SOURCE: Cohn, Dorrit. “The Second Author of Der Tod in Venedig.” In Critical Essays on Thomas Mann, edited by Inta M. Ezergailis, pp. 124-43. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1983, Cohn examines the relationship between the narrator and the protagonist in Death in Venice.]

I

In his review of a now forgotten contemporary novel Thomas Mann draws the following distinction between the author and the narrator of a fictional work: [“Narrating is something totally different from writing, and what distinguishes them is an indirection in the former …”]. This indirectness, he goes on to explain, is most slyly effective when it veils itself in directness: when the author interpolates between himself and his reader a second voice, [“the voice of a second, interposed author,” “as when … a gentleman announces himself and makes speeches who, however, is in no way identical with the epic author but rather an invented and shadowy observer”].¹ Clearly Mann does not have in mind here a simple [“first-person narrator”] who tells his own life in the manner of Felix Krull, or even the peripheral type of first-person narrator who tells the life of a friend in the manner of Serenus Zeitblom. The reader needs hardly be told that a narrator so spectacularly equipped with a name, a civic identity and a body of his own should not be confused with the author of the work in which he appears. It is primarily when a narrator remains a truly [“shadowy observer”], a disincarnated voice without name or face, that the reader will be inclined to attribute to him the mind, if not the body, of the author whose name appears on the title page. This is especially likely to happen with a teller who intrudes loudly and volubly into his tale, as the narrators of Mann's own third-person novels almost invariably do. Like so many of his comments concerning the works of other writers, the distinction Mann draws in the passage quoted above looks suspiciously as though it were meant primarily pro domo.

In recent times, with our consciousness raised by modern literary theory, we have learned to resist the tendency to equate that authorial narrator—as we now generally call Mann's “second author”²—with the author himself. At least in theory. In critical practice the distinction has been slow to sink in, perhaps because it has never been freighted sufficiently with demonstrations and qualifications. The author-narrator equation has been peculiarly tenacious in cases where a narrator takes earnest moralistic stands on weighty problems of morality; the reader then is given to extending the narrator's authority in matters of fictional fact onto his normative commentary. When his tone is more jocular, and especially when he plays self-conscious games with the narrative genre, it seems easier to grant him a personality of his own. This may well be why Mann's narrators in Der Zauberberg and the Joseph novels have long since been recognized as “second authors,” whereas the seriously perorating monsieur who narrates Der Tod in Venedig has almost invariably been identified with Thomas Mann himself.

Nor can we automatically assume that this identification is incorrect. But since it has decisively affected interpretation of Mann's most enigmatic novella, my contention is that it needs to be questioned once and for all.³ In taking up this problem I follow a general directive provided by Franz Stanzel in his Theorie des Erzählens. Having reminded us that the separation of the authorial narrator from the personality of the author is a fairly recent narratological acquisition, he states: [“One must start with the assumption that the authorial narrator is, within certain limits, an autonomous figure … which thus is accessible to the interpreter in his own personality. It is only when this kind of an interpretative attempt has proved conclusively negative that we can assume the identity of the authorial narrator with the author”].⁴ I assume from the wider context of his Theorie that Stanzel would insist that such interpretive assays be carried out intra-textually, without regard to evidence that might be gathered about the author from outside the text. My own intention, at any rate, is to perform my experiment with Tod in Venedig as far as possible en vase clos.⁵

My principal focus will be the relationship of the narrator to his protagonist, such as it emerges from the language he employs in telling the story of Aschenbach's Venetian love and death. This story itself must of course be attributed to the invention of its author; the narrator, for his part, recounts it as though it were historically real.⁶ We can therefore hold him accountable only for his narrative manner, not his narrative matter (or, as the Russian Formalists would say, only for the sujet, not for the fabula). It follows that his personality—his “Eigenpersönlichkeit”—will stand out most clearly at those textual moments when he departs furthest from straightforward narration, when he moves from the mimetic, storytelling level to the non-mimetic level of ideology and evaluation.⁷ In this respect, as we will see, the narrator of Tod in Venedig provides a profusion of data for drawing his mental portrait: generalizations, exclamations, homilies, aphorisms and other expressions of normative subjectivity. These will ultimately allow us to assess his objectivity, to decide whether he is, ideologically speaking, a reliable narrator, and thus a spokesman for the norms of the author who has invented both him and his story.⁸

II

In briefest summary the relationship of the narrator to his protagonist in Tod in Venedig may be described as one of increasing distance. In the early phases of the story it is essentially sympathetic, respectful, even reverent; in the later phases a deepening rift develops, building an increasingly ironic narratorial stance.⁹ In this regard Mann's novella evolves in a manner diametrically opposed to the typical Bildungsroman, where we usually witness a gradual approach of the mind of the protagonist to that of the narrator. Here the protagonist does not rise to his narrator's ethical and cultural standards but falls away from them. The events of Aschenbach's final dream, we are told [“left behind the cultivation of life annihilated, destroyed”] (516),¹⁰ and subsequently, as he shamelessly pursues Tadzio through the streets of Venice, [“the monstrous appeared promising to him, and the moral law appeared invalid”] (518). The narrator meanwhile—as the words he uses here to describe Aschenbach's moral debacle indicate—remains poised on the cultural pinnacle that has brought forth his protagonist's own artistic achievement.

It should be noted from the outset, however, that this bifurcating narrative schema unfolds solely on the ideological or evaluative level of the story, without in the least affecting the point of view (in the technical sense of the word) from which the story is presented.¹¹ On the perceptual level the narrator steadfastly adheres to his protagonist's perspective on the outside world; from the initial moment when he observes the strange wanderer standing on the steps of the funeral chapel to the final moment when he watches Tadzio standing on the sandbar we see the events and figures of the outside world through Aschenbach's eyes. The narrator also upholds from start to finish his free access to his protagonist's inner life (whereas he never so much as mentions what goes on in the mind of Tadzio). In sum, the narrator maintains his intimacy with Aschenbach's sensations, thoughts, and feelings, even as he distances himself from him more and more on the ideological level.¹²

Now to follow this relationship through the text in greater detail. The most obtrusive indicator of the narrator's personality—and of the fact that he has a clearly defined personality—is the series of statements of “eternal truths” he formulates.¹³ There are in all some twenty glosses of this kind scattered through the text, and they express a consistent system of values. This narrator is for discipline, dignity, decorum, achievement and sobriety, against disorder, intoxication, passion and passivity. In short, he volubly upholds within the story a heavily rationalistic and moralistic cultural code, most strikingly in the maxims that culminate many of his statements ex cathedra:

For it is dissolute not to be able to want a wholesome disenchantment. For human beings love and honor each other as long as they are not capable of judging each other, and longing is the product of a lack of understanding.

(496)

… for passion paralyzes the sense of fastidiousness and lets itself be drawn into dealing with charms that sobriety would take humorously or reject with indignation.

(506)

He who is beyond himself detests nothing more than to have to return into himself.

(515)

With their causal inceptions (denn) these sententiae profess full accountability for the case under discussion. They embed Aschenbach's story in a predictable world, a system of stable psychological concepts and moral precepts.

That the narrator's code of values in fact closely matches the protagonist's own before his fall can be seen from the flashback on Aschenbach's career as a writer provided in chapter II. As others have noted, this summary biography sounds rather like a eulogy penned in advance by the deceased himself. The narrator clearly takes the role of apologist, and his gnomic generalizations—more extensive here than elsewhere in the text, and all concerned, as the subject demands, with the psychology and sociology of artistic achievement—serve only to heighten the representative import of Aschenbach's existence. With one notable exception—to which I will return below—they unreservedly enhance the laudatio (see e.g. the passages starting with the words [“For an important intellectual production”; “A living, intellectually uncommitted concreteness;” “But it seems that there is nothing against which a noble and diligent spirit”] (452-55).

The ideological concord between the narrator and Aschenbach continues into the narrated time of the story itself: in the starting episode, the voyage South, the early phases of the Venice adventure authorial generalizations are barely differentiated from figural thoughts. During Aschenbach's introspection while he awaits his Munich tramway: [“he had reined in and cooled off his feelings because he knew that he had an inclination to be content with a gay approximation and a half perfection. Was it now the enslaved emotion that was avenging itself by abandoning him, in refusing to bear and give wings to his art … ?”] (449). Note that tensual sequence in the first sentence: Aschenbach knew what the narrator knows to be true. Note also that the second sentence may quite as validly be read as a question Aschenbach puts to himself (in narrated monologue form) and as a question posed by the analytic narrator. Or take the scene where Aschenbach first perceives Tadzio in the hall of the hotel and wonders why he is allowed to escape the monastic dress code of his sisters: [“Was he ill? … Or was he simply an indulged favorite child, elevated by a partial and capricious love? Aschenbach tended to believe the latter. Almost every artist has a voluptious and treacherous tendency to approve the injustice that brings about beauty and to greet aristocratic favoritism with understanding and respect”] (470; my italics). The narrator's speculation about artists flows from Aschenbach's speculations about Tadzio as smoothly as if the latter had self-indulgently accounted for his own reactions. Again, during Aschenbach's first contemplation of the ocean, narratorial comment dovetails with figural emotions:

I will stay then, thought Aschenbach. Where could it be better? … He loved the sea for deep reasons; out of the need for peace of the hard working artist who wants to rest from the demanding multiplicity of appearances at the breast of the simple, the immense; out of a forbidden penchant for the unstructured, immeasurable, eternal, for nothingness, a tendency that was directly opposed to his calling and for that very reason seductive. He who labors at the production of the excellent longs to repose in the perfect; and is nothingness not a form of perfection? But, as he was dreaming away into the emptiness. …

(475; my italics)

Fused almost seamlessly at both ends with Aschenbach's oceanic feelings, the narrator's intervention creates not a trace of distancing irony. This is true despite the ominous notes he sounds: [“at the breast of … the immense,” out of a “forbidden … seductive tendency to nothingness”]. Aschenbach is still [“the hard working artist who struggles to produce the excellent”], and who may be allowed—by way of vacation—a temporary indulgence in thanatos.

This entente cordiale between authorial and figural minds is disrupted at just about the mid-point of the Venetian adventure in a scene to be considered in detail below. From this point on the authorial commentary becomes emphatically distanced and judgemental. A clear example is the scene where Aschenbach, having followed Tadzio with the “salutary” intention of striking up a casual conversation with him finds himself too strongly moved to speak:

Too late! he thought at this moment. Too late! But was it really too late? The step that he neglected to take could very possibly have lead to something wholesome, light, and serene, to a healthy sobriety. But it must have been a matter of the aging man not wanting sobriety because the intoxication was too precious for him. Who is to unravel the essence and character of the artist! Who can comprehend the deeply instinctual fusion of discipline and licentiousness on which it rests. For it is licentious not to be able to want a wholesome disenchantment.

The narrator distances himself from Aschenbach explicitly and immediately when he questions the directly quoted [“too late!”]. He now provides his interpretation for the failed action, which he attributes to a weakening of willpower, a falling away from the unquestioned values of health and sobriety. The exclamatory authorial rhetoric subsequently reinforces the critical analysis, grounds it in generalizations concerning the moral lability of artists, and caps it with the sententious final judgement. Then, returning to the individual case at hand, the narrator explicitly excludes Aschenbach from this authorial wisdom: [“Aschenbach was not in the mood for self-criticism any more”].

There are numerous instances in the later parts of the story that follow this same general pattern: an inside view of Aschenbach's mind, followed by a judgemental intervention cast in gnomic present tense, followed by a return to Aschenbach's now properly adjudged reactions. To quote one further example: when Aschenbach reads about the Venetian plague in the German newspapers,

“One should be silent,” Aschenbach thought excitedly. … But at the same time his heart was filled with satisfaction about the adventure that wanted to descend upon the world outside. For passion, like crime, does not thrive in the secure order and comfort of the commonplace. Instead, it must welcome any relaxation of civil order, any confusion and affliction in the world for it can vaguely hope to gain some advantage for itself from it. So Aschenbach felt a dark satisfaction about the officially concealed events in the dirty alleys of Venice.

(500; my italics)

Again Aschenbach's response (this time plainly immoral) is instantly denounced and explained by the narrator, and in the severest terms. Even a shade too severe, perhaps. The unwonted analogy between passion and crime makes it appear as though the narrator were bent on imposing his moral standards with the utmost rigidity. At the same time the syllogistic “So …” with which he reverts to Aschenbach's sinful thoughts maintains the sense that he is a perfectly dispassionate analyst.

A further device that underscores the narrator's progressive disengagement is his increasingly estranging and negative way of referring to Aschenbach. In the early sections distancing appellations appear sparingly and remain neutral and descriptive: [“the traveller,” “the waiting one,” “the resting one”]. After the narrator parts company with his character, ideologically speaking, we find on a regular basis the more condescending epithets [“the aging man,” “the lonely one”]. And at crucial stations of his descent Aschenbach becomes [“the afflicted,” “the stubborn one,” “the crazed one,” “the besotted,” “the confused one,” “the one who has gone astray”], and on, in a more and more degrading name-calling series that leads down to the final [“degraded one”].¹⁴

So far the schismatic trend I have been tracing has, to all appearances, its objective motivation in the story's mimetic stratum. Faced with a character who manifests such progressively deviant behaviour this severely judgemental narrator can hardly be expected to react differently. Even so, the smugness and narrowness of his evaluative code in the passages already cited may cause some irritation in the reader, akin to that nauseated intolerance Roland Barthes attributes to the reader of Balzac at moments when he laces his novels with cultural adages.¹⁵ Perennial reactions of this type aside, however, there are at least two of the narrator's interventions in Tod in Venedig that give one pause on more substantial grounds. In these two instances the narrator indulges in a kind of ideological overkill that produces an effect contrary to the one he is ostensibly trying to achieve. It is to these two moments in their episodic context that I will now turn for close inspection.

III

As previously mentioned, the turning point in the relationship between narrator and character on the ideological level roughly coincides with the midpoint of Aschenbach's Venetian adventure: the pivotal scene when the enamored writer for the first and last time practices his art.¹⁶ Before this point is reached however, a long section (480-492) intervenes where authorial generalizations have disappeared from the text altogether; this section comprises mainly Aschenbach's abortive attempt to leave Venice (end of chapter III) and the first quiescently serene phase of his love (beginning of chapter IV). In these pages the narrator goes beyond adopting merely Aschenbach's visual perspective, he also emulates the hymnic diction (complete with Homeric hexameters), the Hellenic allusions and the mythical imagery that properly belong to Aschenbach's consciousness. This stylistic contagion—technically a form of free indirect style—has often been mistaken for stylistic parody, an interpretation for which I find no evidence in the text.¹⁷ The employment of free indirect style, in the absence of other distancing devices, points rather to a momentary “sharing” of Aschenbach's inner experience by the narrator—as though he were himself temporarily on vacation from his post as moral preceptor.

This consonance reaches its apogee in the moments of high intensity that immediately precede the writing scene, when the Platonic theory of beauty surfaces in Aschenbach's mind as he watches Tadzio cavorting on the beach: [“Statue and mirror! His eyes took in the noble figure over there at the edge of the blue, and, with rising ecstasy, he felt he was encompassing with this same glance beauty itself, form as divine thought, the one and pure perfection that lives in the spirit …”] (490). Both the initial exclamation in this quote, and the final present tense (lebt) indicate the extent of the narratorial identification with the figural thoughts. The Platonic montage that now follows (combining passages from the Phaedrus and the Symposium) is largely cast in narrated monologue form, fusing the narrator verbatim with Aschenbach's mental language. An intensely emotive tone thus pervades the text as the narrator, in concert with Aschenbach, approaches the climactic writing scene. His sudden change of tone in the course of narrating this episode is therefore all the more discordant.

The scene opens with a strikingly balanced gnomic statement: [“The happiness of the writer consists in the thought that can fully become feeling, in the feeling that can fully become thought”] (492). No other narratorial generalization in the entire text is as harmoniously attuned to the mood of the protagonist. Its syntactical symmetry reflects with utmost precision the creative equipoise Aschenbach himself seeks between thought and feeling. But already in the next sentence, even as the narrator grants Aschenbach this supreme [“happiness”], he begins to withdraw from the miraculous moment: [“It was such a pulsing thought, such a precise feeling that belonged to and obeyed the lonely man then. … Suddenly, he wanted to write”] (492; my italics). Both the estranging epithet and the distancing adverb underline the narrator's disengagement from the creative act that will ensue. Other even more strongly alienating phrases follow presently: the writer is called [“the afflicted one”], the moment of writing [“at this moment of crisis”], the object of his emotion [“the idol”], and so forth.

When we consider the radical nature of Aschenbach's creative performance in this scene, it is hardly surprising that the narrator refuses to follow him in silent consonance: [“And it was his desire to work in the presence of Tadzio, to use the figure of the boy as a model in his writing, to let his style follow the lines of this body … and to transport his beauty into the spiritual”] (492). As T. J. Reed has pointed out, Aschenbach here tries to enact (literally and literarily) the truth Diotima imparts to Socrates that Eros alone can serve as guide to absolute beauty.¹⁸ In this light his act of “writing Tadzio” can be interpreted as his attempt at gaining direct access to the realm of Platonic ideas. But this mystic creative urge is of course in flagrant violation of Aschenbach's own past aesthetic credo, a credo that the narrator had explicitly endorsed. Its dominant principle, as we recall, had precisely been that the artist can not create in the heat of emotion: [“he had reined in and cooled off his feelings because he knew that he tended to be content with a gay approximation and a half perfection”] (449). Aschenbach's scriptural intercourse with Tadzio thus clearly contradicts the ethos to which he has dedicated his creative life. And beyond that it also countermands the entire process of mimetic art, the patient art of the novelist who had woven [“Maja”—“the novellistic tapestry rich in figures that brought together such a multiplicity of fates in the shadow of an idea”] (450), as the narrator had admiringly described it. These horizontal images of shadow and carpet point up the radical contrast between the reflected phenomenal world Aschenbach had formerly created, and the direct vertical ascension of the Platonic writing act he presently performs.

But if all this helps to explain why the writing scene brings about the sudden change in the level-headed narrator's attitude toward Aschenbach, it also draws attention to his limitations. These come to be clearly in evidence in the drastic distancing move he undertakes in the immediate aftermath of Aschenbach's scriptural act, when he momentarily, but quite literally, steps out of and away from his story. Not the least shocking aspect of his breakaway is that it breaks all the unities—of time, place, and action—to which the novella so classically adheres from the moment of Aschenbach's arrival in Venice. Flashing forward to the public reception the writer's creative offspring will receive, the narrator at first describes it with unrestrained admiration as [“that page and a half of consummate prose … whose purity, nobility, and soaring emotional tension was soon to arouse the admiration of many”] (493). The comment that now follows, however, deflates both the writer and the writing in almost brutally sobering terms: [“Surely it is good that the world knows only the beautiful work but not its origins or the conditions for its creation; for knowledge of the sources from which the artist's inspiration flowed would often cause confusion and repulsion and thus cancel out the impression of excellence”] (493). This is in every respect the least motivated, most jarring and disconcerting of the narrator's interventions. It almost seems as though he were taking headlong flight onto familiar ground—the psychology of the reading public—from the mysteries of a creative process that is beyond his comprehension. The substance of his comment itself raises several questions. Is it not, within its context, plainly contradictory? Having just revealed the sources of Aschenbach's newly created piece, what is the sense of now declaring that these sources had better remain hidden? Finally, is not the attribution of “confusing” and even “repulsive” effects to Aschenbach's sublimated “Platonic” procreation excessively moralistic and unnecessarily aggressive?

These questions will, in my view, inevitably arise in the mind of a reader who dissociates the narrator from the author of Tod in Venedig. And since this, the narrator's most questionable intervention, is located precisely at the point of origin of the ideological schism in the story, it tends to reduce the trustworthiness of his distancing comments from this point forward. At the very least the reader's allegiance will henceforth be divided between the narrator and his protagonist. I would even suggest that Mann may have designedly made his narrator jump the gun: his overreaction within an episode that still clearly belongs to, and indeed climaxes the Apollonian phase of Aschenbach's erotic adventure welds the reader's sympathy more firmly to the protagonist than if the narrator had waited with his distancing move until after Aschenbach had begun his Dionysian descent.

IV

A second, even clearer, instance of evaluative overstatement occurs in the scene where Aschenbach reaches his nadir: the paragraph-long sentence that introduces his second Socratic monologue (in the scene that immediately precedes the death scene). I cannot demonstrate its rhetorical impact without quoting it in full:

There he sat, the master, the artist who had achieved dignity, the author of “The Wretch” who had renounced gypsy instincts and turbid depths in such exemplary and pure fashion, who had broken relations with the abyss and rejected depravity, the high-climber who had overcome his own knowledge and left all irony behind and grown accustomed to the amenities of popularity, he whose fame was officially endorsed, whose name had been titled and whose style boys were encouraged to emulate—there he sat, lids closed, with only an occasional, quickly suppressed mocking and perplexed glance flitting forth sideways, and his drooping lips, cosmetically enhanced, formed a few words from the strange dream logic of his half slumbering brain.

(521)

The most obviously “destructive” aspect of this passage is of course the grotesque [“falling distance”] it builds between the before and after, the former self-image and the present reality. The elevation itself is constructed by sardonically piling up phrases we have heard before in a different context: they are the very phrases the narrator had employed in the laudatory curriculum vitae of the summary interchapter. What is perhaps less obvious is that this sentence parodistically echoes that earlier chapter's opening sentence. The syntactical analogy becomes clear from a skeletal alignment of constituent parts:

(A)	(B)
The author of … the prose epic about the life of Frederick of Prussia;	There he sat, the master the artist who had achieved dignity
the patient artist who … wove the novellistic tapestry “Maja”
the creator of that powerful tale titled “The Wretch”	the author of “The Wretch”
the writer finally … of the impassioned	the high-climber who, free from his own knowledge and all irony …
essay about “Intellect and Art”
Gustav Aschenbach, then (405)	he, whose … whose … he sat there … (521)

As Oskar Seidlin has pointed out, the four nominal clauses of the earlier sentence (A) mark the steps of Aschenbach's artistic achievement—[“The four stages … of creative life”].¹⁹ In the later sentence (B) we again have four nominal clauses, with the first three very nearly corresponding (but in reverse order) to those in (A). But with the fourth—[“the high-climbing one”]—(B) begins to climb hectically, finally culminating in three elaborate genitive constructions. Note also that the nominal series of (A) no longer stands up independently in (B) but is framed by the verbal phrase [“he sat there”], so that the inflated “master” is now subordinated to the disreputable state in which he “sits there.”

Another, even more striking modification is that while (A) pairs each of the four epithets with one of Aschenbach's major works, (B) reduces him to the authorship of a single work, the story “Ein Elender.” The reason for singling out this work is immediately apparent: unlike Aschenbach's other heroes, the protagonist of “Ein Elender” is an anti-hero, the anti-type of his creator's mature self who represents everything Aschenbach has wanted to reject. This despised figure, so the narrator's verbal irony implies, is precisely what the Aschenbach who “sits there” has now become. But the language employed to evoke this identity in turn associates the narrator with the writer who has created this repulsive character. For he applies to the degraded Aschenbach the same unequivocally negative rhetoric that—according to the narrator's own earlier description—Aschenbach had applied to his degraded creature: [“The force of words with which depravity was rejected here spoke for the renunciation of all moral doubt, of any sympathy for the abyss, the refusal of the easily compassionate expression that to understand all meant to forgive all”] (455). The fact that the narrator now applies these same phrases to the author of “Der Elende”—[“who … had refused the turbid depths, renounced sympathy with the abyss, and rejected the depraved”] (521)—confirms that he continues to emulate the values for which Aschenbach had opted at the pivotal moment of his career when he had created his story.

The entire weighty sentence finally leads up to the inquit phrase signalling the quotation of Aschenbach's monologue: [“his drooping lips, cosmetically enhanced, formed a few words from the strange dream logic of his half slumbering brain”] (521). The fact that the narrator quotes his character's thoughts directly on this occasion is in itself significant: no other mode of presentation could have disengaged him as effectively from the ensuing discourse. But the terms he uses to introduce it—[“slumbering brain,” “dream logic”]—are of course even more alienating; they disqualify its meaning in advance, as much as to warn us that the words we are about to hear will be errant nonsense.²⁰ When one examines the actual content of Aschenbach's slumberous mind however one is forced to conclude that his dream-logic produces nothing less than the moment of truth toward which the entire story has been moving: a lucidly hopeless diagnosis of the artist's fate.

Aschenbach's Socratic address takes us back again to the Platonic doctrine of beauty as found in the Phaedrus and the Symposium. But he now turns this doctrine to profoundly pessimistic account—at least so far as the poet is concerned; [“we poets”], he tells Phaedrus [“cannot follow the path of beauty … without having Eros join us and set himself up as the leader, … for passion is our exaltation, and our longing must remain love—that is our happiness and our shame”] (521 f.). Having acknowledged the poet's defeat on the Platonic path to the higher realm, Aschenbach now denounces with particular bitterness his own erstwhile pedagogic pretensions, with words that clearly echo Plato-Socrates' ultimate decision (in Book X of The Republic) to exile the poet from the ideal state:²¹ [“The masterly posing of our style is a lie and a foolishness, our fame and standing a farce, the trust the public has in us is highly ridiculous, and the notion of educating the people and the youth through art is a risky undertaking that ought to be prohibited”] (522). Isn't Aschenbach saying here exactly the same thing the narrator has just finished saying in his introduction, and in almost identical terms? His self-criticism is, if anything, even more biting than the narrator's sarcasm—which now appears as gratuitous aggression, merely intended to add insult to injury.

When we come to consider Aschenbach's despairing statement concerning the constitutional immorality of the poet at the conclusion of his monologue, the narrator's prefatory venom takes on an even more dubious air. To understand this we must briefly turn back to an earlier moment of his rhetoric. In the interchapter the narrator explains—in entirely approving terms—why Aschenbach had, at a decisive point of his artistic development, renounced his youthful indulgence in immoral “psychologism”—[“the indecent psychologism of the times”] (455)—and had opted for a disciplined and dignified pursuit of beauty. At this point the narrator queries—in the form of three elaborately phrased rhetorical questions—whether this “moral decisiveness” of the mature master might not in turn lead him back to immoral behaviour. The exact terms of his predictive speculation (see the quotation in note)²² are less important for our purposes than the fact that he dismisses it indecisively with a decisive shrug of the shoulder—[“Be that as it may”]—and then immediately calls on a philosophical adage—[“A development is a fate”]—to lead him back to and on with his admiring account of Aschenbach's development as an artist.

Now it is precisely to this crossroads in his career—the point when he made his decisive choice against “psychologism” and in favor of purely aesthetic values—that Aschenbach returns at the conclusion of his monologue. And as he does so, he repeats almost verbatim the account the narrator had previously given of this crucial moment. Except that now, far from shrugging off the question of the artist's immorality, as the narrator had done in the interchapter, Aschenbach provides it with an unequivocally affirmative answer: [“Form and detachment, Phaidros, lead to intoxication and desire, … to horrifying emotional outrage, … they lead to the abyss, they too lead to the abyss. They lead us poets there, I tell you, because we cannot manage to elevate ourselves but only to dissipate”] (522). For all its dream-logic, this conclusion to Aschenbach's monologue is tragically clear (as well as clearly tragic): the poet at the crossroads is forced to choose between two paths that both equally lead to the “abyss.” In evading one form of immoral behaviour he inevitably falls into another. In short, Aschenbach's retrospective cognition exactly confirms the narrator's prospective suspicion. How, in view of this, are we to understand the destructive rhetoric with which the narrator introduces Aschenbach's articulation of the dark truth?

Inevitably, if one equates the narrator with Thomas Mann one is forced to find reasons to denigrate Aschenbach's famous last words. Critics have generally done so. They have understood his monologue as an inauthentic self-justification: instead of facing up to his individual guilt—his false choice at the crossroads—Aschenbach attributes his abysmal end to the fate of poets generally, the generic [“us poets”]. One critic puts it this way: [“The tendency to the abyss is not an essential part of the determination of beauty, as Aschenbach would have it, but the result of a false life”].²³ In my opinion this interpretation cannot be substantiated on the basis of the text itself. Within its boundaries only two paths are open to the artist, and both lead to the same abyss. To open an alternate, “moral” path for Aschenbach one has to look outside the text: to Mann's other, more optimistic works (“Tonio Kröger,” the Joseph novels), or to certain of his autobiographical pronouncements.²⁴

On the other hand, if one dissociates the narrator from Thomas Mann one is free to denigrate his introduction to the monologue, and to understand Aschenbach's last words for what they are: his (and the story's) moment of truth, which the narrator is unwilling or unable to share to the bitter end. It is surely significant that only Aschenbach can sound this truth, that he can sound it only with lips drooping under his make-up, and only after these lips have taken in the fatal germs of the plague. In this light his monologue takes on the meaning of an anagnorisis, the expression of that lethal knowledge the hero of Greek tragedy reaches when he stands on the verge of death. The irony the narrator directs at Aschenbach in this moment can then be turned back on its speaker—by a reader who, for his part, is willing and able to share the tragic truth the author imparts to him with this story.²⁵

V

To this point my argument for the “second author” of Tod in Venedig has rested solely on what the narrator says and how he says it. But what he leaves unsaid is equally important for my case. To this other, tacit half of his story I now turn to complement and complete the tell-tale evidence.

It is tell-tale in the literal sense: for with Tod in Venedig Mann (though not his narrator) gives us—among other things—a fantastic tale. His vehicle is of course the population of uncanny figures Aschenbach encounters on his lethal journey. These figures acquire their ominous meaning less by way of their individual appearances—though their death- and/or devil-like features have often been noted—than by way of their serial reappearances. The unlikeliness (on realistic grounds) of their uncanny likeness suggests cumulatively that they all represent the same sinister power, a power relentlessly bent on driving Aschenbach to his ruinous end. Now these hints of supernatural doings, which even a first reader finds too strong to miss and dismiss, are never picked up by the narrator himself. Though he meticulously describes each individual stranger, he passes silently over their obtrusive sameness, to all appearances studiously closing his eyes to it. This wilful blindness is the natural counterpart to the moralistic, realistic, and rationalistic world view he voices throughout.²⁶

Yet for all the narrator's closely woven cover-up on the non-mimetic level of the text, the underlying mystery on the mimetic level keeps shining through the causal fabric. And these abysmal glimpses into a covert realm make the reader feel increasingly uneasy with the overt explanations he is offered. The narrator's silence, in short, speaks louder than his words; it perhaps undercuts his trustworthiness even more effectively than his normative excesses. For nowhere else does it become quite as evident that the author behind the work is communicating a message that escapes the narrator he placed within the work. The exact content of this message—whether it signifies otherworldly, cosmic powers or the powers of the individual unconscious, myth or (depth-) psychology or, as is most likely, both at once²⁷—is less important in the present context than the fact that it refers to a realm that escapes the narrator. Escapes him precisely because he is bent on ignoring all questions that point above or below his plane conception of the world and of the psyche. In this respect his disregard of the demonic figures corresponds exactly to his rhetorical stand-off from Aschenbach's mental experience at both its zenith (the writing scene) and its nadir (the final monologue).²⁸ By the same token, the demonic figures themselves reinforce the truth value of Aschenbach's anagnorisis in the latter instance; for what can their dark presence in the story intimate, if not that a fateful force is at work in the universe, a force that irresistibly draws those who strive for beauty down into the abyss—[“down to the abyss, they too down to the abyss”].

But the fantastic undercurrent in the fabula of Tod in Venedig also has an essential aesthetic function. As Christine Brooke-Rose has recently suggested, every good story needs to keep back something: “whatever overdetermination may occur in any one work …, some underdetermination is necessary for it to retain its hold over us, its peculiar mixture of recognition-pleasure and mystery.”²⁹ In Mann's novella it is clearly the series of mysterious strangers that creates underdetermination, counterbalancing the narrator's overdetermination on the ideological level. In terms of Roland Barthes codes, to which Brooke-Rose refers in the same essay, these strangers would have to be assigned to the story's hermeneutic code, the enigma-creating code that the narrator disregards and that the text leaves unresolved. The fact that it remains unresolved tacitly ironizes—behind the narrator's back—the univocal interpretation he tries to impose on Aschenbach's story.

VI

At this point I call my intra-textual “experiment” to a halt. Not, needless to say, because I have arrived at a complete or completely new interpretation of Mann's novella but because I feel that I have provided sufficient evidence to confirm my starting hypothesis: that the narrator of Tod in Venedig is not identical with its author. But before closing I want to turn back on my experiment to face a crucial methodological question: granted that the positing of a “second author” may explain in a plausible manner certain discrepancies between the narrator's commentary on Aschenbach's story and this story itself, is this the only plausible way to account for these discrepancies? Is it even the most plausible way?

My answer is: yes—but with one very important provision: if, and only if, we grant (or assume, or believe) that Tod in Venedig is a flawless work—flawless in the sense that it perfectly achieves its author's intentions. As soon as we abandon that assumption an alternate way becomes available to us: namely to attribute the narrator's shortcomings to Thomas Mann himself: more precisely, to the peculiar circumstances—personal, historical, etc.—that attended the composition of this work and that made him fall short of his creative goal.

Now this is precisely the way taken by T. J. Reed in his book Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. To my knowledge Reed is the only scholar to have squarely faced the problems raised by the narrator's ideological excesses toward the end of Tod in Venedig. Referring specifically to the sentence that introduces Aschenbach's final monologue (discussed in section IV above), Reed points up the narrator's “emphatic judgement,” and adds: “It is a shade too emphatic for the reader accustomed to Mann's ironic temper. Where are the reservations usually felt in every inflection of his phrasing? The finality with which Aschenbach's case is settled is positively suspicious. … Is it not crudely direct beside the informed survey of Aschenbach's development in Chapter Two … ? There are depths to be sounded under the polished surface of the story.”³⁰ These words serve as the opening gambit for a probing investigation into the genesis of Mann's novella. They clearly indicate that Reed's admirable study is a specific attempt to account for the “positively suspicious” nature of the narrator's judgemental rhetoric. Significantly Reed pursues his genetic interpretation without ever questioning the reliability of this narrator, whom he seems to identify automatically with the author.³¹ What he questions instead is the coherence and aesthetic integrity of the work itself: by following through the stages of Mann's creative process he reveals what he finds concealed beneath the “polished surface” of the final product—that Mann has superimposed “a moral tale” on a text he had originally conceived “hymnically” (pp. 151-154).³² This “diametrical change” explains for Reed what he describes as the novella's “ambiguity in the word's more dubious sense: … uncertainty of meaning, disunity” (p. 173). Mann has “sought to work out a changed conception in materials and language ideally suited to an earlier one” (p. 174). And although Reed has by this point shifted the ground of his critique from the narrator's narrow moralism to what he calls the story's “disharmony between style and substance” (p. 176), the fact remains that it was the vexing narrator who sent him on his way in the first place—sent him, that is, outside the text to probe the vagaries of its composition.

On the face of it Reed's extra-textual approach to the textual ambiguities in Tod in Venedig would appear to differ radically from the intra-textual approach I have followed in this paper. Yet from a certain theoretical perspective these two approaches can be related, if not reconciled, with each other. We owe this perspective to a recent article by Tamar Yacobi where the problem of fictional reliability is discussed on the basis of a reader-oriented theory of literary texts.³³ According to Yacobi, a reader who attributes unreliability to the narrator of a work of fiction is merely choosing one of several “principles of resolution” potentially available to him when he is faced with the “tensions, incongruities, contradictions and other infelicities” of a literary work (p. 119). A rival principle, equally available to him, is what Yacobi calls the “genetic principle” which places the blame on the biographical-historical background of the work. These two principles of resolution have in common that they “both resolve referential problems by attributing their occurrence to some source of report.” The difference between them “lies in the answer to the question: who is responsible … ?” (p. 121). The reader who calls on the genetic principle will answer: the author. The reader who calls on the unreliability principle will answer: the narrator—which signifies, in the case of an authorial third-person text like Tod in Venedig, that he refuses to regard the narrator as the mouthpiece of the author.

From this theoretical vantage point, then, Reed's genetic explanation appears—even to myself—no less (and no more) valid and plausible than my “second author” explanation. But my equanimity gives way when I return from the plane of abstract generality to the concrete singularity of Mann's novella. For within the interpretive arena of an individual text these two explanations are mutually exclusive, and the reader is forced to choose between them. Which brings me—at the risk of stating the obvious—to mention some of my reasons for preferring my perspectival over Reed's genetic resolution.

I have already alluded to what is no doubt my primary reason: the severance of the narrator from the author seems to me a necessary interpretive move for a reader bent on affirming the aesthetic integrity of Mann's novella.³⁴ Obviously one's willingness to make this move will depend to some degree on one's estimation of Mann's œuvre as a whole. And it is no doubt because my own high esteem is due in large part to the complexity of vision I find incarnated in his other major narrative works—though not always in his extra-literary pronouncements—that I am unwilling to ascribe to Mann the ideological simplicities voiced in Tod in Venedig. The fact, moreover, that these pronouncements address the subject of Mann's deepest concerns and most differentiated views—art and the artist—reinforces my reluctance. In his other novels and novellas Mann always approaches this subject obliquely, most obliquely of all in his only other full-fledged tragedy of a creative artist, Doktor Faustus. I take it to be no mere coincidence that Mann here reverts—three decades later—to the same basic narrative indirection I attribute to him in Tod in Venedig.

Admittedly the ironic interval that separates Mann from Zeitblom is far more blatant than the interval that separates him from the teller of the earlier work. Yet the proximity of the narrative situations in these two works offers a kind of proof by the absurd of my “second author” hypothesis: for is it not equally difficult to imagine the narrator of Tod in Venedig to be the creator of Aschenbach as it is to imagine Zeitblom to be the creator of Adrian Leverkühn? Only a mind capable of Mann's famous [“irony in both directions”] could have conceived both members of these pairs in dialectical unison.

Notes

1. Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden (Frankfurt, a. M. 1960), X, pp. 631 f. The novel under review is Adolf von Hatzfeld's Die Lemminge (1923).

2. The term was first proposed by Franz Stanzel in Die typischen Erzählsituationen im Roman (Vienna, 1955).

3. A number of critics of Tod in Venedig have recognized the narrator-author differential as a factor that must be taken into account, but without drawing the interpretive consequences that it implies. See esp. Hans W. Nicklas, Thomas Manns Novelle Der Tod in Venedig (Marburg, 1968), p. 87; Herbert Lehnert, “Tristan, Tonio Kröger und Der Tod in Venedig: Ein Strukturvergleich,” Orbis Litterarum, 24 (1969), pp. 298-304; Josef Kunz, Die deutsche Novelle im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1971), pp. 154, 161. The closest approach to an interpretation based on the narrator's separate personality is found in Inge Diersen, Untersuchungen zu Thomas Mann (Berlin, 1959, 1965), pp. 122-128. Overstressing as she does the political implications of the narrator's ideological conservatism Diersen arrives at conclusions that I find difficult to substantiate on the basis of the text; some of her remarks on the narrator's role are nonetheless valid and insightful.

4. Franz Stanzel, Theorie des Ezrählens (Göttingen, 1979), p. 27 f.

5. Given Mann's ambivalent views concerning art and the artist during the time of writing, as well as his contradictory self-interpretations of Tod in Venedig, extra-textual evidence concerning authorial intentions is notoriously inconclusive. See Herbert Lehnert, Thomas Mann: Fiktion, Mythos, Religion (Stuttgart, 1965), pp. 120-139; Hans Wysling, “‘Ein Elender’: Zu einem Novellenplan Thomas Mann,” in Paul Scherrer and Hans Wysling, Quellenkritische Studien zum Werk Thomas Manns (Bern, 1967); T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (Oxford, 1974), pp. 119-143. Reed's genetically oriented chapter on Tod in Venedig (pp. 144-178) will be discussed in my conclusion.

6. This most general and most basic distinction between novelists and their narrators is pointed up by Wolfgang Kayser in his classic essay “Wer erzählt den Roman?” (Vortragsreise, [Bern, 1958], p. 91). The distinction is discussed in a more modern theoretical vein by Félix Martínez-Bonati in Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981); see esp. pp. 77-96.

7. For the differentiation between mimetic and non-mimetic language in fiction, see Martínez-Bonati, pp. 32-39. Mimetic language is “as though transparent; it does not interpose itself between us and the things of which it speaks”; the non-mimetic parts of a narrator's discourse, by contrast, “refer us back to his presence, since they … are his language, his acts qua narrator, his perceptible subjectivity” (pp. 36 f).

8. I here use the term “reliable narrator” in the sense defined by Wayne Booth: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for … the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author's norms), unreliable when he does not” (The Rhetoric of Fiction [Chicago, 1961], p. 158 f.).

9. The growing separation of the narrator from Aschenbach has been previously noted by Burton Pike (“Thomas Mann and the Problematic Self,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, 37 [1967], p. 136); see also Diersen, p. 124.

10. Page numbers in the text refer to Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden (Frankfurt, a. M. 1960), VIII.

11. In this respect Tod in Venedig is a remarkable illustration for the “nonconcurrence of points of view articulated at different levels” that Boris Uspensky discusses in A Poetics of Composition (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 101-108. Uspensky's recognition that “point of view” is a composite concept that must be divided into several discrete “levels” is therefore essential for the correct description of the narrative situation in Mann's novella. Failure to distinguish between these discrete levels in Tod in Venedig seems to me the reason why its narrative structure has been characterized in such widely differing ways, ranging from those critics who see the narrator as the “mirror” of Aschenbach (Fritz Martini, Das Wagnis der Sprache [Stuttgart, 1964], p. 210) to those who see him as taking an ironic stance from beginning to end (Reinhard Baumgart, Das Ironische und die Ironie in den Werken Thomas Manns [Munich, 1964], pp. 120 f.).

12. In his discussion of Pike's article (see note 9 above) Lehnert denies the mounting distance between the narrator and Aschenbach on the grounds that [“the narrator keeps alternating between an internal and an external perspective”] (Thomas-Mann-Forschung [Stuttgart, 1969], p. 139). It is apparent that Lehnert confuses different point-of-view levels here. A narrator's free access to a character's mind—“Innensicht”—by no means necessarily coincides with sympathy (identification), nor “Außensicht” with irony (distance). This confusion also affects his analysis of the narrative structure of Tod in Venedig in his article (see note 3 above). Neither the perennial [“interplay between the inner perspective and a more distanced biographer's perspective”] (p. 301) that he considers characteristic for this work nor the “Perspektiven-Ambivalenz” to which he relates this alternation seem to me accurate descriptions of the overall narrative structure.

13. The narrator's ideological commentary is also stressed by Nicklas (pp. 91 f.) and Kunz (p. 154).

14. Several critics have remarked on these distancing epithets (e.g. Lehnert, Thomas Mann, p. 116, Nicklas, p. 90, Kunz, p. 155), without however clearly recognizing their evolving function.

15. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris, 1970), p. 104.

16. Cf. Kunz (p. 158) who also regards this scene as the [“point of division”] between the ascending and descending movements of the story.

17. The principal advocate for the “parodistic idiom” in Tod in Venedig is Erich Heller (The Ironic German: A Study of Thomas Mann [Boston, 1958]; see esp. p. 99). Heller qualifies his thesis somewhat in the later essay “Autobiographie und Literatur,” in Essays on European Literature, eds. Peter Uwe Hohendahl et al. (St. Louis, 1972), esp. pp. 92-97. Peter Heller has recently revived the parodistic interpretation in “Der Tod in Venedig und Thomas Manns Grund-Motiv” in Thomas Mann: Ein Kolloqium, eds. Hans S. Schulte and Gerald Chapple (Bonn, 1979); see esp. pp. 69-72. A forceful argument against the parodistic intent of Tod in Venedig is provided by Hans Rudolf Vaget in “‘Goethe oder Wagner’: Studien zu Thomas Manns Goethe-Rezeption, 1905-1912”: in H. R. Vaget and D. Barnouw, Thomas Mann: Studien zur Frage der Rezeption (Bern, 1975); see esp. pp. 40-55.

18. Reed, p. 160. The Platonic import of Aschenbach's creative moment is disregarded by Pike who takes its diminutive yield—“anderthalb Seiten”—as an ironic comment on Aschenbach's artistic potential (p. 135).

19. Von Goethe zu Thomas Mann (Göttingen, 1963), p. 151.

20. The dream concept bears emphatically negative attributes throughout the narrator's discourse. See e.g., [“with confused dream-words”] (461), [“comically dreamlike adventure”] (484), [“dream-spell”] (510), and of course [“the horrible dream”] (515) that leaves Aschenbach [“helpless in the demon's power”] (517).

21. Cf. Erich Heller, The Ironic German, p. 114.

22. [“But is moral decisiveness on the other side of knowledge, of disintegrating and hampering realization—is this not again a simplification, a moral reduction of world and soul, and thus also a strengthening in the direction of evil, of the forbidden, the morally impossible? And does form not have two faces? Is it not at the same time moral and immoral—moral as the result and expression of discipline, immoral, or even amoral, insofar as it by its very nature includes a moral indifference, yes in that it even strives to subdue the moral faculty under its proud and unrestricted scepter? Be that as it may! A development is a fate”] (455).

23. Nicklas, p. 14; see also p. 81. Similarly Diersen, pp. 113, 121.

24. See, inter alia, Pike, p. 133: “Considering Mann's attitude toward art as it emerges in his other writings—fiction, essays, and letters—is not an art which so peremptorily excludes sympathy with the abyss incomplete?” (my emphasis). Nicklas (p. 14) even calls on Goethe (!) for a positive conception of art that shows up the shortcomings of Aschenbach's.

25. I cannot resist breaking my self-imposed interdiction against extra-textual evidence at this juncture. The one point that remains constant in Mann's notoriously self-contradictory comments on Tod in Venedig through the years is that Aschenbach's final monologue articulates the truth of the story. He pronounced on this, so far as I can gather, in four different places. First in a letter to Elisabeth Zimmer, dated 6. September 1915: [“I intended to render something like the tragedy of mastery. You seem to have understood that as you consider the speech to Phaidros as the core of it all”]. Next in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen when he speaks of a past work [“where I let a ‘dignified artist’ comprehend that his kind necessarily remain disreputable and adventurers in feeling”]—whereupon he goes on to quote verbatim further phrases from the monologue. Then in the comments on Tod in Venedig in the Princeton address “On Myself” (1940): [“The artist, imprisoned in the sensuous realm as he is, can really never become dignified: this fundamental conviction imbued with a bitterly melancholy skepticism toward all artists is expressed in the confession (shaped to follow Plato's dialogues) that I gave to the hero as he was near death”]. Finally in a letter to Jürgen Ernestus dated, 17. Juni 1954, where he again quotes and paraphrases the monologue, and then adds (this time with a shade of reserve): [“All this skeptical and suffering pessimism has much truth in it, perhaps exaggerated truth and hence only half true”]. All the above quotations may be found in Thomas Mann, Teil I: 1889-1917, Dichter über ihre Dichtungen 14/1 (Munich, 1975), respectively pp. 406, 411, 439f., 448. All emphases are mine.

26. In this regard the narrator may be taken as a forerunner of Zeitblom, who closes his eyes equally tightly to the supernatural motivations of his protagonist's fate. Curiously Diersen, who draws the analogy between the two narrator's on different grounds (p. 126f.), fails to mention this important link.—I take the narrator's two references to a “Dämon” (502, 517) as purely rhetorical tropes, unrelated to the fantastic figures in the story.

27. The “bifocally” mythic and psychological meaning of the stranger-figures is stressed by André von Gronicka (“Myth Plus Psychology: A Stylistic Analysis of Death in Venice,” in Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Henry Hatfield [Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964], esp. pp. 51-54).

28. Aschenbach himself, while he never relates the stranger-figures causally to his fate or to each other, does on several occasions reflect on them with puzzlement. See esp. 446, 461, 468, 515.

29. “The Readerhood of Man,” in The Reader in the Text, eds. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton, 1980), p. 131.

30. Reed, p. 149.

31. Except perhaps toward the end of his discussion when he states rather cryptically: “It has proved possible to detach Mann from the emphatic condemnations of the later pages. These formulations … are Mann's concession to more confident moralists than himself” (p. 173). Is he suggesting here that the moralistic narrator is a kind of hypocritical role that Mann adopted for public consumption? This seems to me a highly unlikely interpretation.

32. The terms [“moral fable”] and [“hymnic”] are used by Mann himself to contrast the final product with the original creative impulse. See his letter to Carl Maria Weber (4. Juli 1920)—the crown witness for Reed's genetic argument.

33. “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem,” Poetics Today, 2 (1981), 113-126.

34. It is interesting to note in this connection that a number of recent critics have felt it necessary, and for the same reasons, to sever the narrator from the author of another famous work of fiction: Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The operation is performed most boldly by Eric Blackall in Goethe and the Novel (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976). According to Blackall, Goethe's narrator “throughout the novel … is trying to describe something that is really beyond him” (p. 172). Charging this narrator with “conventional platitude” (p. 184) and even “incompetence” (p. 186), Blackall concludes that Goethe employs his services to create “an expressive tension between what is told and the telling” (p. 187). See also Jane K. Brown, “Die Wahlverwandtschaften and the English Novel of Manners,” Comparative Literature, 28 (1976), 97-108, esp. pp. 105-107. In view of Mann's confession that he read Wahlverwandtschaften no less than five times in the course of his work on Tod in Venedig, one suspects that Goethe's interpolation of an unreliable narrator in this novel may have contributed to Mann's choice of an analogous device.