Exorcising the Devil from Thomas Mann's "Doktor Faustus"

Abstract

Standard readings of Doktor Faustus involve intratextual interpretations of the Faust passage at the center of the novel and thereby accept the connection the narrator Serenus Zeitblom draws among love, disease, and the devil. The political-theological metaphor of the novel rests on this analogy: Adrian/Faust as Germany, the devil as the Nazi regime.1 This reading is generally accorded some validity, for Adrian's severe migraines and moments of compositional creativity seem to mirror events in German history in the novel's multileveled temporality. In this context, Adrian exemplifies the artist's descent into an aesthetic barbarism that parallels the political barbarism of his country. But it is time we exorcise the devil from Mann's Doktor Faustus because there is no devil in the novel. Adrian's life is not an allegory for a nation in league with the devil on its descent into barbarism. The demonic parallel is more appropriately drawn, if at all, with Serenus, for Serenus's biography resembles that of Goethe's Faust. He is the humanist doctor who has an affair with a lower class woman and later marries Helen, and he sees the devil in his friend as well as in German politics and culture. Through an intertextual interpretation and a close reading of the novel, I demonstrate that the demonic narrative is untenable. On my reading, Mann's Doktor Faustus is not a metaphorical damnation of Germany for having entered into a pact with the devil, i.e., with Hitler and the Nazi regime. Rather, the novel seeks to deliver a message of compassionate love, and to demonstrate the political and ethical urgency of its messages. My reading of Doktor Faustus builds on queer studies of Mann by Gerhard Harle, Anthony Heilbut and others who have uncovered the gay subtext of Mann's fiction. According to these analyses, Serenus clearly loves Adrian and, although Adrian does not return Serenus's love, he does love other men. Love is seen here as the primary motivator for the writing of the biography and as its principle subject. While my approach is informed by these studies, I am more interested in the narrative structure, its potential to elicit a response of caring love from the reader, and in the political implications of this aesthetic response. Thus, unlike queer readings which typically approach Mann's fiction biographically, I begin with the fictional subtext and move to love and politics. While I offer a new reading of the novel that removes Adrian's music from a Faustian and a demonic context, I still engage with the questions that continue to shape scholarship on the novel: Mann's relationship to (Reed), the debate over whether the novel is modernist or Romantic (Berman, Vaget, Mann, Joyce, Wagner), and the relationship of art to evil in its quest for innovation (Goldman, Heller, Reed). I simply shift the focus and the perspective from which these questions are considered. In my analysis, Serenus represents the Romantic, demonic tradition that Mann seeks to reject, while Adrian offers a new, humanist, modernist alternative that promises subjective expression, liberation, and community beyond suffering. While the literary and musical models certainly do diverge in Mann's portrayal of Adrian's musical text as superior to Serenus's Faustian narrative, the novel's narrative structure and the emotions elicited by the narrative (albeit musical) language are the more salient vehicles for Mann's ethical and political argument. According to Martha Nussbaum, emotional content and experience lend literature its particularity. She distinguishes literature from moral philosophy in that literature communicates moral truths through love's knowledge (40, 45-48).2 When we engage emotionally with novels -in Nussbaum's terms, when we allow them to become our friends -literature becomes a realm of moral education, for literature itself often searches for answers to the question how to live and so enables us to explore that question in the course of reading (23-24, 26-27). …