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p492 ...when the year 1930 was almost half gone, in the month of May, Leverkuhn, by various means, invited a company to Pfeiffering, all his friends and acquaintances... On his cards Adrian had let it be known that he wished to give to a favorably disposed group of friends some idea of his just finished choral symphonic work, by playing some of its characteristic parts on the piano. He thus aroused the interest of certain people whom he had not thought of inviting, as for example the dramatic soprano Tanya Orlanda and Herr Kioeielund, who had themselves bidden through the Schlaginhaufens; and the publisher Radbruch and his wife, who attached themselves to Schildknapp. Adrian had also sent a written card to Baptist Spengler, though he certainly must have known that Spengler had not been for a month and more among the living...
As for me, I admit that I was not at ease about the whole affair... in my heart I liked better to feel he was alone in his refugium, seen only by us few, Schildknapp, our dear Jeanette, the adoring Rosenstiel and Nachedey and myself, than to have the eyes of a mixed gathering, not used to him, focused on him who in his turn was not used to the world...
p493 [Everyone assembles at Pfeiffering] Meanwhile the baying of old Suso or Kaschperl [the guard dog who has been on the job for a surprising 20 years plus by this point], jumping about and rattling his chain in front of his kennel, seemed never to stop; he became quiet only when no more guests came and the company had gathered in the Nike salon... In addition to the guests already named, I mention a few more of those present, at random and from memory: the wealthy Bullinger, Leo Zink, the painter, whom neither Adrian nor I really liked and whom he had presumably invited along with the departed Spengler; Helmut Institoris, now a sort of widower; the clearly articulating Dr. Kranich; Frau Binder-Majorescu, the Knoterichs, the hollow-cheeked jester and academy portrait-painter Nottebohn and his wife, brought by Institoris. Also there were Sixtus Kridwiss and the members of his discussion group: Dr. Unruhe, the researcher into the strata of the earth, Professors Vogler and Holzschuher, Daniel zur Hohe, the poet, in a black buttoned-up frock coat; and to my great annoyance even that quibbling sophist Chaim Breisacher... To my utter astonishment -- and probably not only to mine -- who should have found his way hither but Baron Gleichen-Russwurm, who, so far as I know, was making his first social appearance since that affair with the mouse [a funny story of deceit and theft gone wrong], and had brought his wife with him...
p494 Well, so all these people, some thirty, as I said, at first stood about expectantly in the salon, greeted each other, exchanged their feelings of anticipation. Rudiger Schildknapp, in his everlasting shabby sports clothes, was surrounded by females. Women, in fact, formed the majority of the guests... From the beginning I had observed that many of the guests did not notice Adrian’s presence and spoke as though we were still waiting for him, simply because they did not recognize him. He was sitting at the heavy oval table in the centre of the room...
p495 ...Silence and order were quickly established, It happened that at the table with Adrian sat the old Schlaginhaufens, Jeanette Scheurl, Schildeknapp, my wife and myself... Adrian showed no sign of gratifying the general expectation, mine included, by going to the piano... He began in the now complete hush to address the assembly, in the slightly monotonous, rather faltering voice I was familiar with... I must add that he often mis-spoke -- and in my agony I dug my nails into my palms -- and in correcting one mistake made another, so that after a while he paid no further attention, but simply passed them over. Anyhow, I need not have been so agonized over his various irregularities of pronunciation, for he used in part, as he had always enjoyed doing in writing, a sort of elder German, with its defects and open sentence-structure, always with something doubtful and unregulated about it; how long ago it is, indeed, that our tongue outgrew the barbaric and got tolerably regulated as to grammar and spelling! ...
p496 “Esteemed, in especial dear and beloved brethren and sisters.”
After that he was silent for a little, as though considering, his cheek resting against one hand that was supported by the elbow on the table...
“Firstly,” said he, “I will exhibit to you my thankfulness for the courtesy and the friendship, both undeserved by me, ye have vouchsafed in that ye are come hither into this place, afoot, and by wagon, since out of the desolation of this retreat I have written to and called you, likewise had you written to and called by my leal famulus and special friend, which yet knoweth how to put me in remembrance of our school-days from youth up, since we did study together at Halla; but thereof, and of how high-mindedness and abominacyon did in that study already begin, more hereafter in my Sermoni.”
...
p497 “Now have I a friendly Christian request to you that ye may not take and receive in evil part my homily, but that ye would rather construe it all to the best, inasmuch as I verily crave to make unto you, good and sely ones, which if not without sin are yet but ordinarily and tolerably sinful, wherefore I cordially despise yet fervidly envy you, a full confession from one human being to another, for now the houre-glasse standeth before my eyes the finishing whereof I must carefully expect: when the last grain runs through the narrow neck and he will fetch me, to whom I have given myselfe so dearly with my proper blood that I shall both body and soul everlastingly be his and fall in his hands and his power when the glass is run and the time, which is his ware, be fully expired.”
Again here and there somebody tittered or sniffed; but others shook their heads and made disapproving noises as though the words had been in bad taste. Some of the guests put on a look of dark foreboding.
“Know, then,” said he, at the table, “ye good and godly fold” (he said “god and goodly”), “with your modest sins and resting in Goodes godness, for I have suppressed it so long in me but will no longer hide it, that already since my twenty-first year I am wedded to Satan and with due knowing of peril, out of well-considered courage, pride, and presumption because I would win glory in this world, I made with him a bond and vow, so that all which during the term of four-and-twenty years I brought forth, and which mankind justly regarded with mistrust, is only with his help come to pass and is divel’s work, infused by the angel of death. For I well thought that he that will eat the kernel must crack the nut, and one must today take the divel to favour, because to great enterprise and devises one can use and have none other save him.”
A strained and painful stillness now reigned in the room. Only a few listened unperturbed; there were many raised eyebrows, and faces wherein one read: “What is all this and what is it leading up to?” If he had but once smiled or put on a face to explain his words as a mystification got up by the artist, matters would have been half-way made good. But he did not, he sat there in dead earnest. Some of the guests looked inquiringly at me, as if to ask what it all meant and how I would account for it. Perhaps I ought to have intervened and broken up the meeting, But on what pretext? The only explanations were humiliating and extreme; I felt I must let things take their course, in the hope that he would soon begin to play and give us notes instead of words. Never had I felt more strongly the advantage that music, which says nothing and everything, has over the unequivocal word; yes, the saving responsibility of all art, compared with the bareness and baldness of unmediated revelation. But to interrupt not only went against my sense of reverence, but also my very soul cried out to hear; even though among those who listened with me only very few were worthy. Only hold out and listen, I said in my heart to the others, since after all he did invite you as his fellow human beings!
p498 After a reflective pause my friend went on:
“Believe not, dear brothers and sisters, that for the promission and conclusion of the pact a crosse way in the wood, many circles and impure conjuration were needed, since already St. Thomas teacheth that for falling away there needs not words with which invocation takes place, rather any act be enough, even without express allegiance. For it was but a butterfly, a bright cream licker, Hetaera Esmeralda, she charmed me with her touch, the milk-witch, and I followed after her into the twilit shadowy foliage that her transparent nakedness loveth, and where I caught her, who in flight is like a wind-blown petal, caught her and caressed with her, defying her warning, so did it befall. For as she charmed me, so she bewitched me and forgave me in love -- so I was initiate, and the promise confirmed.”
I started, for now came a voice from the audience: it came from Daniel zur Hohe the poet, in his priestly garment, pounding with his feet and hammering out his words:
“It is beautiful. It has beauty. Very good, oh, very good, one may say so!” ...
“One thinks one is hearing poetry.”
Alas, one did not think so for long! This aesthetic interpretation, however conveniently offered, was not tenable. What we heard had nothing in common with zur Hohe the poet’s tall tomfooleries about obedience, violence, blood, and world-plunder. This was dead sober earnest, a confession, the truth, to listen to which a man in extreme agony of soul had called together his fellow-men -- an act of fantastic good faith, moreover, for one’s fellow-men are not meant or made to face such truth otherwise than with cold shivers and with the conclusion that when it was no longer possible to regard it as poetry, they very soon unanimously and audibly came to about it.
It did not look as though those interpolations had reached our host at all. His thoughts, whenever he paused in his address, obviously made him inaccessible to them.
...
p499 “...Yea verily, dear mates, that art is stuck and grown too heavy and scorneth itselfe and God’s poor man knoweth no longer where to turn in his sore plight, that is belike the fault in the times. But an one invite the divel as guest, to pass beyond all this and get to the break-through, he chargeth his soul and taketh the guilt of the time upon his own shoulders, so that he is damned. For it hath been said ‘Be sober, and watch!’ But that is not the affair of some; rather, instead of shrewdly concerning themselves with what is needful upon earth that it may be better there, and discreetly doing it, that among men such order shall be stablished that again for the beautiful work living soil and true harmony be prepared, man playeth the truant and breaketh out in hellish drunkenness; so giveth he his soul thereto and cometh among the carrion...
p500 “...Sold me time too, four and twenty years... and promised too great things and much fire under the cauldron, to the end that notwithstanding I should be capable of the work although it were too hard and my head too shrewd and mocking thereto. Only certes I should suffer the knives of pain therefore, even in the time, as the little sea-maid suffered them in her legs, which was my sister and sweet bride, and named Hyphialta. [I can’t find any previous use of this name but Here is another work of fiction that borrows the name] For he brought her me to my bed as my bed-sister that I gan woo her and loved her ever more, whether she came to me with the fishes tail or with legs. Oftentimes indeed she came with the tail, for the pains she suffered as with knives in the legs outweighed her lust, and I had much feeling for the wise wherein her tender body went over so sweetly into the scaly tail. But higher was my delight even so in the pure human form and so for my part I had greater lust when she came to me in legs.”
There was a stir in the room. Somebody was leaving, the old Schlaginhaufen pair it was...
p501 “Thereupon did Hyphialta get with child and accounted me a little son, to whom with my whole soul I clung, a hallowed little lad, lovelier than is ever born, and as though come hither from afar and of old stamp. But since the child was flesh and blood and it was ordained that I might love no human being, he slew it, merciless, and used thereto mine own proper eyes. For you must know that when a soul is drawn violently to evil, its gaze is venomous and like to a basilisk, and chiefly for children... I had well thought before that I, as devil’s disciple, might love in flesh and blood what was not female, but he wooed me for my thou in boundless confidence, until I granted it, Hence I must slay him too, and sent him to his death by force and order. For the magisterulus had marked that I was minded to marry me and was exceedingly wroth, sith in the wedded state he saw apostasy from him, and a trick for atonement. So he forced me to use precisely this intent, that I coldly murdered the trusting one and will have confessed it today and here before you all, that I sit before you also a murtherer.”
Another group of guests left the room at this point: little Helmut Institoris got up in silent protest, white, his underlip drawn across his teeth. So did his friends.. They all went out in silence...
Not sure how we are meant to take these confessions. The identification of Echo as his son by Hyphialta would seem to be a delusion even if Adrian was responsible for his death. And while Adrian does seem to have been responsible, in a way, for Rudi’s death I still don’t see how you can blame Mephisto for that unless you want to adopt a truly paranoid conspiracy theory regarding these events. My point is that Adrian seems to be delusional whether you think Mephisto is real, or imaginary, or only perceptible as a result of Adrian’s disease.
“But whatever sinner was I, ye friends, a murtherer, enemy to man, given to divelish concubinage, yet aside from all that I have ever busied myself as a worker and did never arrest... arrest or rist, but toiled and moiled and produced hard things, according to the word of the apostle: ‘Who seeks hard things, to him it is hard.’ For as God doth nothing great through us, without our unction, [see 4. Here] so neither the other. Only the shame and intellectual mockery and what in the time was against the work, that he kept aside, the residue I had to do myself, even also after strange infusions. For there was oftentimes heard by me all manner of instrument: an organ or positive, more delectable than harpes, lutes, fiddles, trombones, clarigolds, citerns, waights, anomes, cornets, and hornpipes, four of each, that I had thought myself in heaven had I not known differently. Much of it I wrote down. Often too, certain children were with me in the room, boys and girls who sang to me a motet from sheets of notes, smiled a funny little knowing smile, and exchanged their glances. They were most pretty children. Sometimes their hair was lifted as though from hot air and they smoothed it again with their pretty hands... Out of their nostrils curled sometimes little yellow worms, crawled down to their breasts and disappeared --”
p502 These words were the signal for another group of listeners to leave the room: the scholars Unruhe, Vogler, and Holzschher... But Sixtus Kridwiss, at whose house they held their discussions, kept his place, looking much excited... A little troupe of women had gathered round Leverkuhn as though to protect him: Kunigunde Rosenstiel, Meta Nackedey, Jeanette Scheurl -- these three. Else Schweigestill held aloof.
Again, how to take this? Since the composition of music looks like magic to me in any case, I wouldn’t be surprised if composers didn’t hear music in their heads from time to time... both audible and visual hallucinations would seem to belong to the realm of neurological disorder... but what do I know? Also, I can't recall Kunigunde or Meta having a single line of dialog.
“So the Evil One hath strengthened his words in good faith through four-and-twenty years and all is finished up till the last, with murther and lechery have I brought it to fullness and perhaps through Grace good can come of what was create in evil, I know not. Mayhap to God it seemeth I sought the hard and laboured might and main, perhaps, perhaps it will be to my credit that I applied myself and obstinately finished all -- but I cannot say and have not courage to hope for it. My sin is greater than that it can be forgiven me, and I have raised it to its height, for my head speculated that the contrite unbelief in the possibility of Grace and pardon might be the most intriguing of all for the Everlasting Goodness, where yet I see that such impudent calculation makes compassion impossible. Yet basing upon that I went further in speculation and reckoned that this last depravity must be the uttermost spur to Goodness to display its everlastingness. And so then, that I carried on an atrocious competition with the Goodness above, which were more inexhaustible, it or my speculation -- so ye see that I am damned, and there is no pity for me for that I destroy all and every beforehand by speculation.
This is just a review of the same in his encounter with Mephisto in Italy. For myself, I look at it as a parody of Christian notions of sin and Grace. Or to put it in the words of Shakespeare’s Don Pedro, it is all “too cunning to be understood.” And it doesn’t help if you throw in considerations of predestination.
But are there things so great that you would or should risk all -- even the unimaginable? It is and has always been the stuff of legend and myth and religion. Jesus and Prometheus, even Darth Vader come to mind. If I was Catholic I’m sure I could name some martyred saints to add to the list. Does it matter if the cause is just or not? And who is to judge that? That I view all this from a comfortably middle-class perspective is also worth keeping in mind.
p503 “But since my time is at an end, which aforetime I bought with my soul, I have summoned you to me before my end, courteous and loving brothers and sisters, to the end that my ghostly departure may not be hidden from you. I beseech you hereupon, ye would hold me in kindly remembrance, also others who perchance to invite I forgat, with friendly commendations to salute and not to misdeam anything done by me. All this bespoke and beknown, will I now to take leave to play you a little out of the construction which I heard from the lovely instrument of Satan and which in part the knowing children sang to me.”
He stood up, pale as death.
“This man,” in the stillness one heard the voice of Dr. Kranich, wheezing yet clearly articulate: “This man is mad. There has been for a long time no doubt of it, and it is most regrettable that in our circle the profession of alienist is not represented. I, as a numismatist, feel myself entirely incompetent in this situation.”
With that he too went away.
Leverkuhn, surrounded by the women, Schildknapp, Helene, and myself, had sat down at the brown square piano and flattened the pages of the score with his right hand. We saw tears run down his cheeks and fall on the keyboard, wetting it, as he attempted the keys in a strongly dissonant chord. At the same time he opened his mouth as though to sing, but only a wail which will ring for ever in my ears broke from his lips. He spread out his arms, bending over the instrument and seeming about to embrace it, when suddenly, as though smitten by a blow, he fell sidewise from his seat to the floor.
Frau Schweigestill, though she had stood farther off, was by him sooner than the rest of us, who, I know not why, wavered a second before we moved. She lifted the head of the unconscious man and holding him in her motherly arms she cried to those still in the room, standing anigh and gaping: “Let me see the backs of ye, all and sundry! City folk all, with not a smitch of understanding, and there’s need of that here! Talked about th’everlasting mercy, poor soul I don’t know if it goes’s far’s that, but human understanding, believe me, that doos!”
I would have split this chapter in two or at least shifted the commentary to a second post if that wasn’t so inconvenient. We are left with a too long post but at least it is the penultimate one for this book... maybe.
What does Adrian’s last “performance” remind me of? I sincerely hope some of you have guessed:
In his interesting yet problematic account of Foucault’s life, James Miller [in The Passion of Michel Foucault] describes the scene and setting of a small Parisian theater in late January, 1947. In the presence of surrealists (Andre Breton) and men of letters (Andre Gide) and others of the arts, Antonin Artaud took to the tiny stage with a handful of papers, poems scribbled across them. The evening was billed as a “Tete-a-tete with Antonin Artaud,” but for the illusive [elusive?] figure of the avant-garde, only weeks after being released from a mental institution in Rodez, it was his first and last chance to unleash upon the world what he called the “Theater of Cruelty.” In his most famous work, The Theater and its Double, Artaud had envisioned a living art-form that decimated the pretend boundary between civilization and culture, between artistic practice and its critical and theoretical accoutrements, something that would rouse bodies out of their plastic and immobile states. This theater would “seek in the agitation of the masses, convulsed and hurled against each other, a little of that poetry of festivals and crowds when, all too rarely nowadays, the people pour out into the streets.”2 Elsewhere in the text he describes a theater beyond linguistic structuralism taking place through the systematic deconstruction of dialogue – and by extension, language – itself: like the “Occidental usages of speech, the new theater “turns words into incantations. It extends the voice. It utilizes the vibrations and qualities of the voice. It wildly tramples rhythm underfoot. It pile-drives sounds.”3
In that tiny theater, this is precisely what Artaud did. Miller recounts how his fever-dream assault on the symbolic order, rendered as an “anchored mind screwed” into his body through “the psycho-lubricious thrust of heaven,” collapsed into strange and hermetic chants of languages unknown, created only by Artaud and understand by him. “O dedi, o dada orzoura, o dou zoura, a dada skizi.”4 Artaud shook and stammered, raging against “syphilis” and “electroshock,” the legions of doctors and psychotherapists who practiced not medicine but served as the mental watchdogs of the state. He dropped his pages and crawled on the ground in search of them; panic swept the audience. This lasted for three hours, and at the end, Gide guided him from the stage. Soon Artaud would be dead, but the overwhelming sense of a manifesting void that he caused the public to feel that day would linger on, finding itself resurrecting in the pages of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, and beyond.
Even if Artaud’s “Tete-a-tete” hadn’t occurred in the same month Mann completed his manuscript for Doctor Faustus, I wouldn’t believe the scene had been thrown in at the last minute because I have the feeling that this scene explains the presence of many of these characters who otherwise have little justification for belonging in the book. There were so many characters thrown in for little if any reason. I still don’t understand the point of Rosenstiel and Nachedey who were always hovering on the periphery but never really came into focus. Except perhaps that they, together with the rest of his little female band of angels (including Jeanette and Frau Schweigestill and his own mother) in the end duplicate the part played by Gretchen and the Mater Gloriosa at the conclusion of Goethe’s Faust. For whatever reason, they at least attempt to redeem Adrian.
But this is even more mystifying than Goethe’s ending. I’m not fond of Goethe’s view that his -- or at least his Faust’s -- being a horn dog wins him the eternal gratitude of womankind. But even that is far easier to believe than that Adrian Leverkuhn, who seems to have had next to nothing to do with women, aside from his brief youthful infatuation with his Esmeralda and his, not cold but not really warm either, friendship with Jeanette, should have been the focus of so much female interest and Grace. It would have been more consistent with the way Mann has cleverly swapped gender expectations throughout the book, if it was a band of men who saved Adrian.
P.S. Here's something I've just run into in a footnote of Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, p 51:
Robert Jourdain, in Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, cites Clara Schumann's diaries describing how her husband heard "music that is so glorious, and with instruments sounding more wonderful than one ever hears on earth." One of his friends reported that Schumann "unburdened himself about a strange phenomenon . . . the inner hearing of wondrously beautiful pieces of music, fully formed and complete! The sound is like distant brasses, underscored by the most magnificent harmonies."
Schuman probably had a manic-depressive or schizo-affective disorder, as well as, towards the end of his life, neurosyphlis. And, as Peter Ostwald brings out in his study of the composer, Schumann: Music and Madness, in Schumann's final breakdown, the hallucinations that he had sometimes been able to command and use in his creative days now overwhelmed him, degenerating first into "angelic," then into "demonic" music, and finally into a single, "terrible" note, an A, which played ceaselessly day and night, with unbearable intensity.
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