A deep, ultimate seriousness runs through them all, a seriousness which their ever-present irony increases rather than diminishes. Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, Gide’s Faux-Monnayeurs, Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s great parables, Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Broch’s Das Tod Vergils, Sartre’s Nausée, Camus’ Etranger-each, in theme, is an inventory of our spiritual holdings, a moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical reckoning-up of our human estate some of them, in form, carry abstraction to a point beyond which further evolution seems impossible. The great novels of the 20th century, its essential books, are without exception terminal books, apotheoses of the narrative form. Kahler’s article has been translated from the German by Francis C. Erich Kahler here analyzes Doctor Faustus in relationship to Thomas Mann’s entire life and work and to the cultural and anti-cultural trends of the past decades. Few books have offered such a challenge to America’s critics and other readers as Thomas Mann’s recently published Doctor Faustus, which marks the climax of one of the great literary careers of our age-a career possibly as important and instructive as the works of art it produced.
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