Textual Awareness: A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust, and Mann by Van Hulle Dirk

Author:Van Hulle, Dirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Chapter 7

Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus

The “MAKING OF” VERSUS DIE ENTSTEHUNG: CHRONOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF THE WRITING PROCESS

In the year of Joyce's death, Harry Levin wrote a critical introduction to his works that was published as part of a series devoted to “The Makers of Modern Literature.” Thomas Mann read the essay in February 1942 and called it “an excellent book” when he finished it early in March. The reason for this appraisal, however, may have had to do with Levin's comments on Mann rather than on Joyce (TB March 2, 1942). Joyce had been one of Mann's most serious competitors in the top five of greatest modernist writers. Now that Joyce was dead, Mann discovered “a brother” in the Irish writer. Thanks to Harry Levin, he also seems to have made a more important discovery. Among the passages that Mann read with “great interest” (TB March 2, 1942), the fifth chapter, entitled “Montage,” is of special importance with regard to Mann's own montage technique, applied in Doktor Taustus.

In this fifth chapter Levin compares Joyce's prose to movie techniques: “Bloom's mind is neither a tabula rasa nor a photographic plate, but a motion picture, which has been ingeniously cut and carefully edited.… The movement of Joyce's style, the thought of his characters, is like unreeling film; his method of construction, the arrangement of this raw material, involves the crucial operation of montage” (Levin 82). This comparison is applicable in particular to the “Oxen of the Sun” episode in Ulysses, written in the form of a concentrated recapitulation of the history of English prose. Levin quotes a few samples from Joyce's impersonations of an Anglo-Saxon bard, Thomas Malory, Thomas Browne, Dickens, and Carlyle, and concludes: “Joyce's shifts from sober reality to bewildering richness, his transitions from the objective to the subjective and back—in the opinion of Sergei Eisenstein, the film director and brilliant exponent of montage—constitute one of the most effective applications of this technique” (96).

This montage technique also proved to be suitable for the encyclopedic ambitions of Joyce's last project. In The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, Umberto Eco demonstrates that Joyce has adopted a medieval model in his works. Since art—for the medieval thinker—is a way of reproducing “the universal rules of cosmic order” (7), the numerous creatures and objects have to be cataloged first in an encyclopedic way, and only then an attempt can be made “to explain the form of the universe”—but not without help, for the medieval thinker “must always be guaranteed the pledge of an Auctoritas” (10). This way, the romantic concept of a text's authority is completely reversed by the medieval notion of auctoritas.

From the medieval habit of quoting in order to demonstrate, Joyce acquired the taste for quotation at any cost, even if camouflaged quotation. Finnegans Wake, even more than Ulysses, can be seen in its entirety as an immense catalogue of authoritative quotations, a Walpurgisnacht of philosophy a rebours. (11)

With an equally ambitious project at the back of his mind, Thomas Mann read in Levin's essay about the “encyclopedic sweep of Earwicker's fantasies” (148).

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