Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann novel)
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Doctor Faustus (in German, Doktor Faustus) is a German novel written by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947 as Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde ("Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by a friend").
The novel documents the life of its fictional hero, Adrian Leverkühn, from his early childhood to his early death. Leverkühn--a musical prodigy, an early twentieth-century German--intentionally plays out his own life-story along lines resembling the German medieval morality tale of Faust, who sold himself to Mephistopheles. As Leverkühn, impassioned by demons, develops artistically toward a fated reckoning day, German society simultaneously develops politically toward its catastrophic, fascistic fate.
Mann´s novel compares the life of Leverkühn with the life of Friedrich Nietzsche. In fact, both suffer a mental collapse due to syphilis. Mann follows the common idea that Nietzsche got syphilis in a visit to a brothel. It happens the same to Leverkühn. The novel brings together by this means the philosophy of Nietzsche, the Avant Garde musician and the destiny of Germany.
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[edit] Structure
Doctor Faustus consists of a vast array of characters, fables, world events, theories, memories, ideas, and places, sometimes directly and sometimes tangentially linked to the story of Adrian Leverkühn's life. For this novel, Mann studied musicology and biographies of major composers Mozart, Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, Hugo Wolf and Alban Berg, as well as philosophers like Nietzsche. He contacted contemporary composers like Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Hanns Eisler for further details. But the most important and direct contribution came from the philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno. Thomas Mann himself acknowledges that in his book 'The Genesis of 'Doctor Faustus' (1949), where he refers that some observations from Adorno made him rewrite whole parts of the book. Other people made contact with the book too during his writing, as Mann regularly read chapters to groups of friends he invited, a 'technique' also used by Kafka, in order to test the impact of the text.
A single narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, threads these items together to the best of his ability and energy. Mann: "Zeitblom is a parody of myself. Adrian's mood is closer to my own than one might -- and ought to -- think.“
[edit] Themes
The novel is concerned with the intellectual fall of Germany in the time leading up to World War II. Leverkühn's own moods and ideology mimic the change from humanism to irrational nihilism found in Germany's intellectual life in the 1930s. Leverkühn (the name means "live audaciously") becomes increasingly corrupt of body and of mind, ridden by syphilis and insanity. In the novel, all of these thematic threads--Germany's intellectual fall, Leverkühn's spiritual fall, and the physical corruption of his body--directly analogue to the political disaster of fascistic Germany. Mann's sense of the inseparable nature of art and politics may be seen in the published version of his 1938 United States lecture tour, The Coming Victory of Democracy, in which he said, ""I must regretfully own that in my younger years I shared that dangerous German habit of thought which regards life and intellect, art and politics as totally separate worlds."" In Doktor Faustus, Leverkühn's personal history, his artistic development, and the shifting German political climate are tied together by the narrator Zeitblom as he feels out and worries over the moral health of his nation (just as he had worried over the spiritual health of his friend, Leverkühn).
Another central theme is music. In the novel, Adrian Leverkühn develops the twelve-tone technique actually invented by Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg, who lived near Mann in Los Angeles as the novel was being written, was very upset that Mann had appropriated the method without attributing it to him, and at his insistence, later editions of the novel included a disclaimer at the end describing Schoenberg's invention of the technique.
Although Leverkühn's time as a student of theology is but brief, metaphysical considerations continue to permeate the novel, culminating in an imagined dialogue with the devil. Here, Leverkühn foregoes love to gain knowledge, paralleling the pact of Faust with Mephistopheles.
[edit] Adaptations
Mann's novel was adapted for the stage in 1999 by Polish theatre director Grzegorz Jarzyna (using the pseudonym "Das Gemüse"). It premiered in October 1999 at the Teatr Polski (Polish Theatre) in Wroclaw, in co-operation with the Hebbel-Theater in Berlin. The play surprised the audience with its traditionality, but did not convince the German critics who described it as a "disaster".
[edit] English translations
- H. T. Lowe-Porter translated many of Mann's works, including Doctor Faustus, almost contemporaneously to their composition. Mann completed Doctor Faustus in 1947, and in 1948 Alfred A. Knopf published Lowe-Porter's English translation (referenced below). It is quite serviceable, and if in certain instances Lowe-Porter's rendering becomes convoluted or arcane, it yet preserves most deeply the linguistic spirit of the author's own era (a stylistic sensibility so difficult to reproduce in subsequent generations).
- John E. Woods' translation of 1997 is a competent, intelligible, and superior English version. Necessarily, in achieving its goal of unified readability by English speakers of its own generation, it sacrifices a good deal in those sections of the text where characters speak in Early New High German.
[edit] References
- Mann, Thomas; translation by Lowe-Porter, H.T. (Helen Tracy). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. ISBN 0-679-60042-6.
- Mann, Thomas; translation by Woods, John E. (John Edwin). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. ISBN 0-375-40054-0.
- Reed, T.J. (Terence James). Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. Oxford University Press, 1974. ISBN 0-19-815742-8 (cased). ISBN 0-19-815747-9 (paperback).
