[In the following essay, Frank elucidates Mann's reference to the mythological figure Phaeax in Death in Venice.]

Tracing a brief quotation in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice to the dialogues of Xenophone, Lorraine Gustafson had demonstrated how the ostensibly insignificant allusion led the informed reader first to the dialogue in its entirety, then back to Mann's novella with a play by play thematic parallel.¹ Similarly, the identification of Aschenbach's beloved, Tadzio, with various mythological figures first woos us back to the respective myths, then returns us to Mann's story to find it both deepened and expanded.

The symbolic transformations of Tadzio have been analyzed at great lengths.² He is described as having the head of Eros; he is seen as beauty in love with itself, i.e., Narcissus; in the scene in which he wrestles with Jaschu he becomes Hyacinthus; and, finally, as he beckons Aschenbach out to sea, he is the “psychagog,” Hermes. Curiously, however, another of Tadzio's transformations has been all but ignored. Early on in their hauntingly silent courtship, Gustav von Aschenbach wryly refers to Tadzio as “little Phaeax” (kleiner Phäake).³ The Phaeacian sailor who piloted Theseus' ship is never referred to again, yet the seed of the myth has been planted the moment that identification is made. On its most naive level the allusion occurs naturally enough: Aschenbach, the lover, has invented a new term of endearment for his would-be beloved; and Tadzio, in his perennial sailor-suit, certainly invites the comparison. We might, as Miss Gustafson had suggested apropos the Xenophone quotation, suspect Mann of merely exercising his erudition; yet once the Theseus myth is evoked, the first naive level of its romantic use yields to at least two deeper, more organic ones.

On the realistic, the action plane of the narrative Aschenbach, as Theseus, sets out to overcome the minotaur. He cannot, as T. E. Apter wrote, “find his way through the maze of sensuality and beauty.”⁴ That maze does not remain an abstraction—Venice, with its involved streets and canals, becomes the labyrinth: “The gondolier's cry, half warning, half salute, was answered with singular accord from far within the silence of the labyrinth.”⁵ Through this maze, Aschenbach pursues the elusive clues to the truth about the plague, the Asiatic cholera ravaging Venice. The minotaur he pursues here is passion; once he finds it, unlike Theseus, he is slain by it: “Some strawberries … overripe and soft” recklessly eaten unwashed may, on the realistic level of the tale, have led to his death.

On the symbolic level of the story, the red, overripe strawberries may be interpreted as the passion which steered Aschenbach to his death. These strawberries find an echo in the recurrent red knot of Tadzio's sailor suit. Too inhibited by his morality to focus on Tadzio's sexual organs, Aschenbach may find their distanced, defused counterpart in the red knot—comfortably closer to the Apollonian regions of the beloved than to the Dionysian, sexual ones.

Although Tadzio is predominantly identified as Hermes in the final scene, we cannot quite forget “little Phaeax”; we have a double-exposure here. Phaeax, too, is piloting Aschenbach “home” to eternity. There is here, of course, a reversal: Whereas the mythological Phaeax piloted Theseus to the labyrinth, “little Phaeax” pilots him away from it. The sailor suit with its red knot, in this context, links Tadzio with his three older fellow travelers: the red-haired man in journeying clothes on the steps of the mortuary chapel, the unlicensed gondolier (i.e., sailor), and the red-haired, red-browed wandering musician. These three “big Phaeaces” pilot Aschenbach as well yet, unlike Tadzio, they are unambivalently satanic. Only when “little Phaeax,” in his admixture of innocence and corruption, takes the rudder of Aschenbach's soul does he find both his dissolution and his salvation.

Notes

1. “Xenophone and Der Tod in Venedig,” Germanic Review, XXI (1946), 209-14.

2. See, e.g., Martin Swales, Thomas Mann: A Study (Hineman: London, 1980) and Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays, Henry Hatfield, ed. (Prentice Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964).

3. Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories (Vintage: New York, 1957), p. 29.

4. Thomas Mann: The Devil's Advocate (New York Univ. Press: New York, 1979), p. 50.

5. Death in Venice, p. 55.