| Lancette Arts Journal Founded in 2000 |
Book Reviews | May 2003 |
An
excruciatingly confusing statement on postmodernism, and how it may or may not relate
to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus
By Alidë Kohlhaas
No doubt, most people who have read or will read in the near future Thomas Mann’s novel, Doctor Faustus, are aware that the novelist used his work as a parable to show that his countrymen sold their soul to the devil upon embracing fascism. Mann uses the protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, as a lightening rod to show how easy it is to sell one’s soul.
The composer’s reason for the sell-out: he sought the ultimate fame of becoming the greatest living composer of his time. His musical creations involve the 12-tone scale, and Mann freely admitted that he based this creative genius on composer Arnold Schönberg. The novelist did so with the help of the left-wing philosopher, Theodor Adorno, with whom he associated during his years in the United States. Adorno wrote a study, Philosophy of Modern Music, which Mann used extensively to explain his protagonist’s musical theory.
Having attempted for a long time to understand the German mind without much success, I chose to read The Temptations of Faust, which above the title has subheading, The Logic of Fascism and Postmodern Archaeologies of Modernity. The writer is Evelyn Cobley, a professor in the department of English at the University of Victoria, B.C. It was naive of me to think I could find the answers I sought in this book. Cobley delves into Mann’s novel only peripherally, and instead peppers her book with endless references to numerous left-wing philosophers, past and present, to create an excruciatingly confusing statement on postmodernism, and how it may or may not relate to the novel.
Faust is an ancient tale, retold many times by many different authors. Faust is the German for fist. Fist and Faust have the same linguistic root. As I began to read Cobley’s book, the text reminded me of the meaning of Faust, for I felt verbally pummeled and wondered if Cobley had written her dissertation on Doctor Faustus with clenched hands (Faustus is a Latinization of the name common to the era in which the story first appeared, namely the 15th century).
Here is an admission. I strongly dislike anyone who makes notes in margins of books and underlines passages. Yet, I found myself constantly underlining passages, and making notes in the margins that question Cobley’s assumptions, comments and comparisons. Of course, here is another admission. As someone, who loves words, and who loves the English language, I have a strong quarrel with the term postmodern. I also have a strong quarrel with the description of art as modern. In the true sense of the meaning of a word, modern is of the “now”. To describe art as modern is a lazy form of depicting a specific period in art, just as describing something as postmodern is a lazy form of describing what followed this modern art or philosophy. So, right from the start, there was a negative reaction to Cobley’s opus magnum. Her study, for lack of a better word, is 271 pages long and offers another 12 pages of notes. What she had to say needed only half the amount of pages.
Considering that Cobley is a professor of English, one would have expected a clearer, more precise language, and a text free of grammatical convolutions, and the repetition of certain words, but specifically the word foreground as a verb; it appears on almost every page, often more than once. It is annoying, and it speaks of a lack of due thought for what the author wishes to express. She also uses redundancies, one of these being “totalitarian fascism”. Is there any other kind of fascism?
By leaning heavily on the philosophers of the left, she avoids committing herself to any definite statements that show where she stands herself. She is quite right in stating that Hitler’s political success is in part the “result of his ability to exploit the neo-Romantic yearnings of the German people.” She is also right that Nazism was “a complex phenomenon to which many factors– social, economic, historical, psychological– contributed”. What she does not make clear is that from the beginning of German unification under Bismark, Germans were not educated in the process of democracy. When forced into a democratic state after World War One, during the Weimar Republic years, Germans were completely lost. Democracy had little or no meaning to most ordinary people. They were used to an autocratic, paternalistic state, and the chaos that rose out of the sudden loss of this autocracy deepened what appears to be a national character, namely the desire for a firm hand to control lives.
This need for control has always been part of the German character. In the Hitler years Germans sold their soul for stability, because they lacked – and I now make this statement unhesitatingly – and still lack a true sense of what democracy is all about.
Mann, of course, is a good example of this. He was a firm nationalist (not to be confused with national socialism) and a true conservative. He was a strong believer in his early life in the “German Geist” (the German mind and spirit) that Germans believed and still believe sets it apart from every other nation. Unlike his brother Heinrich, he disliked liberalism. He, however, realized once Hitler came to power that this German desire for order, paternalism, and what I would call a need for sentimentality, led to the failure of his nation and brought about total moral collapse.
It seems ironic to me that Schönberg, who as a Jew and as a composer of “aberrant” music was forced to flee from the Nazis, is seen as the author of the ultimate totalitarian system of musical creation in Cobley’s study. Of course, 12-tone music has the nature of a defining, unliberal system of music creation, one that one can best describe as being music of the head rather than the heart, a music more of the mind than the soul, a music lacking emotional context. In this way, one can accept Mann using the 12-tone musical system to give us the understanding of the soulless nature of Leverkühn, once having sold it to the “devil”. Mann, through this depiction perhaps suggests that fascism was a natural extension of the “modernity” of his time. Of course, one need not necessarily agree with this.
Mann, who realized during a tour abroad that he could not return home to Germany, settled in Switzerland in 1933 before moving to the United States. Having been absent from Germany through the worst part of the Hitler years, it is interesting that he created a moral parable that completely avoided the more sinister aspects of those years. His book, instead of giving us a visceral depiction, gives us only an artistic tale, interspersed with intellectual play. To the end, he remains a conservative writer, unlike his brother Heinrich.
Cobley does not pick up on this. She prefers to use example after example that equates totalitarianism only with the right, never with the left, without truly committing herself to this view. It is not clear from her book whether or not she agrees with the statements of such writers and philosophers as Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Frederic Jameson, Thomas Hobbes, Michel Foucault, to mention a few. It leaves one to question the reasoning of this book.
Most disturbingly is that the entire book is an echo. Each chapter, and its various subsections, are echoes of what was said before. One finds neither progress nor any regress in this dissertation. In addition, one finds that the book evades the real subject, and is guilty of assumptions. Since many of the so-called postmodern philosophers quoted in this book, such as Derrida (a Frenchman, who coined postmodernism) are Europeans , one wonders why Cobley aligns herself “with theorist who consider American postmodernism to be a belated manifestation of the earlier avant-garde movement of Europe.” She states: “I maintain that the paradoxical interdependence of totalization and fragmentation in Mann’s novel suggests that the logic of fascism persists into our own postmodern times.”
Totalitarianism exists on both sides of the political spectrum, to the right and the left. It is also a tool of political systems that we do not associate with either, such as the theocracies of the Middle East, and the government of Saddam Hussein. There is perhaps no better symbol of totalitarianism that North Korea under Kim Il Jong. She quotes Hannah Arendt, who used the phrase “iron cage” to describe fascism. That iron cage was well employed be Stalin, Mao, and still is by Kim.
Cobley wants us to consider that we should not place all of the blame of fascism and the Hitler years at Germany’s door “in its moment of historical aberration.” She wants us to see that both modernity and postmodernity – oh, what terrible words – are complicit with what she terms a “logic” that led to the Holocaust. Of course, she is right in implying that Germany was not alone in its tendency toward fascism. France succumbed readily to the philosophy, and remained tied to it long into the second half of the 20th century as can be shown through action that took place in Algeria in the 1950s and ‘60s. Of course, Spain, Portugal and Italy are other examples.
Still, one must ask Cobley if she is an apologist for Nazi Germany, or playing the much cliched devil’s advocate, or whether she is speaking on behalf of the prosecution or the defence. For it must be said that the problem must still be placed at Germany’s door even today. There cannot be an excuse for what happened between 1933 and 1945 in Germany, no matter what the circumstances, nor for what transpires there now. It is my contention that if one looks closely at Germany today, one will see that the disorienting efficiencies of Hitler’s disorganized state are still in existence. Inefficiency, masked by a rigidity that appears to be efficiency, seems to me to be part of the German character. In addition, the need for a strong centralized government that is paternalistic in its governing is still seen as the best way to run a state by the citizens of that country.
Germans have a strong need for the state to act as the father-figure, who dishes out generous helpings of social programs the state can ill afford, or its citizens deserve, such as an unproductive six weeks of yearly vacations. In consequence, Germans may well once again be faced with chaos, especially as the East is strongly inclined toward re-erecting the Wall that divided Germany for so long. Economic stagnation and a lack of political will, as well as a lack of the people to accept a change in the status quo may have dire results, such as a rise in xenophobia.
Mann, who stayed in the United States, even took up citizenship there, returned to Europe after the war and settled in Switzerland. There, he died in 1955. He wrote a complex, but very German, book. Like so many of his countrymen and -women, he did not have the emotional ability to look the beast directly into the eyes and confront it. Instead, he wrote a highly philosophical, yet strangely romantic novel that eventually will no longer be seen as the parable he wanted it to be for his readers. As for the Temptations of Faust, it will be seen as just another ineffectual intellectual exercise. It is as self-conscious as the philosophy of postmodernism that its author employs to make her convoluted point. One expects more from a professor of English.
[Temptations of Faust: The Logic of Fascism and
Postmodern Archaeologies of Modernity by Evelyn Cobley,
University of Toronto Press, 305 Pages, Cloth, $55.00]ong>
Copyright © 2003-8 CamKohl Arts Productions