![]() ![]() ![]() Not that similar bargains with “the forces of evil” are uncommon today, being in fact the rule rather than the exception, but the agencies with which the contemporary kind are negotiated have been non-personal. Pacts with devils in human form, complete with “cold winds” and changing guises, are more appropriate to the sixteenth century than to the twentieth. And the book’s major flaw as fiction-counting as minor blemishes the discursiveness, and the imbalance between theory in the first half, story development and human variety in the second-may be attributed to conflicts between Mann’s symbolic and realistic intentions. Yet paradoxically, the story of a former divinity student who bargains his soul and body to become a “musician of genius” is set in the wrong historical era. The career of Thomas Mann’s modern Faust is intended to illustrate the political, artistic, and religious dilemmas of the author’s time. ![]()
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