37. Doctor Faustus - chapter XXXIV - conclusion

Jump to Introduction + Chronology

Jump back to Previous: Doctor Faustus - chapter XXXIV - continued

p371 ...I did not for a moment conceal from myself that with an acuity worthy of note they [the gentlemen of the Kridwiss sessions] had laid their fingers on the pulse of the time and were prognosticating accordingly. But I must repeat that I should have been so endlessly grateful, and perhaps should have lost only six pounds instead of twelve, if they themselves had been more alarmed over their findings or had opposed to them a little ethical criticism. [But wasn’t this also the way they had dealt with the absurdities of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Reich?] ...what in a way they were saying was: It is coming, it is coming, and when it is here it will find us on the crest of the moment. It is interesting, it is good, simply by virtue of being what is inevitably going to be, and to recognize it is sufficient of an achievement and satisfaction. It is not our affair to go on to do anything against it. -- Thus these learned gentlemen, in private. But that about the satisfaction of recognizing it was a fraud. They sympathized with what they recognized; without this sympathy they could not have recognized it. That was the whole point, and because of it, in my irritation and nervous excitement, I lost weight.

...I should never have taken all that speechifying to heart if it had not constituted a cold-blooded intellectual commentary upon a fervid experience of art and friendship: I mean the birth of a work of art very near me, near through its creator, not through itself, that I may not say, for too much belonged to it that was alien and frightful to my mind. In that all too homelike rural retreat there was being built up with feverish speed a work which had a peculiar kinship with, was in spirit a parallel to, the things I had heard at Kridwiss’s table-round.

p372 ...The comment had been explicitly made... that such criticism must of necessity turn against traditional art-forms and species, for instance against the aesthetic theatre, which had lain within the bourgeois circle of life and was a concern of culture. Yes. And right there before my very eyes was taking place the passing of the dramatic form into the epic, the music drama was changing to oratorio, the operatic drama to operatic cantata -- and indeed in spirit, a fundamental state of mind, which agreed very precisely with the derogatory judgments of my fellow-talkers in the Martiusstrasse about the position of the individual and all individuals in the world. It was, I will say, a state of mind which, no longer interested in the psychological, pressed for the objective, for a language that expressed the absolute, the binding and compulsory, and in consequence by choice laid on itself the pius fetters of pre-classically strict form. How often in my strained observation of Adrian’s activity I was forced to remember the early impressions we boys had got from that voluble stutterer, his teacher, with his antithesis of “harmonic subjectivity” and “polyphonic objectivity”! The track round the sphere, of which there had been talk at Kridwiss’s, this track, on which regress and progress, the old and the new, past and future, became one -- I saw it all realized here, in a regression full of modern novelty, going back beyond Bach’s and Handel’s harmonic art to the remoter past of true polyphony.

...I was consumed with loving and anxious suspicion of an aestheticism which my friend’s saying: “the antithesis of bourgeois culture is not barbarism, but collectivism,” abandoned to the most tormenting doubts.

p373 Here no one can follow me who has not as I have experienced in his very soul how near aestheticism and barbarism are to each other: aestheticism as the herald of barbarism. I experienced this distress certainly not for myself but in the light of my friendship for a beloved and imperiled artist soul. The revival of ritual music from a profane epoch has its dangers. It served indeed the needs of the Church, did it not? But before that it had served less civilized ones, the ends of the medicine-man, magic ends. That was in times when all celestial affairs were in the hands of the priest-medicine-man, the priest-wizard. Can it be denied that this was a pre-cultural, a barbaric condition of cult-art; and is it comprehensible or not that the late and cultural revival of the cult in art, which aims at atomization to arrive at collectivism, seizes upon means that belong to a stage of civilization not only priestly but primitive? [That I consider the various Christian religions to be in fact primitive cults, does not help me understand what he is getting at here] ...How often has this intimidating work [Leverkuhn’s Apocalypse], in its urge to reveal in the language of music the most hidden things, the beast in man as well as his sublimest stirrings, incurred the reproach both of blood-boltered barbarism and of bloodless intellectuality! I say incurred; for its idea, in a way, is to take in the life-history of music, from its pre-musical, magic, rhythmical, elementary stage to its most complex consummation; and thus it does perhaps expose itself to such reproaches not only in part but as a whole.

By “barbarism” I think he often means “primitivism”. Again I’m unclear on what is meant by this choice of words. Barbarism, historically, refers to people who don’t speak your language. When Breisacher was using it previously he was talking about people who were not part of the Latin/Roman community, which was consistent with the original Greek use of the term. But here, I’m not sure what is meant by “barbarism.” Is it the speaking of a “different” language or simply a reference to culturally more primitive ideas?

And at the end, “the beast in man” takes us back to that discussion in the Foucault section of the previous blog about “bestiality” that ended up with the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. Could Mann mean by “barbarism” an appeal to the animal in man, the pre-human?

There follows a long and detailed description of Adrian’s Apocalypse and how it relates to Durer’s images, which I am going to skip for the most part.

p375 ...The whole work is dominated by a paradox (if it is a paradox) that in it dissonance stands for the expression of everything lofty, solemn, pious, everything of the spirit; while consonance and firm tonality are reserved for the world of hell, in this context a world of banality and commonplace...

p376 ...it seems to me I shall do best to go on, stating my opinions in the light of that reproach whose plausibility I admit though I would bite my tongue out sooner than recognize its justice: the reproach of barbarism. It has been leveled at the characteristic feature of the work, its combination of very new and very old; but surely this is by no means an arbitrary combination; rather it lies in the nature of things: it rests, I might say, on the curvature of the world, which makes the last return unto the first...

Reading this reminds me, you'll have to bear with me here, of a current Pop Music sensation to wit, "All About That Bass" by Meghan Trainor. I mean the combination of the new and the old, the way musical things return. The thing that struck me the first time I listened to "All About That Bass" was the harmonies that recall the Andrews Sisters (around 1:20). If there are any connections between this Pop song and Albrecht Durer's Apocalypse woodcuts, I am unaware of them... though the tune could well be in heavy rotation in a circle of hell reserved for people like me.

p377 ...When in 1926 at the festival of the International Society for New Music at Frankfurt the Apocalypse had its first and so far its last performance (under Klemperer) this extremely difficult part [“the testis, the witness and narrator of the horrid happenings: the ‘I, Johannes.’”] was taken and sung in masterly fashion by a tenor with the voice of a eunuch... That was altogether in the spirit of the work...

Soullessness! I well know that this is at bottom what they mean who apply the word “barbaric” to Adrian’s creation. Have they ever, even if only with the reading eye, heard certain lyrical parts -- or may I only say moments? -- of the Apocalypse: song passages accompanied by a chamber orchestra, which could bring tears to the eyes of a man more callous than I am, since they are like a fervid prayer for a soul. I shall be forgiven for an argument more or less into the blue; but to call soullessness the yearning for a soul -- the yearning of the little sea-maid -- that is what I would characterize as barbarism, as inhumanity!

I'm getting a vague sort of feeling that the little sea-maid may be key to understanding this book. Unlike mankind in the myth of Prometheus or Adam and Eve in the myth of The Fall, the sea-maid actively seeks out her mortality and her eternal soul, and she does it for love. She chooses to become more than a mere "beast" and is willing to pay the price.

p378 I write it down in a mood of self-defense; and another emotion seizes me: the memory of that pandemonium of laughter, of hellish merriment which, brief but horrible, forms the end of the first part of the Apocalypse. I hate, love, and fear it; for... I have always feared Adrian’s proneness to laughter... So much do I shudder at this episode in and for itself... this hurricane of hellish merriment, that I could hardly have brought myself to speak of it were not that here, precisely here, is revealed to me, in a way to make my heart stop beating, the profoundest mystery of this music, which is a mystery of identity.

For this hellish laughter at the end of the first part has its pendant in the truly extraordinary chorus of children which... opens the second part: a piece of cosmic music of the spheres, icily clear, glassily transparent, of brittle dissonances indeed, but withal of an -- I would like to say -- inaccessible unearthly and alien beauty of sound, filling the heart with longing without hope. And this piece... is in its musical essence, for him who has ears to hear and eyes to see, the devil’s laughter all over again... Every word that turns into sound the idea of Beyond, of transformation in the mystical sense, and thus of change, transformation, transfiguration, is here exactly reproduced. The passages of horror just before heard are given indeed, to the indescribable children’s chorus at quite a different pitch, and in changed orchestration and rhythms; but in the searing, susurrant tones of spheres and angels there is not one note which does not occur, with rigid correspondence, in the hellish laughter. [A music beyond good and evil?]

This is Adrian Leverkuhn. Utterly. That is the music he represents; and that correspondence is its profound significance, calculation raised to mystery. Thus love with painful discrimination has taught me to see this music, though in accordance with my own simple nature I would perhaps have been glad to see it otherwise.

Jump to Next: Doctor Faustus - chapter XXXV-XXXVI