Dr. Faustus

I read but don't absorb most of the passages about music, in much the same way that I read whole sections, or all, of Ulysses, and in much the same way that I learned to skip over the French vocabulary I didn't understand in pursuit of the coherent whole. That notes, chords, harmony and dissonance can have language and ideas as their foundation I believe, but I can't disassemble the structure and have a little laugh at its ingenuity.
It's nice to have an intellectual artist-hero for once, one who makes art from the parody of epiphany, who doesn't make stark emotion the hallmark of artistry. Adrian thinks himself into art, and the structure he discerns within music he does not use to critique it, but make his own intellectual sort. But he does preserve the Joycean hero's bothersome penchant for loneliness...bothersome because it seems to be a prerequisite of genius, and those who love company seemed doomed to mediocrity. Even before "hell's horrid hole" makes its claim, Adrian is removed from the world, reluctant to shake hands and wary of emotion, and of humanity. Every artist must be susceptible to reclusiveness, like Adrian susceptible to the devil.
And the narrator is as extreme as Nick Carraway, calling attention to his flaws only to remind us of his humanity, but never putting into question the material that is supposedly entirely accurate. He and Nick, both strangely drawn to another person, get swallowed up in their protagonists' stories. But neither is meant to be invisible, they both call attention to their reliability and care and diligence and spirit. As shadowers we write them off, and never think of this brand of artistry: observation. But they are just as closed off, just as obsessed, and have made the sacrifice. There's a whole group of characters out there (Mansfield's Bertha included) that don't realize they are artists, that don't realize that their stories should be about them.
There is an anecdote about a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for monumental time. God, in mercy, has the man die of disease before the devil claims him, and the death is tragic, but also is the salvation of a soul that would otherwise have suffered infinitely more. I haven't yet found out whether this will happen to Adrian, but it's a reasonable allegory for Hitler's Germany: Germany sells it soul to the devil (Hitler?) but God intervenes ensuring that Germany loses the war. This is tragic for the German nation and spirit, but not so tragic as Germany's fate had Hitler won.
Finally the philosophic devil: appearing in The Master and Margarita and now here. Checkered shirt, pince-nez, changing forms, but always innocuous forms, checkmating the heroes not through force or evil, but through intellect. It makes the world take on a theoretical hue, when the possessor of the most evil powers uses them in logic games and circus shows. And if the devil is never scary, then who is God in these stories? The devil renounces his evil, God renounces himself, the narrator renounces his character, Germany renounces its humanity...