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.

Misreading Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus correctly - who has not felt how aestheticism prepares the way for barbarism in one’s own soul

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.

I have a liking for these mass movements - Young Törless and fascism

There have been plenty of novels about fascism; that is clear enough.

The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil’s 1906 debut novel, is one of them.   Except, hold it, in 1906 there was no fascism.  I assume that Musil was such a keen observer of some of the psychology of the proto-fascist movements of his time, like the anti-Semitic political parties that were governing Vienna, that he was able to tease out the direction of events.  Or else the fascist bullies in Young Törless are exact portraits of boys Musil knew in school who just happen to prefigure the future.  Could be.  Either way, it is weird.

Young Törless lives at an isolated boarding school on the Hungarian plains.  The covers of the Penguin Classics edition and the older Pantheon I read include helpful photos that remind me that the students are always in military uniform, at least when they are not naked.

Törless has fallen in with “the boys who counted as the worst of his year,” a bad set, the brutal Reiting and the mystical Beineberg.  Reiting discovers that another boy, Basini, has been stealing, and the trio begin to blackmail Basini.  What Reiting wants from Basini is power; Beineberg wants a specimen on which to test his esoteric theories; Törless, passive, but cruel in his own way, want answers to metaphysical questions.  And sex, they all want sex, which they extract from Basini in one way or another:

“You know that sort of thing, it happens every few years.  But they went a bit too far.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well – how!  Don’t ask such silly questions!  And that’s what Reiting’s doing with Basini!”

Törless suddenly understood what he meant, and he felt a choking in his throat as if it were full of sand.  (75)

This is almost the limit of the novel’s explicitness, in other words wild stuff for 1906, plus it is not quite the limit.  Törless’s response to Beineberg’s news is actually pretty explicit.  One of Törless’s confusions is that he is homosexual, or so I see it, although that is an interpretive question.  Perhaps it is a just a phase in Törless’s development.

It is for Reiting, by contrast, who is simply a monster, with sex as another form of humiliation for when he tires of beating and insulting Basini.  Reiting in his later life will marry a women of his class and chase women below him; he will enter politics, eventually joining the Austrian Nazi Party and rising to a high position after the Anschluss.  Obviously this is not in the novel.  But it is Reiting who says things like “And anyway, I have a liking for these mass movements” (175) while planning a violent public humiliation of Basini.

Reiting is really just a charismatic thug, while Beineberg’s evil is ideological.  He is under the influence of Eastern mysticism and perhaps some form of degenerate Nietzschean thought:

“First of all, as far as Basini goes, it’s me view he’s no loss in any case.  It makes no difference whether we go and report him, or give him a beating, or even if we torture him to death, just for the fun of it.  Personally. I can’t imagine that a creature like that can have any meaning in the wonderful mechanism of the universe.”  (77)

Beineberg calls Basini a worm – step around him or on him, what difference does it make.  At this early point in the novel, it is likely a reader takes this all as adolescent bluster, which it is in part.  But Musil’s novel is also about the other part, the part that acts.

Also, there is the stuff about math.