47. Doctor Faustus - chapter XLV

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p473 He was taken from us, that strangely seraphic little being was taken from this earth -- oh, my God, why should I seek soft words for the harshest, most incomprehensible cruelty I have ever witnessed? Even yet it tempts my heart to bitter murmur, yes, to rebellion. He was set on with frightful, savage fury and in a few days snatched away by an illness [cerebro-spinal meningitis, of course] of which there had been for a long time no case in the vicinity. Our good Dr. Kurbis was greatly surprised by the violence of its recurrence; but he told us that children convalescing from measles or whooping-cough were susceptible to it...

I will spare you the details; apparently meningitis is a particularly nasty way to die. Anyway, this is the crucial passage:

p477 ...when I [Zeitblom] spoke a few words of consolation and hope [to Adrian]:

“Spare yourself,” he roughly interrupted; “spare yourself the humanistic quibbles. He is taking him. Just let him make it short. Perhaps he can’t make it any shorter, with his miserable means.”

And he sprang back up, stood against the wall, and leaned the back of his head against the paneling.

“Take him, monster!” he cried, in a voice that pierced me to the marrow. “Take him, hell-hound, but make all the haste you can, if you won’t tolerate any of this either, cur, swine, viper! I thought,” he said in a low, confidential voice, and turned to me suddenly, taking a step forwards and looking at me with a lost, forlorn gaze I shall never forget. “I thought he would concede this much, after all, maybe just this; but no, where should he learn mercy, who is without any bowels of compassion? Probably it was just exactly this he had to crush in his beastly fury. Take him, scum, filth, excrement!” he shrieked, and stepped away from me again as though back to the Cross. [His pose at the end of the previous paragraph is supposed to suggest a crucifixion, I guess. And just by the by, I was sore tempted to let my "crusifiction" misspelling stand here.] “Take his body, you have power over that. But you’ll have to put up with leaving me his soul, his sweet and precious soul, that is where you lose out and make yourself a laughing-stock -- and for that I will laugh you to scorn, aeons on end. Let there be eternities rolled between my place and his, yet I shall know that he is there whence you were thrown out, orts and draff that you are! The thought will be moisture on my tongue and a hosannah to mock you in my foulest cursings!”

...

p478 I was leaving when he stopped me, calling my name, my last name, Zeitblom, which sounded hard too. And when I turned round:

“I find,” he said,  “that it is not to be.”

“What, Adrian, is not to be?”

“The good and noble,” he answered me; “what we call the human, although it is good, and noble. What human beings have fought for and stormed citadels, what the ecstatics exultantly announced -- that is not to be. It will be taken back. I will take it back.”

“I don’t quite understand, dear man. What will you take back?”

“The Ninth Symphony,” he replied. And then no more came, though I waited for it.

[Zeitblom leaves the next day and Adrian’s farwell is] p479 “‘Then to the elements. Be free, and fare thou well!’” [Source ]

He turned quickly away...

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46. Doctor Faustus - chapter XLIV + Charming Landscape

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Remember the wedding of Adrian’s otherwise never mentioned sister? She has, over the years, produced four children, the last a doomed and perfect little man of five named Nepomuk but called Nepo or, most commonly, after his own usage, Echo. In 1928 Echo comes down with a nasty case of measles and then his mother is sent to a sanatorium for a recurrence of a problem with her lungs. The still recovering Echo is sent to live with his uncle. I’m not really giving much away when I start by describing him as doomed as this is clear from almost the first sentence of Zeitblom’s introduction of this character. He is a beautiful and charming child everyone is irrisistably taken with. He is clearly and expressly “too good for this world.” The fictional character he most reminds me of is “Egg” from The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving. (I never saw the movie but I see that Egg was played by Seth Green, who was probably perfect for the role.) Of course Adrian is as taken with Echo as anyone else.

Perhaps Echo’s most unusual and impressive -- in a child of five -- trait is his propensity to say his truly distinctive prayers before bed. Where the text for these prayers comes from no one cares to ask about. I’m going to include the prayers that Zeitblom relates:

Whoso hedeth Goddes stevene

In hym is God and he in hevene.

The same commaunde myselfe would keepe,

And me insure my seemly slepe.

Amen.

Or:

A mannes misdeede, however grete,

On Goddes merci he may wait,

My sinne to Him a lytyl thynge is,

God doth but smile and pardon brings.

Amen.

Or:

Whoso for this brief cesoun

Barters hevens blysse

Hath betrayed his resound

His house the rainbow is;

Give me to build on the firme grounde

And Thy eternal joys to sound.

Amen.

Or, remarkable for its unmistakable coloration by the Protestant doctrine of predestination:

Through sin no let has been,

Save when some goode be seen.

Mannes good deede shall serve him wel,

Save that he were born for hell.

O that I may and mine I love

Be borne for blessedness above!

Amen.

Or sometimes:

The sun up-hon the divell shines

And parts as pure away

Keep me safe in the vale of earthe,

Till that I pay the debt of deathe.

Amen.

And Lastly:

Mark, whoso for other pray

Himself he saves that waye.

Echo prayes for all gainst harms,

May God hold him too in His armes.

Amen

I hadn’t been thinking of predestination, and I’m surprised Mann reminds us of this as it would seem to be something of a problem for this whole selling-your-soul business. Unless you interpret the Elect of God as being people destined (really predetermined) to live in accordance with God’s wishes, then if a person, like Adrian, happens to be among the Elect his actions or bargains would have no consequences as to his final destination. He would be going to heaven regardless. The whole Faustian bargain concept assumes it is you and not God who determines your fate.

Also, the line “His house the rainbow is;” must be a reference to Goethe’s Faust. That passage in Part 1 where Goethe trots out his hobby-horse of light and color, the point of which I would have to review. I found my notes on this and it is at the very beginning of Part 2. Here's a little taste of things to come:

Goethe's Faust

Part 2

Charming Landscape

[From the Interpretive Notes:] p 392 ...What unites these other moments in the drama with this scene, and indeed unites the drama of Faust as a whole, is a fundamental attempt by Faust to comprehend human existence in its constantly varying temporal dimensions and its constant dependence on shifting forces of mind and will, which motivate all actions and thought, with reference to some ultimate and absolute power of spirit or divinity, either within nature and thus accessible to human experience or else above and beyond the natural world, transcending all knowledge and understanding.

p 394 ...The arrival of dawn solicits in Faust’s mind a reciprocal response, which manifests itself in his renewed desire, indeed in his (Faustian) ‘striving’ toward the highest mode of existence...

...The second stage delineated the heroic, ultimately tragic thrust of Faust’s mind toward a confrontation with divinity as it manifests itself in the light of the rising sun. Instantaneous blindness results from the overwhelming brightness of the sun, forcing Faust to turn away his gaze, thus reversing his basic stance in what amounts to a tragic turn of the mind.

p 395 ...When he confronts the sun, Faust retreats, not to escape exposure, as was the case with Ariel and the spirits of nature, but to secure the conditions for reflective thought, which -- as Goethe knew from the entire history of German idealist speculation -- is the necessary condition for all conceptual knowledge and understanding... [This would also seem to be a case of Faust going for Apollinian insight instead of the more profound Dionysian.]

The final section of the monologue introduces one of Goethe’s most archetypal images of human experience. The life of a human being is symbolized by the waterfall as it plummets downward, crashing from rock cliff to rock cliff... [The Magic Mountain picnic?]  The force of the flowing water corresponds to the will or drive that constitutes Faustian striving. The clash of water and rock, however, produces a spray or mist that hovers above the waterfall. The fine water droplets, though in constant motion, are suspended as a constant veil, indistinguishable by the eye as either rise or fall. The term Wechseldauer... ‘in variance lasting’... applied to the resulting rainbow, indicates a central concept for Goethe with regard to the value of art as permanence in change... This mist is described as life’s ‘most youthful veil’... the concept of a veil is central to Goethe’s view of art, as indicated at the end of Act III, when Helena’s veil is transformed into a cloud that carries Faust back from Greece to Germany.

In this mist Faust discovers the ultimate symbolic sign for his reflections on the meaning of human existence. The mist catches the light of the sun as it shines through the air, each tiny droplet of water serving as a crystal from which the light is mirrored back and refracted, forming for the perceiving eye in the totality of this process a rainbow in its varied color. The image of the rainbow serves as symbol for the aspect of human creativity that constitutes art and poetry, indeed, human culture in the most general, all-inclusive sense of the term. This form of visual experience also remains accessible to Faust after he has turned away from the blinding light of the sun, providing a comprehensive and reliable mirror or ‘reflection’ of human striving... ‘This mirrors all aspiring human action.’ The depiction of the rainbow in its accurate scientific detail reflects Goethe’s extensive study of optics and color theory....

p 396 - The striving that constitutes Faust’s essential nature is thus sublimated into a reflection upon itself, a representation of itself as model or analogue for the work of art, in and through which the authentic light of the divine, which -- like the sun -- overwhelms human vision in direct confrontation, is refracted into the many-hued spectrum of the rainbow. In this sense the final line of Faust’s monologue describes the highest possible achievement of human art and culture, in Goethe’s view. That quality or aspect of life accessible to human experience -- the same force that beat again anew in Faust’s pulse at the dawn of this new day, affirmed at the outset of his monologue... is this multicolored refraction, which we may have and hold... Three levels of reflectivity are thus included in the symbol of the rainbow: 1) the mirroring and refracting of the sun’s light; 2) the cognitive perception of the refracted colors by the human eye; and 3) The conceptual comprehension of this visual experience by the mind, as demonstrated by the several reflective structures in the language of Faust’s monologue.” [Fuck me!, I didn’t get any of that reading the original lines. I think I need to quote lines 4698 to 4727. Here are the lines just interpreted:]

Faust: “...But now the alp’s green slants have also shaken

The dusk, for gleam and contour newly minded,

And light descends triumphant, stepwise darting; --

He clears the rim! -- Alas, already blinded,

I turn aside, my mortal vision smarting.

“Thus also, as we yearningly aspire

And find at last fulfillment’s portals parting,

Wrung within tender reach our prime desire,

There will erupt from those eternal porches,

Dumbfounding us, exorbitance of fire;

We only meant to kindle up life’s torches,

And flame engulfs us, seas of torrid blazes!

Love? Hatred? Which? envelopes us and scorches,

Sends pain and joy in vast alternate phases,

Till we gaze back upon our homely planet

And shelter in most young of youthful hazes.

“So, sun in back, my eyes too weak to scan it,

I rather follow, with entrancement growing,

The cataract that cleaves the jagged granite,

From fall to fall, in thousand leaps, outthrowing

A score of thousand streams in its revolving,

From upflung foam a soaring lacework blowing.

But in what splendor from this storm evolving,

Vaults up the shimmering arc, in variance lasting,

Now purely limned and now in air dissolving,

A cooling fragrance all about it casting.

This mirrors all aspiring human action.

On this your mind for clearer insight fasten:

That life is ours by colorful refraction.”

-Source

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45. Doctor Faustus -- chapter XLIII

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p452 My tale is hastening to its end -- like all else today. Everything rushes and presses on, the world stands in the sign of the end -- at least it does for us Germans. Our “thousand-year” history, refuted, reduced ad absurdum, weighted in the balance and found unblest, turns out to be a road leading nowhere, or rather into despair, an unexampled bankruptcy, a descensus Averno [facilis descensus Averno = "The descent to Avernus is easy." From Virgil's Aeneid, with reference to Avernus, a metonym for the underworld and to Lake Avernus in Italy, a volcanic crater lake reputed to emit deadly vapors. -Wiki] lighted by the dance of roaring flames. If it is true, as we say in Germany, that every way to the right goal must also be right in each of its parts, then it will be agreed that the way that led to this sinful issue -- I use the word in its strictest, most religious sense -- was everywhere wrong and fatal, at every single one of its turns, however bitter it may be for love to consent to such logic. To recognize because we must our infamy is not the same thing as to deny our love. I, a simple German man and scholar, have loved much that is German. My life, insignificant but capable of fascination and devotion, has been dedicated to my love for a great German man and artist. It was always a love full of fear and dread, yet eternally faithful to this German whose inscrutable guiltiness and awful end had no power to affect my feeling for him -- such love it may be as is only a reflection of the everlasting mercy.

...

p453 The Apocalypsis cum figuris, that great and piercing prophecy of the end, was performed at Frankfurt on the Main in February 1926, about a year after the frightful events that I chronicled in my last chapter. It may have been due in part to the disheartenment they left in their wake that Adrian could not bring himself to break through his usual retirement and be present at the performance, a highly sensational event, also one accompanied by much malicious abuse and shallow ridicule. he never heard the work, one of the two chief monuments of his proud and austere life; but after all he used to say about “hearing” I do not feel entitled to lament the fact...

Adrian’s father, Jonathan, and Max Schweigestill -- the patriarch of the family he lived with in Pfeiffering -- at the same age and almost the same day, both die. Adrian is not well enough to travel so he only attends the funeral of his surrogate father.

p455 That was after Christmas; the two fathers, their faces already half-turned away, half-estranged from earthly things, had still been present at the Christmas feast. [This is very well put. My dad was very similar his last Christmas and he passed away in March.] Now, as the light waxed, in the beginning of the new year, Adrian’s health markedly improved, the succession of harassing attacks came to an end. He seemed psychologically to have overcome the shipwreck of his life-plans and all the damage bound up with it, his mind rose up, a giant refreshed -- indeed, his trouble might now be to keep his poise in the storm of ideas rushing upon him. This (1927) was the year of the high and miraculous harvest of chamber music...

p457 ...The tendency to the hybrid, to mixing and exchanging, as it showed itself already in the treatment of the vocal and instrumental elements in the Apocalypse, was growing on him. “I have learned in my philosophy courses, that to set limits already means to have passed them. I have always stuck to that.” What he meant was the Hegel-Kant critique, and the saying shows how profoundly his creative power sprang from the intellect -- and from early impressions.

This is entirely true of the Trio for violin, viola, and cello: scarcely playable, in fact to be mastered technically only by three virtuosos and astonishing as much by its fanatical emphasis on construction, the intellectual achievement it exhibits, as by the unexpected combinations of sound, by which an ear coveting the unknown has won from the three instruments a combinational fantasy unparalleled. “Impossible, but refreshing,” so Adrian in a good mood characterized the work, which he had begun to write down even during composition of the ensemble piece, carried in his mind and developed, burdened as it was with the work on the quartet, of which one would have thought it alone must have consumed a man’s organizing power for long and to the utmost. It was an exuberant interweaving of inspirations, challenges, realizations, and resummonings to the mastery of new tasks, a tumult of problems which broke in together with their solutions -- “a night,” Adrian said, “where it doesn’t get dark for the lightnings,”

p458 “A rather sharp and spasmodic sort of illumination,” he would add. “What then -- I am spasmodic myself, it gets me by the hair like the devil and goes along me so that my whole carcass quivers. Ideas, my friend, are a bad lot, they have hot cheeks, they make your own burn too, in none too lovesome a way. When one has a humanist for a bosom friend, one ought to be able to make a clear distinction between bliss and martyrdom. . . .” He added that sometimes he did not know whether the peaceful incapacity of his former state were not preferable in comparison with his present sufferings.

...This was what, as he fancifully put it, his familiar friend Mr. Alkercocke told him to do and demanded of him. In one breath, or rather in one breathlessness, he wrote down the three pieces, any one of which would have been enough to make memorable the year of its production... “it goes,” he once wrote to me... “as though I had studied in Cracow.” I did not understand the allusion until I recalled that at Cracow, in the sixteenth century, courses were publicly given in magic.

...It is beyond all doubt that the year of the chamber music, 1927, was also the year when the Lamentation of Dr Faustus was conceived. Incredible as it sounds, while his mind was wrestling with problems so highly complicated that one can imagine their being mastered only by dint of the sheerest, most exclusive concentration, he was already looking ahead, reaching out, casting forward, with the second oratorio in view: the crushing Lamentation...

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44. Doctor Faustus - chapter XLII

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In which the Wooing-by-Proxy plan goes surprisingly awry.

Poor Rudi really did his best under the circumstances, but it seems that his feelings for Marie were not entirely one sided. She was offended by his wooing for another, which, of course, gave him hopes for himself. Proving himself to be as good at this as Adrian had hoped, Rudi manages to dig himself out of the hole he dug himself into, only to find that, thanks to the way he began in Adrian’s behalf, he is wooing for her hand -- which was not exactly his original plan. Soon they are engaged. Rudi sends an explanatory letter to Adrian that is an emotional blow to him, though he takes it as a lesson learned. What’s more, Rudi decides to abandon Munich for Paris. In his status as Konzertmeister for the Zapfenstosser orchestra, Rudi gives his farewell performance (Meistersinger) before departing Bavaria to join his betrothed in Paris. Alas, after the concert half the characters in the book find themselves (all independently) on the same tram with Rudi sitting across from the heartbroken (and drug-addled) Inez who empties a pistol into him.  He dies. Zeitblom helps care for him until the ambulance arrives and then goes to the Institoris house to inform “the little husband” who responds with:

p450 ”So then,” he said, “it came like that.” And it was clear that his dread had concerned chiefly the manner in which the inevitable tragedy would be consummated.

“I will go to her,” he declared, and stood up again. “I hope they will let me speak to her there” (he meant at the police cells).

After thorough consideration, Zeitblom decides not to telephone Adrian in the middle of the night with this news.

Again, I can’t recall so much plot in a chapter or two -- even an entire book -- by Thomas Mann. I can’t believe that Mann would include all this just for the romance. My previous attempt to match this up with Anna K was not at all successful... so let’s try it again.

Helmut is a pretty good Karenin -- aside from our having no real idea what’s happening in his head. Inez has a few things in common with Anna but also (as the seducer) with Vronsky. Rudi is most like Oblonsky in that the boy just wants to have fun.

Helmut’s wooing of Inez inadvertently sets the affair between her and Rudi going. Adrian’s wooing by proxy of Marie inadvertently turns Rudi into a Benedict. One might wonder if Mephisto was involved, but Adrian seems to have done Mephisto’s job for him, in keeping his life as cold as possible.

Could there be some bourgeois symbolism in all this ending on a tram rather than under a train? If so he is too deep for me.

Perhaps there is another shoe still to drop...


I also just noticed that there is some significance (surprise!) behind the name "Institoris." This from Wiki,

Heinrich Kramer (c. 1430 – 1505), also known under the Latinized name Henricus Institor,[1][2] was a German churchman and inquisitor...

At some date before 1474 he was appointed Inquisitor for the Tyrol, Salzburg, Bohemia and Moravia. His eloquence in the pulpit and tireless activity received recognition at Rome and he was the right-hand man of the Archbishop of Salzburg. By the time of the Bull Summis desiderantes of Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 he was already associated with Jacob Sprenger to make an inquisition for witches and sorcerers. In 1485 he drew up a treatise on witchcraft which was incorporated in the Malleus Maleficarum (literally "The Hammer of Witches").

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