Veering Towards Thomas Mann
I returned to an entirely tranquil Harvey Court last Sunday and, having spent some time battering myself about the head with Malory, have returned to a line of reading I spent most of the holiday exploring/being excited about etc... It has been a long time since I last stumbled across a text that reads and feels as if it is wholly locked together with the task of being - or life. So, rather than spending this quiet week back telling each one of you how good Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus is, I thought a tumblr post could be a bit less repetitive.*
Jason recommended Fred Parker's The Devil As Muse to me towards the end of Michaelmas term so, once I'd returned to London, I had a flick through it and found these two extracts (both delivered by the Devil to Mann's Faustus 'Adrian Leverkühn'):
a book by the christian in love with aesthetics. He knew and understood my particular relation to this beautiful art-the most Christian of all arts, he finds-but Christian with a negative sign, of course: introduced and developed by Christianity indeed, but then rejected and banned as a demonic kingdom-so there you are. A highly theological business, music-the way sin is, the way I am. The passion of that Christian for music is true passion, and as such knowledge and corruption in one. For there is true passion only in the ambiguous and ironic.
Your tendency, my friend, to inquire after the objective, the so-called truth, to question as worthless the subjective, pure experience: that is truly petty bourgeois, you ought to overcome it. As you see me, so I exist to you. What serves it to ask whether I really am? Is not "really" what works, is not truth experience and feeling? What uplifts you, what increases your feeling of power and might and domination, damn it, that is the truth-and were it ten times a lie when looked at from the moral angle. This is what I think: that an untruth of a kind that enhances power holds its own against any ineffectively virtuous truth. And I mean too that creative, genius-giving disease, disease that rides on high horse over all hindrances, and springs with drunken daring from peak to peak, is a thousand times dearer to life than plodding healthiness.
Leverkühn was reading Kierkegaard's Either/Or just prior to the Devil's arrival and the Devil concludes by reminding him that he's gonna pop it in 24years, because he got syphilis that one time he transgressed with a prostitute. I fell for these passages for many reasons, but primarily the appearance of - what feels more like a capital P - 'passion' + syphilis and then Nietschze's consequent presence throughout the Devil's speech. I got a copy from Amazon. Having got through a few chapters the very weight of the text in your hand/head struck me, the text seemed to be an apogee of that particularly German strain of western philosophy - Kant, Hegel, Nietzche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin etc... - but also very personally involved with the idea of what it is to be German, particularly around the time of WW2's curtain call (which brought me back to that Benjamin essay Task of The Translator and his statement that only those texts which are difficult or impossible to translate are those which can be truly translated and so I'm now set on learning German). That wasn't all though, in addition to all of this excitement, I then found out that Adorno helped Mann write parts of the text focused on musical theory but also played something of an editorial role - they spent an evening together with both of their wives discussing something like the final manuscript - and both Mann's Faustus and Adorno's Minima Moralia were, at least on a deeply personal basis for both authors, present for and in one another; Mann said of Adorno that "This is my man", while Adorno described their first meeting as 'a moment of realized utopia'. You should read their correspondence, if only to discover that he's Teddy to his friends.
That's the line of reading, hopefully it's of some interest to you all (and it doesn't appear too manic or self indulgent in writing). The last thing before I head back off to knight after knight after knight who smote another knight with both hands is a rather long extract from Chapter Six. Firstly, because it's the first use of an untranslated german word, which isn't a proper noun. Secondly, because some tiresome human being wrote the blurb and the press release which appears on amazon etc... and they seem to think that this book is nothing more than an allegory for the rise of the nazi regime:snore. I stand by that the book feels as though it thinks very hard about the the very nature of being (German?) and this extract, while directly mentioning the Nazis, seems to make that clear (to me). The narrator, someone who loved Adrian Leverkühn, is talking about the town they both lived in while they studied at High School. It is being written from 1943.
So much for the look of the town. But there hung in the air something of the state of the human heart during the last decades of the fifteenth century, a hysteria out of the dying Middle Ages, something of a latent psychological epidemic-a strange thing to say about the sensibly practical, modern town. But it was not modern, it was old, and age is the past as the present, a past only veneered with the present; and this may sound bold, but one could imagine a Children's Crusade suddenly erupting there-a Saint Vitus' dance, some utopian communistic lunatic preaching a bonfire of vanities, miracles and visions of the Cross, and roving masses of mystic enthusiasts. That did not occur, of course-how could it have? In compliance with the times and regulations, the police would not have allowed it. And yet! what all haven't the police refrained from acting upon in our own day-again in compliance with the times, which certainly do permit such things again of late. Our own times are secretly inclined-or, rather, anything but secretly, very purposefully in fact, with a particularly smug sense of purpose that leaves one doubting life's genuineness and simplicity and produces perhaps a very false, ill-fated historicity-our times are inclined, I say, to return to such epochs and enthusiastically repeat symbolic actions that have something sinister about them, that strike in the face of modern understanding: burning books, for instance, and other deeds I would rather not put into words.
It pains me to edit out a paragraph but I really should get back to watching paint dry on Le Morte Darthur. He talks about "characters" of towns, the persecution of women as witches and a particular women who lived in cellar quarters in his town of Kaisersaschern whose "behaviour had adapted to public prejudice" to the degree that "even a totally unbiased person, upon meeting her[...]might feel an archaic shudder come over him".
And here one bold word that comes from the experiences of our own time. For any friend of enlightenment, the word, the concept, of volk always carries some archaic apprehension, and he knows that one needs to address the crowd as the volk only if one wishes to lure them into some regressive evil. What all has not happened before our eyes-and not just before our eyes, either-in the name of the volk that could never have happened in the name of God, or of humanity, or of justice! That fact is, however, that the volk is always the volk, at least at a certain level of its being, the archaic level, and that people, neighbors from Klein Gelbgiesser Gang, who voted the Social Democratic ticket at the polls, were capable at the same time of seeing something demonic in the poverty of a little old lady who could not afford rooms aboveground, capable of reaching for their children when she approached in order to defend them from the witch's evil eye. And if such a woman were to be burned, which, with only slight changes in pretext, is hardly outside the realm of the conceivable these days, they would stand behind the barriers set up by the town council and gape, but presumably not revolt. I am speaking of the volk, but that same ancient collective layer exists in each of us, and, to say precisely what I think, I do not consider religion the most effective means by which to keep it safely under lock and key. In my opinion, the only help comes from literature, the humanistic sciences, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.
*This is by no means a guarantee though.
