Lovis Corinth: Self Portrait as Howling Bacchant, 1905, Insel HombroichThere is a haunted dread in the eyes of this bacchant. That howl - more distress than joy. Mania, frenzy, delirium; a Dionysian letting go. This is the mental picture that furnished my mind as I read of Gustav von Aschenbach. Aschenbach is the eminent artist of disciplined control, he has based his whole career on fame, he has achieved recognition through hard graft, a hundred little inspirations that have accrued, that have been beaten out and formed into a burnished oeuvre of classicist grace and clarity. But the machine begins to whir out of control, that motus animi continuus, the very heart of eloquence, continues to spin its wheels, refuses to be regulated by the measured rhythm of Aschenbach's daily routine afternoon snooze, spins, spins, whirs on, he must out to quiet the beast.Very swiftly the stage seems to darken into a dream-like state. The tram stop deserted, the streets bare, a stranger suddenly, inexplicably, at the portico of the mortuary chapel - and Aschenbach experiences an opening of his soul, a sudden unrest. Wanderlust, he calls it. Really? This nightmare vision of a primordial wilderness of the dank and decaying, this jungle of greenery with the glowering eyes of a tiger? A vision so stark that he has to shake his head to rid himself of it? But Aschenbach has always been aware of the need for travel as a hygienic necessity, the needed (earned?) escape from work, that "rigorous, frigid, and ardent duty."Aschenbach lives his life with a tightly clenched fist - but on his journey to Trieste, then Pula, then Venice, he gradually begins to relax that grip, the fist opens, the arm hangs loose. He is carried on the water, he is rowed by a menacing gondolier who takes him further than he wants to go, warning him that he will pay, he will pay. And pay he will. But he is delivered safely to the very edge of the civilised world, and there, at the next table in his hotel, waiting for dinner, is a family of young Poles, amongst them a boy of around fourteen. "With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was perfectly beautiful." Vollkommen schön.Beauty. Kant calls it "interesseloses Wohlgefallen" - disinterested pleasure, an echo of Plato's ideas. According to Plato there is a realm of ultimate ideals, where goodness, wisdom, truth exist in changeless perfection. A vision of these ideals is planted into our souls, but man is a forgetful creature, and loses the sharp focus of that vision. Reason, Justice, Virtue cannot be perceived by our senses, but there is one perfect ideal which is visible, and that is Beauty. An earthly image of Beauty reminds us with a frisson of shock of that Absolute. Thus physical beauty here on earth points to a higher reality, a purely spiritual abstract concept. Ah but. There has to be a but. Beauty is a sensuous pleasure, and can provoke a purely sensual response. To have, to hold, to possess, to enjoy. That is not the entrance to a higher sphere. Disinterested pleasure, remember.Aschenbach has to be given the opportunity to enjoy this perfection as a high ideal: surely that is why Tadzio is a prepubescent male, the incarnation of the unspoilt perfect body, no unsightly sproutings or eruptions, smooth, slender, harmonious. It ought to be, has to be possible to leave carnal desire out of the account, to admire this creature as divine ideal. And indeed Aschenbach starts quite well, with transcendental thoughts over dinner about the relationship between the general and the particular in human beauty "from there to think about the general problems of form and art and eventually found his thoughts and findings to resemble certain apparently fortuitous ideas in a dream, that on closer inspection reveal themselves to be completely stale and unworkable." And the next morning there is a putrid smell in the lagoon.Ah but Aschenbach battles. He tries to see the Greek statue, the perfection, himself as a fatherly figure: "And a fatherly awe, the complete devotion of the one who tries to create beauty to the one who is endowed with it filled and moved his heart." He strains to remain the disinterested artist, sees the analogy between his work and this example of youthful perfection, his hewing from the marble of language and this perfect form, are they not similar? "His eyes embraced that noble figure at the bounds of the blue, and in enthusiastic rapture he believed to embrace beauty itself, form as a thought in the mind of God, the one and pure perfection living in the human spirit and of which a human image and analog was erected here for worship." But this is intoxication, 'Rausch', the frenzy of self-deceit. He believes his own poetic musings - but wanton desire is the worm in the rose. Tadzio is no ideal, he is all too human, and it is no longer beauty as such that Aschenbach worships from afar. He wants, he desires human contact. A look, a smile. Recognition.Well, we know how it ends. Aschenbach, no longer named, but given epithets; the one who is led astray, the confused, the intoxicated, the infatuated, is no longer able to resist, either his own infatuation or the cholera that is infiltrating the whole system. 'Eine sittliche Fabel' Mann calls this, a moral tale. Those artists who give up the dignity of a social position and go in pursuit of beauty will come to disaster. Aha.But it's never that easy, not with Thomas Mann. He delights in undercutting himself, building ambiguities into the work, puzzles for the reader to mull over. What kind of artist is Aschenbach? Are we to admire his mastery and classicizing style? Most of the novel is in free indirect speech, so are we to assume that the narrative voice is Aschenbach's? Those false little classicizing flag-ups at the beginning, a spring afternoon in the year 19.., like Goethe or Kleist, or that over-precious sunrise that Aschenbach sees from his hotel window: after a wingéd word brings a message from Olympia, we are treated to plenty of references to Eos, Cleitos and Cephalos and Orion and then we get this rather recherché description: "At the world's edge began a strewing of roses, a shining and a blooming ineffably pure; baby cloudlets hung illuminated, like attendant amoretti, in the blue and blushful haze; purple effulgence fell upon the sea, that seemed to heave it forward on its welling waves; from horizon to zenith went quivering thrusts like golden lances..." Well, you get the picture - that's the DH Lawrence translation, he really gets that rococo style parody that sloshes into the sentimental. So Aschenbach's claim to be an artist might be seen as doubtful. And we've seen that he equates what he does with Tadzio's beauty, we are constantly told that Tadzio is beautiful, but again, what kind of beauty is this? His teeth are rotten, he's weak and cosseted, the family pet, not at all the athletic Greek God ideal. Effete. Over-pretty, like Aschenbach's sunrise. So is this the story of an artist in pursuit of true beauty, or is it the story of an artist whose artistry is never convincingly portrayed, in pursuit of a beauty that mirrors his own corruption, complaisance and self-mockery?A play of illusions.
Since the piece is well known as being a landmark work of fiction regarding male homosexuality, I am not going to focus on that in my review, or on its other element that has been flogged to death as well, being the rather extreme youth (age 14) of the love object. -----Well! What a conflicting piece of fiction. The novella seems fairly divisive amongst critics, but one thing that I think most of us can agree on, is that the novella is a discomfiting piece of writing. I suspect this was so for the author as well as for his readers.For me this was not because of how the protagonist's obsession affected his love-object, but because of how this obsession affected the protagonist himself. ... and, I couldn't shake the feeling that the novella was pretty much autobiographical in many senses. (I found out later that it was so in many respects, and the love-object is based on a real person. Most uncomfortable of all, is that the 'real' Tadzio, was the 10-year old Wladyslaw Moes).Achenbach, the protagonist, is a well-respected author, who, like Mann, tends to engage with political and intellectual issues in his work. Like Achenbach, Mann visited Venice, where he made the acquaintance of a young boy whose beauty he apparently admired; with the difference that Mann was accompanied by his wife and brother, while Achenbach was alone. Okay, there are a few other differences as well - and one pretty large one, but that's a spoiler.Many reviewers and critics have made much ado about the protagonist's homosexuality and/or his pederastic inclinations, but I think what disturbed me most was the stalker-ish intensity of the protagonist's infatuation, and to an extent also how he totally overromanticized the idea of physical beauty, using purple prose and overblown idealistic sentiments to describe his thoughts on physical human beauty, (which I deeply disagree with), and which Mann propped up with symbolism from Greek mythology, and references to Platonic ideals.Ironically, Björn Johan Andrésen, who played the role of the fourteen-year-old Tadzio in Luchino Visconti's 1971 film adaptation of Death in Venice, is credited with saying: “One of the diseases of the world is that we associate beauty with youth. We are wrong. The eyes and the face are the windows of the soul and these become more beautiful with the age and pain that life brings. True ugliness comes only from having a black heart”.Because I have long known that beauty is only skin-deep, I like those sentiments a lot better than: ... he believed that his eyes gazed upon beauty itself, form as divine thought, the sole and pure perfection that dwells in the mind and whose human likeness and representation, lithe and lovely, was here displayed for veneration. This was intoxication, and the aging artist welcomed it unquestioningly, indeed, avidly. His mind was in a whirl, his cultural convictions in ferment; his memory cast up ancient thoughts passed on to him in his youth though never yet animated by his own fire. Was it not common knowledge that the sun diverts our attention from the intellectual to the sensual? It benumbs and bewitches both reason and memory such that the soul in its elation quite forgets its true nature and clings with rapt delight to the fairest of sundrenched objects, nay, only with the aid of the corporeal can it ascend to more lofty considerations. Cupid truly did as mathematicians do when they show concrete images of pure forms to incompetent pupils: he made the mental visible to us by using the shape and coloration of human youths and turned them into memory's tool by adorning them with all the luster of beauty and kindling pain and hope in us at the sight of them...Some interesting thoughts there, though I disagree with the sentiments expressed in bold. Were these the thoughts of the protagonist, or the author himself? From his notes, it would seem that these were actually Mann's own sentiments. They do seem a perfect rationalization for a man in Achenbach's position to make though, which makes them pretty fitting in their context, I must concede.I am surprised that so many people, with so much evidence to the contrary, can still invoke Plato's ideas of essence = form when it comes to physical beauty = spiritual beauty. Surely, it doesn't require too much contemplation to come to the conclusion that physical beauty does not equal spiritual beauty?One could muse that perhaps what Achenbach is rather saying, in what seems like a rationalization for his passion, that beauty can inspire love, the latter which is in itself beautiful. ...and yet, since in this specific context the object of that passion is so young, and vain, and since they had never even exchanged a word with one another, could this be love? Methinks not - this could surely be but an infatuation of the senses.From the notes Mann made for the writing of the novella, it is clear that part of what he wanted to show, was that an artist (an author like himself) cannot be a dignified, purely rational creature, that he needs to be in touch with his passions and emotions, and that the act of creating art is inherently not a dispassionate activity.Something else that Mann seems to be saying behind the scenes, is that love itself cannot be dignified, that love pushes an individual into undignified behavior. Mann being a fairly obviously repressed individual, one can read a certain parallel between the disease that infects Venice, with Achenbach's almost insane passion (insanity features in Mann's notes). Mann seems to see these homosexual pederastic impulses that one surmises he felt himself, as at the same time degrading and ennobling. Ennobling, so the reasoning seems to go, in the sense of that when a person degrades himself for love, it can be seen as a kind of sacrifice of dignity for a higher cause (being, in this case, "love").But one can only follow such reasoning if you can agree that a passion that seems so distant, unrealistic and physical can be ennobling and can be described as "love". To put the matter in a slightly different context - make a small leap in your mind and imagine that the love-object here is instead a 40-year old woman. If the latter was the case, would the scenario in DIV still be creepy? Indeed, it would. What would make the scenario still creepy? It would still be a purely physical obsession characterized by stalkerish behaviour.So one ends up asking yourself how far selfishly and obsessively stalking someone can really be an expression of love? ..and if it is to the extent that one puts this behaviour of yours above the wellbeing of its object? ..and what when the continuation of this behaviour puts the other's life in danger, then is it not actually selfishness and the opposite of love?(view spoiler)[ Achenbach deliberately does not tell Tadzio's mother about the epidemic in order to avoid the outcome that Tadzio's family would leave the resort; which would remove Tadzio from the older man's proximity. In fact, I was sort of visualizing an ending in which Tadzio dies of Cholera, and Achenbach is racked with guilt, possibly even driven totally mad with guilt) (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about Death In Venice (2005)?
I have reread Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice several decades after reading it in the original German in college, having in the interim enjoyed the film version directed by Luchino Visconti. My main impression of the relatively recent translation by Michael Henry Heim (2004) is that it preserves the author’s long-winded and intricate sentence structure. Unpacking Mann’s sentences is one of the challenges of reading his books. Stylistically, therefore, the translation is quite authentic. As I read the novella, I looked for clues supporting the literary analysis I remember from my class discussion so long ago. They were not hard to find. Death in Venice is autobiographical to the extent that it reflects Mann’s own parentage. His father was an austere, disciplined northern German, while his mother had a southern European heritage and a passionate nature. In fact, Júlia da Silva Bruhns was born in Rio de Janeiro and was the daughter of a plantation owner with a Portuguese background. Mann's father, Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, met her in Brazil because the grandfather had established an export business there. (Source: Philipp Hauer, Herkunft und Lebensverhältnisse der Eltern und Großeltern der Brüder Heinrich and Thomas Mann, October 29, 2007, http://www.philipphauer.de/info/d/elt...).Thus both the author and the protagonist in Death in Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach, experienced continual tension between both sets of inherited traits—the Apollonian and Dionysian ideals embodied by the parents. The interplay between these conflicting tendencies gave rise to a successful artist, who combined an appreciation for Dionysian joys and sensitivities with Apollonian respect for structure and hard work. It is worth noting that in the novella, von Aschenbach is an author, whereas in the film he is a composer.Venice represents physical decay and personal dissolution. As his life nears its end, von Aschenbach loses his self-control, as he finally yields to temptation and long-repressed urges. During his fateful sojourn in Venice, he nevertheless manages to produce a short essay about beauty. Of course, the readers do not suspect that the inspiration for this work is the elderly and sickly man’s infatuation with a 14-year-old boy.A few excerpts follow.About the decision to go on vacation:“Yet he knew only too well the source of the sudden temptation. It was an urge to flee—he fully admitted it, this yearning for freedom, release, oblivion—an urge to flee his work, the humdrum routine of a rigid, cold, passionate duty.”About lineage and art:“…a strain of more impetuous, sensual blood had found its way into the family in the previous generation through the writer’s mother, the daughter of a Bohemian bandmaster. She was the source of the foreign racial features in his appearance. It was the union of the father’s sober, conscientious nature with the darker, more fiery impulses of the mother that engendered the artist—and this particular artist.”“Wishing to bear on such frail shoulders the burdens imposed by his talent and wishing to go far, he had great need of discipline, and discipline was fortunately an inborn quality he had inherited from his father’s side of the family.”“Aschenbach did not care for pleasure. Whenever and wherever he was called upon to let his hair down, take things easy, enjoy himself, he soon—especially in his younger years—felt restless and ill at ease and could not wait to return to his noble travail, the sober sanctuary of his daily routine. It was the only place that could enchant him, relax his will, make him happy.”Also worth noting is that von Aschenbach tries to leave (escape from) Venice and its temptations, but instead decides to stay behind due to a coincidence: a trunk with his possessions is shipped ahead to Como instead of a resort near Trieste, where he had planned to resume his vacation. This fortuitous turn of events foils his attempt to return to a balanced life of self-abnegation and artistic production, but the dissolute old man is secretly overjoyed because he can continue to devote himself to his obsession. Venice has entrapped and ensnared him. This same theme of entrapment reoccurs in Mann’s similarly autobiographical later novel, The Magic Mountain, which is set in a sanatorium in Switzerland. Visitors there contract tuberculosis and therefore must remain for treatment. Mann’s wife stayed at such a facility in Davos.
—Seth
I bet someone could write a masterpiece by taking this book’s premise and elongating it into a fuller exploration of the child-adult love taboo. Oh, really? Oh.This book really does read like a Lolita written 40 years prior with Lo’s gender switched and a premature ending just before things get really interesting (if you know what I mean). Death in Venice is equally engrossing and sports a protagonist, Aschenbach, who’s as well developed, far more relatable, and nearly as interesting as our dear Humbert Humbert. The novel does feel cut-off though, as if Mann were afraid to explore the tale any further, and it also includes a not-so-faint whiff of moralizing that’s rather absent in Nabokov’s version. Aschenbach’s portrayal as a driven, successful, and now weary late middle-aged writer is so convincing that I was surprised to learn that Mann wrote this in his mid-30s. The characterization’s so good, in fact, that I was sure it had to be mostly autobiographical. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it’s damn good writing that’s on display for too few pages. I’ll be returning to Mann, and hopefully soon.
—Bram
This small tragicomic satire by Mann has probably done more to edge homosexuality into the common culture than any other single work of art. The remark of Mann’s old enemy Alfred Kerr, that the story “made pederasty acceptable to the cultivated middle classes”, was meant to be sarcastic but has proved quite prophetic.Here, Dionysian acceptance of Life triumphs over the rationalistic dogmatism of Apollo. The world decided to become agnostic about sex as the dogmatic insistence that heterosexuality was ‘better’ (as per the ‘socially responsible Apolline narrative’) in some way was found lacking. Instead of going ahead and making that illegal as a reaction and erecting homosexuality as the new orthodoxy, thankfully we decided to go secular on the matter and relegate it to the private sphere. That is the way to go as far as private practices without externalities are concerned.
—Riku Sayuj
