Medium Specificity

It is ultimately up to the reader to decide whether these numerical eccentricities indicate the presence of a demonic force that is helping to shape the narrative, or whether they are another attempt by Zeitblom to distract attention from evils that actually have purely human causes. Either way it is clear that the chapter divisions in Doctor Faustus function differently than they do in realist novels, where they primarily serve to break down the narrative into digestible chunks. In Doctor Faustus, by contrast, chapter divisions actively participate in the process by which the novel creates meaning.

This is an inherently modernist property, for it illustrates what the art critic Clement Greenberg called modernism’s obsession with “medium specificity,” that is, with those features of an artwork that are unique to a given medium and are ordinarily dismissed as mere carriers of meaning, rather than of meaning proper.1See Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laokoon,” Partisan Review (July–August 1940): 296–310. Greenberg was thinking about the ways in which abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning focused attention on the materiality of paint, but for a writer like Thomas Mann, such meta-literary components as chapter divisions serve an analogous purpose. Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system can be similarly seen as a form of modernist medium specificity, for it privileges abstract considerations about the mathematical relationship between tones over the affective and expressive dimensions of music.

Doctor Faustus has, in fact, often been interpreted as an elaborate attempt to capture the essence of twelve-tone music in the form of written prose. For instance, some readers of the novel have pointed out that the number “forty-eight” (corresponding to forty-seven numbered chapters plus the epilogue) is highly significant in dodecaphonic composition, where each tone row consists of twelve tones and can be presented in four different versions (original, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion).2Probably the first critic to point this out was Aline Valangin in the pages of Die Auslese in April 1948. An English translation of this text can be found in Schoenberg, The “Doctor Faustus” Dossier, 125–30. See also Bergsten, Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus,” 168–79. It is even possible to map the four-fold division of dodecaphonic theory onto the novel. One way to do so would be to argue that the first twelve chapters of Doctor Faustus document Leverkühn’s growth into the world in the manner of a traditional German novel of formation, which conventionally ends when the protagonist has found a place in society. The next twelve chapters, starting with the encounter with the devil figure Eberhard Schleppfuss, invert this process of outward growth and depict Leverkühn’s withdrawal into an inward-facing world of musical composition, abnormal psychology, and sexual aberration (the latter facet culminating in him willfully contracting syphilis). The next twelve chapters, which begin with another Satanic encounter in XXV, form a retrograde to the first twelve chapters and see Leverkühn retrace the steps that took him from Buchel to Munich in reverse order, until he ends up in Pfeiffering, the uncanny equivalent of his childhood home. The final twelve chapters, beginning with the visit by Saul Fitelberg, another devil figure, combine elements of inversion and retrograde when Leverkühn renounces his nascent fame and focuses once again on his inner life, including his tragic relationships with Schwerdtfeger, Godeau, and Echo.3The most recent variation on such a reading that I am familiar with is the one by my colleague Berthold Hoeckner, who goes so far as to argue that Zeitblom must himself be an incarnation of the devil, since he is the only character to appear in chapter I and thus the only character who might complete the symmetry that places a devil figure in each of the starting chapters of a twelve-chapter sequence. See Berthold Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 224–65.

Other critics propose that the three-part chapter XXXIV be counted thrice, resulting in a novel with forty-nine chapters plus an unrelated epilogue. Forty-nine, in turn, is the square of the number seven, which plays an important role in many Satanic rituals. Conceptualizing Doctor Faustus in this fashion not only hints at the magic square of chapter XII, but also moves the novel into the vicinity of the twelve-tone matrices that Schoenberg drew up to illustrate his theories.

Proponents of such readings rarely acknowledge that there is strong circumstantial evidence that Mann never intended them. For instance, he informed his American translator Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter on February 29, 1947, that he was toying with the idea of making his novel more accessible by dividing it into multiple “books,” restarting the chapter numbers with each one. He even composed new transitional sections for this purpose.4Mann, Selbstkommentare, 104. Less than a month later, he backtracked on his previous letter, now observing that: “the work has, after all, been written in consecutively numbered chapters and the text contains several allusions to that.”5Mann, Selbstkommentare, 107. By November, however, still bothered by the possibility that his novel might prove overly taxing to his readers (a consideration that also caused him to slash extended passages for the second edition), he reversed himself once again, now giving Lowe-Porter permission to expand the total number of sequentially numbered chapters to fifty for the American publication, explaining that “this would be a superficial change that would not make much of a difference” (Lowe-Porter never acted on the suggestion).6Mann, Selbstkommentare, 125.

Clearly, then, Mann regarded his self-referential games with chapter numbering as an indispensable part of Doctor Faustus, but he was willing to accommodate minor changes as long as they didn’t interfere with the overall import of those games. A division into fifty numbered chapters, for example, would have kept chapter XXV at the center of the work and would have done nothing to interfere with chapters XIII and XXXIV. But if he had really intended the novel’s structure to allude to the twelve-tone technique, he surely would have said so to his American translator. The fact that he did not actually increases the modernist cachet of his work. For “medium specificity” is by definition not transferable from one artistic medium to another. Tone rows obey an inner logic that is based in the principles of acoustics and the history of Western music; Schoenberg could never have invented an “eleven-tone system.” This logic is lost when transferred to the realm of literature, where twelve chapters are no more of an inherently significant organizing unit than eleven or thirteen chapters would be. As Zeitblom’s excursus at the start of chapter XIV illustrates, the chapter numbers in Doctor Faustus are instead based on a form of medium specificity particular to the novel: they flow from the complex decisions that are involved in the process of giving a meaningful shape to narrated human experience.7Nicholas Dames, in The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), points out that “a turn to the indexical or citational functions of chapters will present itself usually as self-consciously antique. In the case of the novel, it […] serves as a reminder of the novel’s historical lateness” (32). This, too, of course, would have been entirely congruent with Thomas Mann’s intentions.