The hilarious Doctor Faustus - I am not so very fond of laughter

Zeitblom, the narrator of Doctor Faustus, presents an interpretation of his composer friend Adrian Leverkühn suggesting that his avant garde aestheticism is the reason German intellectuals were so often so gullible and accepting of fascism.  Many critics, to my bafflement, have followed that path.

Zeitblom, a teacher of philology. is not a fascist, but, like many of the intellectuals the novel is about, some kind of fellow traveler or enabler.  His objection to the actual Nazis, aside from their vulgarity, is that (Zeitblom begins writing his memoir in 1943) they are losing the war to the “enfeebled democracies” (XXVI, 268), although he holds out hope for the V2 rockets, “such an admirable piece of ordnance that only sacred necessity can have inspired the genius who invented it” (XXXIII, 355).

He has many nutty views, like his suspicion, or even fear, of physics and the “so-called works of God” meaning, for example, the sun (XVIII, 159).  Or his belief that the glissando is “a musical device that , for profoundly cultural reasons, is to be employed with utmost caution and in which I have always tended to hear something anticultural, indeed anti-human, even demonic” (XXXIV, 393). Or his repeated insistence that his association with a group of Munich semi-fascist intellectuals bothered him so much that he lost fourteen pounds.  So he can’t one of them, can he?  Fourteen pounds!

As Reese from Typings notes, the novel is often quite funny, and much of the humor comes from the narrator's lack of humor and the bizarre things he believes.

On the whole he [Adrian] was more in the mood for laughter and foolishness than for metaphysical conversations…  I am not so very fond of laughter… (X, 94)

Luckily I came across A Reader’s Guide to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (2025) by Tobias Boes, available in its entirety as an open access book at JSTOR.  Boes’s book is heavily informed by years of teaching the novel to students at the University of Notre Dame, students who immediately notice Zeitblom’s repressed homosexuality, for example, which I know we are all trained to do now, sure; Boes politely, kindly, suggests that earlier scholars were somehow restrained from writing about such things.

For Doctor Faustus belongs to a class of modernist novels – Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire are other examples – in which the person telling the story is far more complex and far more interesting that the ostensible protagonist.  (Ch. 1, 12)

What was I just saying!  I have not exactly read but have poked around in Boes’s book.  I owe it for showing me that I was not the crazy one, dang it, but everyone else was.  Doctor Faustus is a dense, complex novel, open to complex arguments, but I do not see how it can be interpreted well except through the narrator, which is what Boes does.

“Why must everything appear to me as its own parody?”  (XV, 143)  That is the composer, the ironist, although I take it as Mann’s lament as well.  I knew and to some degree avoided Mann as a writer of Novels of Ideas, for which I have limited taste and am likely a poor reader, when in fact, as with The Magic Mountain he wrote parodies of Novels of Ideas.  Deep suspicion of ideas is itself an idea, yes.