallels vulgar Naziism.
No one can follow my argument here who has not experienced as I have how close aestheticism and barbarism are to each other, or who has not felt how aestheticism prepares the way for barbarism in one’s own soul – though, granted, I have known this danger not of my own accord, but with the help of my friendship for a dear artist and imperiled spirit. (XXXIV, 392)
He deflects his own desiccated, narrow, proto-fascist vision
of life onto the composer, who he never understands and to whom he has always
been, however much he suppresses it, sexually attracted. This is what Doctor Faustus is actually
about.
Zeitblom is a classic unreliable narrator – uncomprehending,
dishonest, often close to insane. He
constantly raises doubts about his own trustworthiness I enjoyed it when, early on, he compared his
method to Tristam Shandy, but this is his peak narratorial craziness:
To what happened between Adrian and Rudolf Schwerdtfeger two days after our memorable excursion, to what happened and how it happened – I know all about it, though the objection may be raised tenfold that I could not know, that I was “not there.” No, I was not there. But it is a psychological fact today that I was there, because for anyone who has experienced an event, lived through it again and again as I have this one, a dreadful intimacy makes him an eye- or ear-witness of even its hidden phases. (XLI, 455)
The chapter that follows is full of detailed dialogue and
movement, including a highly unlikely digression about Zeitblom himself, all of
which, as Zeitblom directly tells us, he made up out of his own tormented
fantasies, his jealousy of Rudolf and Adrian’s other male friends.
Zeitblom is sincere where Adrian is ironic. Critics of Doctor Faustus, written by
a great ironist, have been sincere, taking Zeitblom’s word as Mann’s, despite
warnings, often direct, in almost every chapter that Zeitblom can’t be trusted. Had they not read The Good Soldier and
Pale Fire? Surely they read The
Tin Drum (1959), where the crazy narrator’s life story is full of
surprising parallels to the rise of the Nazis, the biography of Hitler, and
also the biography of Günter Grass? This
all seemed so obvious to me.
Tomorrow I will catalogue some of my favorite opinions of
Zeitblom and point to a new book that shows I am not alone.
I read and am referring to the Vintage International paperback
in the John E. Woods translation.
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