An Ethical Model in a Postmodem Faust: The Daemonic Parody of the Politics of Friendship in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

Dysfunctional friendship has become an ethical and political dilemma in postmodernity. In the dysfunctional nature of friendship, strangeness is a crucial factor. This strangeness is the recognition of alterity and the lack of relationship of otherness to the self. In this regard, two survivors of the Holocaust offer cogent commentaries. Emmanuel Levinas describes ethics as the face-to-face response toward an other (1986) while politics survives within Hannah Arendt's insight that "every single person needs to be reconciled to a world into which [s]he was born a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness, [s]he always remains a stranger" (Essays 308). Arendt's experience after 1933 was that "an abyss had opened" to reveal "the disloyalty of friends" (14). Hence, the role of friendship had to be revaluated in the face of the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Levinas was and continues to be a major voice in this reevaluation of friendship since the Holocaust. With the inspiration from his ethic al writings, we can portray friendship as a response to the call of the other in a deliberate attempt to bridge the void between the self and the other.

Despite these voices, some contemporary theorists maintain that friendship is still problematic in postmodernity. Jacques Derrida, who himself is strongly influenced by Levinas ("Adieu"), submits a volume often essays (Politics) telling us about the cogency of Montaigne's sixteenth-century outcry: "Oh my friends, there is no friend." Meanwhile, though Maurice Blanchot rhapsodizes about his ethical "friendship" with Levinas (Writing; Friendship), his political flirtations with Fascism during the 1930s (Bident) are problematic. Because dysfunctional friendship is becoming more and more of a pattern in postmodernity, we need more examples of exceptional friendship that can be unique and that can make the friend functional.

The intersection of Arendt's and Thomas Mann's works provides opportunities to situate friendship in this manner. On the one hand, Arendt was a perceptive political theorist whose essays have been generally concerned with the loss of human freedom in political governance. She prefers the political writings of Plato to Aristotle and sees the crucial dilemma as placing at center stage "the typically Socratic question What is friendship?" (Life 101). Of course, the problem is how to answer the question. She often positioned her discussions of friendship as ethical comfort within the conflicts of a politically charged milieu. For this reason, Arendt's writings have become a lively subject of discussion in France. From her adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's role of compassion as a moral and political principle, Arendt is portrayed by one of her astute French translators, Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, as "asking questions about the place of ethics and generosity in politics" (241). [1] Since Aristotle, who claimed in his Nicomacheon Ethics that "the science for the good of man is politics" (300), the relative positioning of ethics and politics has been debated. But this positioning of friendship as the crucial ethical problem for politics is also the unsaid problem in the writings of Thomas Mann, Arendt's fellow native German who like her came to the United States in the aftermath of the Nazi debacle. Both Arendt and Mann used their writings as arenas in which to dramatize the struggle for the role of ethics after their departure from their homeland in the face of great political evil. Both had written prior to their emigration from Germany. But the departure from their homeland made them portray friendship differently in their writings. While Arendt was primarily a political theorist who used the principles of ethics and philosophy to engage her contemporaries in debates about human governance, Mann portrayed the great struggle between aesthetics and ethics and seemed to ignore the centrality of the political struggles o f his characters to obtain control over their lives. By bringing Arendt and Mann together, we can better understand not only the underpinnings of Mann's morally involved characters within a political milieu but also Arendt's value as an ethically inspired political theoretician. While Mann's narratives are usually understood to be examples of modernist concerns, his Doctor Faustus goes beyond that limitation because of his ability to transcend mere parody and to offer models of friendship as responses to the call of the other. His is thus a modernist voice speaking to postmodernist readers about universal concerns that make his Doctor Faustus still worthy of being read today.

Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend (1947) offers a case testing ethical criticism. Whereas Charles Altieri presents ethical criticism inspired by Levinas as encouraging "the purposiveness of the particular text as authorial action" (276), in fact such ethical criticism can also make a text such as Doctor Faustus speak clearly to postmodernity. Although the ironic tone of this novel helps to reveal its ethical undercurrent, the novel has little to do with "authorial action" but much more to do with the role that the simulacrum plays in postmodern culture. Linda Hutcheon uses this "novel about parody" (30) as the cornerstone for her discussion of a theory of parody. Parody literally means to "stand beside" so that, for Hutcheon, it has a structural as well as a mocking relationship to the predecessor it models. In this respect parody is insightful as a postmodern simulacrum, a copy of a copy. Scott Durham distinguishes two types of simulacrum, one that naively imitates its predecessor and another that uses copying to challenge the model by modifying and thus renewing the form as well as the content (7-20). This second type of simulacrum Durham calls the "daemonic" (8) aspect of the simulacrum and demonstrates self-consciousness about copying. While both parody and simulacrum are closely linked to Mann's s ironic writings, the word "daemonic" is especially appropriate for Arendt since she admired Socrates, whose "daemon" provided the other voice with which the conscious self struggles in its formation of conscience, a word that, as Arendt reminds us, means "knowing with" ("Thinking" 418). Thus, friendship, prior to being engaged in political or esthetic challenges, is to become a crucial component of the self's ongoing struggle to achieve harmony with itself. Let us first examine what the politics of friendship entails in section I, then how parody works within Doctor Faustus in section II, why this parody is daemonic as opposed to diabolical in section III, what is the extreme risk posed by Leverkuhn for the postmodern in section IV, and how all this leads to a reinstatement of religion as an ethical modeling of friendship in section V.

The Politics of Friendship

In Doctor Faustus, the question of friendship is added to the Faustian legend. In the stylistic drama immortalized in the two parts (1808; 1832) of Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) offers Mann his most famous model. Of course, Goethe himself took the longstanding legend of Faust and gave it dramatic and literary quality. But Rousseavian dimensions of generosity, so crucial to Arendt's ethical vision of politics, are missing from Goethe's Faust, who requested that Margaret become Gretchen: "let me penetrate/Into her heart as into a close friend's" (311). Indeed, the issue of friendship was only on the horizon for Goethe's Faust and not developed in terms of his relationship with Margaret. Mann, however, elaborates the wish for friendship expressed by Goethe's Faust in that Mann has the story narrated by the best friend of the one who makes the diabolical pact. The pact itself was written down by Mann's Faustian hero, Adrian Leverkuhn, who leaves it in his will to his best friend, Selenus Zeitblom . Zeitblom only finds his friend's will after Adrian's death in 1930. Adrian's biography is narrated by Selenus in 1943-45, partly during the bombing of Munich by Americans. The choice to make Adrian's intimate pact public has moral ramifications, especially in that his friend chose to do this. Selenus effectively decides to make public the confidence given to him by his friend. In the midst of their friendship, one based on a common childhood and a comfort in using familiar pronouns to speak to each other, they recognize basic differences that make them strangers to each other. While Selenus identifies himself as a Ph.D., a Catholic, a humanist, and a philologist by training, Adrian is the Faustian contractor, Lutheran and thus a reformer, a theologian by training, and by inclination a talented musical composer. While one has formal humanistic training as a specialist in words, the other receives theological guidance toward music. The title of the novel also reflects the dialectical tension between the frien ds: it is Zeitbiom who has the doctorate, Adrian who provides the humanistic rendition of Faustus in his final magnum opus.

Mann claims that Zeitblom is a parody of himself (Carnegy 16), whose friendship with Theodor Adorno is writ large in the description of Adrian's genius as a musical composer. Adorno was a musicologist by profession. Mann had access to Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music while it was in draft form. As we will see, Adorno himself appears in the novel partly in the form of Mephistopheles. Hence, Mann's personal friendship is ironically transformed to structure the evolution of Adrian's genius in exchange for his ignominious death. As part of the price for his genius, Adrian is tragically infected with syphilis from the prostitute, his beloved Esmeralda. Before his death, Leverkuhn composes in 1927 his magnum opus, The Lamentations of Faust: "Sorrows did move Dr. Faustum that he made writ of his lamentacion" (481), [2] Leverkuhn writes in deliberate parody of himself. So the Faustus title of the novel is partly invented by Adrian's own musical composition. The significance of his musical genius must then be inte rpreted through the written words of his friend. Zeitblom realizes his generosity as friend, not unlike Mann's own references to Adorno as Mephistopheles, through his writing his friend's life story, even as all the while he thinks that he would succumb to the Allied bombing during the last years of the Third Reich. His self-doubt about the ethical implications of his friendship with Leverkuhn makes Selenus even more appealing in its acknowledging the fallibility of his Catholic ethos, one that could judge Adrian according to dichotomous views of good and evil: "this same firmness or, if you like, narrowness of my ethical position can only reinforce my doubts as to whether I ought truly to feel called to the task I have taken on" (6). Perhaps because Adrian's genius and superior talents in music often dwarf the narrator, he presents himself continually as having merely mediocre credentials by comparison. In many other writings by Mann (e.g., Death in Venice), aesthetics is an abiding concern that extinguishes friendship or even precludes it. What makes Doctor Faustus a superior work is that in it the struggle between ethics and aesthetics reveals friendship as a political affirmation that survives the testimony of Zeitblom's narrative. It is Arendt's Socratic question that helps us to discover the daemonic simulacrum comprising Mann's contribution to what Arendt learned from Nathan the Wise (1779), that is, as she writes, that "[Gotthold] Lessing [...] considered friendship [...] to be the central phenomenon in which alone true humanity can prove itself' (Dark Times 12). Mann was the one who narrated the adventure of humanity's odyssey in Doctor Faustus.

Mann does not regard politics as worthy of his scope. In 1918, he rejected it outright: "I do not want politics. I want objectivity, order and decency" (Reflections 189). Hence, he represents ethics and aesthetics as the true dichotomous desires that cannot be reconciled. In his Last Essays, for example, he claims that "the real dichotomy lies between ethics and aesthetics" (162). In Death in Venice (1912), when Aeschenbach's homoerotic attraction to boys is drowned in Venice's cholera epidemic, Mann exemplifies how the blend of one's ethical and aesthetic judgments is absorbed by the politics of a society that feared disease more than it condoned the promotion of the ethical good of an individual. Julien Benda had criticized European intellectuals for taking an ethical stance in 1927 with his pamphlet La Trahison des clercs excoriating the lack of leadership against the rising tide of unethical politicians. In 1946, naturally, when reissuing the second edition of the pamphlet, Benda could see even more clea rly and asserted even more powerfully: "The law of the intellectual is, when the entire world kneels before the unjust one who becomes master, to remain standing and to pit up against him human conscience" (76). Hannah Arendt and Thomas Mann, both of whom read French well and were listening to Benda in 1927 and again in 1946, took up Benda's challenge by providing models of that human conscience which, in French, means both consciousness and a moral voice. Many times in her writings, Arendt brings this distinction, which is both necessary and dialectical. She therefore probes, separates, and criticizes political situations with human consciousness based in a moral voice reflecting the harmony of her Platonic dialogue between the components of her self.

In understanding Zeitblom, Mann's narrative voice, the distinction between conscience and consciousness is also appropriate. It is friendship that allows Zeitblom the proximity to explain Adrian Leverkuhn's intellectual leadership. But Adrian is the friend who left friendship behind by making a pact with the devil in order to further his musical career. Clearly, Adrian chose the aesthetic order over the ethical one. The moral failure of Leverkuhn's choice is explained by an example given by Mann's own friend in musical theory, Adorno. Commenting on Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps, Adorno notes how the sacrifice of a young girl on stage is something "the music accompanies without comment" (46). Here, Adorno establishes that the lack of aesthetic responsibility for violence done to another lies in the fiendish distance that aesthetics can offer in a moral situation. Hence, for Mann as for Adorno, aesthetics becomes a political problem for ethics. In Doctor Faustus, when Mephistopheles presents himself as Esmer alda's "friend and keeper [also 'pimp']" (p. 249), Mann suggests that Adrian's friendship with her shifts to a triangle involving Adrian, Esmeralda, and Mephistopheles and becomes the political problem of the reconciliation of strangeness, much as in Arendt' s exposition of politics (Essays 308). After Adrian hears of the relationship between Mephistopheles and Esmeralda, he returns to Esmeralda, deliberately contracts syphilis from her, and thus brings himself disease, death, and insights into daemonic genius by entering into the political pact. These are, however, only the narrative stakes of Mann's story. Mann's parody turns the tale into one important for its ethical statement about religious risk.

Parody as Laughter

Parody functions for Mann as a wink of the eye. Mann often does not cite his previous model. Instead, he copies it, not slavishly, but with a turn of the ironic screw to give us insight into the problems of the earlier model and, even better, an alternative model to be examined and perhaps even copied again. For postmodernity, such use of parody is a variation of daemonic simulacra, one offering a vision of copying that is creative and provides a different model to be copied. Curiously, Arnold Schoenberg, referring to Mann's attributing the discovery of composing music in a twelve-tone system to Adrian Leverkuhn despite Mann's reference to Schoenberg as the author of this technique, complained vociferously about "this misuse of my property" (22). Hence, although Schoenberg maintains ownership of the copyright, Mann attenuates it in his reply by claiming to have corresponded with Schoenberg about the matter. In the novel, Mann uses parody also to correspond with Schoenberg not only to mock a preceding form and content but also to show respect for its worth as a model even as he modifies it for posterity. Through the eyes of Zeitblom, Adrian wonders why the very nature of art should involve parody. Exemplifying the postmodern simulacrum, Adrian asks: "Why must it seem to me as if almost all, no, all the means of contrivances of art nowadays are good only for parody?" (43). Adrian's question is not unlike the Socratic question that ironically receives no direct answer. By associating Adrian with Mephistopheles--the diabolical identification to the artist who is a mocking liar with a special relationship to music, magic, and laughter--Mann provides the components of parody for Adrian's vision. The result resembles a palimpsest, a text in which some residue of a prior text is identified. In these marks of a former presence, a writer indicates respect for a prior model worthy of being copied, somewhat as the medieval monks copied manuscripts in order to pass on the texts of Western culture.

Mann inherits the texts of other masters and laughs as through his novel he passes them on. For Mann, Goethe is of course the crucial precedent in terms of form and content. Mann reinvests dramatic form with the terms of the dialectics of friendship found in Zeitblom and Leverkuhn, Esmeralda and Leverkuhn, Mesphistopheles and Esmeralda, and finally Mesphistopheles and Leverkuhn, Within the forms of these dialectics, Mann builds on the shoulders of giants to construct his own versions of Milton, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky. Though they constitute his daemonic influences, Mann does not simply copy them. Instead, he also questions their viability by modeling their thought and then combining them not only with other insights but also within his own framework of an ethical vision existing beyond the limitations of their own times.

Let us look at several examples of how Mann weaves these parodies into his story. At first glance, we could see with Paul Eisenstein that "Zeitblom appears to be retelling yet an other story of paradise lost: Adam's downfall is traced in the manner of Milton to Esmeralda (Eve)" (343). Eisenstein comments further that Mann's story argues that memory and repetition are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, Mann remembers and yet sacrifices the focus on human sinfulness for a vision that lies in the friendship between Selenus and Adrian. Mann much more closely allies the diabolical seduction of Adrian with the foibles of genius than with the moral category of sin. The overlap of sin and genius leads Adrian to an affinity with music, where no morality is articulated and where Mephistopheles claims to reign. Here, by having Adrian compose music that becomes increasingly more avant-garde, Mann moves away from his own preference for Wagner, whose music was aligned with magic and the presence of evil threats as well as the ideology of the Third Reich into the modern concerns of musical form. Although Mann's irony toward both Milton and Wagner has been colored by Schopenhauer's "will to power," that will clearly drives Adrian to go beyond the study of theology into music; as Lawrence Ferrara observes, "music speaks of the essence and is directly expressive of, 'the most secret history' of the Will" (186). In order to gain access to that "secret," Mann shows, Adrian must also be willing to go beyond morality, that goal eloquently discussed by a Nietzsche whom Mann admires for his "double vision" (Bridges 48), a Nietzsche looking both backward and forward ironically. In Adrian's deliberate infection with syphilis (M. Mann 317), Mann incorporates Nietzsche's life-experience. Mann also adapted Dostoyevsky's by modeling Ivan Karamazov's vision of the devil; Mann acknowledged (Story 76) that Dostoyevsky was part of his reading at the time and influenced his presentation of the scene of the devil's pact. There is more than mere modeli ng in Mann's adaptations of these giants, however. The abiding presence of Mann's irony enables Mann to laugh even at his narrator, Zeitblom, whose insecurity contrasts to what he glimpses of the genius of Adrian. But because Adrian himself incarnates the positive thrust of Mann's parodies, his character is greater than any single one of the original models or even of their collective presence in him.

Throughout his life, Adrian is associated with laughter. Whereas his narrator-friend admits that "I have always feared Adrian's penchant for laughter" (397) partly because "I am not so very fond of laughter" (94), Adrian laughs exuberantly--laughs, for instance, in mockery of Zeitblom's father for his confidence in the science of pharmaceuticals or laughs sat the naivete of the wefts sung by his adolescent friends. But rather than hostility, Zeitblom explains that Adrian's "love of laughter seemed instead a kind of refuge, a mildly orgiastic release [...] from the rigors of life that result from extraordinary talent" (94). The word instead is crucial in that Zeitblom realizes alternatives to the forms before him. Of course, Zeitblom sees from the outside that Adrian shares in "the laughter of hell" (398), a laughter at once diabolical and daemonic.

The Daemonic Doubling of the Diabolical

Mann's Mephistopheles is not altogether evil. This devil brings genius to its highest human fulfillment so that others can enjoy Adrian's musical compositions. After all, Mephistopheles had led Adrian to his death in 1930, "Adrian's time, which led him only to the threshold of our incredible epoch" (268). Yet another model Mann parodies is the diabolical incarnation of evil. In his reference in German to Adorno's father's name (Wiesengrund) in the pact scene with the devil, Mann thus ironically links his friend to the devil. Evil is thus not a simple category. Rather, Mann elaborates an answer to Wittgenstein's question from Faust: "Is this the sense of belief in the Devil that not everything that comes to us as an inspiration comes from what is good?" (87c). While Mann's devil is a conscience for Adrian, he is not conscience as a moral voice pointing out the difference between good and evil. To explain Mann's view, Arendt's insights are helpful here.

Arendt was inspired by Socrates to view consciousness and conscience as the components of a dialogue internal to the self. Conscience, as literally "knowledge with another" (Arendt, "Thinking" 418), involves the dialectical process friendship often provides by offering knowledge of an individual from within and from without. This is the kind of knowledge that Adrian's friendship with Mephistopheles provides: knowledge of the inside and the outside. In the pact scene, the devil knows that Adrian is ambitious to become a great musical artist and that he is intimate with Esmeralda. Sharing this knowledge with Adrian, he produces harmony with Adrian's consciousness by offering success in that which Mephistopheles possesses: art, music, and laughter. What Arendt calls the "banality of evil" (Eichmann)--that is, the inability to think--is not present in Mann's Mephistopheles. In fact, Mann's devil is an artist of negotiation in presenting music to Adrian as the gift of access to cultural leadership and also the abi lity to control time.

The pact of friendship between Adrian and the devil is based on their common alliance with music. The devil promises Adrian change and leadership in a society that will be awestruck by his musical genius. Zeitblom observes, from the outside, that German culture began to become aware of "the rediscovery of music itself as organization of time" (338). Adrian can control the time of his appreciation within his culture if he can control the music. As Mann notes in an article published in 1944, he himself realizes the cultural role that music plays: "Social changes are like developments in music [...]; [they are] rejected until the ear can catch up and becomes accustomed to the new" ("German" 84). In this daemonic inspiration of music, however, there is a problem. Mann's devil points to it in stressing the ties between genius and disease, what he calls "creative disease, genius-bestowing disease" (258). This alliance separates Adrian from his potential audience because within himself he will have both crossed into the world of the forbidden and have begun the process of self-destruction. In the pursuit of self-realization in art, Adrian thus embodies Adorno's principle of "the identity of the non-identical" (Heimann 250-60). This inspiration of art has been described as "a dialectic of art desiring to become non-art, and yet being totally unable to become non-art" (Bahr 148). Being fooled into taking the extreme risk of being more than himself, Adrian is thus led by the daemonic promise of being able to transcend himself in music whose organization of time will also lead him to think that he can live forever.

Leverkuhn: The Incarnation of Extreme Risk

Adrian's family name, Leverkuhn, means literally "to live boldly." With this name prefiguring his destiny, Adrian seeks to push the limits of himself in the realm of music. In the aesthetic realm, music appears to be an ironic arena in which to push the self s limits. It has been observed, however, that "[i]n most of Mann's works music figures as a subverter of all order, social and moral, [as] a sensuously alluring embodiment of all the blandishments of decay and death" (Beddow 9). As Adrian finds after his study of theology, music appears to subvert the ineffectual ability of words to study the divine. Insofar as the devil admits to Adrian of "my special relation to this fine art" (257), the subversion appears to be of the highest order. Once again, Mann uses parody to question such prior heroes as Prometheus and Orpheus, who also lived boldly in order to push the limits of human potential. When Adrian allies himself with Mephistopheles, he thus questions the negative potential of evil, much as Arendt hers elf would do in 1963 by presenting Eichmann as incarnating the "banality of evil." Because the politics of having numerous friendships--with Esmeralda, the devil, and later with Echo and Marie Godeau--brings Adrian much pain and many tears, Mann also subverts Adrian's friendship with Zeitblom. Although Adrian can laugh his diabolical laughter, Zeitblom sees the tragic sacrifice of his friendship in "Adrian's laughing to the point of tears at all his misery" (476). After all, Adrian did write his pact down for Selenus, and Adrian's insight in 1927 bears repeating: "Sorrowe did move Dr. Faustum that he made writ of his lamentacion" (481). Adrian thus returns to words to explain to his friend Selenus the realistic details of his pact with the devil.

Hannah Arendt suggests that the choice of being a pariah is a conscious choice to be "unburdened by the world" in an act of "inner emigration" (Dark Times 14, 19). The "inner emigration" is one's acting inauthentically to pursue ambitions that preclude harmony between conscience and consciousness, what she learned from Socrates to be "the relation between me and myself' (Crises 84). Epitomizing this pariah status, Adrian chooses to be marginalized from his society and to betray his friendship to Selenus. Meanwhile, Selenus admits that his Catholic morality makes it difficult for him not to judge evil as evil and to act according to "my conscience as a citizen" (33). But when he sees Adrian laugh to the point of tears about his pain, Selenus comes close to a hagiographic commentary on Adrian's self-sacrifice. Instead, however, we are left with the observation by Inez that "pain is something beneath man's dignity, a disgrace not to be suffered" (406). Although this is certainly a humanitarian perspective, it i s one that belies the affirmation included in Mann's parodic sensibility. In the display of Adrian's life, Mann has offered a ritual performed for the affirmation of the culture Adrian left behind.

The Religious Overlay

In matters of religion, Mann's irony is adapted especially from Kierkegaard's example. Kierkegaard saw the links between genius and illness. He also admired the methods and sacrificial examples of Socrates and Christ. Kierkegaard's irony, however, was couched within his ideas of religious salvation. For Mann, religion is seen in the wink of an eye that does not provide a safety net for the one who risks. Despite Adrian's pact with the devil and the success of his musical genius, he continues until the end to be theologically interested. Zeitblom, however, the voice whom Mann describes in 1948 as a parody of Mann himself (Carnegy 16), insists on his humanism. Mann himself proposed a "new humanism" whereby "in the idea of human dignity, of the value of the individual soul, humanism transcends into the religious" ("German" 85). Perhaps Zeitblom incarnates Mann's insecurities. There is, in any case, an affirmation in the religious component of humanism that remains ethically focused in its response to the other, in what Levinas calls "solicitude" (Totalite 146). Selenus hears and responds to such solicitude from his friend Adrian across the grave to do something with the written pact the composer had bequeathed to him.

Prior to providing the pact for Selenus, Adrian had attempted and failed in friendships. Although he did not have children of his own, he befriended his much younger nephew Echo. This friendship recalls the relationship Diderot presented in dialogue between Rameau and his parasitic, brilliant nephew. Because not much communication occurred between the two generations in Diderot's work, in Mann, parody is at work and becomes postmodern in that it transcends the mere copy of a copy in a simulacrum to provide ethical examples of friendship that do not simply replicate prior models of such relationships. While Rameau was the theoretician of the very musical harmony Adrian's twelve-tone method subverts, Mann inverts the relationship of Diderot's Rameau with his nephew. Adrian is the genius. Echo, as well as Marie Godeau, are the objects of Adrian's love, late in life. Neither one can reciprocate, and both leave Adrian with the need to return in some fashion to Selenus.

Arendt once again provides a clue as to how to see the ethical nature of the relationship between Selenus and Adrian. She notes that the Roman meaning for religion, religare, was "binding themselves back to a beginning" (On Revolution 199). Hence, according to this view, Selenus was responding to Adrian's solicitude for the friendship they had once had, for an expression of that togetherness that expressed itself in common endeavors and the ability to be able to use the intimate pronouns in German to address each other. This novel as biography is an expression of what binds them back to their beginnings without condemning the friend for surpassing the limits acknowledged by the befriended narrator. The basis for the story is also a pact, an agreement of friendship between Adrian and the Other, one that also had to be told so that the dialectic that gave meaning to Adrian's choice could be seen by others.

Adrian's music, like the church organ he studied in his native Kaisersachern, must be accompanied by a "liturgical ensemble" as Blanchot ("Thomas Mann" 7) understood. By involving the antipode of God, the "liturgical ensemble," that is Selenus's narrative, is a parody of sacred ritual. In the pact with the devil, Adrian speaks of the visit as an "annunciation"(258). This annunciation is the scene when Gabriel informs Mary that she will be the mother of God. By contrast, Adrian is informed of his impending association with the Prince of Darkness. The pact scene is thus parodic and also more than that in that it is testimony to the friendship of Selenus, his gift of the narrative bequeathed by Adrian to his friend. In Mann's irony and his sense of the non-repetitive nature of his parody, he offers a postmodern insight that allows his modernist writing to survive and to guarantee that each reading of Zeitbiom's tribute to his friend will neither be a simple copy nor a sign of dysfunctional friendship. Instead, the holy part of this liturgy has to do with Selenus's response to his friend with whom he shares a common beginning. Mann's Doctor Faustus may be read as "refusing either to confirm or definitively to reject the merciful ending of Faust" (Scaff 154). Such a reading, however, grants too much ambivalence to the narrative and does not acknowledge the postmodern force of the daemonic simulacrum that Mann gives his story by having a friend narrate the fate of his friend. Despite the differences between the friends, the story provides a religious tribute in their reaching back together to find Adrian's salvation in his sacrifice of himself so that others will see the price he had to pay for the recognition of his genius.

We must not forget that Mann's irony, as a mockery of the past but also as a vision for the future, looks forward as well as backward. It is the narrative itself, played out by Adrian's friend, that is the ritual performance of the pact. Doctor Faustus thus provides a postmodern view of parody as the simulacrum that updates Nietzsche's "double vision" to appreciate the past and to look forward. The model of friendship between Adrian and Selenus survives the many trials of politics and substitute copies of friendship to become a model for the response to the call of the other. [3]

Roland A. Champagne (rachampagne@umsl.edu) is chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the author of The Ethics of Reading According to Emmanuel Levinas (1998) and essays on Hannah Arendt and Kant in the Fall 1998 issue of Idealistic Studies, on the music of Roland Barthes in the Spring 1999 issue of Semiotica, and on Italo Svevo in volume 8 of Italiana (1999). He is working on a book (entitled Questioning Political Space) on the ethics in Hannah Arendt's writings.

Notes

(1.) All translations from French and German sources are mine unless I indicate another translator.

(2.) Subsequent references to this translation will be made by page number after the citation.

(3.) I thank Albert Camigliano, Thomas Sebastion, and Ingeborg Goessl for their help with the German, Alfred Goessl for his bibliographical suggestions, and the editors of Style for their helpful copyediting.

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