11: Illness and Redemption: Leverkühn as Christ
In her 1977 study “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag famously argued that “the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is the one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”
1Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor,” in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 3. As Sontag was well aware, Thomas Mann would not have agreed with this statement.
2Sontag was a big Thomas Mann fan and refers to his works throughout “Illness as a Metaphor.” She also chronicled her youthful infatuation with the writer, which led her to pay a visit to his house in Pacific Palisades shortly after Doctor Faustus was finished, in her essay “Pilgrimage,” The New Yorker, December 14, 1987, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/12/21/pilgrimage-susan-sontag. The relationship between the two figures is plotted in Kai Sina, Susan Sontag und Thomas Mann (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017). Mann was the twentieth-century’s great poet of illness: typhoid fever in
Buddenbrooks, cholera in
Death in Venice, tuberculosis in
The Magic Mountain, syphilis and meningitis in
Doctor Faustus, uterine cancer in the late story “The Black Swan.” In most of these works, disease serves a metaphorical function and is usually used to indicate a fundamental inner unsoundness of the characters whom it afflicts.
The syphilitic infection at the heart of
Doctor Faustus is slightly different in this regard. “The syphilitic personality type [is] someone who ha[s] the disease,” Sontag wrote, “not someone who [is] likely to get it. In its role as scourge, syphilis implie[s] a moral judgment (about off-limits sex, about prostitution) but not a psychological one.”
3Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor,” 39. The proximity of Mann’s thought on this matter to Sontag’s is demonstrated by the fact that he, too, makes a great deal of syphilis’s historical reputation as a punishment or “scourge” (247/338). This insight is central to the novel. Leverkühn is not predisposed towards syphilis but
chooses to contract it. The moral indictment that this choice precipitates is triggered not by the literal action of having had sex with a prostitute, however, but rather by the allegorical significance of this act. And allegory in
Doctor Faustus is, as we have already seen, always a highly complicated matter. In chapter 9, “Five Masters from Germany,” I introduced the four-fold allegorical schema pioneered by early Christian thinkers as a framework through which to interpret
Doctor Faustus. I also offered a “typological” reading of the novel that stressed the similarities between Leverkühn and a number of prior figures from German intellectual life. In chapter 10, “Music Theory and Political Allegory,” I added to this a “moral” layer, according to which Leverkühn’s musical project allegorizes the slide into unreason and anti-democratic reaction that took place in the early twentieth century. In a final layer of allegory, one which early Christian theorists would have called “anagogical,” Leverkühn’s life can also be read theologically, as a commentary on the ultimate outcome of the struggle between good and evil in modern times.