Thomas Mann - Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories
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| Rafail Sergeevich Levitsky, Morning Impression along a Canal in Venice, oil on canvas (1896) |
THE FIRST encounter
I had with the works of Thomas Mann was the seminal Death in Venice, which,
until reading this volume was the only contact I’d had with Mann’s oeuvre.
After reading a few more of his shorter works which attend the titular piece in
this compendium one begins to see a number of themes developing.
There is a real sense of Schopenhauerian
pessimism running through the texts and which presents itself in the declines
of the respective protagonists. the introduction posits as much, declaring that
Mann’s “intellectual mentors were Schopenhauer and Nietzsche” but, citing Mann
saying “for when a critical intellect and great writer speaks of the general
suffering of the world, he speaks of yours and mine as well, and with a sense
almost of triumph we feel ourselves all avenged by his splendid words.”[1]
This implies that, for Mann at least, these works had something of a redemptive
character to them, though it is difficult to see, with endings like that of Death in Venice, where the supposed
redemption is supposed to lie for the reader.
Mann spoke of “masks” which he would wear
as a text’s protagonist, essentially allowing himself to hide his very thinly
veiled self-insertion in the guise of another character. It is not hard to see
Mann himself in the repeated motif of the artistic loaner who
…sets no store by himself as
a living being, seeks recognition only as a creative artist, and spends the
rest of his time in a gray incognito like an actor with his makeup off, who
has no identity when he is not performing.
‘Tonio Kröger, Part 3, in Thomas
Mann, Death in Venice and Seven Other
Stories, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (London: Vintage, 1954)
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This idea of wearing makeup – wearing a disguise in order to perform
reminds us of Aschenbach in Death in
Venice, who finally, under the spell of his passion wears makeup in try to
look younger and more beautiful for the object of his unrequited love.
This rather
complicates things then, if the self-insertion, the already masked figure of
Mann, wears a further mask of makeup in order to disguise himself. The
redemptive quality of the pieces is then brought up – are the works an attempt
to avenge the suffering souls of the world, to work through the dilemmas
presented by Nietzsche?
In Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice especially,
though certainly in Tristan too, we see the protagonists, who like Mann are men
of literature, either denigrating their art almost to the point of
self-loathing or questioning it to the point at which the reader will no doubt
start doing so too.
Literature isn’t a
profession at all, I’ll have you know – it is a curse. And when do we first
discover that this curse has come upon us? At a terribly early age. An age
when by rights one should still be living at peace and harmony with God and
the world. You begin to feel that you are a marked man, mysteriously
different from other people, from ordinary normal folk; a gulf of irony, of
skepticism, of antagonism, of awareness, of sensibility, is fixed between you
and your fellow men – it gets deeper and deeper, it isolates you from them,
and in the end all communication with them becomes impossible.
Ibid. part 4
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While normally this quote would be interesting, but not entirely
useful for analysis, in the light of Mann’s self-proclaimed self-insertions, as
well as the repetition of such defined tropes in the figures of his characters,
we are able to use this quote well for explaining part of Aschenbach’s actions
towards Tadzio.
One of the things
that always struck me about Death in
Venice, was that though the constant references and allusions to Greek
society allows us to defer judgment to the moral standards of that society, the
ending would still seem to suggest that there was something bad about it – or morally wrong. Of
course, it is not the immoral nature of the relationship that causes the
protagonist to break down, but rather the destruction of this self he has built
up. He has recently come to “the recognition that knowledge can paralyze the
will, paralyze and discourage action and emotion and even passion, and rob all
of their dignity.”[2] As
the artistic dignity of the protagonist breaks down, so too does the city:
The consciousness of his
complicity in the secret, of his share in the guilt, intoxicated him as small
quantities of wine intoxicate a weary brain. The image of the stricken and
disordered city, hovering wildly before his mind’s eye, inflamed him with
hopes that were beyond comprehension, beyond reason and full of monstrous
sweetness.
Death in Venice, part 5, in Ibid.
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The City becomes the intoxication itself, as the cholera sweeps over
it. It is described as being Asiatic and exotic, like the Dionysian rites that
the text evokes – like Tonio Kröger’s
hometown, the sanatorium in Tristan, Venice comes to reflect the protagonist so
that the location becomes as complicit in his downfall as it was in his initial
alienation. The protagonist who, at first, is isolated from his environment,
actually becomes attached to it as he finds something of it in himself, and
then, finally, is destroyed by it.
[1] ‘Introduction’ in Thomas Mann, Death
in Venice and Seven Other Stories, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (London:
Vintage, 1954)
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