SOURCE: Hayes, Tom, and Lee Quinby. “The Aporia of Bourgeois Art: Desire in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.” Criticism 31, no. 2 (spring 1989): 159-77.

[In the following essay, Hayes and Quinby explore “the dilemma of desire” in Death in Venice.]

Death in Venice is undoubtedly a central text in Thomas Mann's oeuvre and in contemporary literary criticism. It is also, and this is not exactly the same thing, an exemplary text of “high” modernism, one that questions the moral and aesthetic “certainties” of bourgeois culture. On the one hand the novella has been read as a cautionary tale, an apologue showing that even the most Apollonian artist may give way to Dionysian excess and sink into a slough of despond. In this reading Death in Venice charts the irruption of the Freudian id and elicits sympathy for an artist suddenly engulfed by his “base” desires. On the other hand, from its inception, there have been those, such as Stefan George, who have argued that the novella challenges such notions of baseness by celebrating the spiritualized male friendship depicted in Plato's Phaedrus.

In the following pages we want to show how both of these readings are circumscribed within a discourse of desire in which desire is the desire to attain the unattainable.¹ In this discourse, desire produces and is produced by a system of binary oppositions in which one term is privileged over the other: first-order sense experience is opposed to representation of that experience. Content is thus opposed to form, or in Nietzschean terms, the Dionysian to the Apollonian, impulse to repression, transgression to conventionality. Narrative form reproduces these polarities of desire: Classical art privileges the Apollonian; Romantic art privileges the Dionysian. Post-Romantic, “high”-modernist art reaches an impasse in which the Apollonian and the Dionysian are both privileged and denigrated—hence its overwhelming sense of irony. This impasse is “figured” by the plight of the artist who is alienated from bourgeois values as well as from a “true” self seen to be “outside of” or marginal to those values. The artist figure is thus caught in a situation where immediacy, which is always transgressive, must be sacrificed in order to create art, the monumentalization of self. This art always yearns for its other, always longs to recapture Dionysian exuberance. Yet to do this is to forsake classical Apollonian form, to accept death in dissolution. Such a formulation, which separates mind and body, which sees man as head, mind, spirit and woman as flesh, body, emotion, is reinscribed in Death in Venice in the relationship between Gustave Aschenbach and Tadzio.

This dilemma of desire, we argue, is the aporia of bourgeois art, which, in the era of “high” modernism, is itself represented as a crisis of representation and subjectivity. Our intervention is to situate this crisis within a genealogy of desire.² We want to show its double involvement, its simultaneous subversiveness of patriarchal values and its re-appropriation of the very subversion it produces. By focusing on the desiring subject and the subject of desire in Death in Venice we will examine connections between representations of homoeroticism and masculinist assumptions implicit in the partriarchal ideology that produces and is produced by bourgeois art. Such a reading locates connections between homophobia, misogyny, and artistic production within the mentality produced by—and necessary for—the power structures within bourgeois culture.³ For the representation of this desire is always already inscribed with the binary opposition of sexual difference. It is always an objectification of the Other, an appropriation of alterity that inevitably valorizes repression and/or sublimation and sees Western culture as fallen from an idealized, spiritualized version of ancient Greek culture.

Throughout Death in Venice assumptions of sexual difference within this discourse of desire are called into question only to be reaffirmed. For example, Aschenbach's desire for Tadzio places in question the series of polarities upon which heterosexuality is constructed, the oppositions masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual, and the conflation of the two in the opposition of masculine/homosexual, which Jonathan Dollimore has examined in his essay on homophobia and sexual difference.⁴ But while Aschenbach's homoeroticism unsettles these polarities, the moral context of the story perpetuates them, for in Aschenbach's aestheticized desire for Tadzio the first term of each of these binary oppositions is privileged and associated with the Apollonian and/or “masculine” virtues of rationality, order, and restraint, while the second term is devalued and associated with the Dionysian and allegedly “feminine” characteristics—receptivity, desire, hysteria, the overflow and redundancy of speech.⁵ Such oppositions reflect, support, and maintain misogynistic values in patriarchal societies. In effect, such binary opposition recapitulates the misogynistic story of the Fall, as does Aschenbach's demise. In patriarchal societies, “femininity” seduces men to their deaths.

In this context, the displacement of femininity in the novella operates in concert with the simultaneously homophobic and homoerotic discourse that runs throughout. As Harold Beaver has argued, in order to decenter and expose the homophobic sexual system of bourgeois society we must “reverse the rhetorical opposition of what is ‘transparent’ or ‘natural’ and what is ‘derivative’ or ‘contrived’ by demonstrating that the qualities predicated of ‘homosexuality’ (as a dependent term) are in fact a condition of ‘heterosexuality’; that ‘heterosexuality,’ far from possessing a privileged status, must itself be treated as a dependent term.”⁶Death in Venice raises this possibility. Yet as Aschenbach moves towards death, the aesthetic and sexual categories of bourgeois society are broken down only to be aestheticized and displaced onto “a long-haired boy of about fourteen” (p. 25).⁷ This coupling of death and desire reestablishes heterosexuality as the “natural” form of sexuality and homosexuality as “derived.”⁸

The ideological significance of this displacement becomes evident when we consider Mann's own statements about the novella's homoeroticism. In a 1920 letter to his openly homosexual friend Carl Maria Weber Mann explained that the theme of Death in Venice “is inherent in the difference between the Dionysian spirit of lyricism, whose outpouring is irresponsible and individualistic, and the Apollonian, objectively controlled, morally and socially responsible epic … what I originally wanted to deal with was not anything homoerotic at all. It was the story—seen grotesquely—of the aged Goethe and the little girl in Marienbad whom he was absolutely determined to marry.” But Mann changed the setting and the gender of the love object because he wanted to “carry things to an extreme by introducing the motif of the ‘forbidden love.’”⁹ Mann's Nietzschean concept of a Dionysian/Apollonian split points to the underlying contradictions of sexual difference in which the story embroils us and shows that their binary opposition tends to be resolved in favor of the Apollonian. As his words suggest, despite his interest in portraying Dionysian transgression, its polarized relationship to Apollonian responsibility (re)produces commitment to a rigidly channeled eroticism, an overdetermination that constructs “frightful” fantasies such as those Aschenbach himself experiences.

The English translations of the novella accentuate this resolution toward the Apollonian. For example, in the passage where Aschenbach is said to wish to ease the tension of his desire for Tadzio, the sexual suggestiveness of the phrase “lag nahe und drangte sich auf” is lost.¹⁰ Kenneth Burke's translation states that Aschenbach wishes to put the relationship “on a sound, free and easy basis,”¹¹ while H. T. Lowe-Porter says Aschenbach wishes to place it “upon a blithe and friendly footing” (p. 47). Something closer to the sexual innuendo of the German text may have been captured if the passage had been rendered: “to have things lie more intimately and pressingly upon each other.” The German text teems with such double entendres and homoerotic allusions. We get something of the flavor of this in the English translations when we are told that Aschenbach's imagination is haunted by visions of “Hairy palm-trunks” rising “near and far out of lush brakes of fern, out of bottoms of crass vegetation, fat, swollen, thick with incredible bloom” (p. 5), and again when we are told that Aschenbach espouses “an intellectual and virginal manliness, which clenches its teeth and stands in modest defiance of the swords and spears that pierce its side,” of whom “the figure of Sebastian is the most beautiful symbol, if not of art as a whole, yet certainly of the art we speak of here” (p. 11).¹² Such phrases—at once sympathetic and disdainful—prepare readers to accept the tragedy of Aschenbach's desire for Tadzio even as the language pushes toward a parody of the conventions of romantic love to the point where readers are led to distrust their initially sympathetic reactions to Aschenbach's dilemma.¹³

Aschenbach's demise is both tragic and comic. The text renders our view of his efforts to regain his youthful appearance ambivalent, and we simultaneously suffer with, laugh at, and are shocked by his infatuation with this young boy. By sustaining an ambivalent reaction to these questions, at times the irony verges on burlesque. Such irony interrogates bourgeois culture's heterosexist assumptions.¹⁴ But within the context of patriarchal culture, Aschenbach's desire for Tadzio has tragic dimensions as well, for Tadzio is not the cause of either Aschenbach's obsessional desire or his paranoid constraint; he represents, rather, a disruptive return of Aschenbach's repressed eroticism which results from the social proscriptions and personal inhibitions that maintain the patriarchal social order. Aschenbach's aestheticized desire for the boy re-enacts the bourgeois family's complex Oedipal feelings in which he, as the “father,” mourns for his own imminent death at the hands of the “son,” even as his obsession threatens to destroy that “son.” Apollonian civilization breeds such discontents.

This ambivalent desire for Tadzio crystallizes in Aschenbach's reaction to the first time the boy recognizes him with a smile, the description of which points to a self/other identification of the two: “With such a smile it might be that Narcissus bent over the mirroring pool, a smile profound, infatuated, lingering, as he put out his arms to the reflection of his own beauty” (p. 51). We might suppose that Tadzio's smile would thrill the love-sick Aschenbach, but instead he is “shaken” by it. “Reproaches strangely mixed of tenderness burst from him: ‘How dare you smile like that! No one is allowed to smile like that!’” (p. 52) Aschenbach's retreat from Tadzio's smile, his inability to receive the boy's full gaze, suggests that the form his desire takes maintains itself only as long as he possesses the exclusive (phallic) power of the gaze.¹⁵ Thus Tadzio's smile, as the sign of his own empowerment, shatters Aschenbach's illusions of wholeness.¹⁶ Aschenbach, too fully a subject of the patriarchal order in which Eros is constructed around the hierarchical oppositions of sexual difference, is “quite unmanned” as he “whispered the hackneyed phrase of love and longing,” only after fleeing from Tadzio. This fear of emasculation takes its revenge when Aschenbach risks Tadzio's death rather than disclose the threat of the cholera epidemic to the boy's mother. Aschenbach's erotic desire is deeply implicated in a thanatoid impulse against Tadzio, and his failure to warn the boy or his mother is a form of Oedipal revenge.

Eros and Thanatos fuse in the novella's final passage and once again a smile marks the moment. Yet this time, at the point of death, as Aschenbach meets Tadzio's gaze “It seemed to him the pale and lovely Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned” (pp. 74-75). With these words, the narrator appears to lay to rest the deeply conflicted self that Aschenbach represents, but not without encasing this final moment in textual irony, for unlike the “shocked and respectful world [that] received the news of his decease,” readers have been made privy to the connections between Aschenbach's erotic obsession and unfulfilled desire, his career as a writer, and his death. The gaze of Tadzio as feminized Other is a Medusa gaze that implicitly brings on Aschenbach's death.

Details of Aschenbach's marriage highlight the connection between his homoerotic repression and his authorial career. He “married young … but after a brief term of wedded happiness his wife had died. A daughter, already married, remained to him. A son he never had” (p. 14). Aschenbach's minimal familial background short-circuits assumptions that he had never experienced conventional family life as an adult and calls attention to his “normality.” And this, in turn, encourages us to see his love for the seemingly fatherless Tadzio as all the more scandalous. Tadzio, the son he never had, suggests an idealized image of Aschenbach as the fatherless boy he never was but yearns to have been. Such yearning nostalgically reflects a desire to experience childhood, the imagined fullness of a mimetic, maternal, logocentric world that opposes the discipline, detachment, and restraint valorized by the creator “of the dialogue between Frederick and Voltaire on the theme of war” (p. 15).

Tadzio's association with the maternal world of speech, as contrasted with the paternal world of writing associated with Aschenbach's literary career, derives from his name, with its “melodious sound” and “long-drawn-out u at the end” (p. 32). Because Aschenbach cannot understand the boy's language, the “mingled harmonies” of his words “raised his speech to music” (p. 43). As the narrator informs us early on, Aschenbach's mother was the “daughter of a Bohemian musical conductor” (p. 8), and it was from her that the blood of the Dionysian poet flowed in him. But Aschenbach's career is marked by a complete denial of the Dionysian, his style exhibiting “an almost exaggerated sense of beauty, a lofty purity, symmetry, and simplicity, which gave his productions a stamp of the classic, of conscious and deliberate mastery” (p. 13). Classicism's repression of the Dionysian returns first with a vengeance in his infatuation for Tadzio and culminates in a bacchanalian dream in which “one and all the mad rout yelled that cry, composed of soft consonants with a long-drawn u-sound at the end, so sweet and wild it was together, and like nothing ever heard before!” (p. 67).

Once the Dionysian has irrupted in desire for Tadzio, Aschenbach initially attempts to sublimate it through his reading of Plato's Phaedrus. His effort to local eternal, universal truth in the Phaedrus is hence another attempt to resolve the binary opposition of his desire in favor of the Apollonian. Alice van Buren Kelley has argued from a traditional humanist point of view that Aschenbach's failure to heed the lesson of the dialogue—that passion and reason must be reconciled—leads to his demise.¹⁷ But as Frank Baron has pointed out, “Mann's parodistic treatment questions the wisdom of rejecting sympathy with the ‘abyss,’ or of ignoring knowledge and irony, and of the exaggerated emphasis on morality, dignity and form.”¹⁸ What we are arguing is that Aschenbach's rejection of “sympathy with the ‘abyss’” is inevitable in a paradigm that opposes Dionysian passion to Apollonian reason and that his plunge into the abyss in equally inevitable within the binary logic of bourgeois discourse. When he drifts into a Platonic reverie that dramatizes the idea of writing as an autoerotic act (pp. 43-46), he struggles to see Tadzio as pure form divorced from content, from articulated meaning; indeed, his inability to understand Tadzio's native tongue, Polish, fulfills Aschenbach's earlier disappointed desire to go somewhere where he could hear people “speaking an outlandish tongue” (p. 15).

Aschenbach's emphasis on form over content epitomizes patriarchal culture's practice of privileging mind over body. As his reverie intensifies, it is internalized and identified with the writing process itself. “Was not the same force at work in himself when he strove in cold fury to liberate from the marble mass of language the slender forms of his art which he saw with the eye of his mind and would body forth to men as the mirror and image of spiritual beauty?” (p. 44) This ambivalence of form in Aschenbach's work was been carefully prepared for; his writing exhibited “the aristocratic self-command that is eaten out within and for as long as it can conceals its biologic decline … ; the sere and ugly outside, hiding the embers of smoldering fire … ; the gracious bearing preserved in the stern, stark service of form” (p. 11).

When Aschenbach first sees Tadzio he thinks that “with all this chaste perfection of form it was of such unique personal charm that the observer thought he had never seen … anything so utterly happy and consummate” (pp. 25-26); after his eyes meet Tadzio's he contemplates “general problems of form and art” (p. 28); and as he watches Tadzio bathing he conjures up mythologies “of the birth of form, of the origin of the gods” (p. 33). Form, then, corresponds, in Aschenbach's mind, the mind of a quintessentially bourgeois artist, to the aristocratic and, above all, “masculine” and/or “spiritual” virtues, whereas content is associated with the potentially decadent “feminine” body and the “outlandish” Polish tongue. The narrator's reference to Tadzio as “a masterpiece from nature's own hand” (p. 31) betrays a desire to compete with nature for control over experience, but, as Mark C. Taylor has noted, the battle for such mastery “is always self-defeating.”¹⁹

Gradually Aschenbach's repressed fantasies come to dominate his mental life. His reading of the Phaedrus, entered into at the peak of homoerotic desire, reinscribes the underlying contradictions implicit in the polarity between the Dionysian (“maternal”) world of orality and the Apollonian (“paternal”) world of literacy.²⁰ He imports into his reading of the dialogue the story of how Semele, mother of Dionysus, was consumed by Zeus when she asked to mate with him in his true form as a god. Zeus's appropriation of Semele's reproductive power allegorizes the myth of the bourgeois artist's sublimation of desire in art.²¹ The consequences of this displacement became apparent in the later bacchanalian dream, but for now the focus is on spiritual beauty and pure form. Aschenbach's reading of the Platonic dialogue ends with the “sly arch-lover,” Socrates, telling Phaedrus “the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other.” The narrator draws attention to this idea by telling us that it is “perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows” (p. 46). Yet in the actual dialogue Socrates says that lovers reach out after their beloved “in memory” and “are possessed by him, and from him they take their ways and manners of life, in so far as a man can partake of a god.” Truly “spiritual” lovers believe their beloved is the source of their inspiration and so “the draughts which they draw from Zeus they pour out, like bacchants, into the soul of the beloved, thus creating in him the closest possible likeness to the god they worship” (253b).²² Although Aschenbach certainly aestheticizes his own desire, he makes no attempt to instruct Tadzio in the ways of Apollonian art. Instead he feels “a sudden desire to write … in Tadzio's presence.” Believing that “Eros is in the word,” he proceeds to fashion “his little essay after the model Tadzio's beauty set” (p. 46).

At this serene moment when Apollonian form triumphs over Dionysian content, Aschenbach's fate is sealed. His transference of Eros into writing—no less than Plato's famous attack on writing—violates the very principles articulated in the passage Aschenbach summarizes (cf. Phaedrus 274-78). When he attains the perfect form, the perfect embodiment of the “masculine” ideal, he also ensures his own destruction, for at that moment he severs whatever connections he may still have with the maternal world of speech, the principle of community and self-fulfillment which is made possible through recognition of the Other. Previously we were told that Aschenbach is “A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, [who] has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man” (p. 24), and in the same paragraph where he decides to write in Tadzio's presence we are told that “our solitary felt in himself at this moment power to command” (p. 46). In retaliation, this repressed femininity, this denial of the Dionysian impulse, rises up in his imagination as a most un-Platonic bacchanalian vision.²³

Having reached his career pinnacle and having attained a sublime Apollonian style, Aschenbach attempts to liberate himself from compulsive toil (associated with his strict Prussian father) and repair the damage done to his psyche by the denial of Eros (his musical Bohemian mother). But because bourgeois desire demands that transgressive impulses be either repressed or sublimated, the threat of their release activates a death wish. His fantasy is one of absolute self-sufficiency, of becoming his own father (he “felt a father's kindness” toward Tadzio [p. 34]), which spurs his narcissism and his death-obsessed Apollonianism.²⁴ “Tadzio's teeth,” Aschenbach notes, “were imperfect, rather jagged and bluish, without a healthy glaze, and of that peculiar brittle transparency which the teeth of chlorotic people often show” (p. 34). Chlorosis, it should be noted, is not a gender-neutral term; Webster's Third defines it as “an iron-deficiency anemia in young girls characterized by a greenish color of the skin, weakness, and menstrual disturbances.” Therefore Aschenbach's pleasure in Tadzio's frailty is part of a misogynistic desire that a love object, whether male or female, remain forever young; this denial of mortality inexorably pushes one toward death.

Envisioning total satisfaction, the complete eradication of tension and psychic conflict, Aschenbach embraces the oblivion and death heralded by “the two apocalyptic beasts” above which he sees the first of several portentous, sexually ambivalent men. These men, all of whom are snub-nosed (pp. 4, 22, 60), recall Socrates's snub-nose, a traditional symbol of satyrs, which is referred to throughout the Phaedrus. There the opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian is dramatized in the allegory of the soul where the hooked-nosed horse driven by the charioteer is contrasted with the snub-nosed one (253d-e). Aschenbach himself, of course, has an “aristocratically hooked nose” (p. 15), representative of his repressed and repressive Apollonianism. Tadzio's classically Greek “brow and nose,” which descend “in one line” (p. 25), represent the perfect blend of Apollonian and Dionysian elements, while his mother's “rather sharp nosed” physiognomy (p. 27) is suggestive of phallicized motherhood. Such imagery marks an opposition between the Dionysian and the Apollonian which, in its dissociation of the sensual from the aesthetic, leads Aschenbach to reject the sensual as unseemly and to lock himself into a sense of the self as separate. Having withdrawn into a shell of individual autonomy, having become alienated from his body and from the emotions associated with bodily pleasure, having shut himself off from contact with others and the Other, he denies his dependence on the human community, denies the loss of the mother, and tries to monumentalize himself in works such as The Abjuct. Thus the chronology of Aschenbach's demise parallels the rhetorical structure of the Phaedrus, which recapitulates the transition from orality to literacy and thereby dramatizes the psychological anxiety that accompanies separation from the mother.

But the parodic use of the Phaedrus as an allegory of Aschenbach's fate also undercuts the tragic implications of his plight as an Apollonian artist who is destroyed by Dionysian impulses. The tragic consequences of Aschenbach's infatuation with Tadzio reinforce the homophobic strictures and repressions of bourgeois morality, thus supporting the story's value as a cautionary tale in which Dionysian transgression is linked with Aschenbach's corruption. But the comic implications of this infatuation place in question the binary oppositions upon which heterosexist morality is constructed. They also place in question a reading of the novella which suggests that Aschenbach's fate is a consequence of the failure to sublimate base desires. Yet the novella's comic dimensions are also circumscribed by bourgeois morality. No carnivalesque alternative appears possible in the logic of the narrative, or, as we have shown, in the binary logic of desire in a patriarchal society. On the one hand, we might feel that Aschenbach could “free” himself from repression, yet if he is to be an examplary bourgeois artist, that path is sealed off even from his fantasy life. And when he endangers Tadzio with his silence Aschenbach also blocks off the path of sublimation by transgressing the principle of the Oedipal triangle whereby the son internalizes his rebellion against the father as conscience and sublimates the homosexual love for the rival into altruistic social feelings. Therefore when he regresses to a pathological narcissism characterized by both grandiosity and worthlessness, Aschenbach embraces psychic death.²⁵ His conformity to the paradigm of bourgeois morality reveals an aporia of that paradigm—it generates desire, then valorizes both release from and control over that desire.

As he attains greater technical mastery of his art, Aschenbach removes himself ever more from his “origins,” and this, in turn, produces an ever deepening sentimental nostalgia—a desire to return to childhood, to maternal care, to the Golden Age. Yet the voice of the narrator also distances us from this retrogressive movement. This voice stands as a reminder of the historical difference between Goethe, the progressive artist working under Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine, and Aschenbach who, like Mann, worked under Wilhelmine imperialism in the years before the first World War. Georg Lukacs has observed that “It was Mann's fate to be born into the age of decadence, with its peculiar ambience in which one could transcend the decadence only by imaginatively realizing its extreme moral consequences” (p. 29). But the belief that art can transcend decadence places aesthetics in the category of the sacred, thus assuming a binary opposition between art and reality. It is through such an assumption that the voice of the narrator, even (perhaps especially) in its detachment, lends itself to the belief that one can be “above the fray.”

In this respect Aschenbach's relationship to Tadzio parodies the romantic myth Paul de Man has seen reflected in the Hegelian topos of the “Beautiful Soul.” Aschenbach aestheticizes Tadzio, and the narrator's seemingly detached commentary encourages us to watch the gradual demystification of romantic idealism from a safe distance. From such a perspective Romanticism represents the point of maximum delusion from which we are encouraged to feel superior as we watch Aschenbach go through the regressive states of “the agony of the romantic disease.” But, as de Man has explained, this demystification is “the most dangerous myth of all” because it assumes that there is a single universal and eternal truth that we, either conjointly with an author (by means of our ability to “grasp” his or her intention) or independently (by means of our own superior insight), may possess.²⁶

The narrator's ambivalent assault on bourgeois sensibility, like Mann's problematic relationship to German imperialism was fraught with contradictions that hold out the promise of resistance to, yet still mirror, aspects of the fantasy world that accompanied the rise of fascism. Such a fantasy world, which may be seen as the objective correlative of Nazism, has been shown to be intensely misogynistic and homophobic. It is built, in part, upon a reification of women's role into the idealized world of Kinder, Küche, Kirche, and a corresponding appropriation of women's sexuality. As Klaus Theweleit has shown in his examination of Freikorps writings, the representation of women under fascism exemplifies “masculine” flight from the “feminine” and fear of ego dissolution.²⁷ Aschenbach's aestheticization of Tadzio is, like the narrator's corresponding aestheticization of Aschenbach, a displaced, intellectualized aspect of this misogyny that is seductive to a refined consciousness embarrassed by overt homoeroticism.²⁸ For this aestheticization is part of a mentality that sees people as objects. Indeed fascism, in this sense, may be seen as the reductio ad absurdum of capitalism, the triumph of a consciousness which fetishizes people as commodities to be bought, consumed, or discarded.

Historians have recently begun to examine the symbiotic relationship between such a mentality and homophobia, which appeared so blatantly under fascism. Their analyses differentiate the persecution of homosexuals within other eras from the form it has taken within bourgeois culture. Foucault has marked a moment of the deployment of sexuality that medicalized divisions between “normality” and “perversion” with the publication of Carl Westphal's article on “contrary sexual sensations.”²⁹ In 1871 Germany outlawed sexual acts between males. As Richard Plant has shown, under the Weimar Republic the German Homosexual Rights Movement struggled against such legislation, and Mann supported that struggle.³⁰ Plant further observes, however, that proponents of homosexual rights sometimes employed arguments that furthered the medicalization of homosexuality; such arguments were especially accessible to homophobic appropriation. For example, Nazis used the work of the well-known sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, a homosexual who advocated reform of anti-homosexual legislation, to justify persecution on the basis of abnormality.³¹ And Plant also points out that since the end of World War II Nazi persecution of homosexuals has been virtually ignored while the practice of “homosexualizing the enemy” has been extensively promoted.³² Misogyny and homophobia persist, then, because the discursive practices that perpetuate them have not been deconstructed and because the forums of power from which they are generated have not been overturned. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have pointed out, “Only a challenge to the hierarchy of sites of discourse … carries the promise of politically transformative power.”³³

Therefore it is not surprising that the homophobia and misogyny inscribed within the stylistic forms of bourgeois literature are perpetuated even in Mann's parody of those styles. The parodic rendering of Ignatian exercises—the spiritual journey upward—as artistic discipline, leads not to mystical union with God the Father but to morbid self-absorption; and the portrayal of the romantic hero's quest as travel adventure—the secular journey downward—with its overlay of naturalistic reportage wrapped in meditative irony, retains, even as it ridicules, the linguistic formulas of masculine selfhood. The Venetian setting also carries this duality. As Michael Moon has observed, “in the early years of this century Venice had a unique reputation as the stock place for refined upper-class men to ‘disintegrate’ and give into their suppressed homoerotic longings (consider Mann's Death in Venice …) [and] … male-homosexual tourists commonly made contact with men of Venice's large lower-class population of gondoliers and sailors, some of whom engaged in prostitution,”³⁴ and as Valentine Cunningham has pointed out, “Venice is where literary time-travellers traditionally go for cultural transgression, labyrinthine transactions and narcissistic posturings in a world of dubious reflections and subtle mirror-images.”³⁵ Yet this signifier of transgressive sexuality and artifice is also a center of European ethnocentrism, imperialism, and patriarchal authority. Similarly, Aschenbach's aestheticization of Tadzio is counterposed by the association of Tadzio's body with the cholera epidemic, thus equating Aschenbach's homoerotic desire with disease and death—with the medicalization of homosexuality. And the spiritualized male homoerotic desire of the Phaedrus is parodied in the primitive physicality of Aschenbach's Dionysian vision: “The females stumbled over the long, hairy pelts that dangled from their girdles … [and] shrieked, holding their breasts in both hands; coiling snakes with quivering tongues they clutched about their waists. Horned and hairy males, girt about the loins with hides, drooped heads and lifted arms and thighs in unison” (p. 67). This Dionysian dream, which includes a cannibalistic ritual and a sexual orgy, reinforces rather than subverts the bourgeois ideal of necessary sublimation.³⁶

Aschenbach's repressed, aestheticized longings “humanize” him, but it is precisely those longings that are produced by and produce the misogyny and homophobia endemic to the “subject of desire.” As long as such a work incorporates binary oppositions of sexual difference, it will reinscribe bourgeois sexual and artistic “normality.” Significantly, it is the narrator, not Aschenbach, who refers to art as feminine in sexually menacing metaphors: “She gives deeper joy, she consumes more swiftly … she will in the end produce in them a fastidiousness, an over-refinement, a nervous fever and exhaustion” (p. 15). Thus the feminine nature of art inevitably debauches, or so it seems to the ironic narrator whose implicit self-parody points to an identification with Aschenbach even while it attempts to differentiate between them. Aschenbach is an objectification of contradictions that the narrator parodies yet perpetuates.³⁷ Aschenbach's dreams, his reading of the Phaedrus, and his homoerotic desire for Tadzio all provide glimpses of subversive forces that challenge the hegemony of masculinist discourse and patriarchal values. But the potential of those forces to subvert is turned back upon itself, placing in doubt the merit of their subversion rather than querying the basis of their construction in partriarchal discourse. In this sense we may take the abandoned camera that witnesses but does not—indeed cannot—record either Jaschiu's humiliation of Tadzio or Aschenbach's final collapse as an emblem of the novella's aporia of desire.

Notes

1. Juliet Flower MacCannell has pointed out that “if the machine of culture is literally driven by the excess of desire over satisfaction, then obtaining satisfaction from the system is tantamount to halting the drive, the source of (symbolic) power.” “Oedipus Wrecks: Lacan, Stendhal and the Narrative Form of the Real,” in Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, ed. Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), p. 936.

2. Michel Foucault characterizes his studies on sexuality as a genealogy of “desire and the desiring subject,” an analysis of the “practices by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves as subjects of desire, bringing into play between themselves and themselves a certain relationship that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being, be it natural or fallen.” The Use of Pleasure, Vol. 2, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 5.

3. In her brilliant analysis of male homosocial desire Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown how “homophobia directed by men against men is misogynistic.” Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), p. 20. This point is relevant here because reluctance to treat the ideological and thematic meanings of homosexuality in Death in Venice combines fear and hatred in a way that shows the suppression of male homoerotic desire to be what Gayle Rubin has seen as “a product of the same system whose rules and regulations oppress women.” “The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1975), p. 180.

4. See “Homophobia and Sexual Difference,” Oxford Literary Review, 8.1-2 (1986), 5-12.

5. Albert Braverman and Larry David Nachman have argued that the Apollonian/Dionysian opposition of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy informs a dialectic of decadence in Death in Venice. “The Dialectic of Decadence: An Analysis of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice,” The Germanic Review 45 (1970), 289-98. However, their analysis does not deal with issues of sexual difference implicit in this opposition. As Sedgwick notes, the word “decadence” itself is often simply a euphemism for “homosexual” (Between Men 222 n.8).

6. “Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes),” Critical Inquiry, 7 (1981), 115.

7. All quotations from the novella will be cited in the text from Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), unless otherwise specified.

8. Ed Cohen has explored ways in which depictions of male homoerotic desire in Oscar Wilde's work counter dominant (hetero)sexual hegemony in “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation,” PMLA, 102 (1987), 801-13. Our argument suggests that the portrayal of male homoeroticism does not in and of itself constitute a challenge, although it has the potential to do so. However, that potential is diminished if it fails to see connections between misogyny and homophobia and/or if it reinvests the work with heterosexist values. Jeffrey Meyers moves in this direction when he argues that Death in Venice portrays homosexuality as the link between creative genius and self-destructiveness. Homosexuality and Literature, 1890-1930 (London: Athone Press, 1987).

9. Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955, selected and trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 102-04. Richard Winston has noted that Mann had a “special tenderness for prepubescent boys.” Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist, 1875-1911 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), p. 268. Mann himself referred to his “sexual inversion” and often spoke and/or wrote frankly about his homoeroticism. For example, after a trip to Venice in 1896 he wrote to Otto Grautoff: “How am I to free myself from sexuality? By eating rice? … Here and there, among a thousand other peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to allegedly ‘very beautiful’ girls, and not only to girls” (quoted in Winston, Thomas Mann, p. 97).

10. Der Tod in Venedig und andere Erzahlungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1950), p. 44.

11. Death and Venice, trans. Kenneth Burke (New York: Modern Library, 1970).

12. Saint Sebastian, a third-century Roman soldier, was ordered killed by his lover, the emperor Diocletian, when it was discovered that he was a Christian. After his recovery from being shot many times by archers, Diocletian ordered him beaten to death.

13. Paul de Man has suggested that this kind of irony results from “a problem that exists within the self” that the writer exploits in the form of self-duplication. When an author like Mann ridicules and/or invites readers to ridicule a character like Aschenbach, de Man suggests, “he is laughing at a mistaken, mystified assumption he was making about himself.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn., revised (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 211, 213-214.

    Mikhail Bakhtin points out that Mann's Doktor Faustus is “thoroughly permeated with reduced ambivalent laughter.” He quotes Mann's own comment on the history of the creation of the novel: “Therefore I must introduce as much jesting, as much ridicule of the biographer, as much anti-self-important mockery as possible—as much of that as was humanly possible!” and then adds that “reduced laughter, primarily of the parodic type, is in general characteristic of all of Mann's work. In comparing his style with that of Bruno Frank, Mann states: ‘… In matters of style I really no longer admit anything but parody.’ It should be pointed out that Thomas Mann's work is profoundly carnivalized.” Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 179-180 n.26. But as Linda Hutcheon has shown, “Parody, which deploys irony in order to establish the critical distance necessary to its formal definition, also betrays a tendency toward conservatism.” A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 68.

14. Mann's brother Heinrich, who accompanied the Manns on the trip to Venice that inspired the novella, satirizes the hypocrisy of a middle-class professor in his 1904 novel Professor Unrat (filmed as The Blue Angel), but this melodramatic farce does not challenge the heterosexist assumptions of bourgeois society.

15. Jacques Lacan has analyzed the relation of the gaze to sexual domination in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), and Michael Moon has applied this analysis to the manifestation of “visual terrorism” in “Sexuality and Visual Terrorism in The Wings of the Dove,” Criticism, 28 (1986), 427-43.

16. The reading process may also be said to shatter our illusion of such wholeness. That is the exchange between Aschenbach and Tadzio replicates the exchange between reader and text; we read a text “as if,” in the words of Robert Con Davis, “by giving attention to it, we look into it and master or possess it as an object. But while reading, in fact, we are focused upon and held by a Gaze that comes through the agency of the object text. Thus held in the act of reading … we are not masterful subjects; we—as readers—then become the object of the Gaze.” “Lacan, Poe, and Narrative Repression,” in Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, ed. Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), p. 988.

17. “Von Aschenbach's Phaedrus: Platonic Allusion in Der Tod in Venidig,” JEGP, 75 (1976), 228-40.

18. “Sensuality and Morality in Thomas Mann's Tod in Venidig,” The Germanic Review, 45 (1970), 124.

19. Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 15; Taylor later adds that “The one who deferentially appreciates the masterpiece admits that he is not completely in control of the experience he undergoes. … Just as a master can be lord only over a subjected servant, so a masterpiece can rule only in relation to obedient or even servile appreciation. This interplay of mastery and servitude opens the work to the other, which it struggles to dominate, repress, or exclude” (pp. 89-90).

20. “As long as the structure of the ego is Apollonian,” Norman O. Brown has argued, “Dionysian experience can only be bought at the price of ego-dissolution. Nor can the issue be resolved by a ‘synthesis’ of the Apollonian and the Dionysian; the problem is the construction of the Dionysian ego.” Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, nd), p. 175. De Man has deconstructed “the pseudo-polarity of the Apollo/Dionysos dialectic that allows for a well-ordered teleology.” Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 83-85; and Jacques Derrida has shown how “at the moment of already tying the episteme and the logos within the same possibility, the Phaedrus denounced writing as the intrusion of an artful technique, a forced entry of a totally original sort, an archetypal violence.” Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 33; see also pp. 34, 39, 50, 97-98, 103; Stanley E. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 37-41; de Man, Blindness and Insight, pp. 137-38, 288, and Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 225 and n.52. Francis Barker has termed the process by which discourse substitutes itself for the body-object, “as the text is substituted for the flesh,” “a metaphysics of death.” The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 105.

21. Kelley argues that Aschenbach's inclusion of the Semele reference shows that he believes that “there is a decided feeling that Beauty[,] because it can be revealed through the senses, is somehow suspect” (p. 235).

22. Quoted from R. Hackforth's translation in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). The valorization of Greek homosexuality is controversial. In Greek Homosexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), K. J. Dover maintains that it was a form of mentorship for boys in training who were apprentices in the virtues of Athenian citizenship, but in The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), Eva C. Keuls argues that we should not let this blind us to the way it reinforced patriarchal and misogynistic aspects of Athenian society.

23. In Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' “Bacchae” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), Charles Segal has explained how “Dionysus' cult gives to women a power and an importance that were denied them, on the whole, in fifth-century Athens. Yet it does so in a complex and ambiguous way. Dionysus releases the emotional violence associated with women and gives it a formalized place in ritual, a ritual not in the polis but in the wild. … Dionysus is felt to have a special affinity with women not only because he symbolizes the repressed emotionality associated with the female but also because he himself spans male and female” (p. 159).

    In his essay “Freud and the Future,” Mann discusses Dionysiac religious practices and the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen, who originally correlated Dionysian worship with a primordial Great Mother cult. Essays, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), p. 318. Bachofen distinguished between a “higher” Apollonian “spiritual” masculinity and a “lower” Dionysian “phallic” form. See Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 90-92; and Brown, pp. 126, 174, 280.

24. Brown believes that the Spinozan causa sui project is, like the Oedipal project, “in essence a revolt against … the biological principle separating mother and child” (p. 127). Aschenbach may be seen to stand at the end of a long tradition of male literary figures, including Satan, Dr. Frankenstein, and Ahab, who deny the mother and thus become, in Brown's words, “morbidly involuted” (p. 129).

25. On the way in which the Oedipal triangle produces and is produced by bourgeois ideology see, in general, Brown as well as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: Viking, 1977), and, more specifically, Jessica Benjamin, “The Oedipal Riddle: Authority, Autonomy, and the New Narcissism,” in The Problem of Authority in America, ed. J. Diggins and M. Kann (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 196-200, and Leo Bersani, A Future for Astynax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 120-23.

26. Blindness and Insight, p. 14.

27. Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987).

28. In her extension of George Bataille's application of Hegel's analysis of the master-slave relationship to an understanding of how eroticism centers around maintaining tension between life and death of self, Jessica Benjamin has argued that death is “a throwback to the original oneness with the mother. Such merging or boundary loss is experienced as psychic death once we have differentiated—the proverbial return to the womb.” “Master and Slave: The Fantasy of Erotic Domination,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow and others (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), p. 285.

29. The History of Sexuality, vol, 1: An Introduction. trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 43.

30. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), p. 207.

31. Plant, pp. 30-34.

32. Plant, p. 15.

33. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 201. Even such an astute semiotician and celebrator of the carnivalesque as Julia Kristeva has perpetuated the identity between fascism and homosexuality. Cf. her problematic remark that “We know the role that the pervert—invincibly believing in the maternal phallus, obstinately refusing the existence of the other sex—has been able to play in antisemitism and the totalitarian movements that embrace it.” About Chinese Women, trans. Stanley Mitchell (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), p. 23. Juliet Flower MacCannell has noted that “Kristeva attempts to trace the origins of Fascism, particularly anti-Semitism, to an abnormal, ‘abject’ response to the (for her necessary) Oedipal triangle. … She finds that abjection is aboriginal in the person of the Jew because of his God, his emphasis on manhood, and the repression of the maternal, and that therefore he is the ‘origin’ of his own persecution, since what he has ‘repressed’ returns to kill him: the death drive and the mother.” Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 34 n.11.

    In his discussion of Mann's homoeroticism Ignace Feuerlicht has noted that Mann contended that homosexuality was characteristic of Nazism. “When his son Klaus, a homosexual and an antifascist, protested in an article against the identification of homosexuality and fascism, Mann did not agree, only added, ‘debatable.’” “Thomas Mann and Homoeroticism,” The Germanic Review 57 (1982), 93.

34. Moon, p. 439.

35. “Back to Shiftwork,” TLS (September 18-24, 1987), p. 1025.

36. Citing the work of Marcel Detienne, Richard Halpern has noted that “Maenadic worship directed its inverting energies against both the Attic state and the household. Practiced solely by women, the central ritual practice of maenadism was omophagia, or the eating of raw meat, which rejected cooking both as the basis of the state religion and as the duty of a wife. Omophagia exemplified the thoroughgoing primitivism of maenadism, which, by reverting from culture to nature, temporarily evaded the patriarchal structures of both polis and oikos.” “Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson and others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 90.

37. As Terry Eagleton has explained in reference to Conrad's Secret Agent, modernist prose operates in “a naturalistic mode which … in its self-parodic quality, detaches itself ironically from its own vision. It is, as it were, naturalism to the second power—an Olympian, dispassionate view of reality which then views itself in precisely the same light in order to distance itself sceptically from its own presuppositions.” Against the Grain: Selected Essays 1975-1985 (London: Verso, 1986), p. 25.