Thomas Mann and Shakespeare

Something Rich and Strange

Tobias Döring, Ewan Fernie

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628922103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries, Thomas Mann and Shakespeare is the first book-length study to explore the always fascinating, if sometimes disturbing, connections between Shakespeare and Mann. It establishes startling resonances between the central works of these two authors, pairing, for instance, Der Zauberberg with The Tempest, Der Tod in Venedig with The Merchant of Venice, Tonio Kröger with Othello and Love's Labour's Lost with Doktor Faustus. Showing how the conjunction of Shakespeare and Mann affords new, alternative perspectives on fundamental issues such as modernity, irony, art, desire, authorship and religion, Thomas Mann and Shakespeare challenges the increasingly walled-in specialism of literary topics and periodization and demonstrates the scope for new ways of reading in literary studies.

OneThe Violence of Desire: Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Mann

OneJonathan Dollimore

Thomas Mann compared Nietzsche to Hamlet, both being ‘called to knowledge … and … shattered by it’ (1959: 142).1 It’s an intriguing comparison in the light of Nietzsche’s own reading of Hamlet as someone who doesn’t think undecisively, but rather knows too much: ‘knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet. … true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man’ (1956: 50–2).2

This idea is central to Nietzsche’s philosophy and Mann’s novels, namely that intelligence, rationality, self-reflexiveness, perhaps consciousness itself – those things which make us distinctively human – may also be pathological: they make us sick. Conversely, healthy praxis, a vital engagement with the world, may require illusion and myopia. They found a precedent in the early modern condition of melancholy, and in Hamlet most famously. In fact, Mann observed that Nietzsche’s great essay on this very topic, ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben’ (‘On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life’) was ‘a fugue taking for its theme’ (1959: 154)3 the following passage from Hamlet:

… conscience does make cowards of us all,

And … the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

(3.1.85–90)

I’m reminded too of those lines from Henry IV, Part 2 where time and mutability, seen from an omniscient viewpoint, becomes a kind of entropy:

O God, that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times

Make mountains level, and the continent,

Weary of solid firmness, melt itself

Into the sea! …

… O, if this were seen,

The happiest youth …

Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.

(3.1.44–52.4)

Living, surviving, praxis, is conditional on not knowing. But of course Nietzsche and Mann went further than this. They were thinking of a knowledge which shatters because it’s a dangerous knowledge, undermining of psychic, social and political well-being in the present. And yet this too has an early modern precedent in the subversive thinking of the malcontent – Shakespeare’s Edmund in King Lear being only the most famous case in point. That was, after all, a time when it was self-evident that thinking outside the doxa could be dangerous. It’s why some people paid with their liberty, parts of their body and sometimes with their life for voicing the wrong idea in the wrong place at the wrong time. And when a character in Mustapha, a play by Shakespeare’s contemporary Fulke Greville, can speak of ‘knowledge’ as ‘the endless hell of thought’ (1973: 119), it suggests that then too this dangerous knowing could also be more fundamentally a crisis of consciousness, of being too conscious. Too human.

But it is indeed in modernity that the idea is most familiar to us. Of knowing, for example, that all knowing is illusory, or that all values are debilitatingly relative; or that ethical truths are in fact lies or necessary fictions; or knowing enough to know that we know nothing in the larger scheme of things; or knowing enough to become vulnerable to that disabling existential angst which leads some to surrender to the delusions of religion, fanaticism or the charismatic leader, some to a nihilistic destruction of others and of self, muttering as they do something about the horror, the horror. There’s no consolation in this kind of knowing; it’s not the cognition of revelation, of the blinding insight, or that very different and precious cognition which leads to a mystical comprehension of the oneness of being. All the more remarkable then that this painful, disturbing cognition is the prerequisite of so much modern philosophy and creativity; and it means that modern art which matters is crucially cognitive.

It might be said that for Shakespeare at his most tragic, the real pathology was not knowledge but desire, the state of being ‘blasted with ecstasy’, understood in its deepest and most extensive sense, which is to say a desire which is always more than sexual, although it is perhaps expressed most revealingly as sexual desire, as in sonnet 129, ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ or 147, ‘My love is as a fever’. And yet precisely because this was desire in its broadest sense it was, for the Shakespearean protagonist, also deeply cognitive – one only has to regard for a moment the depth of reflection on desire in the period to see that. In a sense it was a theological given: the Fall narrates the desire to eat from the tree of knowledge. Transgressive desire and forbidden knowledge go together.

In Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) Aschenbach is wrecked by a desire which erupts as much from a cognitive crisis as a sexual one. He too has been called to knowledge and shattered by it. That’s to say, he has sought an affirmation not by disavowing the dangerous knowledge but by both confronting and trying to contain it. Affirmation is fraudulent unless it first – in the words of Thomas Hardy – ‘exacts a full look at the Worst’ (1930: 154). This is what Aschenbach has done in writing ‘that powerful tale entitled A Study in Abjection, which earned the gratitude of a whole younger generation by pointing to the possibility of moral resolution even for those who have plumbed the depths of knowledge’4 (David Luke translation of Death in Venice, hereafter referred to as Luke, 202).5 Much hangs on that word ‘even’: moral resolution is possible even – not especially – with knowledge. Knowledge and ethics conflict and it’s an ethical/cognitive affirmation which has cost him dear. It has made him spiritually sick, burnt out, ripe for desire as insurrection and self-destruction.

I want to concentrate on three aspects to this knowledge/desire convergence as it involved Thomas Mann, especially in the writing of Doktor Faustus. In that these three aspects are inseparable they are really only one, but I distinguish them in what follows for the sake of elucidation. First, the realization that barbarism is not the opposite of the civilization it destroys, but its creation, second (and consequently) the realization that the self-destructive barbarism generated by civilization has a uniquely virulent intensity typically manifested as violation, and thirdly the realization that art, even or especially in its highest manifestations, can be complicit with that barbarism. I use the term barbarism because it’s the one generally used as the translation of the German Barbarei, but I’ve come to feel it misses something crucial in Mann’s usage, something conveyed most famously perhaps in Walter Benjamin’s thesis that there is no document of civilization which is not also a document of barbarism.6

Doktor Faustus is a novel which finds the precedent of this dangerous knowledge in the early modern period, in Shakespeare’s time. Its use of Shakespearean comedy is well known, not least because Mann himself later documented it.7 My concern here is with the darker side of the Renaissance, to which Mann’s choice of the Faustus myth inevitably led him. It’s a myth which leads us back into western theology where the dilemma of the terrible proximity of good and evil, of civilization and barbarism, is faced full on. And of course there is a branch of theology, called theodicy, which addresses exactly this dilemma, and Mann devotes the whole of Chapter 13 of his novel to it. Essentially, the dangerous knowledge which preoccupies Mann is inseparable from a radical theodicy. The word itself originates with Leibniz, but the dilemma it articulates is much older: if God is indeed all-powerful it means He created evil. Orthodox theodicy tries to vindicate God in the face of this dilemma; a radical theodicy tracks evil back to its source in God, thereby offering ‘a daemonic conception of God’ (H. T. Lowe-Porter translation of Doctor Faustus, hereafter referred to as L-P, 98)8 – and sometimes responds rebelliously as in Fulke Greville’s famous Chorus Sacerdotum from Mustapha:

Oh wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound:

Vainly begot yet forbidden vanity

Created sick, commanded to be sound:

What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?

Passion and reason self-division cause:

Is it the mark or majesty of power

To make offences that it may forgive?

(1973: 138)

Or, as Zeitblom puts it, paraphrasing the Hegelian teaching of Schleppfuß, ‘[he] declared the vicious to be a necessary and inseparable concomitant of the holy, and the holy a constant satanic temptation, an almost irresistible challenge to violation’ (L-P 98).9 If he is to be believed, Nietzsche was only thirteen when he decided that God was ‘the father of evil’ (1956: 151).10 In secular thought the theodical insight becomes the primal drama of evil originating within the good, of evil as violation, of what we hold most precious mutating into its opposite, its negation.

Of course for Mann this was not, most immediately, a philosophical or theological issue but a political one. Doktor Faustus was written during, and is partly about, the Second World War, about fascism. M...

Table of contents

• New Directions In German Studies
• Volumes in the series
• Title
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Something Rich and Strange (with a Note on Mann’s Shakespeare, by Tobias Döring)Ewan Fernie
• 1 The Violence of Desire: Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Mann Jonathan Dollimore
• 2 Laughter in the Throat of Death: Thomas Mann’s Shakespearean Sprachkrise Richard Wilson
• 3 Masquerades of Love: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Musical Development of Shakespeare’s Comedy in Mann’s Doktor Faustus Alexander Honold
• 4 The Magic Fountain: Shakespeare, Mann and Modern Authorship Tobias Döring
• 5 ‘A dark exception among the rule-abiding’: Thomas Mann and Othello Friedhelm Marx
• 6 ‘Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath’: Shakespearean Overtones in Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig John T. Hamilton
• 7 Shakespeare to Mann, via Wagner Dave Paxton
• 8 ‘Yes—yes, no’: Mann, Shakespeare and the Struggle for Affirmation Ewan Fernie
• 9 Teenage Fanclub: Mann and Shakespeare in the Queer Pantheon Heather Love
• 10 A Kind of Loving: Hans Castorp as Model Critic David Fuller
• 11 Changing the Subject Ulrike Draesner
• Afterword Elisabeth Bronfen
• Index of Names
• Copyright