SOURCE: Rockwood, Heidi M., and Robert J. R. Rockwood. “The Psychological Reality of Myth in Der Tod in Venedig.” Germanic Review 59, no. 4 (fall 1984): 137-41.

[In the following essay, Rockwood and Rockwood offer a Jungian interpretation of Death in Venice and assert that the mythological aspects of the novella are “integral parts of human psychological reality.”]

Despite the great number of psychological background analyses of Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig scholars have so far not attempted to read the novella exclusively and consistently in terms of Jungian psychology, especially in the light of Jung's theory of the archetypes. This theory, to be exemplified in more detail later, seems to us particularly well suited as an interpretive foil for Mann's work, since it concentrates on integrating timeless, depersonalized “mythological” elements into a theory of human personality. The presence of both highly personal as well as depersonalized elements has so far been seen rather as an interpretive dilemma for the Mann scholar, as T. J. Reed states:

Der Tod in Venedig kept the primal suggestiveness of myth by not bringing it into direct contact with the other ways of seeing which are present in the work. The levels of meaning are parallel and self-contained … the mind cannot entertain myth and psychology as true explanations of Aschenbach's fate simultaneously.¹

We expect to show that this dilemma does not exist, if we look at human nature and Mann's novella in the light of Jungian theory, and that the mythological elements in Der Tod in Venedig are integral parts of human psychological reality. While this type of interpretation downplays the personal experiences of Mann that have entered into the novella, it will elucidate the deeper significance of his characters and point us towards new connections and interpretive possibilities. Since Jung, in his theory of the archetypes, attempted to map the psyche of MAN regardless of his place in space and time, it should be unnecessary to ascertain a specific influence of Jung on Mann at the time Der Tod in Venedig was written.² The sole test of such an interpretation should be its ability to clarify, unite and explain diverse elements in the novella, and to provide us with new insights into its structure.

Gustav Aschenbach's journey into the world of archetypes starts with his fateful walk to the North Cemetery. It is necessary to recapitulate briefly the state of mind he is in at the time to understand the impact of this day on his life. As has been much discussed, Aschenbach is the product of conflicting influences on his early life, namely the bourgeois qualities inherited from his father's side of the family and his mother's bohemian and more artistic heritage. Although as a young man Aschenbach was subject to the bohemian aspects of his nature, he has striven diligently to negate this side of his personality throughout his adult life. Long before he had left his desk on that particular spring day, the principle which had motivated his art was therefore already dead. It is fitting that Aschenbach's walk should have taken him to the North Cemetery, for unconsciously he is indeed a mourner. As he stands among the Greek crosses in the cemetery he finds himself fascinated by the scriptural formulae on the facade of the mortuary chapel—“Sie gehen ein in die Wohnung Gottes,” and “Das ewige Licht leuchte ihnen”³—for these formulae accurately describe events occurring within himself at this very moment.

In archetypal terms Aschenbach has made the mistake of identifying totally with his persona as a respectable, bourgeois man of letters. He of all people would not be unaware that, as Jung has observed, “the persona is usually rewarded in cash.”⁴ But having been denied nurture from his true artistic Self, this artificially contrived persona has begun to die. The process has thrust Aschenbach into the Unconscious, that region of the psyche which is indeed the “house of the Lord” and the source of “light everlasting.”

Aschenbach is brought back to reality by the sight of a man standing in the portico, “oberhalb der beiden apokalyptischen Tiere, welche die Freitreppe bewachen” (p. 339). This is reality in a new dimension, one which Aschenbach has so far suppressed; it is the fourth dimension, the realm of living myth. The man, symbolically and actually, stands at the entrance of the Unconscious, having just come into the light of consciousness. In archetypal terms this stranger is known as the Shadow. According to Jung, this is the “figure nearest to consciousness and … also the first component to come up in an analysis of the unconscious.”⁵ The Shadow is the negative or the dark side of the personality; sometimes it is of a puerile and inferior character. Aschenbach's Shadow is of course the personification of all the traits which he would consider bohemian. What betrays the fact that the man in the cemetery is Aschenbach's Shadow, however, is not so much the man's appearance, but Aschenbach's emotional reaction to him: it is violent and at the same time strangely passive—he finds himself spellbound, with no more power to act than in a dream. This is exactly the effect which the Shadow has on the individual. Jung states that “… the inferiorities constituting the shadow … have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly … possessive quality … with uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one behaves more or less like a primitive, who is not only the passive victim of his affects but also singularly incapable of moral judgment.”⁶ A further telling characteristic of the Shadow is its capacity for resentment. It is this very quality—the stranger's intense air of resentment—that so disturbs Aschenbach. Jung indicates that an encounter with the Shadow has an enduring effect on the Ego, and when the Shadow is integrated, the result is an alteration of personality.⁷ Thus Aschenbach is conscious of a “seltsame Ausweitung seines Innern, … eine Art schweifender Unruhe, ein jugendlich durstiges Verlangen in die Ferne” (p. 340). The immediate result is something which previously would have been unlikely for so disciplined a person as Aschenbach: the fantastic daydream with its phallic symbolism.

Aschenbach encounters the Shadow three more times, in three separate guises, each uncannily alike, and each symbolic of moral degeneration. On the ship to Venice he is the fop, later he appears as the renegade gondolier and finally as the street musician at the hotel in Venice. The similarities between these figures have been pointed out before; if, however, it is true that psychologically Aschenbach and his Shadow are one, then Aschenbach too must share in their common characteristics. While the physical resemblance between Aschenbach and the Shadow figures is at first barely perceptible, it does exist. What is most striking about all of the Shadow figures is their foreignness: the wanderer is “durchaus nicht bajuwarischen Schlages” (p. 339), the fop is an old man masquerading as a youth, the gondolier is “durchaus nicht italienischen Schlages” (p. 354), and the musician is “nicht venezianischen Schlages” (p. 386). Aschenbach too shows this trait, for he also is out of place: though he pretends to be bourgeois, his instincts are as bohemian as the “Merkmale fremder Rasse in seinem Äussern” (p. 343) inherited from his mother. Furthermore Aschenbach is “etwas unter Mittelgrösse” (p. 347) with an almost delicate figure. The gondolier is “eher schmächtig von Leibesbeschaffenheit” (p. 354), the musician is “schmächtig gebaut und auch von Antlitz mager und ausgemergelt” (p. 386), and the stranger, though he is of medium height, is, like the others, thin. They all do something with their lips: the stranger and the gondolier bare their teeth to the gums by curling back their lips; the fop and the musician are both characterized by loose play of the tongue in the corner of the mouth. This is a distorted echo of the mobility of Aschenbach's mouth, which is “gross, oft schlaff, oft plötzlich schmal und gespannt” (p. 347). Three of the figures have noses that are out of the ordinary: they are snub-nosed. Aschenbach's “gedrungene …, edel gebogene … Nase” (p. 347) is one of his more unusual features. All of the Shadow figures wear hats, so does Aschenbach. Strictly speaking, however, the definite physical resemblance between him and the Shadow figures does not occur until near the end of the novella, when Aschenbach is rejuvenated by the hotel barber: with his hair dyed and rouge on his cheeks he becomes his Shadow, even to the tie and hat. At this point the metamorphosis is complete.

As we have seen, the Shadow is a negative figure. For Aschenbach it is initially the embodiment of the personality traits which are repugnant to the Ego—in this case those associated with bohemianism. Jungian theory postulates a second archetypal figure, one which is more complex and numinous than the Shadow. It is the Anima, and it represents the feminine characteristics of the masculine personality. The Anima comprises only one aspect of the unconscious, but her power of fascination and possession is so great that she often seems to encompass it completely:

Although it seems as if the whole of our unconscious psychic life could be ascribed to the anima, … she is not characteristic of the unconscious in its entirety … This is shown by the very fact of her femininity … the anima-image is usually projected upon women.⁸

It happens that Aschenbach's Anima-image is not projected upon a woman, but upon Tadzio. Scholarship is generally careful to point out the aesthetic aspects of this fascination, so as not to brand Aschenbach as a would-be pederast.⁹ The archetypal approach offers us yet another interpretation of this unusual projection. Aschenbach, in repudiating his bohemian heritage, is, of course, repudiating his mother. Ordinarily one's attitude is more positive towards the parent whose sex is opposite from one's own; Aschenbach, however, has inverted the relationship, and the antagonism which he would ordinarily direct towards his father, he directs instead towards his mother. Now, the Shadow-image, which is projected onto the same sex as oneself, partakes of the antagonism customarily reserved for the parent whose sex is the same as one's own. Thus Aschenbach blurs the sexual identification of the Anima as soon as the Shadow-image begins to reflect qualities associated with his mother. Jung points out that when the masculine personality identifies not with the Shadow, but with the Anima, it often results in homosexuality.¹⁰ So in Der Tod in Venedig Tadzio is made the embodiment of femininity, and his sisters, in contrast, become harshly masculine.

Aschenbach's initial reaction to Tadzio is intellectual. He ponders the mysterious harmony between the individual and universal law that results in human beauty. He tries to assume a patronizing air to hide his excitement. But ultimately he cannot break away from the power of the archetype, which has the effect of living myth:

… the autonomy of a mythological figure … works, because secretly it participates in the observer's psyche and appears as its reflection, though it is not recognized as such. It is split off from his consciousness and consequently behaves like an autonomous personality.¹¹

Slochower makes a similar observation when he states that “in essence, the boy is Aschenbach's ‘double.’”¹² Aschenbach, ironically, is charmed by an idealization of just those qualities which earlier had been so distasteful to him when encountered in the guise of the Shadow figures. We again see the sailor suit and the blond hair of the gondolier, the red tie of the perverted fop, the coquettish behavior and the importance of mouth, lips and teeth, but now the expression coincides with Aschenbach's highest conception of beauty. Just as Aschenbach and the Shadow figures were linked, there are further external aspects to connect him with his Anima. Tadzio's sickly and delicate appearance makes us think of Aschenbach, who as a youth was weak himself and could not go to public school and for whom work even later in life is a constant struggle. Furthermore, Tadzio's “transparency” is, of course, a link with his femininity. Ezergailis points out that he shares this quality with several of Mann's female figures and that it symbolizes “total openness and dissolution of form,” but even so that there is in it “a core of continuity, a record of past events.”¹³ This is certainly a fitting description of the Anima. As she goes beyond time and space, she also goes beyond good and evil. Though she can be a helper, she can also be a temptress, and even when she functions more as savior than siren, her activities are dangerous to the psyche. To experience the highest meaning the Anima can impart, one must undergo a kind of “preliminary death,” where traditional values no longer make sense:

Only when all props and crutches are broken … does it become possible for us to experience an archetype that till then had lain hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima.¹⁴

The new meaning which emerges out of this situation is concealed in the archetype of the child. The child, as Jung explains, is a “subduer of conflicts and a bringer of healing”:

The child … is thus both beginning and end, an initial and terminal creature … Psychologically speaking, this means that the “child” symbolizes the preconscious and the postconscious essence of man … In this idea the all-embracing nature of psychic wholeness is expressed.¹⁵

What is most characteristic of the archetype of the child is its bisexual nature. Aspects of the child archetype are, of course, clearly expressed in Tadzio. Though the boy is about fourteen, his hands are “noch kindlich” (p. 358) and “seine Achselhöhlen waren noch glatt wie bei einer Statue” (p. 373). Since the signs of adolescence are not yet present, his hermaphroditic nature is still intact. Jung points out that the “hermaphroditic means nothing less than a union of the strongest and most striking opposites.”¹⁶ For Aschenbach, the “opposites” strongest in his life are the bourgeois and the bohemian. He has now been forced to accept the reality of his own bohemianism, and thus for the first time to recognize the essential similarity of the two principles whose opposition had separated mind from soul.

Ultimately he cannot reconcile these conflicting forces, for intellectually he is wedded to a philosophy of either/or at a time when both/and offers the only possibility of continued existence. In the pseudo-Socratic monologue at the end of the novella Aschenbach still sees the path of love and Eros as leading to destruction. Van Buren Kelley has pointed out that Aschenbach is here actually misinterpreting his “sources” and confusing “love” and “lust”—two emotions that Socrates distinguished, but that only serves to show that Aschenbach cannot even at this point be truly forgiving toward his own emotionality, his own unconscious values.¹⁷ Consciously, as before, Aschenbach rejects the insight brought by the unconscious. The “page and a half of perfect prose” he writes at this point has often been seen as proof to the contrary, as a sign that unity of conscious and unconscious forces has been achieved, but Bance points out that it is closely followed by Aschenbach's death,¹⁸ meaning that the possible unification is at best short-lived, and there has even been a suggestion that it might be one of Mann's ironic touches.¹⁹ Unable to reconcile or to resist them, Aschenbach therefore submits to his unconscious forces and follows the summons of Tadzio's twilit grey eyes far beyond where ego-consciousness can follow. What has taken place in the several weeks prior to this moment on a deserted beach in Venice has been the psychological preparation for the biological death of Gustav Aschenbach.

We have tried to show that the Jungian concept of the archetype offers an explanation for the psychological reality of the mythological relationships involving Aschenbach, the stranger, the fop, the gondolier, the street musician and Tadzio and supplied a single fabric into which all these major relationships can be woven. If, as Jung says, “the psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to myths,”²⁰ then one might also suspect, for a novella as consistent psychologically as this one, that there should be one particular “traditional” myth that would likewise encompass the entire pattern. This has in fact already been shown by Moeller, who reads Der Tod in Venedig consistently in terms of the Hermes myth. Moeller points out that Tadzio is referred to as “Psychagog,” which is Hermes' epithet when he leads the dead into Hades. The gondolier shares this attribute with Tadzio—in Aschenbach's mind he is associated with Charon. Hermes also serves as the protector of travellers, bringer of dreams, patron of poets and thieves. He is the God of entrance and has magical connections with thresholds. Moeller observes that when Aschenbach leans against Tadzio's door, he is at the entrance of death. Similarly Aschenbach encounters the stranger between portals. Hermes proceeded in mythology from an elderly, comic figure (the fop) to a beautiful young man (Tadzio). Some of the paraphernalia associated with Hermes are hat and staff (wanderer and gondolier with his oar). Hermes is often shown with his legs crossed (wanderer and Tadzio). He is also supposed to have invented the lyre, hence his association with the street musician.²¹

Moeller, however, does not take into consideration the most important character of all—Aschenbach. If the mythic structure of the novella does indeed possess psychological reality, then Aschenbach himself must be an integral part of the organic pattern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine the problem fully, but we would like to offer some suggestions for achieving this. In Hermes the Thief Norman O. Brown points out numerous attributes of Hermes which would apply to Aschenbach. As an ambitious man of letters, Aschenbach is a “careful craftsman of his art,” who propagandizes for the bourgeois and against the “rival cult,” the bohemian; he struggles to realize the Apollonian concept of art with its pursuit of pure beauty, since the Dionysian would not be respectable. Hermes is, like Aschenbach, connected with commerce and craftsmanship, and though originally of humble origin, he is constantly at work to “secure status and privileges that will put him on a par with Apollo, the aristocrat of Olympus.”²² It should also be pointed out that in his capacity as trickster, Hermes is the “patron of stealthy action,”²³ which is certainly appropriate to the ill-fated protagonist of Mann's novella.

With respect to the other archetypes too there are numerous similarities that have not been fully explored. Hermes has certain Anima characteristics, such as “guile in sexual seduction,”²⁴ he is also a mischief maker, an author of “lies and deceitful words and stealthy disposition.”²⁵ Hermes, also an infantile God, is moreover connected with the child archetype. Many of the Shadow aspects of Hermes have been well explored by Moeller, but it should also be noted that Hermes is a phallic God. The description “phallic forwardness”²⁶ certainly fits the stranger at the cemetery as well as the street musician and ties both of them to the seductive aspects of the Anima, which are responsible for Aschenbach's Dionysian nightmare at the end of the novella.

The foregoing remarks are meant only to suggest facts which a comprehensive application of the Hermes myth to Der Tod in Venedig would have to consider. What are the psychological interpretations of such an analysis? To be sure, Mann has admitted that Hermes is his favorite God,²⁷ but surely this does not account for the extraordinary relevance of the Hermes myth to Mann's novella. It is inconceivable that Mann could have been consciously aware of all the attributes of Hermes which can be found in the story. Our suggestion is that these attributes must conform to unconscious psychological reality, as Jung would claim. If we bear in mind Malinowsky's observation that myth is “not an explanation put forward to satisfy scientific curiosity … [but] the rearising of a primordial [i.e. archetypal] reality to narrative form,”²⁸ we can understand that the “experience” presented here reflects mythological elements because they are psychological elements.

We have shown that Jung, in his psychological theory, incorporates archetypal, mythological elements, and how they appear in everyday experience. They exist side by side with personal experiences in the human persona. The presence of both can thus hardly be seen as an interpretive dilemma, as initially stated, and the success of Der Tod in Venedig is the result of Mann's intuitive grasp of the essential nature of human experience.

Notes

1. T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann. The Uses of Tradition (Oxford, 1974), p. 345.

2. For a complete overview of Freudian criticism as well as the possible influence of Jung on Thomas Mann see Manfred Dierks, Studien zu Mythos und Psychologie bei Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann Studien, 2. Band (Bern, 1972).

3. Thomas Mann, Das erzählerische Werk. Band 11 (Frankfurt, 1975), p. 339. All further references will be to this edition.

4. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious: The Collected Works, vol. 9, pt. 1, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York, 1959), p. 123f.

5. Jung, Archetypes, p. 271.

6. C. G. Jung, Aion: The Collected Works, vol. 9, pt. 2, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York, 1959), pp. 8-9.

7. Jung, Archetypes, p. 270, fn. 18.

8. Jung, Archetypes, p. 27.

9. Cf. Inta Miske Ezergailis, Male and Female: An Approach to Thomas Mann's Dialectic (The Hague, 1975). T. J. Reed also points out that Aschenbach's “appreciation of Tadzio is at first markedly aesthetic …” Reed, p. 158.

10. Jung, Archetypes, p. 71.

11. Jung, Archetypes, p. 269.

12. Harry Slochower, “Thomas Mann's Death in Venice,” American Imago 26 (1969): 106.

13. Ezergailis, p. 186.

14. Jung, Archetypes, p. 32.

15. Jung, Archetypes, p. 178.

16. Jung, Archetypes, p. 173.

17. Alice van Buren Kelley, “Von Aschenbach's Phaedrus: Platonic Allusion in Der Tod in Venedig,” JEGP 75 (1976): 228-240.

18. A. F. Bance, “Der Tod in Venedig and the Triadic Structure,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 8 (1972): 160.

19. Scott Consigny, “Aschenbach's ‘Page and a Half of Choicest Prose’: Mann's Rhetoric of Irony,” Studies in Short Fiction 14 (1977): 359-367.

20. Jung, Archetypes, p. 7.

21. Hans-Bernhard Moeller, “Thomas Mann's venezianische Götterkunde, Plastik und Zeitlosigkeit,” DVLG 40 (1966): 184-205.

22. Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (New York, 1969), pp. 83-91.

23. Brown, p. 8.

24. Brown, p. 14.

25. Brown, p. 9.

26. Thomas Mann and Karl Kerenyi, Gespräch in Briefen (Zürich, 1960), pp. 44-45.

27. Mann and Kerenyi, p. 51.

28. Quoted in C. G. Jung and Karl Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York, 1949), p. 7.