42. Doctor Faustus - chapter XL

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[Adrian dispatches Zeitblom to Munich to invite Mlle Godeau on an excursion to the Bavarian Alps by train and sledge. She accepts. The party is to include, besides Godeau, her “aunt,” Adrian and Zeitblom, both Rudi and Rudiger (who wishes to ski behind the sledge) and also Zeitblom’s ghost wife Helene. Their first stop, after the switch from train to sledge, is Linderhof, “the small rococo castle of Ludwig II...” which they tour. Then they go to Kloster Ettal where they have their evening meal at a hotel before returning home the way they came. And that could be it for this chapter... the second short recap in a row! Except for that “Oh. My. God.” moment I had while reading the closing pages of this fairly uneventful jaunt in the snowy Bavarian mountains. To fully appreciate what is to follow you need to have been with me through the daunting slog through Michel Foucault... are those groans I hear? Bear with me.]

p430 ...The discussion was intermitted only by a visit to a church; it was in the main a controversy between Rudi Schwerdtfeger and me over the so called madness, the incapacity for reigning, the dethronement and legal restraint of Ludwig. To Rudi’s great astonishment I pronounced all that unjustifiable, a brutal piece of philistinism, and in addition a political move in the interest of the succession.

Rudi took his stand on the interpretation, not so much popular as bourgeois and official, that the King was “completely crackers” as he put it. It had been absolutely necessary for the sake of the country to turn him over to psychiatrists and keepers and set up a mentally sound regency. He, Rudolf, did not understand why there should be any question about it... I must say that I surprised even myself by the eloquence which the subject aroused in me, although before that day I had scarcely given it a thought. I found that unconsciously I had formed quite decided opinions. Insanity, I explained, was an ambiguous conception, used quite arbitrarily by the average man, on the basis of criteria very much open to question. Very early, and in close correspondence with his own averageness, the philistine established his personal standards of “reasonable” behaviour. What went beyond those norms was insanity... But a sovereign King, surrounded by devotion, dispensed from criticism and responsibility, licensed, in support of his dignity, to live in a style forbidden to the wealthiest private man, could give way to such fantastic tastes and tendencies; to the gratification of such baffling passions and desires, such nervous attractions and repulsions, that a haughty and consummate exploitation of them might very easily look like madness. To what mortal below this regal elevation would it be given to create for himself, as Ludwig had done, gilded solitudes in chosen sites of glorious natural beauty! These castles, certainly, were monuments of royal misanthropy. But if we are hardly justified in considering it a symptom of mental aberration when a man of average equipment avoids his fellows, why then should it be allowable to do so when the same taste is able to gratify itself on a regal scale?

But six learned professional alienists had established the insanity of the King and declared the necessity for his internment.

Those compliant alienists had done what they did because they were called on to do it. Without ever seeing Ludwig, without having examined him even according to their own methods, without ever having spoken a word to him. A conversation with him about music and poetry would just as well have convinced those idiots of his madness. On the basis of their verdict this man was deprived of the right to dispose of his own person, which doubtless departed from the normal, though it by no means followed that he was mad. They degraded him to the status of a patient, shut him up in his castle by the lake, unscrewed the door-knobs and barred the windows. He had not put up with it, he had sought freedom or death and in death had taken his doctor-jailer with him: that was evidence of his sense of dignity, but no convincing proof of the diagnosis of madness...”

Am I mad or is this not Foucault’s main argument in Madness and Civilization in a nutshell?

p432 But his frantic extravagance was a definite sign of an unbalanced mind; it had become intolerable; and his powerlessness to govern had followed upon his unwillingness to govern: he had merely dreamed his kingship, refusing to exercise it in any normal form. In such a way no state can survive.

“Oh, nonsense, Rudolf. A normally constructed minister-president can govern a modern federated state even if the king is too sensitive to stand the sight of his and his colleagues’ faces. Bavaria would not have been ruined even if they had gone on letting Ludwig indulge his solitary hobbies, and the extravagance of a king meant nothing, it was just words, a pretext and swindle. The money stayed in the country and stonemasons and gold-beaters got rich on his fairy palaces. [Now we have Bataille’s “Accursed Share” a few years early] More than that, the estates had paid for themselves over and over, with the entrance fees drawn from the romantic curiosity of two hemispheres. We ourselves had today contributed to turn the madness into good business. . . . Why, I don’t understand you, Rudolf,” I cried. “You open your mouth in astonishment at my apologia, but I am the one who has the right to be surprised at you and not to understand how you, precisely you -- I mean as an artist, and anyhow, just you . . .”

I sought for word to explain why I was surprised, and found none. My eloquence faltered; and all the time I had the feeling that it was an impropriety for me to hold forth like that in Adrian’s presence. He should have spoken. And yet perhaps it was better that I did it; for my mind misgave me lest he be capable of agreeing with Schwerdtfeger. I had to prevent that by speaking myself, in his proper spirit. I thought Marie Godeau also was taking my action in that sense, regarding me, whom he had sent to her about the day’s excursion, as his mouthpiece. For she looked at him and not at me. For his part, indeed, he had an enigmatic smile on his lips, a smile that was far from confirming me as his representative.

What is Zeitblom trying to say about Rudi? If he can't find the words how are we supposed to guess them? What does his having seduced Adrian have to do with Ludwig?

“What is truth?” he said at last. And Rudiger Schildknapp chimed in at once, asserting that truth had various aspects, of which in the present case the medical and practical were perhaps not the highest ones, yet even so could not quite be brushed aside. In the naturalistic view of truth, he added the dull and the melancholy were remarkably enough united. That was not to be taken as an attack on “our Rudolf,” who certainly was not melancholic; but it might pass as a characterization of a whole epoch, the nineteenth century, which had exhibited a distinct tendency to both dullness and gloom. Adrian laughed -- not, of course, out of surprise. In his presence one had always the feeling that all the ideas and points of view made vocal round about him were present in himself; that he, ironically listening, left it to the individual human constitutions to express and represent them. The hope was expressed that the young twentieth century might develop a more elevated and intellectually a more cheerful temper. Then the conversation split up and exhausted itself in disjointed speculation on the signs, if any, that this might come to pass...

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