Other misplaced ideas: the political meaning in the narrative structure of Doctor Faustus

Abstract

The present article investigates how the formal and discursive contradictions in Serenus Zeitblom’s narrative in Doctor Faustus (1947) constitute the core through which the novel articulates its political dimension. Beginning with the debate on narrative reliability, we seek to understand what Serenus’s interpretation of Adrian Leverkühn’s life reveals about the narrator himself. To this end, we first situate Serenus within the lineage of self-conscious narrators exemplified by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr (1819). We then bring this tradition into dialogue with Roberto Schwarz’s reading of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) in A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism (1990). In this way, we demonstrate how Serenus’ narrative not only operates as a mechanism of involuntary self-exposure similar to that of these narrators but also carries an inherently political meaning. Thus, the contrast between humanist discourse and political inaction in the face of the rise of Nazism becomes legible in the narrative structure itself, so that the biography Serenus composes simultaneously stages a process of political learning and a critique of the intellectual bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum) to which he belongs.