The Cry for Myth (31 page)

We are entering into times, my friend which will not be hood-winked by psychology....Thy life shall be cold, [therefore] thou shalt love no one…. Love is forbidden you, insofar as it warms. Thy life shalt be cold, therefore thou shalt love no human being.
†

Mann’s novel is difficult reading, but it becomes captivating when the devil appears and holds a conversation with Adrian, who has been ill with a severe migraine attack, retching and spewing all day. We recall that migraine often is accompanied
by out-of-body experiences and psychological breakthroughs. Icy drafts blow through the room, and Adrian remarks on how cold it is—all of which make a fitting atmosphere in which to hold a conversation with the devil. Adrian states in this conversation that the devil says only those things that already are in himself, Adrian—which is a description of what happens when our subconscious talks back to us. Thus the thrusts and the obsessions
are the breakthrough of Adrian’s own preconscious and subconscious ideas
.

Satan is an amazing conversationalist, but the conversation is one-sided—Adrian tries in vain to shut up his adversary, as we all do when accosted by Satan. But the devil lords over the talk with his irony and sarcasm. When Adrian demands to know who he is, the devil wards off the question except to say that he is “in fact German, German to the core.”

The devil scorns the profession of psychology; it is a “nice, neutral middle point and psychologists the most truth-loving people.”
*
He talks of Luther’s having thrown an inkwell at the devil, though he keeps calling Luther Dr. Martinus. He discusses Oswald Spengler at length and the latter’s two-volume work,
The Decline of the West
, a book damned by the bourgeoisie when it was published because of its pessimistic prophecy.
†
In his own agony about what was occurring in Germany, Mann seems to find in Spengler as well as Nietzsche his prophetic statements.

The whole novel is about the illness of the twentieth century. It requires us to rethink the meaning of health in a declining civilization and to reconsider how we use our great progress
in medicine. For the sickness which Mann (and Hesse in
Steppenwolf
before him) are talking about is a spiritual illness. About this the devil says some pithy things:

“What is sick, what well, my friend, about that we must not let the philistines have the last word. Have you forgotten what you learned in the schools, that God can bring good out of evil?” And he adds, in language which sounds surprisingly like the New Testament, “A man must have been always ill and mad in order that others no longer need be so. And where madness begins to be malady, there nobody knows at all.”
*
The passion of modern human beings is to conquer the world of medicine and therefore of health—to arrive at a concept of health which Mann believed is our vanity rather than actually health—”more than the piddling condition of so-called healthiness.”

The devil tells him, by way of persuading him to make the pact, that real creativity comes that way, i.e., from the devil. A genuine inspiration, immediate, absolute, unquestioned, ravishing, where there is no choice, no tinkering, no possible improvement; with shudders of awe from head to foot, with tears of joy blinding his eyes. It comes but from the devil, the true master and giver of such rapture.

But what is most crucial in this chapter, in which Adrian confirms his bargain with the devil, is the discussion of modern art and music. Mann believed, as Paul Tillich, Oswald Spengler, and other great students of our age have believed, that
the best measure of the spiritual health or illness of a culture is its art
. The chief symptom of the twentieth century, the age of the despair and dissolution Mann has described, is the
trivialization of art
. Arthur Miller, we recall, has warned us of the contemporary “trivialization of drama,” which is another
similarity with our own day. This is the proof of the work of the devil; it is a gnawing away at the soul of modern culture.

“What is art today?” asks the devil rhetorically. “A pilgrimage on peas. There’s more to dancing in these times than a pair of red shoes.”
*
He dismisses the “stylists,” for they persuade “themselves and others that the tedious has become interesting, because the interesting has begun to grow tedious.”
†
All artists have become powerless, “but the sickness is general, and the straight-forward ones show the symptoms…. Composing itself has got too hard, devilishly hard.” Here Mann must be saying that the twelve-tone scale is without harmony (he charges at one point that in it the harmony is irrelevant) and that the art of music is part of the new triviality, an avoidance of the great forms which were in the past so important. Beethoven’s
Ode to Joy
is the foil; Adrian’s new scale, and music, does away with Beethoven’s “joy.” “But music too by untiringly conforming her specific concerns to the ruling conventions has so far as she could played a role in the highbrow swindle.”
**

The devil continues regarding the relation between sickness and creativity:

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. I have never heard anything stupider than that from disease only disease can come. [The creative person] takes the reckless product of disease and as soon as it takes it to itself it is health....On your madness they will feed in health, and in them you will become healthy.”
‡

In other words, out of consciously admitted illness can come great creativity, which is why there has been such a close relationship
through history between disease and creativity.

Again Mann argues that creativity thrives on illness, and disease is the process by which the creative person shifts forms; he or she creates from formlessness to a new form. The trouble is that our culture is in the midst of this process and has not yet found its new Renaissance. We have not found our own method of creating health by healing works of art.

Satan then repeats the sentence that love is forbidden to Adrian and his life will be cold. “A work-filled eternity of human life shall you enjoy.” When the hourglass runs out, the devil will have “good power to deal and dole with, to move and manage the fine-soul Creature after my way and my pleasure, be it in life, soul, flesh, blood or goods—to all eternity.”
*

THE LAMENTATION OF DR. FAUSTUS

Toward the end of Mann’s rendering of this myth, Adrian invites his acquaintances and admirers to his recluse home under the pretext of playing for them his crowning achievement, a symphonic cantata entitled
The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus
. But when the group has assembled, Adrian launches into a confession. “Since my twenty-second year, he confesses, I have been married to Satan.” He continues about his life, all in the semi-gibberish that is the telltale mark that the syphilis has done its work. A strained and painful stillness now reigns in the room. The audience becomes restive as they begin to see that Adrian has lost his sanity. One of the doctors present says in a loud stage whisper that Adrian is mentally deteriorated. Some persons in the audience who are embarrassed get up to leave. Adrian continues in his gibberish until he collapses at the piano with a paralytic stroke.

The peasant woman who takes care of Adrian’s house pushes
through the guests and takes Adrian in her arms, rebuking all these renowned people for not having the human kindness to take care of him. He is taken off to the hospital. His one faithful friend, Serenus, goes later to the hospital to see him and finds that he is in complete senility.

There follows the epilogue about the deterioration of Germany, the most important paragraphs of the whole book. In this epilogue Mann cries aloud what the reader feels about those years, that Hitler and his mates are a “monstrous national perversion … its prime movers have had themselves poisoned by their physicians, drenched with petrol and set on fire … evil men willed that Germany be destroyed down to the ground.”
*
Mann ends this tortured book with his beseeching God to be merciful to his people, his friends, his Fatherland.
†
“It is finished. An old man, bent, well-nigh broken by the horrors of the times in which he wrote and those which were the burden of his writing.”
**

One is deeply gripped by this “lamentation.” But the question immediately arises in the myth, What evil was Adrian guilty of? What was the Faustian character who bore the guilt? In Mann’s interpretation, it is a nation of people, Germany. Marlowe’s Faustus and Goethe’s Faust clearly sinned, the first by usurping the role of God and the second by his passion to have all power and all sensuality for his own power and sensation. But Adrian is not guilty of any clear sins, certainly not the death of the little boy he loved; nor did he destroy or kill any other person. And whether one likes the twelve-tone scale or not, it is surely not a sin to invent it.

Above all, Mann is concerned with the guilt each of us bears as a part of the sins of our society. The basic source of guilt and evil, which this myth is about, namely, that
Germany itself had become the Faust, and Germany itself bears the punishment
. Thus the “guilty person” is not a person but a nation, and
this
nation represents the Faustian evil in all the nations of the West
. It is a collaborative guilt, a collective guilt of whole peoples.

It is significant that this was the Germany which had made such great contributions to art, philosophy, music, and science. This excellence made it possible for the philosopher Hegel to argue, half a century before Hitler and the Nazis, that the epitome of attainment in all evolution was Germany with all its supreme culture. This Germany was the Icarus which soared to its too great height—and fell to its grizzly death and destruction in Nazism.

The guilt must also be borne by all of us in the West—we who saddled Germany with impossible war debts in the Treaty of Versailles. But Germany itself was the modern Faustus and crashed in the ruins of the bunkers in Berlin, where these evil men, the Hitler leaders, “poisoned by their physicians … willed that Germany be destroyed down to the ground.” The crashing down of the great art in Dresden, the slaughter of 20 million Russians, the torture and killing of 6 million Jews—all these things are so evil as to beggar our imagination. They present us with the most gripping and authentic picture of the myth of Faust since the “Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus.”

Thus
Dr. Faustus
is the myth which shows us the meaning of vicarious evil and cathartic salvation. Mann is describing human life as he saw it in those terrible years. He is presenting the fact that we all are guilty even though we did not commit the specific evil. We are saved by a virtue beyond ourselves; and perhaps our virtue will aid someone else. Life is never a question of adding up particular sins. The child of a sharecropper, or the starving child in Africa, did not themselves do anything particularly evil; they suffer for someone else’s—or perhaps fate’s—mistake.
Our hyper-individualism in the West is already part of the evil
. God is no bookkeeper: the innocent and guilty are part and parcel of the same evil and same salvation. All three of these Fausts—Marlowe’s, Goethe’s, and Mann’s—we
have noted had degrees in theology, which means that goodness is never very far from evil.

Mann specifically cites the trivialization of art as the basic flaw in our civilization. But no particular person or group is responsible for that, whether they like to play twelve-tone music or not. The book is saying that all Germans, indeed all of the West, share in the common guilt. We have sold our souls to Satan, and we all hope for the grace of salvation. To be human is to exist in the paradox of Mephistopheles on one side and the good angels on the other.

PSYCHOTHERAPY AS FAUSTIAN

We noticed above that Thomas Mann, in his
Dr. Faustus
, makes frequent criticisms of psychology. One, for example, is the remark of the devil, “Psychology—God warrant us, do you still hold with it? That is bad, bourgeois nineteenth century.”
*
This is certainly not because Mann was opposed to psychology in real life; he was very appreciative of it and gave an excellent lecture to honor Freud in celebration of the latter’s eightieth birthday. But there is plenty of evidence that our twentieth century in the West is a Faustian culture. How is this related to psychology? Our booming stock market, our increasing multitudes of millionaires, our nuclear arms race, and star wars—all these make our age a playground for the myth of Faustianism more profound than Marlowe’s age and certainly Goethe’s.

There is a curious relationship between the spread of psychology and this myth of the Faustian age of Western culture. Is it the prevalence of emotional sickness, the special need for help in adjustment, a society of
Waiting for Godot
, or as Mann would say, a culture in which there is a trivialization of God? The remark of the Viennese wit, “Psychoanalysis is the sickness
which its therapy purports to cure,” expresses some deep relationship between this very sickness and the cure for it.

Indeed, the devil’s own methods have the flavor of psychoanalysis. “What you don’t feel, you won’t hunt down by art,” says the devil, “unless it wells from your own inward source.” And again, the devil remarks, “We only release, set free. We let lameness and self-consciousness, scruples and doubts go to the devil.”
*

We noted above, especially in the Goethe and Marlowe versions, that Faust, in presenting his problems, sounds like modern persons who come for psychotherapy. When Goethe’s Faust complains, “Each morning I wake in desperation,” and “Existence seems a burden to detest,” he is speaking exactly like our patients.
†
Indeed, the myth of Faust so permeates our culture that it is part of the corrective endeavors—in this case, psychotherapy—as well as the problems.

Persons who come for therapy do so because they lack power; they complain that they cannot achieve. Shall they sell their souls to the devil—in our day called heroin, cocaine, alcohol? Some of them have of course tried those ways, seeking at least some surcease of sorrow even if they can’t expect cures.