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Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

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Polarities in Death in Venice

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In Death in Venice, Mann exploits polarities for characterization, to underscore his themes, and to drive the plot. These polarities are most easily seen in the setting for the story and in his descriptions of Tadzio, von Aschenbach, and the mysterious men who appear in key scenes. Since his story is structured this way, Mann’s descriptions accrue meaning and help to develop the novella’s central polarity, the relationship between life and art.

In moving von Aschenbach from the rainy, gray streets of Munich, Germany to the sunny, hot climate of Venice, Italy, Mann symbolizes the differences between temperament and sensibility in northern and southern Europe. Von Aschenbach, a German, epitomizes the austere, hardworking, methodical, and rational Teutonic character, priding himself on his intellect, focus, and self-restraint. Venice, for von Aschenbach, signifies adventure, a place he thought of as “incomparable, someplace as out of the ordinary as a fairy tale.” Approaching it from the sea, von Aschenbach describes “that dazzling grouping of fantastic buildings that the republic presented to the awed gaze of approaching mariners; the airy splendor of the palace and the Bridge of Sighs.” A city built upon a swamp, with canals for streets, Venice is an international center for the arts and a tourist haven, known for its beaches, warm climate, and sensuous decadence. By describing it from the perspective of the port, Mann utilizes the sea’s symbolic link to sex, death, and chaos to show how von Aschenbach is drawn inexorably towards it, and away from the solid footing of land.

The polarity of the two cities is only one of many Mann uses to highlight the battle raging in von Aschenbach’s mind and body. This battle, part of what Mann presents as a universal one, entails the conflict between the emotions and the intellect or, more specifically, in the mythic terms that implicitly frame the story, between Apollonian and Dionysian principles. Apollo and Dionysus are Greek gods, the former god of the sun, the latter, god of wine. In his study, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche uses these terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” to symbolize principles of classical Greek culture. The Apollonian principle corresponds to ideas of form, individuation, and rational thought, whereas the Dionysian principle suggests the opposite, corresponding to drunkenness, ecstasy, and unrestrained emotion. Tragedy, in Nietzsche’s view, results from the tension between these two principles. Mann, a student of both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, from whom Nietzsche derived some of his ideas, dramatizes von Aschenbach’s tragedy by showing him devolving from a person of refined tastes and discerning judgment into an obsessive and self-deluded would-be pedophile who can no longer control his desires. Von Aschenbach, who initially embodies the Apollonian principle, in the end literally loses himself to the Dionysian principle, surrendering all pretense towards worshipping Tadzio for his form and giving full rein to the lustful impulses that consume him. Venice and Munich are not the only settings in the story. Mann also characterizes von Aschenbach by showing what he is thinking. By moving back and forth between von Aschenbach’s thoughts and perceptions of the physical world, Mann underscores the writer’s growing self-deception, and also emphasizes the growing distance between the narrator and von Aschenbach as von Aschenbach’s mania deepens.

The polarity that undergirds the story, of course, is that between the modern world and ancient Greece, with all of its literary figures and mythological characters. Most of the characters in the story have a counterpart in myth. Tadzio, for example, is referred to variously as Hyacinthus, Eros, Narcissus, etc. for qualities he exhibits that resonate with von Aschenbach. Von Aschenbach also...

(This entire section contains 1317 words.)

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participates in these fantasies he has of the boy. For example, after his luggage is misdirected and he decides to stay in Venice he watches Tadzio play on the beach, daydreaming of playing Socrates to Tadzio’s Phaedrus. Cribbing from the Platonic dialogues, von Aschenbach-Socrates dreams of saying to the boy, “My dear Phaedrus, beauty alone is both worthy of love and visible at the same time; beauty, mark me well, is the only form of spirit that our senses can both grasp and endure.”

The mysterious men—the traveler in the cemetery, the gondolier, the old fop, and the street musician— that von Aschenbach encounters at crucial points in the story also have their counterparts in myth, and serve as a link between antiquity and the modern world. In their lascivious appearance, their foreign [to von Aschenbach] appearance, and the responses they elicit from von Aschenbach, the men symbolize the Dionysian principle, which both attracts and repels von Aschenbach. In his essay, “Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Mann’s Death in Venice,” Manfred Dierks suggests the men are “corybantes from his [i.e., Dionysus’s] swarm.” Corybantes are Dionysus’s guardians, charged with inspiring terror and frenzy during sacred rites and rituals. They function in Mann’s novella to foretell von Aschenbach’s descent into mania, and in their foreign appearance, they are linked to the object of von Aschenbach’s desire, Tadzio, a Pole. Foreignness itself is a leitmotif in Mann’s story, that is, a recurring image or idea helping to structure the composition and draw readers’ attention to Mann’s themes. By making Tadzio and the men foreign, Mann can make them all the more inscrutable to von Aschenbach, who can then project upon them his own desires. It is noteworthy that von Aschenbach never talks with Tadzio, but when he hears him speak, the boy’s voice captivates him:

Von Aschenbach understood not a single word he said, and though it may have been the most ordinary thing in the world it was all a vague harmony to his ear. Thus, foreignness raised the boy’s speech to the level of music, a wanton sun poured unstinting splendor over him, and the sublime perspectives of the sea always formed the background and aura that set off his appearance.

The mysterious men, Tadzio and von Aschenbach, and other polarities, Dierks argues, are derived from parts of the tragedy, The Bacchae, by the Greek playwright Euripides. The play details Dionysus’s anger at King Pentheus of Thebes, who has challenged his divinity by questioning his parentage. The women of Thebes are possessed by Dionysus’s power, wearing animal skins, dancing ecstatically, and copulating on Mt. Cithaeron. Dionysus defeats Pentheus easily, in large part because of the latter’s hubris and ambivalent sexual identity, leading him to his death at the hands of the Bacchae (Dionysus’s worshippers, led by Pentheus’s mother), who literally rip him to shreds. Mann incorporates his own scene of bacchic mania in his novella in two ways. At the macro level, the inhabitants of cholera-infected Venice are beginning to act out their baser instincts as the plague progresses, displaying drunkenness and lewdness. At the micro level, von Aschenbach, after deciding not to warn Tadzio’s family of the plague, experiences an intense dream of such a ritual, in which men, women, and animals swarm together in a frenzy of sex and violence:

With foam on their lips they raved; they stimulated each other with lewd gestures and fondling hands; laughing and wheezing, they pierced each other’s flesh with their pointed staves and then licked the bleeding limbs. Now among them, now a part of them, the dreamer belonged to the stranger god.

Mann uses the dream to symbolically mark von Aschenbach’s final capitulation to the Dionysian principle. With von Aschenbach’s fall, Mann cautions those who would choose the life of unrestrained passion over that of reasoned behavior. As a neoclassicist, Mann was as interested in instructing his readers as he was in entertaining them. Von Aschenbach’s tragedy, Mann suggests, is as old as the myths upon which his story is built.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on Death in Venice, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Mann's Death in Venice

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One of the persisting critical questions regarding Gustave von Aschenbach, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), is whether or not he is a tragic character. Like numerous critics, Erich Heller argues that he is, and describes the novella as the “tragic story of Aschenbach’s disillusion and downfall.” In sharp contrast, Martin Travers insists that “it is not on a note of exaltation that Aschenbach is granted his exit, but rather on one of banality. . . . It is not the noble genre of tragedy but that hybrid form of doubtful status, tragi-comedy, that provides the medium for his valediction.” I would go further and argue that Mann presents us with a parody of tragedy, which satirizes the romantic assumptions that enable such an exalted view of humankind. Consequently, Aschenbach is not a romantic artist-hero but a parody of one. His literary career is described as a “conscious and overweening ascent to honour.” However, the novella focuses not on his so-called rise but on his bathetic decline and fall. Indeed, from the outset Aschenbach’s supposed pilgrimage of artistic renewal moves relentlessly downward.

Michel Butor notes that the word “pilgrimage” designates, “first of all, the journey to the tomb of a saint, next to the spot of a vision, an oracular site; one carries his question there and expects a response, a curing of the body or soul.” In a parodic pilgrimage, however, there is no revitalization of artistic powers or regeneration of body and soul. Indeed, in Mann’s novella, Aschenbach’s physical decline, evident from the beginning, becomes increasingly apparent as the story progresses. He suffers from a “growing fatigue”; his strength is “sapped.” In fact, long before his fatal journey to Venice, Aschenbach’s life is “on the wane.” By forty, he is “worn down by the strains and stresses of his actual task.” Nevertheless, he endures. At fifty-something he is still holding fast—until, of course, he falls in love in Venice.

However, in a satiric narrative such as Death in Venice, “falling in love” is not merely a metaphorical expression. As Frank Palmeri explains, “The plot and the rhetoric of narrative satire cohere in accomplishing the same movement of lowering or leveling.” Palmeri continues: “The reduction of spiritual to physical in satiric narrative corresponds to the rhetorical reduction of metaphors to literal meanings.” This displacement “works to satirize hidebound characters . . . who live within the confines of clichés and received ideas.” In a letter to Carl Maria Weber (4 July 1920), Mann explained how the fall motif was originally connected with Aschenbach’s story:

Passion as confusion and as a stripping of dignity was really the subject of my tale—what I originally wanted to deal with was not anything homoerotic at all. It was the story—seen grotesquely—of the aged Goethe and that little girl in Marienbad whom he was absolutely determined to marry.

. . . this story with all its terribly comic, shameful, awesomely ridiculous situations, this embarrassing, touching, and grandiose story which I may someday write after all.

Walter Stewart offers this apposite conclusion: “Mann sees the actual fall of Goethe in the presence of a child as the very essence of degradation. . . . That Gustav Aschenbach collapses in exhaustion following his frantic chase after Tadzio must therefore be considered something less than a coincidence.”

Writing to Karl Kerenyi (20 February 1934), Mann says, “I am a man of balance. I instinctively lean to the left when the boat threatens to capsize on the right, and vice versa . . . ” In sharp contrast to Mann, Aschenbach is an extremist. He is off balance and destined to fall. Thus, instead of reaching a climax, Aschenbach’s story continues to wind down, as “(o)ne afternoon he pursue(s) his charmer deep into the stricken city’s huddled heart.” There he literally “lose(s) his bearings. He did not even know the points of the compass; all his care was not to lose sight of the figure after which his eyes thirsted.” Then, when Aschenbach realizes that his mad quest to locate his beloved Tadzio is fruitless, he “(sinks) down on the steps of the well and lean(s) his head against its stone rim.” Ironically, the narrator’s description of Venice as a “fallen queen” applies to Aschenbach as well. Indeed, our final view of Aschenbach emphasizes this fallen state: Gazing at Tadzio from his beach chair, Aschenbach’s tired head falls upon his chest, and he expires.

Numerous critics have suggested that tragedy is no longer possible in the twentieth century be- cause, in general, we no longer believe in ideas of the heroic and noble. When we can no longer tell straightforward tragic tales, we must turn, as Thomas Mann does in Death in Venice, to parody. Mann’s predisposition toward the parodic mode is made clear in his essay “Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner” (1933):

It is well to understand that the artist, even he inhabiting the most austere regions of art, is not an absolutely serious man . . . and that tragedy and farce can spring from one and the same root. A turn of the lighting changes one into the other; the farce is a hidden tragedy, the tragedy—in the last analysis—a sublime practical joke. The seriousness of the artist—a subject to ponder.

Source: Rita A. Bergenholtz “Mann’s Death in Venice,” in Explicator, Vol. 55, Spring, 1997, pp. 145–47.

The Vulnerable Artist

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Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) (1912) tells the story of how Gustav von Aschenbach, a writer famous for the chiselled perfection of his work and for the values of order and self-discipline which it enshrines, decides to break out of his routine existence in Munich by taking a holiday in Venice. In Venice he becomes increasingly fascinated by a Polish boy, Tadzio, who is staying with his family at the same hotel. Aschenbach persuades himself that his interest in the boy is purely the disinterested one of aesthetic appreciation, but gradually it becomes clear that he has succumbed to a homosexual infatuation. Aschenbach’s decline is echoed in disturbing events which occur in Venice: the weather is oppressive, the city smells of carbolic. Aschenbach finally discovers the true state of affairs: there is a cholera epidemic in the city. But he is no more able to leave than he is to warn Tadzio and his family. Not long afterwards he is found dead in his deck chair on the beach.

One of the central problems which Der Tod in Venedig poses for the reader is the whole question of motivation and causality in the story. The opening few pages raise the issue with particular clarity. The weary, jaded Aschenbach is standing by a tram stop in Munich. Across the road there is ‘das byzantinische Bauwerk’ (the byzantine edifice) of a cemetery. In the doorway of this building Aschenbach suddenly notices a tramp, a strange, exotic figure whose long white teeth are bared in a curious grimace. The narrator continues: . . .

Whether the strange man’s appearance with its suggestion of wandering and travel had stirred his imagination, or whether some other physical or psychological influence was at work—to his surprise he was aware of a strange opening up of his inner life, a kind of disquiet and restlessness.

The narrator can, it seems, only conjecture as to what is going on. Is it simply the image of a wanderer that fills Aschenbach with thoughts of travel? Or are there other factors at work? A few lines later the narrator puts an end to all speculation with the terse phrase . . .

it was the urge to travel, nothing more.

But this need for a change of scenery quickly assumes fantastic proportions in the protagonist’s fevered imagination: he sees a vision of an exotic, sultry jungle, . . .

amongst the knotted trunks of a bamboo thicket he saw the baleful eyes of a crouching tiger gleam.

The vision fades—but the decision to travel remains. As he boards the tram Aschenbach looks around for the tramp but he is nowhere to be seen.

The opening scene swiftly establishes what are to become key motifs and images for the story as a whole. The mysterious tramp will recur in two figures who appear later on: in the unlicensed gondolier and in the street musician who entertains the hotel guests. All three have certain physical features in common: the snub nose and the bared teeth. All three figures suggest an exotic, forbidden realm existing outside the familiar world: particularly the episode with the gondolier makes clear the metaphorical significance of these figures. They represent death (the bared teeth, glimpsed first outside the cemetery, suggest the skull). Does this then mean, we ask ourselves, that we are to take this story on a supernatural level? Do we take the title literally: that it is about Death summoning the ageing artist? It is, of course, a possible reading. But what of the psychological argument—what of that phrase about ‘Reiselust nichts weiter’? Perhaps Aschenbach is simply jaded, in need of a change. Perhaps for this reason his subconscious generates the dream of rampant, anarchical living: the jungle. The images of untrammelled life harbour a certain threat—the eyes of the crouching tiger. Aschenbach seems aware of the threat . . .

to travel then . . . but not too far, not as far as the tigers.

But, within the symbolism of the story, the tigers do catch up with him. For the clerk at the travel agent in Venice will tell Aschenbach about the movement of cholera epidemics in recent times. And the cholera is born in that . . .

jungle of primeval islands in whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches.

Is cholera then purely the contingent outward embodiment of an essentially metaphysical process? Aschenbach has repudiated his orderly, contained existence: he seeks experience of anarchic, dionysian fury, and the very intensity of rampant life will overwhelm his weary body and mind. Does the strange God, Dionysus, follow the course of the cholera in order to seek out his destined victim? It is certainly suggested, at the metaphorical level. But there is also the meticulously sustained level of psychological realism to the story. And, accompanying and articulating this level of motivation we have the narrator’s stern comments of moral judgement on Aschenbach. Particularly towards the end epithets such as ‘der Verwirrte’, ‘der Betörte’, ‘der Starrsinnige’ abound, epithets which spell out Aschenbach’s self-deception, blindness, and obstinacy. And the moral viewpoint is not simply a matter of brief phrases. It culminates in a bitter paragraph that highlights the horror and degradation of Aschenbach’s condition . . .

He sat there, the master, the artist made respectable, the author of The Wretched, that work which in such exemplary and clear form had renounced any sympathy with bohemianism, with the lurking depths, the abyss, which had reprehended the reprehensible; he who had climbed so high, who had gone beyond all knowledge and irony, who had accommodated himself to the responsibilities that go with fame and public trust, he whose renown was officially recognized, whose name had been ennobled, whose style was taken as a model for schoolboys to follow—he sat there, his eyelids closed: occasionally there was a sidelong glance, scornful and embarrassed, but then swiftly hidden, and his slack lips their colour heightened by rouge, formed single words . . .

The very rhythm of this sentence with its complex of relative clauses (‘er saß dort . . . der Meister . . . der Autor . . . der Hochgestiegene . . . er, dessen Ruhm . . . dessen Name . . . er saß dort’) gives a passionate, rhetorical feel to the narrator’s disgust as he contrasts Aschenbach, the man of orderliness and control, with the pathetic wreck crumpled against the fountain.

The story works on two levels. At a metaphorical level it is the tragedy of the creative artist whose destiny it is to be betrayed by the values he has worshipped, to be summoned and destroyed by the vengeful deities of Eros, Dionysus, and Death. At a realistic, psychological level, the story is a sombre moral parable about the physical and moral degradation of an ageing artist who relaxes the iron discipline of his life, who becomes like the pathetic dandy on the boat to Venice, an older man desperately trying to recapture his lost youth. Both these levels of the story—and the kind of reader response which they elicit—co-exist in Thomas Mann’s text. One can illustrate this co-existence by examining the function of those passages in the story which draw on a whole tradition of aesthetic philosophy from Plato onwards. I have in mind those paragraphs where we are given discursive reflections about art and beauty, quotations from and allusions to the Platonic dialogues. In one sense, such passages supply a philosophical and metaphysical context for Aschenbach’s experience which makes his story illustrative of larger problems. Beauty, so the argument runs, is the one absolute that is perceivable by the senses. When man encounters the Beautiful he is visited almost by a shock recognition that he has come face to face with an intimation of his higher spiritual destiny. Yet Beauty is a subversive value: the very fact that the senses are involved in its perception means that man’s excited response may be not spiritual but sensual. The higher love may, on examination, prove to be nothing more than a sexual infatuation. And this is true particularly of homoerotic experience. Because a homosexual attraction cannot lead to physical creation, to procreation, it may promise the higher creativity of the mind, of art. Yet equally the homoerotic can be the source of furtive, degraded and degrading relationships. Such considerations as these figure in the text of Der Tod in Venedig in two ways. Clearly they function in their own right as philosophical reflections on the ambiguous nature of Beauty. And this philosophical scheme gives Aschenbach’s story the dignity of a metaphysical drama. But equally these reflections are inseparable from the particular psychological context of Aschenbach, the ageing artist. He himself uses such considerations to justify—and, ultimately, to deceive himself about—the nature of his feelings for the boy Tadzio. The metaphysical argument is of a piece with the realistic, psychological argument. The Platonic musings on Beauty are vital ingredients of Aschenbach’s psychology: they are his thoughts—and yet they are also the thoughts enshrined in a major philosophical tradition of the West.

What, then, is the effect of this coexistence of meanings? T. J. Reed has shown how the story has its roots in what was initially a local problem: Mann disliked the enthusiasm in contemporary art circles for work that was sensuous, plastic, ‘sculptured’, rather than reflective, critical, analytical. From this came the impetus to a moral tale about the degradation that awaits the man, the artist who denies scruple and reflection in the name of a cult of formal beauty and perfection. But the ideas and values that are implicated in Aschenbach’s decline are, as we have seen, part of a longer cultural and philosophical tradition with which Mann has to take issue if he is to understand the forces that mould and shape his hero’s thinking. And any such cultural tradition is not simply a stable, timeless entity: it is transmitted through the specific sensibility of a particular man, of a particular time, of a particular culture and society. The story makes clear that Aschenbach is very much part of the historical ambience around him. The narrator reflects: . . .

In order for a significant product of the human mind to make instantly a broad and profound impact there must be a secret affinity, indeed a congruence between the personal fate of its creator and the general fate of its contemporary audience.

In what does this sympathy consist which makes Aschenbach the spokesman of a generation? The narrator answers: . . .

Once—in an unobtrusive context—Aschenbach had directly suggested that any major achievement that had come about stood as an act of defiance: it had been made in defiance of grief and torment, poverty, destitution, bodily weakness; vice, passion and a thousand other obstacles.

Aschenbach speaks, then, for a generation of ‘Moralisten der Leistung’ (moralists of effort), a generation which identifies moral good with spiritual struggle and attrition. Virtue is to be found in the ‘Trotzdem’, in the overcoming of difficulty, scruple, doubt in an exercise of willed self-assertion. This is a Nietzschean legacy, what J. P. Stern has called ‘the morality of strenuousness’. The narrator, in a passage of explicit commentary, goes on to imply a critique of the cast of mind that identifies morality with an entity that has, strictly speaking, no room for moral values. . . .

Does form not have two faces? Is it not moral and immoral at one and the same time? Moral as the result and expression of discipline, but immoral and indeed anti-moral in so far as it is of its very nature indifferent to moral values; in fact it is essentially concerned to make morality bow before its proud and limitless sceptre.

Here the narrator comments upon an aspect of Aschenbach’s personality as artist, but such is the ‘sympathy’ that binds this artist to his time that the aesthetic credo implies the cultural and intellectual temper of its age. Der Tod in Venedig appears some two years before the outbreak of the First World War. It is a text which suggests how the ethos of discipline and order is a questionable value, one which, in its very repudiation of scruple, reflection, analysis, lays itself open to the seductions of untrammelled, orgiastic experience, thereby confusing self-transcendence with self-abasement. Mann’s story acquires a particularly sombre colouring when we remember the waves of collective enthusiasm with which a whole European generation acclaimed the outbreak of war in 1914. Significantly, in his essay Bruder Hitler (Brother Hitler) of 1939 Mann wrote the following: . . .

Death in Venice knows a great deal about the repudiation of contemporary psychologism, about a new decisiveness and simplicity in the psyche—all this, admittedly, I brought to a tragic conclusion. I was not devoid of contact with tendencies and ambitions of the time, with what was felt to be—and proved to be—the coming mood: twenty years later it was to be hawked through the streets.

It would, however, be too easy to see Der Tod in Venedig as simply a cautionary tale. For it is too perceptive in its understanding of the ethos of form, too implicated in the cast of mind which it diagnoses, to be a work of straightforward didacticism. Indeed, it is one of the profoundest ironies of the book that its own formal control, its deliberately ‘classicizing’ style is of a piece with the artistic and human ethos which it criticizes. And this gives the work an authority richer than unambiguous denunciation could ever achieve. To borrow the term applied to Aschenbach’s achievement, Mann’s tale is bound to its time by complex ties of sympathy. And sympathy implies ‘suffering with’, a ‘suffering with’ which, in this case, embraces analytical understanding and critique.

Source: Martin Swales, “The Vulnerable Artist,” in Thomas Mann: A Study, Rowman and Littlefield, 1980, pp. 29–45.

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