Third is the Bacchae of Euripides, source of the novella’s plot and of its finest and most famous passage, too long to quote here, Aschenbach’s apocalyptic dream of a fatal Dionysian revel, a party to end the world.įor this is a masque of death. Second is Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and its definition of the ideal drama as one in which the roiling, tearing, burning, brutal flux of life, typified by the Eastern god Dionysus, is arrested in cool, still images by the Greek artist pledged to Apollo.
First is Plato’s Phaedrus, with its coruscating dialogue on the ethics of pederasty and the divine frenzy to which every true poet is subject, a divinity heralded on earth by the beautiful boy.
DEATH IN VENICE AUTHOR CODE
In Mann’s case, at least three antecedent texts are running like code beneath the surface to generate the novella’s superstructure. Like Ulysses and The Waste Land, like the poetry of Yeats and the plays of O’Neill, Death in Venice has an apparently realistic or naturalistic surface secretly subtended by myth. The sight of this lively adolescent figure, seductive and chaste, lovely as a tender young god, emerging from the depths of the sky and the sea with dripping locks and escaping the clutches of the elements-it all gave rise to mythic images. “It was a face reminiscent of Greek statues from the noblest period of antiquity,” the imperious narrator, a narrator as Classical in form and proportion and irony as Aschenbach’s own are implied to be, “It was the face of Eros…” How better to escape the prison of his Northern soul than in an imaginative dalliance with the Eastern boy on the Southern lagoon, a warm welling-up of aristocratic Greek love in the fevered heart of the German bourgeois? Suffocating from the heat, he tries to leave almost as soon as he arrives-he’d long been sickly and had fallen ill in the city once before-but then chides himself for his timidity and takes advantage of the accident of misdirected luggage to stay.Īnd the city does offer him one attraction: a beautiful 14-year-old Polish boy named Tadzio, an ephebe walled off from Aschenbach’s stricken attention by his wealthy mother, a governess, and a company of sisters. Even en route, shipboard, he is forced to endure the company of an old man in youthful drag, his cheeks rouged and a wig on his head then, when he arrives, he is nearly robbed by an unlicensed gondolier. Like Mann’s later German tourists to Italy in the anti-fascist parable Mario and the Magician, Aschenbach finds the warm Catholic South a stew of mountebanks and swindlers. To Venice, “this sunken queen of cities,” he goes. Much as his own art might be a moral imposture, its marmoreal solidity no less an expression of the will-to-power than some more overtly rebellious performance would be, he still thinks a trip might introduce a lightness or liveliness into a literary style that conspicuously lacks it. Why duplicitous?Īnd does form not have two faces? Is it not moral and amoral at the same time-moral insofar as form is the product and expression of discipline, but amoral and indeed immoral insofar as it harbors within itself by nature a certain moral indifference and indeed is essentially bent on forcing the moral realm to stoop under its proud and absolute scepter?
Upon seeing first a Byzantine church with “mystical” inscriptions above its door-the novella’s first hint of “the east”-and then, at the gate of a graveyard, a red-headed stranger, “clearly not of Bavarian stock,” his red hair likely signifying Jewish heritage, the weary author begins to yearn for escape to a Southern or Eastern place (but “not all the way to the tigers”) to liberate him self from his respectable and somewhat duplicitous martyrdom to literary form. As in all of Mann’s works-as in Mann’s own life-this tension between the stolid North/West and the fervid South/East will structure the tale.Īschenbach, long a widower, exhausted from his literary labors, takes a stroll through Munich one day. The aristocratic “von” was a gift of the state he is of bourgeois origin, the son of a German civil servant and a Bohemian woman whose own father was a music conductor.
Gustav von Aschenbach is a middle-aged German author of great renown, one who renounced his youthful Romanticism to become an artist of Classical restraint and moral greatness, one taught in schoolbooks and granted an honorary title. Yet here we are, rereading perhaps the 20th century’s greatest novella, Thomas Mann’s masterpiece of 1912. The real fantasy, then, does not even have the romanticizing sanction of classical pederasty, but was the daydream of what the average person might imagine to have been a common pedophile, a prowler at the periphery of playgrounds, the type of person one speaks of putting not in but under the jail rather than awarding the Nobel Prize.
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