History, Myth, and Music: Thomas Mann's Timely Fiction

193 Pages·1998·15.159 MB·English

by  Susan Scaff

SUSAN VON ROHR SCAFF
History, Myth, andMusic
Thomas Mann's
Timely Fiction
CAMDEN HOUSE
History) Myth) and Music
Studies in German Literature) Linguistics) and Culture
Edited by James Hardin
(South Carolina) ,
Copyright© Susan von Rohr Scaff 1998
All Rights Reserved Except as pennitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, perfonned in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any fonn or by any means,
without the prior pennission of the copyright owner.
Fmtpublished 1998
Camden House
Drawer 2025
Columbia, SC 29202-2025 USA
Camden House is an imprint of Boyd ell & Brewer Inc.
PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604-4126 USA
and of Boyd ell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, SuffolkIP12 3DF, UK
ISBN: 1-57113-190-6
Libnuy ofC ongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scaff, Susan von Rohr, 1943-
History, myth, and music: Thomas Mann's timely fiction / Susan
von Rohr Scaff.
p. em. - (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and
culture (Unnumbered))
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57113-190-6 (alk. paper)
1. Mann, Thomas, 1875-1955. Doktor Faustus. 2. Literature and
histOly-Gennany-History-20th century. 3. Mann, Thomas,
1875-1955-Knowledge-Mythology. 4. Mann, Thomas, 1875-1955-
-Knowledge-History. 5. Mann, Thomas, 1875-1955-Knowl.edge-Music.
6. Music and literature. 7. Myth in literature. I.1itle.
II. Series.
PT2625.A44D695565 1997
833'.912-dc21 97-33057
CIP
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
.
List of Abbreviations
VI
..
Preface
VII
Introduction 1
1: The Mythical Foundation of History: 11
Re-creation of Tradition in
Joseph and his Brothers
2: The Ambiguity of Art: Music as a 31
Medium of Death and Salvation
3: Unending Apocalypse: The Crisis of Musical 66
Narrative in Doctor Faustus
4: The Mannian Conception of Divinity: 99
Workings of the Demonic in Music
and the Soul
5: The Duplicity of the Devil's Pact: 126
Theodicy and Redemption in Doctor Faustus
German and English Titles of Mann's Works
and their Translations 157
Works Consulted 163
Index 175
Abbreviations
B 1-3 Thomas Mann: Briefe, vols. 1-3. Eel. Erika Mann. Frankfurt aiM:
Fischer Taschenbuch, 1979.
DD 1-3 Dichter iiber ihre Dichtungen: Thomas Mann, vols. 1-3. Ed.
Hans Wysling, with Marianne Fischer. Frankfurt aiM:
HeimeranlS. Fischer, 1981.
DVS Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Trans. H. T. Lowe
Porter. New York: Vmtage Books, 1963.
ETD Essays of Three Decades. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Al
fred A. Knopf, 1948.
LE Last Essays. Trans. Richard and Clara Wmston and Tania and
James Stem. New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1959.
OD Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades.
Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, Agnes E. Meyer, and Eric Sutton.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942.
PM Past Masters and Other Papers. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. Lon
don: Martin Seeker, 1933.
R1-5 Die Briefe Thomas Manns: Regesten und Register, vols.1-5. Eds.
Hans BUrgin and Hans-Otto Mayer, with Yvonne Schmidlin.
Frankfurt aiM: S. Fischer Verlag, 1976-1987.
SN The Story ofa Novel: The Genesis of ((Doctor Faustus. Trans. Rich
J)
ard and Clara Wmston. New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1961.
TJN "The Theme of the Joseph Novels." U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1943.
TMA Thomas Mann)s Addresses: Delivered at the Library of Congress
1942-1949. Washington: Library of Congress, 1963.
TMP Thomas Mann: Pro and Contra Wagner. Trans. Allan Blunden.
Ed. Erich Heller. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1985.
Preface
T
his book grew out of a vibrant interest in Thomas Mann that I devel
oped as a student at Berkeley in the 1960s and that now seems, in its
particulars, very long ago. In those days, shortly after 1\1ann's ten-year so
journ on the coast of California, this author combined for us the fascination
of proximity (we could drive to the family home in Pacific Palisades) with the
very current predilection for deliberating the artist's and intellectual's - our
own - estrangement. In graduate seminars the talk was all of the alienation
and self-destructiveness of "the Mannian hero." It would not go too far to
say that Mann became the center of a somewhat perverse and self-indulgent
cult of youthful admiration.
Since then fads have changed and our culture, mercifully, no longer hal
lows morbid disaffection. I myself put Mann aside for many years to study
the European tradition in its breadth. Returning to him after two graduate
degrees in English literature and experience teaching Western civilization, I
saw him with new eyes. No longer the narrow creator of grimly superior art
ist figures, Mann reverberated with the _perennial themes of the Western
world: the human fall, sin despite the best of intentions, the struggle for res
titution, the doubt of redemption. A lifelong lover of classical music, I delved
into Mann's musical descriptions and discovered all of these themes devel
oped in fulsome detail. Additionally, his fascination with myth, I realized,
along with his fear about the end of civiliza6on, put Mann at the heart of
European modernism. I had studied Mann as an exclusively Gennan writer,
but with his modernist themes of myth and history and his preoccupation
with the most fundamental conundrums of the Western world, he now be
came a figure of much broader cultural significance.
Too much scholarship has been devoted, I believe, to Mann as the
quintessential Gennan. Source studies dominate the secondary literature, and
these draw attention for the most part to the author's roots in his national
heritage. The better part of the criticism, moreover, is written in Gennan and
is therefore inaccessible to the non-specialist. Mann, of course, became an
American citizen during his years in exile and enjoyed great renown among
American readers in his own time. Continuing interest in him is reflected in
the fact that his books are widely available in English translation, and Eng
lish-language reviews of new biographies and translations occupy The New
York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. Given this lively
interest, my own purpose is to provide the general reader and the teacher of
Mann with an interpretation of the major novels that emphasizes the broadly
Vlll PREFACE
significant themes in his work. The uniqueness of my thesis will be of interest
as well to those engaged in critical discussions of this much debated writer.
Unlike any other reading, my book approaches the music in Mann's fiction
by considering it as a fonn of narrative. I maintain that music functions as an
analog to myth and history. Both personal integrity and communal history, I
argue, are reclaimed by retelling our stories or myths harmoniously in music.
Shorter versions of four of the book's chapters have been published pre
viously as journal articles in The Germanic Review, Monatshefte, and Christi
anity and Literature, and have benefited from comments by these journals'
reviewers. Chapter 1 is based on "The Dialectic of Myth and History: Revi
sion of Archetype in Thomas Mann's Joseph Novels"; Chapter 3 on "Un
ending Apocalypse: The Crisis of Musical Narrative in Mann's Doktor Faus
tus'; Chapter 4 on "The Religious Base of Thomas Mann's World View:
Mythic Theology and the Problem of the Demonic"; Chapter 5 on "The
Duplicity of the Devil's Pact: Intimations of Redemption in Mann's Doktor
Faustus." I have revised and expanded all of this material extensively for the
present study.
Without a doubt my most important professional experience in prepara
tion for writing this book has been teaching Humanities at the University of
Arizona. The richness of the Western tradition that I came to appreciate in
teaching a three-semester history of Western culture stands behind my
broadly thematic approach to Mann. The writing itself took time, and I
would like to thank the Research and Graduate Studies Office of The Col
lege of the Liberal Arts at The Pennsylvania State University for awarding me
a semester's leave to complete the manuscript. I would also like to express
gratitude to my two primary "consultants" for the book, my husband, Law
rence A. Scaff, and my father, John von Rohr, whose insights into the work
ings of the European heritage have been an invaluable resource. Finally, I
want to offer my appreciation to my daughters, Janine and Rosalyn Scaff,
and to my mother, Helen von Rohr, whose support and enthusiasm for my
own enthusiasm has helped make this project worthwhile.
Introduction
T
homas Mann established himself as a novelist in the modernist age,
when writers of fiction - Joyce, Proust, and Woolf, among others
took a special interest in music. Their fascination equals the preoccupation of
Renaissance poets with the harmony of the spheres. The attention that mod
ernists paid to music took many fonTIS, ranging from James Joyce's imitation
of musical style in the "Sirens" episode of Wysses to VIrginia Woo)fs sugges
tion of cosmic sotmd in the barely audible "harmony" of time passing in To
the Lighthouse to Marcel Proust's psychological representation of the Vmteuil
sonata as an obsession of Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. Whatever
approach that they take, modernists share one tendency that distinguishes
them from the poetic tradition celebrating cosmic harmony: a fascination
with dissonance. Far from assuming the ancient myth of a universal order
represented by music, they make much of the undoing of order, both within
the work of art and in the minds and souls of human beings.
Mann depicts modem music as an ordered art on the verge of chaos and
creates characters so affected by music that disequilibrium becomes the very
mode of contemporary experience. Mann is by far the best-known "musical"
writer in the German tradition. This study will reexamine the cultural signifi
cance of music in Mann's writings within the context of myth and history. In
the early stages of his career Mann's focus is on Wagnerian decadence, in
large part the subject of his tum-of-the-cenrury novel Buddenbrooks. Decep
tively "~plifting," Richard Wagner's grandly mythical music seduces the lis
tener with its "yearning and cunning" and eats away at the moral fibre of the
civilized world. Wagner's art, Mann says, "is not quite innocent," and "in
volvement with it almost becomes a vice, it becomes moral, it becomes a
reckless ethical dedication to what is hannful and consuming."l By the time
he writes Doctor Faustus during the Second World War, Mann has trans
muted Wagner's threat to human integrity into the crisis of Nazism and re
cast the Wagner problem in a new form, the discordant twelve-tone music of
Arnold Schonberg. The Pythagorean myth of cosmic harmony forms a
backdrop for the clashes of the modem world expressed in Schonberg's dis
sonant art. Mann asks, what is the meaning of such harsh music? Can har
mony, both cosmic and spiritual, be reestablished under the increasingly
cruel conditions of the twentieth century? Would musical harmony signify
the redemption of contemporary history?
Throughout his writings Mann approaches these questions through the
problem of modernity, and, in the company of other modernists, links the