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.
Very nice. I'm glad you enjoyed it even if it is Novel-of-Ideas-ish...
ReplyDeleteSerenus is quietly hilarious, but I do think you're a little harsh on the poor man. I'll be conventional and note that he owes quite a lot to Mann himself. Zeitblom starts writing on the same day Mann starts Faustus, e.g. But more importantly I think is that they're both initially sympathetic to an anti-Democratic German conservatism that is going to lead to bad places. Mann sees through it earlier than Zeitblom--Zeitblom may not even see through it until the Germans start losing the war--but they make a similar political turn. One Mann wishes/hoped more Germans made.
That similarity may almost be what gives the feeling of repressed homosexuality, though it didn't occur to me until I reread the novel after having read Fiedler.
Is there a first-person novel with a completely reliable narrator? Oh, probably, but there oughtn't be. Zeitblom isn't as nuts as Kinbote (assuming, of course, Kinbote is nuts and not really an exiled king...)
Novel of ideas often suggests something allegorical and this clearly isn't that. Novel with ideas?
Thanks for the shout-out.
So I take the vast majority of first person fiction as having reliable narrators. I do not think I am supposed to doubt what the narrator of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books is telling me. And given the excerpt I just read, boy does he tell me a lot. This is what is popular now, no kidding.
ReplyDeleteI guess I do not think of the Novel of Ideas as allegorical but perhaps as dialectical. Positions are presented and the poor reader is supposed to evaluate them. There is a chapter (XIV) in Doctor Faustus is which undergrads on a lark argue various philosophical positions; at the end Zeitblom admits that he made it all up, that it is representative at best. As usual, a parody of ideas, close to nonsense.
I was often reminded of The Tin Drum exactly because Zeitblom shares so much with Mann, although Mann, in fairness, went through his political crisis during World War One, as detailed in Observations of a Non-Political Mind (which I have not read). So Mann was ready for the Nazis. Unlike Zeitblom who, as you suggest, may never really change.
I came across another book, Overturning Dr. Faustus : rereading Thomas Mann's novel in light of Observations of a non-political man (2007) by Frances Lee which is on exactly this subject, taking Zeitblom as an outrageous self-parody. Highly Kinbote-ish. Lee even doubts Adrian's encounter with the prostitute ever happens, which would mean - well, I am not sure this is right, but I am less ure it is wrong.
.
Oops, here's the Lee book. I hope.
ReplyDeleteHave you read the Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man? In this book the humour and playfulness is obvious and doesn't need to be seen as evidence of "irony" (the constantly used term). An instance: Felix, is chosen to pretend to be an aristocrat, leaving the marquis to conduct an affair. He writes to the marquis' parents decrying the poverty he encounters and hopes for social solutions, he is reproved by them as, they say, it is a Christian duty to give charity - with no poverty, there can be no charity.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the book links, they look fun. When Boes says that Zeitblom is more interesting that Adrian, I would largely agree, but that he's quite the same league as Ashburnham, Kinbote, or Humbert Humbert, I don't--and I don't think Boes would either.
ReplyDeleteI thought some about the crazy names in Faustus, but not all of them. Sword-polisher, indeed. Zeitblom seems to be an actual name--there's a painter--but it also suggests to me flower of the time--even if he might be a slightly rank flower...though I'm not sure blom from blumen works for a German or not.
I've lately become curious about Erich Heller's Thomas Mann, The Ironic German, but I haven't scored a copy yet. I read something else by Heller & was impressed.
I read Non-political man a bit over a year ago, just before rereading Magic Mountain (which it was also supposed to help for, but I didn't find it much did.) It's an unpleasant read because it's such a splenetic book, and the prose style is far too close to the annoying end of German philosophical prose. (Too much Kant. Not enough Nietzsche. This is not a comment on ideas, just phrasing.) There's no sign to me he's begun the process of changing his mind on militarism and autocracy in it. Though a couple of the added essays in the New York Review Books reprint do show the change, including the one on Whitman. But for the book as a whole, you have to want to dive deep into the Mann rabbit-hole to read it.
A second vote for Krull if you haven't already read it. It's fun.
I've read the "Felix Krull" short story a couple of times, but not the novel. But there is a copy in this very house, so someday soon, I hope.
ReplyDeleteThe names in Faustus, to the extent I looked them up, are something else. I see why no one translates them, yet I wish someone would. Goofy Pynchon names.
And yes, the rabbit-hole. I do not quite like Mann enough to go down it, I guess, so I appreciated that you had done some of the work.