6: Doctor Faustus and Literary Modernism
Doctor Faustus has always been a “novel on the margin of modernism.”
1Thus, the title of a volume edited by Herbert Lehnert and Peter C. Pfeiffer, Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”: A Novel on the Margin of Modernism (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1991). Born in 1875, Thomas Mann belongs squarely to the generation of writers to which literary critics refer as the “high modernists,” that is, the cohort that decisively broke with realist representation and devoted itself to inventing a new formal language. But generally speaking, the high modernists did their most important work in the 1920s, and when Mann sat down to write
Doctor Faustus in 1943, contemporaries such as Marcel Proust (born in 1871), Virginia Woolf (1882), and Franz Kafka (1883) were already dead. A double sense of lateness thus hangs over the work, a fact that Mann comments on at great length in
The Story of a Novel. First,
Doctor Faustus, like any other work of modernism, provides a capstone to what Zeitblom calls the “epoch of bourgeois humanism” (372/512). But second,
Doctor Faustus is also marked by a definite sense of coming late
within the modernist movement, at a time when the formal tools invented by Mann’s generation were no longer quite adequate to keep up with the pressures of the times, exemplified by global war, the rise of totalitarian propaganda, and the Holocaust.
Mann had ample occasion to reflect on both of these dimensions in his encounters with James Joyce, whom he did not read directly (his English was not good enough) but instead studied by way of a critical introduction written by Harvard professor Harry Levin.
2Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941). He immediately recognized the great Irish writer as a “brother”
3Diary entry for February 20, 1942, in Mann, Tagebücher, V: 395. and noted with some satisfaction that both he and Joyce employed traditional narrative styles only parodically.
4Diary entry for September 19, 1943, in Mann, Tagebücher, V: 627. But as time went on, he also began to show traces of disenchantment with what he now called Joyce’s “eccentric avant-gardism,” cribbing one of Levin’s judgments with resigned approval: “He has enormously increased the difficulties of being a novelist.”
5Both quotations from Mann, The Story of a Novel, 91. By the early 1950s, Mann even seemed to turn his back on the modernist legacy altogether, now noting: “I am one of the last people, maybe the last person period, who still knows what a ‘work’ is.”
6Diary entry for April 3, 1951, in Mann, Tagebücher, IX: 43.By then, of course, a new generation of novelists who rose to prominence in the years immediately following the war (Orwell and Camus, Sartre and Ellison, to name but a few) had started to engage with their times in frequently stripped-down prose that rebelled against both the conventions of traditional realism and the formal exuberance of high modernism. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus had once proclaimed history “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”; this new generation instead sought tools with which to engage it, given the horrors that they had witnessed.
7James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 2.377. Doctor Faustus, in its attempts to process the recent German past and draw more general lessons from it, in some sense anticipates these works. Its formal language, however, is still that of the modernist moment, even if it frequently bends this language to innovative ends. For any reader, an awareness of how the style and structure of
Doctor Faustus differs from that of more traditional novels is a prerequisite to making sense of the work.