Montage

Mann employed montage technique throughout his career. Perhaps the earliest famous example of it occurs in Buddenbrooks, where he cribs several pages of a medical textbook in order to vividly yet clinically render Hanno Buddenbrook’s slow death from typhoid fever. He also described this technique in a host of literary manifestos, from “Bilse and I” in 1906 to the 1940 essay “The Art of the Novel.” Nevertheless, it remained perhaps the most controversial aspect of his craft throughout his life. For cultural conservatives, Mann’s habit of copying from other sources was plagiarism at worst and evidence of a lack of imagination at best. Poets were supposed to be inspired inventors, not merely copyists who shuffled around pre-existing materials. Mann’s detractors among the literary avant-garde, on the other hand (his fellow novelist Alfred Döblin most famously among them) thought that his notion of montage did not go nearly far enough, that it was mere “quotation.” The Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein had developed a theory of montage in the 1920s that located the aesthetic effect of this technique precisely in the incongruity between juxtaposed elements. A sudden shift in style or perspective, so Eisenstein thought, could usefully destroy any lingering realist illusion in a film and instead force viewers to confront that they were dealing with an artistic construct. Mann was never interested in such avant-garde confrontation, and always tried to suture his quotations into his own literary texture.

The way in which the montage technique is deployed in Doctor Faustus nevertheless represents an important advance over Mann’s previous work. In a letter to Emil Preetorius, Mann spoke of a “strange” development in his use of the montage technique and noted that “something like this has never happened to me before.”2Letter to Emil Preetorius, December 12, 1947, in Mann, Selbstkommentare, 139. A few months later, writing to Erich Kahler, he claimed that “the idea of montage is in fact one of the premises of the book.”3Letter to Erich Kahler, March 6, 1948, in Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889–1955, Volume II: 1943–1955, ed. and trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 549. Indeed, the use of montage in Doctor Faustus differs both quantitatively and qualitatively from that in previous works. There is hardly a major text by Thomas Mann in which montage isn’t used at some point, but in Doctor Faustus it is one of the structuring principles of the work, to be found in almost every chapter, and indeed on almost every page. Such extensive acts of quotation also change the fundamental nature of the novel. We have already discussed the important connection between montage and polyphonic style, which allows Mann to juxtapose several different temporal layers in his text. Another important consequence of this near-constant game of textual hopscotch is that the flow of the action in Doctor Faustus is repeatedly interrupted as Mann pauses the plot to insert yet one more passage from one of Adorno’s essays, from a Nietzsche biography, or from a treatise on syphilis.

The first-time reader is bound to feel these interruptions most acutely whenever the discussion shifts to musical matters and the action comes to a halt for an extended period of time (as it does in chapter VIII, for example). It’s easy to react to such interruptions with annoyance, since they subvert the expectations that we place in a well-made plot. Mann’s digressions are undoubtedly clever, but shouldn’t he also have anticipated that most readers would eventually grow bored with them?4He did, in fact. For instance, he assured his young American admirer Fred H. Rosenau in a letter dated February 18, 1948, that, “it may sometimes seem that the essayistic portions of the book explode the novel form, but nevertheless even in these parts everything relates to the greater whole.” Mann, Selbstkommentare, 169.

One of Mann’s fundamental aims in Doctor Faustus, however, was to make us aware of a crisis afflicting art in the early twentieth century, and the montage structure of his novel should be seen as itself an expression and illustration of this crisis. Mann believed that the quest for ever more “advanced” forms of aesthetic expression over the course of the long nineteenth century had led the arts into a dead end, as it created a gap between what audiences demanded and what artists delivered. Within literature, this quest included the advent of such techniques as free indirect discourse and the stream of consciousness, as well as such movements as naturalism, symbolism, and literary impressionism. One possible solution to this dilemma lay in a new approach to production that would seek to create art out of the recombination of existing materials. Within the fine arts, the collage technique pioneered by the cubists expresses this tendency; within music, Stravinsky’s neo-classical play with established musical forms represents a similar response to the crisis. Thomas Mann’s montage technique, which substitutes appropriation for invention, intellectual reflection for spontaneous inspiration, also falls into this pattern.

Doctor Faustus, then, is a “novel on the margin of modernism” because it exemplifies modernist techniques but also desperately hopes to escape from the general intellectual condition of which modernism is ultimately a symptom. One of the main theses of the novel, as I have tried to argue in the introductory section of this book, is that the general disenchantment with the liberal ideology of progress that grabbed hold of Western societies in the early twentieth century led to an even more devastating “politics of eternity,” in which seemingly timeless concepts such as blood, soil, and masculine honor became the basis of a fascist body politic. Adrian Leverkühn, the quintessential modernist composer, exemplifies this same development on an artistic level when he turns away from the nineteenth-century musical tradition and pioneers his “strict style,” designed to exclude inspiration and novelty from the compositional process as much as possible.

Serenus Zeitblom, Leverkühn’s humanistic biographer, observes this development with horror and tries to critically account for it. But just like wide swathes of the German intelligentsia, he lacks the courage to fully acknowledge the role that people like him played in the political catastrophe that led to the rise of the Nazis. Zeitblom ultimately is an unreliable narrator, which in the context of Doctor Faustus means not only that we cannot fully trust his propositional statements, but also that his narrative—marked by metaliterary games such as the chapter numbering, by a polyphonic style, and by montage and digression—recapitulates many of the developments that Zeitblom ostensibly condemns. An alternate way to describe Doctor Faustus, then, would be as a “novel overcome by modernism”: the supreme example of a historical period and an artistic style that its very content indicts in the strongest possible terms.