The hilarious Doctor Faustus - I am not so very fond of laughter

Zeitblom, the narrator of Doctor Faustus, presents an interpretation of his composer friend Adrian Leverkühn suggesting that his avant garde aestheticism is the reason German intellectuals were so often so gullible and accepting of fascism. Many critics, to my bafflement, have followed that path. Zeitblom, a teacher of philology. is not a fascist, but, like many of the intellectuals the novel is about, some kind of fellow traveler or enabler. His objection to the actual Nazis, aside from their vulgarity, is that (Zeitblom begins writing his memoir in 1943) they are losing the war to the “enfeebled democracies” (XXVI, 268), although he holds out hope for the V2 rockets, “such an admirable piece of ordnance that only sacred necessity can have inspired the genius who invented it” (XXXIII, 355). He has many nutty views, like his suspicion, or even fear, of physics and the “so-called works of God” meaning, for example, the sun (XVIII, 159). Or his belief that the glissando is “a musical…