Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus

Thomas Mann wrote his doorstopper novel Doctor Faustus late in life, long after his more widely read works of fiction, including Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain.

Thomas Mann, 1875–1955

It sometimes happens that a writer, toward the end of a career, attempts a massive opus that takes farther innovations that author started to explore earlier. Mann’s Doctor Faustus is that sort of book. You could also group in that category James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. Often those late-in-life bids for the magnum opus, or great work, end up more as fodder for literary critics than as a good read. Maybe that’s because the writer has gone several steps too far in developing their favorite stylistic devices and topics. 

My reservations about Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus are about the characters, the content, and the style. The narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, is a lifelong friend and obsessive chronicler of the novel’s main character, the classical composer Adrian Leverkühn. We have to take for granted Serenus’ description of Adrian as an “extraordinary human being,” and a great artist. But nothing in the novel makes us believe that Adrian is an extraordinary person, since his interactions with other people are puerile and condescending. Nor is the fuddy-duddy narrator Zeitblom very likeable, even if his fussiness and overly apologetic tone are at times funny. A novel where the main character is distasteful and the narrator is pedestrian—that’s a huge pill for a reader to swallow for their own good! 

Mann also spends an extraordinary amount of time describing nonexistent musical works that Adrian composes. When Mann has Adrian’s speaking or writing in the archaic language he uses, the book moves along like a cart drawn by an old horse and missing a wheel.  

 

There were times I felt that reading Doctor Faustus was a self-inflicted punishment. Nevertheless, I finished the book, tugged along by truly extraordinary moments that rewarded my patience, moments that are the most extraordinary I’ve ever read by Thomas Mann.

 

For instance, in turns out Mann was holding out on us before Doctor Faustus. Who knew that Mann had incredible insights into love and passion? He sidestepped those topics in many of his earlier works. I love this quip by Mann’s in Doctor Faustus about relationships: “There are people with whom it is not easy to live; but to leave, impossible.” (All English quotes are from the Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter translation.)

 

And this penetrating comment about an affair between a married woman and a young man:

“Passion is too much taken up with itself to be able to conceive that anyone would be seriously against it.” Mann trowels even deeper into that dangerous liaison, adding, “the joy, the love and suffering, did not come into their own if they remained wordless… The more secret they were, the more they required a third party, the intimate friend, the good man, to whom and with whom one could talk… ” The narrator Serenus Zeitblom becomes that confidant for the lovers.

 

Mann also makes some amazing statements in Doctor Faustus about music and language: “Music and speech, he insisted, belonged together, they were at bottom one, language was music, music a language; separate, one always appealed to the other, imitated the other, used the other’s tools, always the one gave itself to be understood as substitute of the other.” No one on Earth has ever said that better!

 

Mann’s descriptions of the natural world and the cosmos in the novel are also extraordinary. For example, he describes Adrian’s father’s love of books on nature and insects: “Clearwings were there depicted which had no scales on their wings, so they seemed delicately glassy and only shot through with a net of dark veins. One such butterfly, in transparent nudity, loving the duskiness of heavy leafage, was called Hetaera esmeralda. Hetaera had on her wings only a dark spot of violet and rose; one could see nothing else of her, and when she flew she was like a petal blown by the wind.”

 

Mann is quite witty on the subject of artists who embrace an outdated style and turn their backs on contemporary art. He says about these artists that they, “persuade themselves and others that the tedious has become interesting, because the interesting has begun to grow tedious.”

 

On a similar note, Mann writes, “For just as little as one understands the new and the young, without being at home in the traditional, just so must love for the old remain ingenuine and sterile if one shuts oneself away from the new, which with historical inevitability grows out of it.” In its own fussbudgety way, Thomas Mann had a revolutionary outlook on the arts.

 

My favorite chapter in Doctor Faustus doesn’t concern the principle characters in the novel, who all lack emotional appeal for me. But I loved Chapter XXXVII, where the impresario Saul Fitelberg tries in vain to persuade composer Adrian Leverkühn to abandon his retreat from the world in rural Bavaria and to move to Paris to become the darling of the salons and concert halls. Fitelberg’s half-German, half-French monologue is a hilarious satire both of the avant-garde and of its critics. 

 

In a way, the real protagonist of Doctor Faustus is not one of the novel’s characters, but the nation of Germany. The book tells the story of that country in the twentieth century, its selling of its soul to the devil, and the terribly tragic inability up till then of German culture to find a political expression of its greatest and most humanistic triumphs.

_________________________________

Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry