Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: A Novel at the Margin of Modernism edited by Herbert Lehnert and Peter C. Pfeiffer (review)

Book Reviews95 HERBERT LEHNERT and PETER C. PFEIFFER, eds. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: A Novel at the Margin of Modernism. Columbia: Camden House, 1991. 226 p. This newanthology on Thomas Mann's DoctorFaustus offers abroad spectrum of approaches to the novel's modernity. A collection of papers from an international symposium onDoctor Faustus and modernism at the University ofCalifornia, Irvine, the volume takes up Mann's treatment ofsuch disparate topics as evil, music, Jews, women, emd the hero's psychology. In their excellent introductory material, Herbert Lehnert and Peter C. Pfeiffer set useful parameters for this wide-ranging debate. With the passing of the Symbolist world view, they say, eirt lost its high moral status and became dissociated from common rational norms. The decline is exacerbated for Mann by the threat of Romantic pessimism to the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment, and Adrian Leverkühn's elitist music is presented as a breedidown in communal values. The issue the book raises is whether Western civilization, confounded in Leverkühn's era by the romantic lure of Fascist ideology, can resist the pressures on its moral fibre. Doctor Faustus is about Nietzsche's "moral" critique ofrationalistic systems, but Mann also asks whether the questioning of tradition has not gone too far. The contributors to the anthology tedie veuying positions on Mann's traditionalism. Objecting to the reactioneuy ethos of Doctor Faustus, Egon Schwarz and Brigitte Prutti observe a disturbing conservative bias in the author's portrayal ofJews and women, respectively. Helmut Koopmann faults Mann not for clinging to particular prejudices but for failing to represent the full force of contemporeuy evil. With National Socialism, Goethe's ethic of redemption no longer obtains, yet Mann, while refusing Goethe's optimism, finds no satisfactory way to conceptualize Fascist malevolence. In his psychological analysis of Leverkuhn, Manfred Dierks reads the musician's obsession with system and order eis a rigid "Netrcissistic" defense against the irrational forces that threaten individual and cultural stability. The remaining writers point cautiously to more positive signs in the crisis of tradition. According to Ehrhard Bahr, Mann overcomes the Nietzschean split between art and life by having Leverkuhn adopt the aesthetics ofTheodor Adorno. When Leverkuhn achieves Adorno's ideal, the identity of non-identical elements, the artist escapes the threat to creativity that comes from indulgence in the Dionysian at the expense of Apollonian discipline. John Fetzer and Hems Vaget identify affirmative adaptations oftradition in Doctor Faustus. Fetzer, explicating the intertwined themes oflove, death, emd music, finds constructive links between Leverkühn's art emd the work ofWagner emd Brentano emd edso an encouraging emphasis on love. Vaget discovers surprising remnants ofthe Christian theology of grace. In his view, Mann clings to tradition in a lifeaffirming way, leaving open a Goethean possibility for redemption. Hemnelore Mundt, finally, pays tribute to the impact of Doctor Faustus on Mann's successors, whose perceptions of modernity have been shaped by Mann's unified conception of eirt, religion, and society. The Camden anthology is a rich collection because it takes on the issues of modernism with vigor and discernment, alerting the reader to a veiriety of 96Rocky Mountain Review approaches to Mann's modern-day Faustian vision. Doctor Faustus, however, may be called a modernist text in large part because it relegates itself to a certain indecisiveness. Despite its despairing tone, the book refuses to express finaljudgment on the outcome ofthe contemporary crisis. The novel complicates this inconclusiveness, moreover, by adopting a self-conscious Nietzschean perspectivism, inviting but also declining systematic lines of interpretation. As their respondents point out, some contributors may carry their arguments too feir, evading Mann's beiffling complexity. Thus, to portray Mann as an antis émite, as Schwarz does, is to neglect the possibility that the depiction of Saul Fitelberg, for example, may not be driven by racial considerations at all. To insist with Dierks that the artist's creative pathology shuts out the irrational is to ignore the vital function ofthe Dionysian in Leverkühn's genius. To eirgue that by adopting Adorno's aesthetics Mann resolves Nietzschean polarities (Bahr's viewpoint) is to disregard the "Nietzschean self-aggrandizement which lurks behind the aesthetic analysis" (165). Although they...