[In the following excerpt, Urdang discusses setting in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.]

Every piece of work is in fact a realization—piecemeal if you like, but each complete in itself—of our own nature; they are stones on that harsh road which we must walk to learn of ourselves.

—Mann

. . . who would taste
The medicine of immortality,
And who would "be as God"?
And in what way?

—Shapiro

In his introduction to the American edition of the Stories of Three Decades, Thomas Mann says, about a group of early stories, that they "wear the impress of much melancholy and ironic reflection on the subject of art and the artist: his isolation and equivocal position in the world of reality, considered socially and metaphysically and as the result of his double bond with nature and spirit." The youthful melancholy may have lessened with the years, but the theme of the place of the artist in the world continued to occupy Mann's attention. All the artist-figures in his works share certain characteristics not shared by the non-artists—although they too, by reason of their very humanity, have the "double bond with nature and spirit."

Perhaps the most important characteristic of Mann's artist is his isolation, whether subjective (as in the case of Tonio Kröger) or objective (like Leverkuhn's, expressed in the social isolation that results from his contraction of syphilis, the physical isolation of the house in the country to which he retires, the psychological isolation of his madness). Mann would certainly have agreed that isolation is not the peculiar prerogative of the artist—that it is one of the inescapable concomitants of the human condition. Nevertheless, essentially the artist remains for him the exile, the outsider, the stranger to normal, conventional human activity. The artist can observe life and the world of reality, can interpret it, can even understand it; but he cannot participate in it. If he does, disaster follows (Cipolla is shot for having thus misused his art, von Aschenbach dies of cholera because he has permitted himself to get involved in life, Leverkiihn's attempts at human relationships are aborted by the deaths of those he loves).

These artists are all, in this sense, "marked men," whether or not the sign or stigma of their differentness is generally visible (interestingly, it is the artist manqué, the dilettante who shares some—but not all—of the characteristics of the truly creative artist-figure, who is most often physically marked; Herr Friedemann is a hunchback, Klaus Heinrich has a club foot).

Some further characteristics of Mann's artists, as at least one critic has pointed out, are their unusual sensitivity (producing that heightened perception necessary for the production of a work of art), their lack of adaptability (another aspect of the inability to conform to external values), and their general uselessness and incompetence in dealing with practical life (an ineffectuality sometimes even carried over into the sphere of their art: Spinell, in Tristan, is ineffectual in his role as artist as well as in his role as man).

Mann always sees the artist in his relation to the bourgeois. Sometimes, as in Dr. Faustus, the two are represented by separate characters (Leverkiihn, artist; Zeitblom, bourgeois); more often, both aspects are contained within a single character. Tonio Kröger is the son of a respectable German consul father and a fiery, musical Italian mother; even Hans Castorp, in whom the bourgeois element is by far the stronger, had painted some pictures that were not without artistic merit; and von Aschenbach's ancestors "had all been officers, judges, departmental functionaries"—and northerners—except for his maternal grandfather, "a Bohemian musical conductor," and a southerner, for Mann frequently identifies the north with the bourgeois and the south with the artist (Kröger's father, too, was northern, his "artistic" mother southern). It is an awareness of the conflict that results from the presence of these two opposing forces (the one representing the bond with the world of reality, with nature; the other representing the bond with the spirit) within himself that tortures the artist and that has produced him. He both wants and does not want to share in the life that he recognizes as "the world of reality"; he both wants and does not want to rid himself of the sign or stigma of his isolation; but he can no more avoid his destiny than a giraffe can decide to become a horse and proceed to do so.

There is one quality above all that isolates Mann's artists from their fellow-men. It is a truism to apply to the artist the phrase "divine discontent," but perhaps it is as good a phrase as any to describe the impulse that urges him to persist—and the better because it can be used to characterize as well the legendary Faust. For Mann's artist, like the Faust-figure, is driven—by something in himself that he does not understand—to seek knowledge beyond the humanly knowable. More than that; since in his relation to his work the artist is omnipotent, in his role as creator he becomes a true usurper of superhuman powers. For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that force which drove the symbolic Faust to estrange himself from both man and God would be explained only in terms of a literal pact with the devil. For later writers the devil had become a metaphor, the inferno raged within the mind; but the evil was no less real, and the imagery persisted. Particularly writers of the Romantic school recognized the existence of evil and made it concrete; the forces of darkness are never far from their dark landscapes, filled with gloomy castles, deserted roads, sinister forests, threatening storms, vampires, werewolves, satanic heroes and helpless heroines. Here nighttime, illness and sin form an unholy alliance. The discovery and exploitation of the Unconscious confirmed what these writers already knew. The old metaphors had not been wrong. The devil was real, and was still at work, although the language used to describe him had shifted from that of theology to that of psychiatry.

Several critics have pointed out Mann's indebtedness to the ideas of German Romanticism. They find evidence of this debt in his conception of genius as disease; in one of his persistent prejudices, that illness is more interesting and deeper than health; in his fascination with decadence and death; in his notion of the close relationship between pleasure and pain, between beauty and death; in his emphasis on the connection between the unnatural, unclean, sick, death-bound, sinful and diabolical, and the artist. His use of these ideas, Romantic as it was in essence, was not naive. His purpose, more than anything else, was to show that particularly for the artist it is necessary not only to recognize the existence of evil, but to seek it out and embrace it. To understand this process as one of "succumbing" to the fascination of death and disease (or, if you like, sin), is to misunderstand it; for there is nothing passive about it. The artist-heroes, like Baudelaire and the Decadents, must actively pursue evil. Like Faust, they must invite the devil.

Unlike more mystical writers, Mann does not claim either sainthood or salvation for these sinners. Their reward, if it is one, is the creation of works of art—and that very creation is at the same time the deepest manifestation of their sin, for the power to create is a prerogative of the divine, and not the human, and they have usurped that power. It is for this reason that, like Faust, Mann's creative artists must be punished. Tonio Kröger must watch life dancing past from behind the glass door; Cipolla must be shot; Aschenbach must die of cholera; Leverkühn must go mad, because each of them has signed his pact with the devil.

While it was not until Dr. Faustus (1947) that the devil appeared in his own person in Mann's books, we are told that he planned a Faust book as early as 1901, and hints of the Faustian story may be found again and again in earlier works. The Magic Mountain, with its many discussions of evil, its equating of sin with sickness and death, its frequent use of the trappings of mediaeval magic, its Walpurgisnacht—and its eventual ironic salvation of the hero (who, after all, was not an artist), which Maltes this work a comedy, rather than a tragedy¹—is one of these. And The Magic Mountain was originally conceived as a "comic counterpart" to Death in Venice.

At first glance, the two works are entirely dissimilar. One is a novel in many "books"; the other is most often considered a "long short story." The hero of one is a young bourgeois; that of the other, an aging artist. The action of one covers many years; that of the other, a few weeks. One appears to be a novel of ideas, in which the youthful protagonist passes, picaresque-fashion, through a series of intellectual or ideological adventures; the other seems like a study of the disintegration of a man. And yet Mann must have felt that, seminally at least, some underlying theme or idea linked the two works. It may be that the overtones of the Faust legend which appear in The Magic Mountain can provide a thread leading to the untangling of that theme.

Since his earliest appearance in the sixteenth century the figure of Faust, representing the darkly questioning mind, the eternally unsatisfied spirit, the incurable thirst for knowledge which drives its victims to transgress human limitations, has engaged the thoughts and the imaginations of men. Based on the far older and virtually universal tradition of the magus, the god-priest-king of myth and the ancient world, with the coming of Christianity the central figure of the legend had become a sorcerer whose superhuman aspirations were implemented by the use of magic, the black art, and who, for his forbidden tampering with the forces of darkness, was condemned by orthodoxy to eternal damnation. Magus or magician, he owed his perennial existence to the fact that the problems and dilemmas made concrete in his story are those fundamental moral and philosophical questions which have been presented and represented throughout history: the relationship between man and the powers of good and evil; man's revolt against human limitations; the desire for knowledge beyond mere information; and the disparity between the sublimity and misery of human life.

The Faust-figure has stood for different things to different periods of history. To the viewers of the first Faust dramas and puppet-plays, derived from traditional retellings of the legend, his punishment was a warning against inordinate ambition, speculation about the unknowable, and any kind of league with evil spirits. In Marlowe's tragedy he had become the protagonist of an action which concentrated, intensified, and symbolized the doom brooding over the entire Christian world—for his sin, committed in time, was punished in eternity. For Goethe he became a symbol of the absolute incorruptibility of man, who can spend a lifetime sinning but will not finally be false to the divinity within himself. Essentially, however, Faust, whose sin consists in his "divine discontent"—in wanting knowledge that transcends what can be humanly known—that is, in wanting for himself those qualities and powers reserved for the deity—is a special kind of sinner. He is one who has deliberately chosen evil, fully aware of the price he will have to pay. It was this sinner who caught the imagination and interest of the writers of Sturm und Drang and, later, the Romantics. Like Milton's Lucifer, the "sublime criminal" of Schiller's Räuber, the satanic heroes of the Gothic romances, and the "fatal men" of Byron, Faust, by reason of his "tragic stain," has taken the desperate, irremediable, fatal false step, and has chosen sin and darkness.

At first glance, Gustave von Aschenbach, the protagonist of Death in Venice, would seem to be the antithesis of the Faust-figure and of the artist as Mann usually sees him. He is a successful, middle-aged man, wealthy enough to own a house in the mountains as well as a town house in Munich, and to travel as he pleases; although his wife is dead, his marriage had been happy, and his married daughter is not a source of anxiety to him; fame had come to him early, and he was admired by both the general public and the connoisseur; although his best work is behind him, he is still "busy with the tasks imposed upon him by his own ego and the European soul," and he wants to live to a good old age. He is consciously a Classicist, an anti-Romantic. His achievement is the product of the "union of dry, conscientious officialdom and ardent, obscure impulse" personified in his parents; his favorite motto is "Durchhalten!"; the classic austerity of his style has disciplined every aspect of his life, and he is linked with a series of ascetics: Frederick the Great, Savonarola, St. Sebastian. And that is not all. His rejection of Romanticism, of "bohemianism and all its works," is entirely conscious. As a youth "he had done homage to intellect . . . had turned his back on the 'mysteries' . . ."; as a mature man, he "turned his back on the realm of knowledge." Further, we are told that "The Abject," his most famous story, "rejects the rejected, casts out the outcast. . . . Explicitly he renounces sympathy with the abyss, explicitly he refutes the flabby humanitarianism of the phrase, 'Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. "' This series of rejections from which Aschenbach's life and art have sprung would seem to represent the opposite of that acceptance which is generally characteristic of Mann's artists. It is as if we are being presented with an artist who is truly superhuman—who by virtue of discipline and "austerity" and the Classic ideal has succeeded in evading the curse of his destiny, in avoiding the abyss, and in escaping the eternal damnation which is Faust's. But the story is not yet finished.

The first section concerns Aschenbach's walk in Munich, a walk which starts out prosaically enough but finishes with undertones of the dreamlike, the mysterious, the fantastic, even the sinister. He first observes the stonemason's yard, which forms a "supernumerary and untenanted graveyard opposite the real one," and then his attention is drawn to the figure of a man with a "pilgrim air" who stands on the portico of the mortuary chapel. Thus the stranger's connection with death is obvious from the beginning. He is described in negative terms, as "not Bavarian" (as the painted old man on the steamship is "no youth at all," as the gondolier is of "non-Italian stock," as the street-musician is "scarcely a Venetian type"); he has that reddish hair associated in the German tradition with sinister figures (the hair of the painted old man is dyed brown, so we do not know its original color; the gondolier has a blond moustache; the street musician has "a great mop of red hair"); he has "long, white, glistening teeth laid bare to the gums" (the gondolier's efforts "bared his white teeth to the gums," the street-musician is described as "showing his strong white teeth in a servile smile"). Aschenbach does not know whether seeing the stranger produces in him the unrest which he immediately feels, but a longing to travel suddenly comes on him like "a seizure, almost a hallucination," and he has a vision of the jungle:

a landscape, a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky, steaming, monstrous, rank—a kind of primeval wilderness-world of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels. Hairy palm-trunks rose near and far out of lush brakes of fern, out of bottoms of crass vegetation, fat, swollen, thick with incredible bloom. There were trees, mis-shapen as a dream, that dropped their naked roots straight through the air into the ground or into water that was stagnant and shadowy and glassy-green, where mammoth milk-white blossoms floated, and strange highshouldered birds with curious bills stood gazing sidewise without sound or stir. Among the knotted joints of a bamboo thicket the eyes of a crouching tiger gleamed . . .

For an unaccountable reason, this vision inspires in him "a longing inexplicable," and while he is not so irrational as to contemplate a journey to the tigers, he decides almost at once to give up his quiet summer in the mountains and to travel to the south (invariably, for Mann, the source of art). When, safe in the tram, he thinks again of the man on the portico, the stranger has disappeared; "his whereabouts remained a mystery."

This early episode, then, foreshadows much of what is to come. Vernon Venable has interpreted the story as one in which,

the treble is the simple narrative sequence of Aschenbach's voyage, his life on the Lido, his love for the boy Tadzio, and his death. The ground bass is the "life and death" theme, repeated as a sort of undertone to the story by those characters who seem to have no very obvious connection with the narrative content.²

He quite rightly points out that a clue to Mann's technique lies in the dualism or polarity which always characterizes his subject-matter; that the themes of his novels are generally constituted by such large antitheses as life-death, fertility-decay, flesh-spirit; that he "never prefers one term of his antithesis to the other, for his interest is not in arguing theses but in developing themes"; finally, that his irony is so deep-seated that even individual symbols are ambiguous, and the jungle, for example, which represents life at its most lush, is seen also as the breeding-place of the plague. These general statements cannot be denied, but it would seem that in Death in Venice the life-death antithesis, which does pervade the story, is used not primarily for its own sake, but as a metaphor in the presentation of the true theme, that of the impossibility, for the artist, of avoiding his destiny, as Faust could not avoid his. The mysterious stranger, then, signifies life (as opposed to the cemetery, the crosses and monuments in the stone-mason's yard, and the mortuary); the vision of the jungle, seen by Aschenbach now as lush, rank fertility, is here opposed to his musings on the mystical meanings of the scriptural texts; Aschenbach's fear and his desire are opposed—three oppositions which do fall roughly into the three realms of physical things, of ideas, and of emotions, as Venable suggests; but there is more to it than that. The stranger, who reappears in various guises throughout the story, is not simply a symbolic human figure who happens to be there and unwittingly acts as a catalyst for Aschenbach's decisions (although, if we choose to take the entire story in its psychological interpretation only, we could say that none of the characters outside of Aschenbach himself has any "real" existence, beyond that which he gives them in his mind—just as we cannot know whether the devil did actually appear to Leverkühn or whether that scene was the product of a mind already diseased). He is the figure of the tempter who can assume any shape he pleases, and if we do not recognize him yet, we need only wait until he appears as the gondolier, an "obstinate, uncanny man," who says, "The signore will pay," and then vanishes before he has received any money; or as the street-musician, that suspicious figure that "seemed to carry with it its own suspicious odor" (carbolic, in terms of the naturalistic detail). The jungle, too, may be seen as standing for more than simply "life" or "death"; although Aschenbach is first drawn toward it as the one and is eventually destroyed by it as the other, at bottom it represents the "mysteries," the forces of darkness, the Romantic abyss which Aschenbach has successfully avoided throughout his life.

The second section of the story concerns Aschenbach's past life and discusses his works; it does not advance the narrative in any way. Here too, however, are disquieting hints of the inevitable ending. The classic austerity, the moral fibre of the man and the artist, which is the surviving principle around which he has built his life and his art after rejecting both knowledge and the "mysteries," is itself called into question:

And yet: this moral fibre, surviving the hampering and disintegrating effect of knowledge, does it not result in its turn in a dangerous simplification, in a tendency to equate the world and the human soul, and thus to strengthen the hold of the evil, the forbidden, and the ethically impossible? Is it not moral and immoral at once . . . ?

In this section we learn that we know more about Aschenbach than he himself does. As he sees himself, by denying the existence of evil, renouncing sympathy with the abyss, he has escaped the destiny of the artist. But what he has attempted to deny, in refusing to acknowledge his guilt and attempting to escape the punishment of Faust, is his own humanity. "Development is destiny," Mann tells us, and there is no escaping it.

In the third section we travel with Aschenbach to Venice. He is going to meet his fate, but he does not go directly. First he tries an island in the Adriatic: "A blunder." Even after he has arrived on the Lido reality becomes dreamlike and distorted: "this right-about of his luggage sends him back, as if accidentally. But as soon as he sets foot on the steamer that is to take him to Venice, "reality" begins to fade—as it did when he first saw the mysterious stranger. The sailor who escorts him belowdecks is hunchbacked; the ticket-seller has "a beard like a goat's," he gives Aschenbach an "odd impression," he looks like a circus-director, is glib like a croupier, his bow is melodramatic. On the deck Aschenbach encounters the old fop from Pola, a caricature of what he himself is to become.

He felt .. . as though the world were suffering a dreamlike distortion of perspective. . . . Strange figures passed and repassed—the elderly coxcomb, the goat-bearded man . . . there came over him a dazed sense, as though things about him were just slightly losing their ordinary perspective, beginning to show a distortion that might merge into the grotesque.

The sight of Venice at first dispels his morbid feelings, but it is followed immediately by the episode with the gondolier, a figure Aschenbach recognizes as somehow uncanny and threatening. "The signore will pay," says this sinister figure, and in his own mind Aschenbach identifies him with Charon, after a passage in which the Venetian gondola is compared to the black coffin and the bier.

The next significant episode is his first sight of the boy Tadzio, here already seen in terms of Greek sculpture, of Phaeax and Eros, accompanied by his sisters with their vacant, nunlike expressions and dresses of cloisterlike plainness. Aschenbach is at once conscious of his own grey hair, and Maltes the Romantic connection between beauty and death (which has already been foreshadowed by the description of Venice, followed by the gondola incident):

"He is delicate, he is sickly," Aschenbach thought. "He will most likely not live to grow old." He did not try to account for the pleasure the idea gave him.

The final episode in this section is Aschenbach's abortive departure from a Venice which has somehow become a challenge to him.

The hardest part . . . was the thought that he should never more see Venice again .. . he must henceforth regard it as a forbidden spot, to be forever shunned; senseless to try it again, after he had proved himself unfit.

The city has become a forbidden spot, not, he recognizes, because of anything intrinsic to itself, but because of some failure on his own part. But of course he does not leave. Again on his return to the Lido reality becomes dreamlike and distorted: "this right about-face of destiny—incredible, humiliating, whimsical as any dream!" By the end of the episode he has come to a partial realization of his true motives in returning:

he . . . sat hiding the panic and thrills of a truant schoolboy beneath a mask of forced resignation. . . . He felt rejoiced to be back, yet displeased with his vacillating moods, his ignorance of his real desires.

When he sees Tadzio again, "the casual greeting died away before it reached his lips, slain by the truth in his heart," and he Maltes a "gesture of welcome, a calm and deliberate acceptance of what might come."

In the fourth section, as in the second, little "happens" in a narrative, or dramatic, sense. Aschenbach sees Tadzio daily. Athens, Socrates, Phaedrus are key names. All the imagery is expressed in terms of Classic myth; but the cold clarity of the disciplined, austerely Classical—which Aschenbach has always opposed to the mysteries of the Romantic abyss—has become distorted. The clean, sharp outlines are blurred by a sensual, even a specifically sexual, grossness, and it is this very distortion which now draws Aschenbach. The sun is a naked god with cheeks aflame. There are references to Elysium; Oceanus; Achelous and the nymphs; Semele and Zeus; Eros; the Trojan shepherd borne aloft by an eagle; Eos; "the goddess, ravisher of youth, who stole away Cleitos and Cephalos and, defying all the envious Olympians, tasted beautiful Orion's love"; Poseidon's horses; Hyacinthus, doomed to die because two gods were rivals for his love; Zephyr; Narcissus—in the grip of his hopeless passion Aschenbach sees "a world possessed, peopled by Pan." It is a world soon to be possessed by panic.

The fifth, and longest, and last section deals with the coming of the plague to Venice, and with Aschenbach's final recognition of the relation between the cholera—with the vice and lawlessness that accompany it—and his own illicit passion; with his further recognition of the relation between beauty and death, here virtually identified; and with his perception of the connection between art and the abyss—with his final understanding of the nature of his guilt—of the Faustian role of the artist—and of his own destiny. It embodies a rejection, on Mann's part, of the Classic view of the artist, and an acceptance of the Romantic view.

The section opens with Aschenbach's earliest intimation of something gone wrong in the life of the Lido. The hotel barber is the first to mention "the sickness" to him and that afternoon, on his trip into Venice (now become an infernal region), he notices the "sweetish, medicinal smell, associated with wounds and disease," and Maltes the further connection between disease and the sinful, or diabolical:

Passion is like crime .. . it welcomes every blow dealt the bourgeois structure, every weakening of the social fabric. . . . These things that were going on in the unclean alleys of Venice... gave Aschenbach a dark satisfaction. The city's evil secret mingled with the one in the depths of his heart . . .

Next come the street-musicians, among whom reappears the sinister stranger, not a Venetian, with his mop of red hair, his suspicious odor, his mocking laugh. But Aschenbach, drinking pomegranate juice (another reminder of the dreamlike, the unreal, the subterranean) on the hotel terrace, cannot elicit a direct statement from the man on the subject that is troubling him. It is not until the next day that the British travel agent enlightens him, describing the source of the cholera in virtually the same words that were used to describe Aschenbach's vision of the jungle, showing that he had travelled farther than he had intended in response to the "pilgrim air" of the now nearly-forgotten stranger in Munich:

Its source was the hot, moist swamps of the delta of the Ganges, where it bred in the mephitic air of that primeval island-jungle, among whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches, where life of every sort flourishes in rankest abundance . . .

Aschenbach knows that he should leave, but he is kept in Venice by the deeper knowledge that the guilty secret of the city is less frightful than his own.

His art, his moral sense, what were they in the balance beside the boons that chaos might confer?

That night he has a real Walpurgisnacht of a dream. "The beginning was fear; fear and desire, with a shuddering curiosity . . ." at the end, "in his very soul he tasted the bestial degradation of his fall." When he awakes, panic is in the air. But in the city of death and fear Tadzio, the beautiful beloved, remains, and Aschenbach

would follow him through the city's narrow streets where horrid death stalked too, and at such times it seemed to him as though the moral law were fallen in ruins and only the most monstrous and perverse held out a hope . . .

. . . strange thoughts for a man thought of by his contemporaries as the conqueror of decadence; but by this time he has become its victim.

There is not much more he must do to demonstrate his complete surrender to the forces of darkness that now surround him, made visible in the ravages of the cholera, in the increase on the streets of Venice of intemperance, indecency, and crime. His disgust at the contrast between his own aging body and grey hair, and the ideal youthful beauty he sees in the boy Tadzio blinds him to the perversity of the impulse that leads him to dye his hair and paint his face in hideous emulation of the young-old man he had encountered on the steamer. He gets lost in the maze of streets, and sinks down, already stricken, although he does not realize it, with the preliminary symptoms of the cholera, on the steps of a well:

There he sat, the master. . . who had .. . in a style of classic purity renounced bohemianism and all its works, all sympathy with the abyss and the troubled depths of the outcast human soul . . .

The irony is obvious. But it is an irony deeper than at first appears, for this is not merely a depiction of the personal degradation and downfall of an individual artist. It is the picture of Faust on the midnight of his last day, with nothing to do but wait until the devil comes to claim him for eternal damnation; it is the picture of the artist-figure who recurs again and again in Mann's work, here seen at the point at which he must pay his debt to the dark forces through which his art came into being. Now that the end is in sight, Aschenbach realizes what Mann has known all along:

What good can the artist be as a teacher, when from his birth up he is headed direct for the pit? For knowledge .. . is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving; it takes up no position, sets no store by form. It has compassion with the abyss—it is the abyss . . .

He realizes that he has not escaped, that he cannot escape the artist's destiny—which is that of the damned Faust. Beauty, simplicity, detachment, form—all the virtues of art—lead to the bottomless pit:

Yes, they lead us thither, I say, us who are poets—who by our nature are prone not to excellence but to excess.

The final paragraph of the story is devoted to his death, and here the final Romantic equation is made, for death itself appears to him as the "pale and lovely summoner," in the image of his beautiful beloved.

What is Mann "saying," then, in Death in Venice? What is it all "about"? More than anything else, it is about the nature and destiny of the artist. As Henry Hatfield has noted,

The novella is . . . an expression of a gnawing anxiety about the cost in human terms, of playing the role of the "hero of creative work."³

Told in Romantic terms, in terms of the life-death antithesis and the Romantic beauty-death synthesis, it is a demonstration of the thesis that

true art can come only from a perception of all sides of life, and that the sick, the unclean, the unnatural, death itself, must be studied and understood.

More than that, it shows that, for the artist, cursed as Faust was cursed, by his artist-nature, it is necessary actively to seek out and embrace evil; and that there is no escape from the inevitable punishment which must follow on his guilt. That guilt consists, essentially, not in committing any particular sin, but in being an artist, a creator, in reaching out beyond the humanly knowable and taking on himself the burden of superhuman power. This is the Romantic view of the artist as creator, rather than imitator. It is Faust's guilt. Throughout his long and successful life Aschenbach thought he had avoided that destiny, only to find at the end that it cannot be avoided. He renounced knowledge, bohemianism, "the abyss," in favor of discipline, classicism, and austerity—only to find that these are nothing more than the other side of the same coin. By choosing to be an artist he had sealed his pact with the devil, and now at the end of his life, after a period of more than twenty-four years' creativeness, the devil has collected his price.

The story is far from a literal transposition—a parody, in Mann's sense—of the Faust legend, as Dr. Faustus frankly is. In terms of time, it deals only with the culminating moment of the Faust legend. Aside from the dream Walpurgisnacht there is no overt reference to the legend's narrative; it is all implied. But many other less overt references to the Faust story remain: the mysterious stranger, always "uncanny," "suspicious," described in such a way as to relate him to the sinister supernatural figures of German tradition; the excursion through the streets of Venice (or the kingdom of Hell), when it seemed "the moral law were fallen in ruins and only the most monstrous and perverse held out a hope"—as would be true of Hell; even the details of Aschenbach's early career create some kind of parallel to Faust's researches into all branches of knowledge. Aschenbach's opportunities to get away from Venice—the first when he actually decides to leave, and is brought back by the "accidental" misdirection of his luggage, the second when the British travel agent urges him to leave and he consciously decides to remain—echo the damned Faust's belief in his inevitable damnation and his refusal to listen to the voices that speak to him of grace.

In view of the fact that Mann had planned a Faust book as early as 1901; that Death in Venice (1911) was followed by The Magic Mountain, with its Faustian echoes, originally conceived as a "comic counterpart" to it; that he did, so many years later, write Dr. Faustus; and that he tended to return again and again to ideas that appealed to him, it does not seem far-fetched to see in Death in Venice an initial statement of the Faust theme, particularly since every artist who appears in Mann's works seems to be related in some way to the Faust-figure. Without implying that this was always a conscious relation on Mann's part of the artist to an historical literary legend, one could say that for him the Faust stories held meanings valid generally for our time, and specifically for Mann himself, and that throughout his career as a writer he continued to feel out these meanings. As Mann himself said,

Every piece of work is in fact a realization—piecemeal if you like, but each complete in itself—of our own nature; they are stones on that harsh road which we must walk to learn of ourselves.

¹ Relevant here is Mann's idea of the "Parody," a term he uses to mean the re-telling of a myth or legend from a modern, self-conscious point of view; Tristan, a story written in 1902, is the first clear example of this, as the novel Dr. Faustus is the last. In this usage, a parody is neither burlesque nor allegory; it is a reworking of the substrata of meaning in the myth in terms of a contemporary story with naturalistic details.

² Vernon Venable, "Poetic Reason in Thomas Mann," The Virginia Quarterly Review, XIV (Winter 1938), 65.

³ Henry Hatfield, Thomas Mann, p. 61.