Vladimir Nabokovs "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" und Thomas Manns "Doktor Faustus"
Jan Stottmeister, M.A., Humboldt Universität Berlin, November 2006
For a PDF copy of the thesis, please send an email to jan.stottmeister(at)berlin.de .
The thesis is written in German. An English abstract is attached below.
Best,
Jan Stottmeister
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Abstract
At first glance Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) und Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947) would seem to have little in common. Dense with religious symbolism, historical commentary and protracted debates about German culture and mentality, Mann’s text is poles apart from the narrative aesthetic of Nabokov’s first English novel.
Yet there are notable similarities between the two texts. Both novels recall the life of a fictional contemporary artist and both contain extraordinarily detailed descriptions of that artist's works. In the two novels we find a first-person narrator who can be seen as a complement to and alter ego of the main protagonist. Beyond such basic similarities a comparative reading of Sebastian Knight and Doktor Faustus shows how numerous themes, narrative devices and even the wording of certain descriptions in Mann's novel are prefigured in Nabokov's text.
In the first chapter a survey of the history of the artist-novel from the late 18th to the early 20th century shows how the level of detail in the treatment of the creative works of the writer Sebastian Knight and the composer Adrian Leverkühn is without precedent in the history of the genre. Typically the artist-novel is focused on the biography of a protagonist and the issue of his identity as artist. Descriptions of the artist's oeuvre are generally minimal. As the biography of a fictional artist told as the story of his works, Nabokov‘s Sebastian Knight makes a radical departure from previous models of the genre. Mann's novel represents a similar break with generic tradition.
The second and third chapters of this study examine just how the creative output of both protagonists is interwoven into the structure of the novels and with what narrative strategies this is executed. While Mann's challenge of transposing musical works into text is quite different from that faced by Nabokov, there are nonetheless parallels in the narrative techniques employed by both writers to invoke the works of the respective protagonists. Knight and Leverkühn also have a similar artistic development. Having undertaken a parodic deconstruction of conventional stylistics both develop their own individual style in an intellectual, self-reflexive art which invents its own rules instead of following the rules of tradition. The last works of both artists - Knight's novel The Doubtful Asphodel and Leverkühn‘s Oratorio Doktor Fausti Weheklag - can both be read as allegories of the plots of the novels in which they are described. The concept of a self-reflexive art, the idea of a fiction within a fiction, is thus brought to its logical conclusion.
The fourth chapter highlights startling parallels in the characterisations of Knight and Leverkühn as cold and aloof figures. Their biographies are the basis for a discussion of similar themes: the relationship between art and disease, the tension between artistic and emotional independence and the determining force of origin, and the opposition of eros and intellect which in both novels is dramatised by the figure of a femme fatale and accompanied by allusions to Shakespeare's Love’s Labour’s Lost.
A key feature linking both novels is the use of a first-person narrator. In V., Knight's half-brother and in Zeitblom, Leverkühn's childhood friend, we find unreliable narrators whose approach to the life-story of the respective protagonists is coloured by their own bias. Here the act of narration itself becomes an attempt to approach the biographies of Leverkühn and Knight after their deaths. A comparative analysis of the narrators in the fifth chapter focuses especially on the complex interrelationship of identity and difference which shapes their attitude towards the protagonists. While Nabokov displays far greater virtuosity in this point, it is striking that Mann should opt for this form of narration which marks a radical departure from the reliable or omniscient narrators typical of earlier works.
The last chapter investigates the possibility of a direct influence of Nabokov on Mann. Although there are no indications from Mann's letters and diaries of the time that he had any knowledge of Nabokov's first English novel when he began to conceive Doktor Faustus in March 1943, this chapter sketches out a number of possible ways Mann may have come to know the novel of the then still obscure Nabokov. (The most interesting potential link would be via Mann's contact to James Laughlin, the publisher of Sebastian Knight.) Beyond the possibility of direct influence, here exile is discussed as a situation which may have given rise to similar literary motifs and narrative strategies.