26. Doctor Faustus - chapter XXV - part 4

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[continued from p241]

He: “Terse and testy. But why so testy? Because I put to you friendly questions of conscience, just between ourselves?  [This is a more fun Mephisto. And if he is only accessible as a consequence of disease, if he is an otherwise remote aspect of ourselves (I’m thinking in a pantheistic way now) this is even more interesting. At least to me. If you have, under special circumstances, access to the deity and you summon Mephisto instead of God, what does that say about you?]  Because I shewed you your despairing heart and set before your eyes with the expert’s insight the difficulties absolutely inseparable from composition today? You might even so value me as an expert. The Devil ought to know something about music. If I mistake not, you were reading just now in a book by the Christian in love with aesthetics [Kierkegaard]. He knew and understood my particular relation to this beautiful art -- the most Christian of all arts, he finds -- but Christian in reverse, as it were: introduced and developed by Christianity indeed, but then rejected and banned as the Divel’s Kingdom -- so there you are. [The omniscience of Devil (or God, for that matter) also works well with a pantheistic interpretation. How better for “Devel/God” to know “your” mind than if you are a part of the godhead. From this perspective, the work of the flagellants in the meninges simply cuts away at the individuation that separates us from the consciousness of what we really are. If god or devil speak to us we are simply coming closer to ourselves] A highly theological business, music -- the way sin is, the way I am. The passion of that Christian for music is true passion, and as such knowledge and corruption in one. For there is true passion only in the ambiguous and ironic. The highest passion concerns the absolutely questionable. . . . No, musical I am indeed, don’t worry about that. I have sung you the role of poor Judas because of the difficulties into which music like everything else has got today. Should I not have done so? But I did it only to point out to you that you should break through them, that you should lift yourself above them to giddy heights of self-admiration, and do such things that you will behold them only with shudders of awe.”

I haven't read Kierkegaard since college, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this (an essay in Either) is the section being referred to, though the whole book -- with it's comparison of the aesthetic and the ethical -- would be of interest to Mann,

An essay discussing the idea that music expresses the spirit of sensuality. 'A' evaluates Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni, as well as Goethe's Faust. 'A' has taken upon himself the task of proving, through the works of Mozart, that "music is a higher, or more spiritual art, than language". During this process he develops the three stages of the musical-erotic.[21] Here he makes the distinction between a seducer like Don Juan, who falls under aesthetic categories, and Faust, who falls under ethical categories. "The musical Don Juan enjoys the satisfaction of desire; the reflective Don Juan enjoys the deception, enjoys the cunning." Don Juan is split between the aesthetic and the ethical. He's lost in the multiplicity of the "1,003 women he has to seduce".[22] Faust seduces just one woman. Kierkegaard is writing deep theology here.

-Source

p241 I: “An annunciation, in fact. I am to grow osmotic growths.” [A reference to Adrian's father's experiments with growing crystals from an earlier chapter, p19 to be specific.]

He: “It comes to the same thing. Ice crystals, or the same made of starch, sugar, and cellulose, both are nature; we ask, for which shall we praise Nature more. Your tendency, my friend, to inquire after the objective, the so-called truth, to question as worthless the subjective, pure experience: that is truly petty bourgeois, you ought to overcome it. [I see Nietzsche here and a rejection of the Socratic/scientific/objective] As you see me, so I exist to you. What serves it to ask if I really am? Is not ‘really’ what works, is not truth experience and feeling? What uplifts you, what increases your feeling of power and might and domination, damn it, that is the truth [definitely Nietzsche] -- and whether ten times a lie when looked at from the moral angle. This is what I think: that an untruth of a kind that enhances power holds its own against any ineffectively virtuous truth. And I mean too that creative, genius-giving disease, disease that rides on high horse over all hindrances, and springs with drunken daring from peak to peak, is a thousand times dearer to life than plodding healthiness. I have never heard anything stupider then that from disease only disease can come. Life is not scrupulous -- by morals it sets not a fart. It takes the reckless product of disease, feeds on and digests it, and as soon as it takes it to itself it is health. Before the fact of fitness for life, my good man, all distinctions of disease and health falls away. A whole host and generation of youth, receptive, sound to the core, flings itself on the work of the morbid genius, made genius by disease: admires it, praises it, exalts it, carries it away, assimilates it unto itself and makes it over to culture, which lives not on home-made bread alone, but as well on provender and poison from the apothecary’s shop at the sign of the Blessed Messengers [this was Zeitblom's father's pharmacy. Mohammed is called the Blessed Messenger but I don't think that's what Mann has in mind. If I were to turn this into a screenplay I would make Adrian a jazz musician and substitute heroin for syphilis... it would work perfectly.] Thus saith to you the unbowdlerized Sammael. He guarantees not only that toward the end of your houre-glasse years your sense of your power and splendour will more and more outweigh the pangs of the little sea-maid and finally mount to most triumphant well-being, to a sense of bursting health, to the walk and way of a god. That is only the subjective side of the thing, I know; it would not suffice, it would seem to you unsubstantial. Know, then, we pledge you the success of that which with our help you will accomplish.  You will lead the way, you will strike up the march of the future, the lads will swear by your name, who thanks to your madness will no longer need to be mad. On your madness they will feed in health, and in them you will become healthy. [Not the way it worked for Nietzsche and Bataille and Foucault] Do you understand? Not only will you break through the paralyzing difficulties of the time -- you will break through time itself, by which I mean the cultural epoch and its cult, and dare to be barbaric, twice barbaric indeed, because of coming after the humane, after all possible root-treatment and bourgeois raffinement [refinement]. [And Mann had no notion of Foucault... unless he had his own Mephisto] Believe me, barbarism even has more grasp of theology then has a culture fallen away from cult, which even in the religious has seen only culture, only the humane, never excess, paradox, the mystic passion, the utterly unbourgeois ordeal. But I hope you do not marvel that ‘the Great Adversary’ speaks to you of religion. Gog’s nails! Who else, I should like to know, is to speak of it today? Surely not the liberal theologian! After all I am by now its sole custodian! In whom will you recognize theological existence if not in me? And who can lead a theological existence without me? The religious is certainly my line: as certainly as it is not the line of bourgeois culture. Since culture fell away from the cult and made a cult of itself, it has become nothing else then a falling away; and all the world after a mere five hundred years is as sick and tired of it as though, salva venia, they had ladled it in with cooking-spoons.”[a phrase Adrian has used previously]

So many chapters of exposition lead to this paragraph! I wouldn’t be surprised if he wrote this first and then constructed the earlier chapters to back-fill the story.

This passage is also in harmony with "The Grand Inquisitor" from The Brothers Karamazov. He changes appearance several time throughout this conversation, which I have spared you, but at this point he has changed form again into... wait for it... Schleppfuss!

p244 “Obedient servant,” I say. “I ought to know you; and I find it most civil of you to give me a privatissimus here in our hall. As ye now are, my Protean friend, I look to find you ready to quench my thirst for knowledge and conclusively demonstrate your independent presence by telling me not only things I know but also of some I would like to know. You have lectured me a good deal about the houre-glasse time you purvey; also the payment in pains to be made now and again for the higher life; but not about the end, about what comes afterwards, the eternal obliteration. That is what excites curiosity, and you have not, long as you have been squatting there, given space to the question in all your talk. Shall I not know the price in cross and kreuzer? Answer me: what is life like in the Dragon’s Den? What have they to expect, who have listened to you, in the speluca?”

He (laughs a falsetto laugh): “Of the pernicies [pest, bane, curse, disaster], the confutatio [something that confutes, proves false] you have to have knowledge. Call that prying, I do, the exuberance of the youthful scholar. There is time enough, so much that you can’t see to the end of it, and so much excitement coming first -- you will have a plenty to do besides taking heed to the end, or even noticing the moment when it might be time to take heed to the ending. But I’ll not deny you the information and do not need to palliate, for what can seriously trouble you, that is so far off? Only it is not easy actually to speak thereof -- that is, one can really not speak of it at all, because the actual is beyond what by word can be declared; many words may be used and fashioned, but all together they are but tokens, standing for names that do not and cannot make claim to describe what is never to be described and denounced in words. That is the secret delight and security of hell, that it is not to be informed on, that it is protected from speech, that it just is, but cannot be public in the newspaper, be brought by any word to critical knowledge, therefore precisely the words ‘subterranean,’ ‘cellar,’ ‘thick walls,’ ‘soundlessness,’ ‘forgottenness,’ ‘hopelessness,’ are the poor, weak symbols. One must just be satisfied with symbolism, my good man, when one is speaking of hell, for there everything ends -- not only the word that describes, but everything altogether. This is indeed the chiefest characteristic and what in most general terms is to be uttered about it: both that which the newcomer thither first experiences, and what at first with his as it were sound senses he cannot grasp, and will not understand, because his reason or what limitation soever of his understanding prevents him, in short because it is quite unbelievable enough to make him turn white as a sheet, although it is open to him at once on greeting, in the most emphatic and concise words, that ‘here everything leaves off.’ Every compassion, every grace, every sparing, every last trace of consideration for the incredulous, imploring objection ‘that you verily cannot do so unto a soul’: it is done, it happens, and indeed without being called to any reckoning in words; in soundless cellar, far down beneath God’s hearing, and happens to all eternity. No, it is bad to speak of it, it lies aside from and outside of speech, language has naught to do with and no connection with it, wherefore she knows not rightly what time-form to apply to it and helps herself perforce with the future tense, even as it is written:’There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.’ Good; these are a few word-sounds, chosen out of a rather extreme sphere of language, yet but weak symbols and without proper reference to what ‘shall be’ there, unrecorded, unreckoned, between thick walls. True it is that inside these echoless walls it gets right loud, measureless loud... [and so on. I don’t believe there is much here that couldn’t have been said about life in the SS camps.]

p246 He: “...You assaye to question me in order to be feared, to be afraid of the pangs of hell. For the thought of backward turning and rescue, of your so-called soul-heal, of withdrawing from the promise lurks in the back of your mind and you are acting to summon up the attritio cordis, [abrasion, suffering of the heart] the heartfelt anguish and dread of what is to come, of which you may well have heard, that by it man may arrive at the so-called blessedness. Let me tell you, that is an entirely exploded theology. The attrition-theory has been scientifically superseded. It is shown that contritio [repentance] is necessary, the real and true protestant remorse for sin, which means not merely fear repentance by churchly regulation but inner, religious conversion; ask yourself whether you are capable of that; ask yourself, your pride will not fail of an answer. The longer the less you will be able and willing to let yourself in for contritio, sithence the extravagant life you will lead is a great indulgence, out of the which a man does not so simply find the way back into the good safe average. Therefore, to your reassurance be it said, even hell will not afford you aught essentially new, only the more or less accustomed, and proudly so. It is at bottom only a continuation of the extravagant existence. To knit up in two words its quintessence, or if you like its chief matter, is that it leaves its denizens only the choice between extreme cold and an extreme heat which can melt granite. Between these two states they flee roaring to and fro, for in the one the other always seems heavenly refreshment but is at once and in the most hellish meaning of the word intolerable. The extreme in this must please you.” [Reading ahead, much of this description of hell could also just as well be a description of the Soviet conquest, especially of Berlin]

[to be continued]

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