Nonpolitical Mann? Faustian Bargains and False Romanticism in Colm Tóibín’s The Magician

Abstract

This essay explores how Colm Toíbín’s biographical novel The Magician, alongside Thomas Mann’s own writings, exposes contradictions in Mann’s definition of “nonpolitical,” the relationship to today’s culture wars, the risks of virtue signaling and cancel culture, and the Faustian bargain of literary fame and external validation versus empathy and real human connection. Building on her study, Derivative Lives: Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative, Rademacher argues that what biofiction does especially well is to illuminate powerful spaces of uncertainty. Such gaps of knowledge and “not seeing” are not internalized, apolitical actions, but expose unsettled, contentious questions that continue to act on our lives. Within this framework, it is fear of and retreat from the uncertain that complicates Mann’s thinking and fiction. Toíbín’s novel exposes how Thomas Mann internalized a false Romanticism that rationalized personal and political forms of detachment and disengagement. In turn, the biofiction reveals how individuals become lost when they use imagination not as a means of contesting reality to understand the always incomplete and evolving nature of the human condition, but in order to conceal or evade this inquiry—deepening deceptive fictions.