Irony Ironised

Extract

‘I sate alone here, by my lamp, nigh to the windows with shutters closed, before me the length of the hall, and read Kierkegaard on Mozart’s Don Juan. Then in a clap I am stricken by a cutting cold, even as though I sat in a winter-warm room and a window had blown open towards the frost. It came not from behind me, where the windows lie; it falls on me from in front. I start up from my boke and look abroad into the hall, belike Sch. is come back, for I am no longer alone. There is some bodye there in the mirk, sitting on the horse-hair sofa that stands almost in the myddes of the room. . . .’

Such is the meeting of Adrian Leverkühn, the demonic composer of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, with the Devil, who has come to make the traditional bargain for a soul.

It is not by accident that Adrian Leverkühn is reading Kierkegaard’s essay on Mozart’s Don Juan in Either/Or. We might even hazard a guess as to which lines Leverkühn was reading when the Devil appeared:

‘When sensuousness appears as that which must be excluded, as that which the spirit can have nothing to do with, yet without passing judgment upon it or condemning it, then the sensuous assumes the form of the demonic in aesthetic indifference. . . . Don Juan consequently is the expression for the demonic determined as the sensuous; Faust its expression determined as the intellectual or spiritual, which the Christian spirit excludes.’