Polyphonic Composition
Critics who remain wedded to the idea that
Doctor Faustus is structured like an elaborate dodecaphonic matrix might draw support for their reading from a passage in
The Story of a Novel. There, Mann describes the impact left upon him by Theodor W. Adorno’s
Philosophy of New Music, which he studied in the late summer of 1943: “Moreover, this reading nourished the musical conception which had long been my ideal of form and for which this time there was a special esthetic necessity. I felt clearly that my book itself would have to become the thing it dealt with: namely, a musical composition.”
1Mann, The Story of a Novel, 64. Given that Adorno’s manuscript deals extensively with Schoenberg, is it not natural to assume that the “ideal of form” described here would be that of dodecaphonic technique?
In fact, Mann had taken inspiration from music throughout his long and varied career and had always turned to more traditional models than those provided by twelve-tone composition. Throughout the years in which Mann wrote
Doctor Faustus, he repeatedly commented on the strange incongruity between his own musical conservatism and the subject matter of his novel, perhaps most emphatically in a diary entry for September 28, 1944, in which he declared that “the triad-world of the
Ring cycle is, in truth, my musical home.” The formal influence of Wagner can indeed be strongly felt in
Doctor Faustus. In an introductory lecture on
The Magic Mountain that he delivered just a few years before he began writing his late modernist masterpiece, Mann spoke at great length on the debt that he owed to Wagner’s method of composing in
leitmotifs—recurring melodic fragments that add depth and continuity to the characters and concepts in Wagner’s music dramas.
2Thomas Mann, “The Making of The Magic Mountain,” trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter, Atlantic Monthly (January 1953): 41–45. In
Doctor Faustus, the repeated references to Schwerdtfeger’s blue and Marie Godeau’s black eyes serve a similar purpose.
Surely Mann had something more drastic in mind than this, however, when he spoke of a “special esthetic necessity” to engage with musical form in the
Doctor Faustus project. At a different point of his
Story of a Novel Mann writes: “But, above all, the interposition of the narrator made it possible to tell the story on a dual plane of time, to polyphonically weave together the events which shake the writer as he writes with those he is recounting.”
3Mann, The Story of a Novel, 31. The crucial word “polyphonically” is omitted in Richard and Clara Winston’s translation. This was not the first time Mann had used this metaphor to describe his novels; in a diary entry written a quarter-century before
Doctor Faustus, he had already called
The Magic Mountain “a polyphony of themes, thoughts, and impressions.”
4Diary entry for March 25, 1919, in Mann, Tagebücher, I: 178. Nevertheless, the term here acquires a novel and more technical connotation than it had before.
Mann’s phrasing indicates that he conceived of the two temporal planes that structure Doctor Faustus, and which I refer to in my commentary as “Time of Narration” and “Narrated Time,” as two interdependent narrative lines. (“Polyphony” is the technical name for a musical texture in which each voice presents a different melody. The various parts are harmonized by the laws of counterpoint, not by the chordal logic of “homophonic” compositions.) Sitting in Freising in 1944, Zeitblom recalls events that took place in Munich and Pfeiffering in the early 1920s: two separate narrative lines that nevertheless advance in tandem with one another. Yet when Zeitblom’s hands shake during the process of composition, it is impossible to tell whether they do so out of fear and loathing for Leverkühn’s actions during the 1920s or because of the Allied bombing raids that are targeting nearby Munich in the 1940s. Or to be more exact: they shake for both of these reasons, for the two seemingly independent lines are instead harmonically connected and Leverkühn’s misdeeds, so Zeitblom hints, may be the root cause of the Allied destruction.
Doctor Faustus makes use of this polyphonic technique to a far greater degree than even Mann’s quote from
The Story of a Novel would suggest. For its not just that Zeitblom and Leverkühn exist on two different temporal planes that are nevertheless in constant reference to one another; Leverkühn himself exists on multiple temporal and referential frames as well. Gunilla Bergsten therefore compares his function in the novel to that of a musical chord, though I personally prefer to avoid this term, since Mann strongly associates chords with the realm of homophony, not polyphony.
5Bergsten, Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus,” 136. I’ll expand on this particular aspect of the novel in chapter 9, “Five Masters from Germany.”
“History,” in Doctor Faustus, is thus treated not only horizontally (or “melodically”), as a matter of temporal unfolding, but also vertically (or “harmonically”) as a question of the simultaneity of non-simultaneous elements. This polyphonic approach greatly expands the capacity of the novel form. Nineteenth-century realism generally comments on history by illustrating how certain events lead to particular consequences. Doctor Faustus, on the other hand, supplements this basic cause-and-effect structure with a mind-bogglingly expansive modernist vision, concatenating multiple frames of reference in a way no sociological analysis or realist tale ever could.