Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told By A Friend

Doctor Faustus: The Life Of The German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told By A Friend by Thomas Mann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took me nine months to read this book, and now I'm supposed to summarize it in a review limited to 20,000 characters? Pah! I don't dare even attempt it! Many others have outlined the plot (such as it is) and explored in greater detail than that of which I am capable, the parallels between the story and Mann's bout of cultural guilt over the Third Reich. Anything I say about this would only serve to expose how much I did not understand about this novel. And because I didn't understand the entirety of this novel, I will present my thoughts scattershot, with little or no context, as I don't have the capacity to provide it. My reading of this book, like my reading of Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, has left a great gaping void where my brain used to reside, but a void more capable of being filled now, because of the beautiful trauma that has been inflicted therein.

Since I am ill-equipped to address the slow-burning, then fast-burning plot, the emotionally deep and most-often tragic characters, or even the many clever uses of metafictional technique throughout, I will concentrate, quite simply, on one of the central conceits of the novel: the music of the composer, Adrian Leverkuhn.

Mann has caught my innermost feelings regarding what I will call "avant-classical" music. The sort composed by Ligeti, Penderecki, Part, Crumb, Xenakis, Schnittke, and Stockhausen. I have a perverse love of this seemingly-nihilistic music, a certain spiteful soft-spot for the naughtiness of it all. The brooding goth that lives behind my heart delights in the sheer transgressiveness of the music, while I take great intellectual interest at the same time, a real fascination that I can't explain, but is a core part of my deep life. It's a mixture of fear and delight, a rarefied emotional state that makes me feel connected with the rest of the cold, dark universe. Mann's prose, while not directly explaining the feelings I feel when I'm listening to such music, hints at them in a sidelong way:

Contagious diseases, plague, black death, were probably not of this planet; as, almost certainly indeed, life itself has not its origin on our glove, but came hither from outside. He, Adrian, had it on the best authority that it came from neighbouring stars which are enveloped in an atmosphere more favourable to it, containing much methane and ammonia, like Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. From them, or from one of them - he left me the choice - life had once, borne by cosmic projectiles or simply by radiation pressure, arrived upon our formerly sterile and innocent planet. My humanistic homo Dei, that crowning achievement of life, was together with his obligations to the spiritual in all probability the product of the marsh-gas fertility of a neighbouring star.

"The flower of evil," I repeated, nodding.

"And blooming mostly in mischief," he added.

Thus he taunted me, not only with my kindly view of the world, but also by persisting in the whimsical pretence of a personal, direct, and special knowledge about the affairs of heaven and earth. I did not know, but I might have been able to tell myself, that all this meant something, meant a new work: namely, the cosmic music which he had in his mind, after the episode of the new songs. It was the amazing symphony in one movement, the orchestral fantasy that he was working out during the last months of 1913 and the first of 1914, and which very much against my expressed wish bore the title Marvels of the Universe. I was mistrustful of the flippancy of that name and suggested the title Symphonia cosmologica. But Adrian insisted, laughing, on the other, mock-pathetic, ironic name, which certainly better prepared the knowing for the out-and-out bizarre and unpleasant character of the work, even though often these images of the monstrous and uncanny were grotesque in a solemn, formal, mathematical way.

-And again:

. . . a barbaric rudiment from pre-musical days, is the gliding voice, the glissando, a device to be used with the greatest restraint on profoundly cultural grounds; I have always been inclined to sense in it an anti-cultural, anti-human appeal. What I have in mind is Leverkuhn's preference for the glissando. Of course "preference" is not the right word; I only mean that at least in this work, the Apocalypse, he makes exceptionally frequent use of it, and certainly these images of terror offer a most tempting and at the same time most legitimate occasion for the employment of that savage device. In the place where the four voices of the altar order the letting loose of the four avenging angels, who mow down rider and steed, Emperor and Pope, and a third of mankind, how terrifying is the effect of the trombone glissandos which here represent the theme! This destructive sliding through the seven positions of the instrument! The theme represented by howling - what horror! And what acoustic panic results from the repeated drum-glissandos, and effect made possible on the chromatic or machine drum by changing the tuning to various pitches during the drum-roll. The effect is extremely uncanny. But most shattering of all is the application of the glissando to the human voice, which after all was the first target in organizing the tonic material and ridding song of its primitive howling over several notes: the rerun, in short, to this primitive stage, as the chorus of the Apocalypse does it in the form of frightfully shrieking human voices at the opening of the seventh seal, when the sun became black and the moon became as blood and the ships are overturned.

My dark fascination was inflamed as I read and recognized that Mann could convey that which I could not, my love of that dark, mysterious music. His ability to put into words, albeit indirectly, the feelings I feel when listening to this color of music, is, frankly, astounding. And while there were some sections on music theory that baffled me, there were long stretches of prose that enveloped me. The existentialist in me is in love with a good portion of this book. I can see myself hiding in its shadows frequently. Or maybe I can't see myself at all. And maybe that's the point.


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