[In the following essay, Binion discusses Aschenbach's preoccupation with death and “his headlong rush to meet it” in Death in Venice.]

The story line of Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice is short and straight. An aging author settled in Munich travels south on an impulse for a brief respite from his harsh and lonely literary labors, finds his way as if by enchantment to Venice in all its moldy magnificence, and there is secretly so smitten with a Polish boy among the other guests summering in the same grand hotel on the Lido that he cannot tear himself away despite a spreading plague to which he eventually succumbs. The narrative, richly and finely wrought, often verges on a studied monologue by the solitary, self-enclosed hero as it recounts his fatal escapade from his own perspective, tracking his furtive thoughts and feelings through their innermost twists and turns. Only rarely does it back away far enough to reflect on his fate with a detachment beyond his own reach. That fate is of his own making in all its essentials even after he lets himself go—even after he relaxes his strenuous, disciplined grip on life once he has avowed his forbidden love to himself. At this point his virile moralism starts yielding irreversibly to a reckless effeminate lust that wells up from his depths and that he recognizes in the process as the great source from which his artistry had drawn its secret sustenance all along. Because Mann's hapless hero—Gustav Aschenbach, latterly von Aschenbach—is presented straight off as a figure of European culture at its height, the message en clair is that culture, being grounded in repression, carries with it a standing risk of regression such that, paradoxically, creativity at its loftiest is prone to self-destruct.

Before his sentimental misadventure in Venice, creativity in this authoritative author is both released and policed with a perfervid, consuming sense of purpose. A scion of sober, dedicated Prussian state servants on his father's side, Aschenbach strives to subject his art to a rule of law as strict and firm as that imposed on his ancestral realm by its warrior kings. Day after day he rises before dawn to a strenuous, austere regimen of wresting phrases from forced imaginings, wrenching them into literary shape, and impressing upon them a look of spontaneity as of a single outpouring. Behind its smooth and stately front his consummately crafted prose is built up bit by bit out of disparate, minute, fugitive stirrings of the heart fastened upon, nailed down, and joined together into finished works that are so many triumphant, if increasingly joyless, concealments of a growing weariness. These finished works themselves, as befits their begetting, uphold a stern ethic of tireless perseverance, of scorn for laxity or self-pity in whatever guise, of contempt for the foibles to which the flesh is heir. Flouting his own frail health, Mann's prophet of steadfastness against all odds and defiance of every limitation is himself the very model of the suffering-active virtue and the heroism of weakness that his writings extol. His style at length officialized and his person ennobled, Aschenbach toils on only the more titanically at his desk as at a lonely outpost. Achieving literary mastery and personal dignity only by a continual laborious overcoming, administering his hard-won renown like a conquered province, straining and at length overstraining to fulfill “the tasks laid upon him by his ego and the European soul,”¹ declining all facility, repudiating all sensuality, concealing all signs of inner wear and tear, he is living beyond his moral means, with nerves taut and teeth clenched. In so doing, he is leading the dangerous life of the artist as a “born deceiver.”² For behind that tireless travail his art is a covert fantasy indulgence, his labor of letters a sensual-aesthetic exercise, and his fame an unconscious aphrodisiac.

At those perilous heights of repression, such a supreme Kulturmensch is just that supremely vulnerable to regression. And regress Aschenbach does, little by little, through the whole course of the tale. Indeed, he regresses on two levels at once: cultural and erotic. Culturally he is in vibrant rapport with his own times as the action begins, speaking straight to the hearts of a vast youthful readership thankful to him for his recent novelistic celebration of all those who, overburdened, labor at the edge of exhaustion for a worthy life or even a touch of greatness. Looking backward, he is proud of his early essay on aesthetics that readers ranked with one by Schiller, proud of the crisp exchanges between Voltaire and Frederick the Great in his epic novel set in the Seven Years War, proud of his acquired purity of language such as Louis XIV is said to have prescribed for himself—proud, in sum, of his closeness to the spirit and style of the great modern standard-setters. As soon as he starts to relax, his musings drift through snatches of Goethe and August von Platen on their way back to high classicism. Then, on reaching the Lido, he recurs instead in his literary fancy to Virgil and Plutarch, to Xenophon, Socrates, and Homer; once his idle thoughts even slip into Homeric hexameters as he mentally casts his daily doings and observations in Greek mythic molds. He blesses the comely Polish lad, Tadzio, Christianly early along, then paganizes him in flights of fancy, only to awake one morning in a cold sweat from a dream of an archaic phallic procession celebrating his ephebic idol in place of the tempter god Dionysus.

Erotically, meanwhile, his point of departure is a homosexuality buried in his discipleship of Frederick the Great and in his self-identification with Saint Sebastian. Even buried, it brings on a fateful fit of restlessness when, still in Munich, he merely glimpses a bold, southern-looking male vagabond. On shipboard along his way south he advances through a fascinated distaste for a senile fop (who prefigures his own comedown) to a felt kinship with gay August von Platen as he reaches his bewitching final destination. Then, as he settles into the watery wonderland, he graduates to an inhibited attraction for Tadzio that revives old thoughts about beauty as the one pure idea to appear sensually and old erotic fancies drained in his abstemious life's service. He sinks into pedophile voyeurism while watching the divinized youngster sea-bathe. Later he also sneaks along after the Polish party on its jaunts through sinuous canals and jagged alleyways, ogling Tadzio with a passion that ultimately enslaves his soul in the course of that dream of a savage sexual free-for-all in the godlike youngster's train. With this final instinctual upsurge, all the base cravings that Aschenbach's lifelong literary toil had served to dam up or work up turn against his embattled ordering ego with a voluptuous vengeance, shaming him in his shattered remnants of ancestral pride while destroying “his whole life's culture”³ overnight. His whole life's culture that succumbs is likewise the culture of Europe's lifetime, as if in a giganticized replay of Thebes succumbing to the divine madness brought to it from the Orient by Dionysus and his celebrants.

Closer in scale than lone Aschenbach to Thebes subverted by an epidemic frenzy from the Orient is Venice undermined by a deadly plague from the Orient that spawns crime and vice while festering under official denial and repression conjoined. Aschenbach sniffs out that worsening pestilence and, once he has acknowledged it to himself over his initial resistance, rejoices in its progress, keeping an eager watch over “the foul undercover goings-on in Venice, that adventure of the world outside him which darkly joined with the one in his heart to feed his passion with vague, lawless hopes.”⁴ Plagued Venice thus takes on the very aspect of Aschenbach's sick psyche. To him in his illicit pursuit as also to Venetian lowlife, “every rent in the civic fabric will be welcome.”⁵ He thrills at seeing through the official coverup of “that evil secret of the city's which fused with his own and which it meant so much for him to keep”⁶—this lest the vacationing Polish party pack up and off, to be sure, but even more by the force of that very fusion. Sanitation and law enforcement are undermined as the public authorities make common cause with local hotel keepers, merchants, and even criminals to keep the dirty secret under wraps so as not to lose the tourist trade. This corruption on high encourages the baser elements of the populace to act out their “dark antisocial drives” unabashedly and unrestrainedly.⁷ To Aschenbach's “somber satisfaction,”⁸ the city's collusion with its underworld proves its undoing as license and lawlessness run rampant along its fetid byways and up its nasty back alleys.

Mann pushes this pointed parallel between Aschenbach and Venice well beyond even these morbid parameters. Just like Aschenbach's artistry at once moralizing and demoralizing, Venice is a tricky, two-faced thing—half land and half sea, “half fairy tale, half tourist trap.”⁹ Just like Aschenbach's art inspired from dubious depths, Venice is a portal to Europe for irrational, plague-fomenting regions beyond Europe's pale where the vices now surfacing along the lagoon are at home. Just like Aschenbach the titled artist slipping over the brink, Venice too is a “sunken queen” in its decaying splendor, a cultural monument being sapped from below out of filthy canals and through moldy, crumbling walls. As Aschenbach, exhausted one sultry day from his latest chase after Tadzio, eats a handful of overripe strawberries, his eye is caught by a grand façade with a void behind it where once a palazzo had been. This image throws back to the opening theme of the tale, that of Aschenbach's art concealing his inner depletion—a theme expressed even at that starting point in such physical terms as “the elegant self-mastery eaten away by a biological decay that it hides from the world's eyes to the very last: the yellow ugliness that, though a sensual handicap, can yet kindle its seething ardor to pure flame, goading itself on to supremacy in the very realm of beauty.”¹⁰ In return, these physical terms anticipate Aschenbach's last fling, when the burnt-out artist who had looked ahead to an old age with a full life's experience behind it for his art to draw upon turns into a death-ridden degenerate cosmetically rejuvenating himself, artificially masking an exhaustion previously overwritten by the contrived sprightliness of his prose.

Death stalks Aschenbach as if outwardly throughout the tale before closing in on him for the kill. In the text proper, with its explicit theme of the revenge of the repressed, death is no more or less than the wages of his reckless passion. The subtext, however, extends that over theme so that Aschenbach acts out his fate instead of simply meeting it in an unguarded moment through those mushy strawberries. He is a suicide, as Mann called him in a preparatory note for the novella,¹¹ only not from shame or despair or disenchantment like the usual suicides of earlier fiction. Rather, death is the end term of his regression, the undertow of his flood of instinctual release.¹² Nor is his suicidal course presented as special pathology. His only special pathology is the one stressed at the outset, when it is shown at its apogee: the all-too-high level of repression set by his cultural aspirations on top of his sexual self-denial. Once the psychic lid lifts, his tabooed erotism overflows, unloosing a deadly thrust at its core that it normally absorbs—a deeper striving for an end of all striving, for a primal peace without duty or desire. Death is at the end of Aschenbach's regressive line, at the base of his instinctual pit—and not just of his alone, for such fundamentals are not meant to vary from one individual to the next. Here, then, in Mann's subtext, is a clearcut conception of sexuality as a derivative and overlay of a basic, universal death drive, and of culture in turn as a derivative and overlay of the sex drive. It belongs to this subtext of Mann's on a par with his text that culture is the more tenuous the higher it is pitched.

This subtext is inseparable from Mann's expressionistic narrative scheme. Expressionism proper distorts physical reality to reflect an artist's own or a central character's intense experience of it. Death in Venice, while it stops short of full-fledged expressionism, does manipulate physical reality to reflect Aschenbach's subjective needs and train of thought, and this to the very last in Aschenbach's own most cultivated literary idiom. Thus the weather projects his mood, actual or impending. Thus too the other characters and their doings appear as emanations of his psyche,¹³ actualizing his inner purposes. Chance itself obeys his secret will: when he would sensibly cut short his stay in Venice but cannot bear to leave Tadzio, his trunk is misdirected so that he can delay his departure unintentionally. Even the plague respects his schedule: he succumbs punctually just as the Poles are packed to leave. In line with his outer story unfolding as if from within him, he is solitary and mute from first to last except for conventional, impersonal contacts and phrases. The narrative points up his withdrawal and self-enclosure by styling him “the loner,” “the mute one”—“der Einsame,” “der Stumme,” once even “der Einsam-Stumme.” He exchanges no words and few glances with Tadzio in particular, who remains unintelligible in his own right unless as a pubescent Narcissus adoring himself in his lover's furtive, fevered gaze. The narrative is aligned with the hero's own perspective even where it comes short by design, as when it evokes his brief, happy marriage in his youth through a single, cursory, vitalike phrase fit for an obituary. This expressionistic narrative mode was not alone Mann's at the time; a far more flagrant use of it in the same year as Death in Venice, 1912, was Franz Kafka's in The Metamorphosis, which recounts from its hero's own vantage point his delusion of having turned into a bug.¹⁴ Unlike Kafka's hero, Mann's has no need to hallucinate, as reality meets all his unspoken wants.

Also expressionistically, symbols that cross Aschenbach's path link up in the narrative with others that cross his mind. The opening passage finds him thoughtlessly reading tombstone inscriptions at a stonecutter's opposite a mortuary chapel. Next his gaze alights on a skeletal, exotic vagabond who, standing in the Grecian archway of the chapel, glares boldly back at him and then vanishes. Of an instant he pictures to himself a rank primeval jungle with a fierce tiger crouching, its eyes aglow. Then already, “his heart pounding from terror and enigmatic longing,”¹⁵ his decision is taken to journey far away, as if in a dream of death.¹⁶ Much later he associates back to that funerary chapel and that vagabond when a travel clerk confirms his suspicion that a plague has struck Venice. That figure of death from the chapel portico (a derivative of the “bone man” spawned by the bubonic plague and long familiar in art and letters) reappears as the gay old dandy on Aschenbach's Adriatic steamer, then as his exotic, shady, Charon-like gondolier, and again in his hotel courtyard in the guise of a balladmonger stinking of disinfectant: all four of them intrigue and repel him at once. The rank jungle in his vision prompted by the bold, bony, southerly stranger recurs in the travel clerk's account of the plague having germinated in the Ganges delta. The fresh strawberries that he enjoys while first watching Tadzio on the beach reappear soggy, rotten, and deadly on the very spot where he had once resolved to flee Venice. The laughter pealed out by the quarantined singing buffoon in his hotel garden reechoes as Tadzio's lilting name intoned in the lewd frenzy of his devastating Dionysian dream. The hour glass that, early in the tale, images his fear of dying before his life's work is done comes back to haunt his musings just when the south Italian buffoon's act is over. This redoubling, tripling, or quadrupling across time of suggestive elements of the hero's experience, whether outer or inner, lends that stream of experience a semblance of fatedness, as if it were all continually subject to a single will. To this same effect of his pursuit of an inner purpose unknown to him, and with a bonus of irony, Aschenbach searches his heart on approaching Venice whether some “late-life sentimental adventure”¹⁷ might not await him there. “A strange expansion of what was inside him”¹⁸ is how the narrator describes Aschenbach's reaction to the skeletal vagabond vanishing, meaning only a sudden restlessness but suggesting the correspondence between his innermost longings and the contingencies of his incipient quest for escape.

Within this “strange expansion” of what is inside him Aschenbach's thoughts tend to death continually: as he gazes out from his ship deck onto infinite, empty horizons; as he nestles into the coffin-black seat of a coffin-black gondola reminiscent of “death itself,”¹⁹ wishing the ride might last forever, with Charon incarnate rowing; as in his beach chair he ponders the weary artist's love for the sea as nothingness or else daydreams timelessly about simply dissolving; as he rejoices at the sight of Tadzio's brittle teeth or again at the sound of Tadzio's hard breathing, each betokening an early death; as he holds with August von Platen that to have looked on beauty is to be slated for death; and so on and on, with decadent, death-infested Venice soon amplifying the theme at every turn. Indeed, the strangest “strange expansion” outwards of what is inside him is his fellowship with the stricken city denying the death within it—denying that titular “death in Venice” that sparks indefinable hopes of “frightful sweetness”²⁰ in him.

Earlier I likened Aschenbach's resolve to travel, after his glimpse of a mysterious stranger and his flash of a tiger crouching, to a dream of death. The same likeness holds for Aschenbach's outer story unfolding symbol-laden out of his innermost will: this expressionistic narrative mode resembles nothing so much as dreaming. Strindberg maintained in a 1908 preface to A Dream Play of 1902 that his whole expressionist theater was modeled on dreams. Mann's narrative itself insists repeatedly in Death in Venice how dreamy the consciousness is that it conveys, and this alike whether it is recording inner or outer reality. The sight of the bony vagabond before the chapel in Munich draws Aschenbach out of his “daydreams.”²¹ On first observing the old coxcomb on shipboard, Aschenbach feels “as if the world were starting to settle into a dreamlike strangeness, a weird distortion”²²; on seeing that same creepy, coquettish old codger a couple of pages later, Aschenbach feels once again as if the world were turning “dizzily bizarre and grotesque”²³; in between, before he dozes off, that oldster and a hunchbacked ticket clerk flit through Aschenbach's mind with “confused dream words.”²⁴ On nearing Venice, Aschenbach runs through some measured lyrics of “the sorrowful and ardent poet the turrets and towers of whose dreams had once risen from those waters to meet him,”²⁵ this lyrical dreamer being gay Platen again, here coyly unnamed. On his first gondola ride to the Lido as if across the Styx, it strikes Aschenbach “dreamily”²⁶ that his oarsman might be a cutthroat. His exhilarating cogitations about beauty when he first sees Tadzio at dinner promptly seem to Aschenbach shallow, like “intimations from a dream,”²⁷ and he goes off to a night's sleep full of real “dream images.”²⁸ As he sits on the beach the next day, he is “dreaming … deeply into the void”²⁹ just when Tadzio walks by. His trunk going astray is a “comically dreamlike adventure,”³⁰ and he rests up for a good hour afterwards, “thoughtlessly dreaming.”³¹ Resuming his routine, he sits on the beach mornings “dreaming out over the azure sea”³² even as his beloved often dreams “into the blue.”³³ He rises early, while the sea still lies “blinding white in morning dreams”³⁴ or even before, to dream himself back to sleep while awaiting the dawn with Tadzio's name on his lips.³⁵ Later in the day “his heart would dream tender fancies.”³⁶ Whenever Tadzio is out of sight, he wants only “to dream of him.”³⁷ During the balladmonger's act the laughter and carbolic stench together with Tadzio's nearness cast a “dream spell”³⁸ over him. He “dreams” an instant of alerting Tadzio's mother to the plague.³⁹ He leaves his cosmetician's parlor “dream-happy.”⁴⁰ He soliloquizes in “weird dream logic”⁴¹ as he eats his terminal strawberries. At every step of his way he seems to be sleepwalking. In his fateful, “fearful dream”⁴² of the tempter god's lewd rites he gradually turns into the wild celebrants that he begins by watching—and so indeed is his waking relation to his surroundings a self-relation. Erasing what remains of the line between dream and reality, the narrative questions whether that dire Dionysian nighttime event can properly be termed a dream at all, and again later whether his anxious feeling of “issuelessness”⁴³ refers to himself or to the world outside as he walks to his beach chair one last time.

Aschenbach's premonition of his death and his headlong rush to meet it emerge, then, from Mann's text only by implication. They emerge time and again through the symbolic value of his wandering thoughts together with—thanks to the dreamlike narrative technique—the omens that cross his path. In fact, both the logic and the suggestive force of that technique make his death, like everything else in the tale, into his own doing. More, either pole of his lifelong tension between repression and release, control and uncontrol, is deathlike: cold formalism on the one side and hot dissolution on the other. His affinity for death is most nearly explicit in his remaining in Venice knowing of the plague, his feeling that he could not survive his imminent separation from Tadzio, and his eating those high-risk strawberries as his time nears its end. Never, though, does Aschenbach or his narrator recognize outright, in so many words, that in chasing after Tadzio he is really chasing after death. In his fateful phallic dream the promiscuous revelers do feast on each other's flesh and blood as part of the fun besides fusing with the dreamer before their orgy is done: their divine rapture puts them, and hence him, at mortal risk. But death is not the orgiasts' aim despite that gory hint of it. Through that devastating dream, therefore, Aschenbach's self-concealments lift just short of his death wish. Mann supplies the omission not only by matching Aschenbach's objective experience that issues in death with his fantasy world within, but vicariously too for good measure by having him see his own likeness in afflicted Venice, feel an affinity for the death on the loose there, join the sick city in its coverup, go giddy with joy as this “complicity” opens up obscure vistas of “chaos,”⁴⁴ and take a “bizarre satisfaction”⁴⁵ in goading knowing Venetians into outright lies about the death on the loose in their midst. As a clincher, Aschenbach literalizes the implied equivalence between the death wish within him and the death plaguing Venice around him when he succumbs to the city's sickness. Besides suffusing the text in these multiple ways, the subtext extends it logically: Aschenbach is still regressing in dying. No wonder readers tend to imagine that Aschenbach's death wish is right up there in simple affirmation on the textual surface of the tale.

If Aschenbach does not recognize death, that consummate, eternal release from duty and desire, as the ultimate goal of his frenetic escapade, that is because in Mann's conception this final sense of it can never be grasped through introspection, from which Aschenbach shies away in any case for all his inwardness. As Freud, its later theorist, was to argue, the death drive works in concealment, never manifesting unalloyed,⁴⁶ so that it can be known only inferentially apart from its frightful and enticing mythic-symbolic showings. Enticing is Tadzio in a mythic-symbolic posture, seeming to beckon from the end of a sand bar against the horizon as Aschenbach watches from his beach chair in his last throes before rising to join him. And frightful is the war scare that hangs over Europe as the tale opens, whereupon the narrative focus narrows to Aschenbach for the duration before abruptly spreading back out worldwide at the very close.

Notes

1. Thomas Mann, Die Erzählungen, vol. 1 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1967), 340.

2. Ibid., 345.

3. Ibid., 393.

4. Ibid., 384.

5. Ibid., 381.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 391.

8. Ibid., 381.

9. Ibid., 383.

10. Ibid., 345.

11. Manfred Dierks, Studien zu Mythos und Psychologie bei Thomas Mann: An seinem Nachlass orientierte Untersuchungen zum “Tod in Venedig”, zum “Zauberberg” und zur “Joseph”-Tetralogie (Bern: Francke, 1972), 21.

12. Cf. Arnold Hirsch, Der Gattungsbegriff “Novelle” (Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1928), 139, 140, 143.

13. Cf. ibid., 140.

14. Cf. my “What The Metamorphosis Means,” in Soundings (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1981), 7-14.

15. Mann, 340.

16. Cf. Hirsch, 143.

17. Mann, 351.

18. Ibid., 340 (“eine seltsame Ausweitung seines Innern”).

19. Ibid., 353.

20. Ibid., 392; cf. Charles Baudelaire, “Les deux bonnes soeurs,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Yves-Gérard le Dantec (Paris: Pléiade, 1954), 185 (“d'affreuses douceurs” link alcove and coffin).

21. Mann, 339 (“Träumereien”).

22. Ibid., 350.

23. Ibid., 352.

24. Ibid., 351.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 354.

27. Ibid., 359.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., 362.

30. Ibid., 369.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 371.

33. Ibid., 373.

34. Ibid., 371.

35. Ibid., 377.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., 383.

38. Ibid., 388.

39. Ibid., 392.

40. Ibid., 395.

41. Ibid., 397.

42. Ibid., 392.

43. Ibid., 398.

44. Ibid., 392.

45. Ibid., 384.

46. But for Freud as against Mann, the death drive down in the depths of life was no derivative of Eros. Mann's conception more nearly paralleled the one propounded also in 1911-1912 by Sabina Spielrein; see my “Vom Sterben betrunken: Sigmund Freud als Kulturerscheinung seiner Zeit,” Inn 11, no. 32 (May 1994): 17-23.