Thomas Mann's Artist-Heroes

Chapter Eight. Art as Disease: Doctor Faustus

121 CHAPTER EIGHT Art as Disease: Doctor Faustus Are Beethoven and Nietzsche great because they had syphilis? The twentieth-century Faustus believed this so completely that for the sake of his art he wouldn’t have his lesions treated, and the spirochete gave him his awful masterpieces as a reward. Saul Bellow1 I Mann emphasizes the Faustian similarities between Hans Castorp and Adrian Leverkühn when he writes in 1953 that the hero of The Magic Mountain “is the seeker, the quester, who ranges heaven and hell, makes terms with them and strikes a pact with the unknown, with sickness and evil, with death and the other world, with the supernatural.”2 The Magic Mountain (1924) and Doctor Faustus (1947) are so similar in characters, themes, symbols and politics that the syphilitic seems to follow just after the tubercular novel and to ignore the “healthy” achievement of the Joseph tetralogy (1933–43) and the Goethe book (1939). Mann had discussed the Romantic glorification of disease3 as early as “Tonio Kröger” (1903), when Tonio’s aphoristic conversation with Lisabeta Ivanovna expresses the artist’s opposition to health and proximity to damnation: “Only the irritations and icy ecstasies of the artist’s corrupted nervous system are artistic. . . . The kingdom of art increases as that of health and innocence declines. . . . [The artistic gift] rests upon extremely sinister foundations. . . . A genuine artist [is] foreordained and damned. . . . [He may not] pluck a single leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with his life.”4 Doctor Faustus returns to and transforms the concept that had dominated Mann’s art from the beginning of his career: that creativity is dearly bought by the suffering of the diseased and sacrificial artist, who becomes a social pariah at the same time that he produces the art that refines and redeems his society. In The Magic Mountain disease is a highly charged, paradoxical symbol—an experience to be both dreaded and desired. In Doctor Faustus disease is glorified by deluded, demonic figures and associated with Nazi values. Both The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus are intensely intellectual novels whose realistic descriptions have symbolic significance. (The linden tree, porcine enchantment,5 the magic number thirty-four and Apollonian visions appear in both novels.) Both novels are strongly influenced by the life and ideas of Nietzsche, characterized by the use of irony and leitmotif, concerned with the symbolic meaning of music and structured by a series of ideological polarities: free will and eternal recurrence, reality and appearance, culture and barbarism, love and death. Both have a “double-time reckoning”: they juxtapose flatland and mountain time, the decline of Adrian and of Germany. Both describe at considerable length the influence of a pedagogue, Settembrini and Kretschmar, and the intellectual development of the two heroes: their being and becoming, their avid quests for the heights of knowledge and creativity. Both portray disease as an attractive temptation that releases the hero from the responsibilities of bourgeois life. Both concern the Teutonic character, the conflict between a European Germany and a German Europe, the destructive destiny of Deutschland in the two great wars of the century. The characters of The Magic Mountain are divided and redistributed in Doctor Faustus. As D. J. Enright observed: “Zeitblom is a more thoughtful and less confident Settembrini, the Devil is a Naphta with more poise and much more power and Leverkühn is a Castorp who is shut off from Castorp’s way of salvation.”6 Adrian and Serenus have the same intimate but coolly formal relationship as Hans and Joachim. Serenus and Settembrini share the same culture, enlightenment and humanism. The English translator, Rüdiger Schildknapp, like Settembrini, always wears the same old clothes and checked trousers (which represent the shabby but still at122 chapter eight tractive anglophile elements in Germany). Adrian’s teacher, Dr. Stoientin, warns him against diabolical temptation just as Settembrini warns Hans against Clavdia. Clavdia, like Hetaera esmeralda, is a diseased temptress who comes from the East. Naphta’s fanatical ideology is expressed by the devil and two reactionary thinkers in Doctor Faustus: by the Lutheran Kumpf, whose “Pauline gospel of sin and justification made him turn away from aesthetic humanism”;7 and by the diabolical Schleppfuss, who wears a soft hat rather like a Jesuit, preaches atavistic conservatism and stresses the disintegration of modern culture. There is a dramatic gunshot toward the end of both novels: Naphta...