Deaths in Venice

by Kitcher, Philip;

  Mann and many others thrilled to the pessimism without worrying overmuch about whether it rested on philosophically irrefutable foundations. In Mann’s own case—as in that of Thomas Buddenbrook—there was an immediate connection with his sense of his own life and its uncertain value. The 1938 essay on Schopenhauer expresses his detached skepticism about a priori philosophical arguments and the greater probative force of considerations drawn from experience: apropos of the philosophical defense of common morality, he suggests that it is not our ordinary ethical views (for example, the condemnation of suicide) that need intricate philosophical defense but rather the philosophical system that gains credibility from its ability to deliver conclusions experience can validate.136

  For Mann, as for Wagner, Schopenhauer’s pessimism had attractions quite independently of its official metaphysical basis. Not only would both men have warmed to the celebration of the arts as portals to reality, but both would have applauded the high place assigned to music. Moreover, Mann plainly resonated with Schopenhauer’s insistence on the blind and disruptive character of Will, particularly powerful in the sexual urge, never satisfied and permanently at odds with our higher nature. On Schopenhauer’s account, sexual desire is a low grade of objectification of Will, one present in all sexually reproducing animals, sharing the usual feature of Will that desire, once satisfied, soon arises again, but also conflicting sharply with the higher modes of Will available to reflective beings who can consider their situation and set their own goals.137 It is thus particularly painful for those human beings who have been most profoundly touched by civilization. From his youth on, Mann felt sexual desire as a burden—and he would continue to do so until late in his life. As a nineteen-year-old he wrote to his confidant Otto Grautoff: “Recently, I have nearly become an ascetic. I am ardent, at my beautiful moments, for pure aesthetic sensibility, for the sensibility of the intellect, for intellect, soul, character. I say: let us separate the lower part of the body from love!”138

  Fifty-odd years later, he recorded in his diary his continued sexual potency (“flattering to my vanity”), lamented that some of the medicines he took acted as aphrodisiacs, and complained that his libido did not leave him in peace.139 The problem of sexuality is twofold: most obviously (as the next chapter will explore), Mann was troubled by the direction of his sexual impulses, but more fundamental to his unease was precisely the aspect of sexuality emphasized in Schopenhauer’s discussions, the constant, insatiable, and uncontrollable demands of this form of Will.

  Mann and his contemporaries saw Schopenhauer as modifying the problematic of philosophy, replacing Kantian questions about the world and our knowledge of it with issues about the value of human lives that had been neglected since the Greeks but that were live problems for late nineteenth-century Germans. They did not much care whether Schopenhauer had been right in his “correction of Kant,” for they could respond to the claims of the fourth book of The World as Will and Representation and to some of those articulated in the second and the third in their own right. Schopenhauer was important for his posing of questions, someone who educated Mann as he educated Nietzsche, reintroducing the ideal of philosophy as something by which the philosopher lives—even if thoughtful and passionate readers would choose to aspire to that ideal in different ways (and even if they doubted that Schopenhauer had been able fully to embody his own pessimism).140

  Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche offered no systematic treatment either of the possibility of achieving value in one’s life or any general argument for the impossibility of doing so.141 In accordance with the approach to Nietzsche elaborated in Mann’s writings, the philosopher’s mature works can be regarded as a series of penetrating analyses of general features found in different types of human lives.142 Nietzsche can be read not as operating on the grand Schopenhauerian scale—demonstrating that Human Life has some deep Metaphysical Feature that renders it worthless—nor as focusing on particular lives in detail and exposing their specific limitations, in the way a writer of fiction (for example, the Joyce of Dubliners) might do. Nietzsche explores species and genera of human lives arising and taking shape under particular cultural conditions and diagnoses the shared causes of failure within a general type. On this interpretation, Nietzschean scorn for “the herd,” the rejection of ovine conformity to tradition, the call for the Übermensch, would serve as provocations, opportunities for ironic assimilation. Provoked and inspired, a writer might focus Nietzsche’s broad claims on particular characters in a work of fiction, figures on whom alternative perspectives might be taken and about whom a more ambivalent verdict might be reached. An avowed ironist would not be swept up in enthusiasm for the Übermensch—surely an inadequately sketched character if ever there was one—but would appreciate Nietzsche’s importance as “the greatest and most experienced psychologist of decadence.”143

  Reading him in this way, Mann would have been profoundly interested in Nietzsche’s responses to the proposals about the potential worth of human lives offered by the philosopher’s great predecessors—by Schopenhauer and Wagner—and thus particularly concerned with “Schopenhauer as Educator” and the polemical writings against Wagner, works we know Mann read with great care. He would also have been drawn to the many-sided explorations of humanity and its prospects, from Human, All Too Human (whose title Mann plays on)144 and The Gay Science to Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morality—all works from which he quotes or to which he alludes. In wrestling with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Mann is disposed, throughout his fiction, to counter their abstract treatments with an attempt to embed and explore the questions they raise within the concrete circumstances of human life—as if, inspired and at the same time frustrated by the generality of philosophy, he were to be concerned with the issues as they arise within some surveyable context, in which possibilities can be more confidently understood and appraised.145

  Death in Venice is more “philosophical” than Mann’s other early works not because it alone wrestles with the questions Mann shares with philosophers—they arise almost everywhere146—but because, as in more austere philosophical treatments, the situation is radically simplified. Not, to be sure, in the extreme way of Schopenhauer as metaphysician, where a generic subject confronts the world. Nevertheless, the character is defined in ways that avoid potential complications. Aschenbach is detached from many of the conditions of human life: his wife is long dead and his daughter has married, and there has been little recent contact with her; even in the years before his journey to Venice, years in which he pursues his routine (Mann’s own, of course!)—concentrated work in the morning, the nap, the stroll, the reading, the correspondence—he has probably not had many, even any, intimate conversations with others. We are given a vision of a socially isolated subject whose life is centered on the activity of writing, an activity that is always slow and often painful, in which satisfaction is rarely found, despite the rewards that come from the reception of his works. With an eye to the third essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, we may conceive of Death in Venice as, in part, a response to the potential value of a particular type of asceticism.147 Aschenbach’s watchword is “Durchhalten,” variously translated as “endure,” “stay the course,” and “persevere,”148 with clear implications that one must strive to come through difficulties. Central to the life whose final weeks comprise the bulk of the novella is the concept of discipline.

  The question whether a life based on discipline could ipso facto be worthwhile was, for Mann, a deeply personal one. At times, he offered a negative answer about himself. On his thirty-third wedding anniversary, he declared to his wife, Katia,149 that his life failed the Schopenhauer-Nietzsche test: were he to be given the chance to repeat it, he would refuse, since the pains and sufferings outnumbered the ephemeral successes (including, by that stage, the Nobel Prize for literature).150 That, however, was much later. It is worth considering if Death in Venice allows a different verdict.

  5

  The novella
tells of the breakdown of discipline. A writer who has aimed at purity in his art and at a corresponding defense of conventional morality falls prey to an obsessive passion that leads him to physical and moral collapse.151 The mature Aschenbach had repudiated bohemianism, rejecting the idea of compassion for human follies and lapses, decrying any “sympathy with the abyss.”152 Nevertheless, his overwhelming desire to remain in the presence of Tadzio prompts him to reject what he recognizes as his duty: namely to warn the boy’s mother, the “lady of the pearls,”153 of the presence of cholera in Venice. He explicitly considers the “purifying and proper course of action” and sketches in advance the words he would employ: “Allow a stranger, Madame, to be of service to you with a warning about something which self-interest is keeping from you. Depart at once with Tadzio and your daughters! Venice is infected with plague.”154 It takes only a moment for him decisively to reject offering any counsel of this kind—and, in deciding to remain silent, Aschenbach is completely aware of what he is doing: seduced into dishonesty, intoxicated by the consciousness of his complicity in guilt (“as a tired brain would become intoxicated by a small amount of wine”),155 he aligns himself with the corrupt city fathers and with their strenuous efforts to conceal the plague.156

  His decision is followed immediately by the vivid and horrifying dream—or perhaps a state of possession more intense than any dream—in which monstrous and obscene Bacchic rites are enacted around him.157 In the wake of the dream, he feels compelled to play more completely and more conspicuously the role of lover, driven by an urge to please the beloved and thus to allow himself a cosmetic concealment of his age. Aschenbach transforms himself, recapitulating the elderly fop who, on the voyage to Venice, had so disgusted him. Feverish under his makeup, he pursues Tadzio, as he has done so often before, this time losing the boy in the labyrinth of Venetian alleyways. With burning head, sweating body, shaking neck, and unbearable thirst, he recklessly buys fresh strawberries, soft, musty, and overripe, and collapses at the fountain. There, in his Socratic ruminations, he offers reasons—or rationalizations?—for the unavoidability of the abyss.

  The decision to tell the story of Aschenbach and Tadzio rather than that of Goethe and Ulrike von Levetzov,158 an alternative Mann had seriously pondered, allows him to set a trap for unwary readers. Mindful of the sins of that famous “Somdomite,” Oscar Wilde,159 they might suppose Aschenbach to have fallen early, for his moral collapse to consist not in the failure to warn Tadzio’s mother but in his obsession with a pubescent boy—or possibly even in his having “unnatural urges” long before they were ever expressed. Not only did Mann correctly judge that the novella would convince critics of his moral seriousness, but he explained to his friend Philipp Witkop that, any expectations to the contrary, he was not writing an “immoral” story: “I am hard at work: on a rather strange thing I have brought back from Venice, a novella, serious and pure in tone, concerning a case of “boy-love” [Knabenliebe] on the part of an ageing artist. You will say ‘Hm. Hm.’ But it is very respectable.”160

  Those inclined to greet Aschenbach with “Hm. Hm.,” denouncers of “Greek love,” could be allowed to think of the writer as thoroughly corrupt. The ambiguous formulation of his protagonist’s moral collapse serves as protective covering for the author’s own leanings, and it is easy to envisage Mann’s ironic smile as he imagined the way committed homophobes would applaud his defense of rectitude and decency.

  For the real moral collapse—Aschenbach’s self-conscious decision not to warn Tadzio’s mother—to have its full impact, and for the moralizing narrator to be able to present it as he does, readers must have advance knowledge of the discipline that is systematically and thoroughly undone. This episode in the writer’s life, the journey to Venice and its aftermath, must be set against its previous pattern. Mann accomplished this with a brilliant structural idea, interposing between the opening chapter (the decision to journey south) and the implementation of that decision (the voyage and the stay at the lido) a chapter reviewing Aschenbach’s life. That chapter has the style of an obituary, a summing up of the career of an eminent man.161 Yet it cannot be an obituary, since to place it at the end, after Aschenbach’s death, would make, explicitly or implicitly, some summary judgment about the worth of his life—and thus vitiate the philosophical project of inviting the reader to ponder what this life has meant. To open with it, on the other hand, would be to diminish the force of the portrait, for we need to feel our way into Aschenbach’s current distress—the mind moving on in painful but profitless ways162—to appreciate the sensitivities that lie behind the eulogist’s measured prose. The many indications of Aschenbach’s suffering in the exercise of his relentless discipline—the allusion to the figure of St. Sebastian, for example—would provide an inadequate sense of what Aschenbach has been, done, and overcome, unless we came to them from an extended depiction of him at a moment of crisis, a moment when even his severe discipline has failed to overcome the obstacles he confronts—neither patient care nor a sudden inspiration will succeed. Placing this “obituary notice” where Mann does enables us to appreciate the condition from which Aschenbach’s decline begins.163

  Our readerly view of the intense discipline is purely retrospective: we do not see Aschenbach at work. Yet, as with the visit to Venice and the strong attraction to the boy on the lido, Mann’s own experience as a writer undergirded his portrait of his protagonist’s discipline. His decision to burn his early diaries164 deprives us of his descriptions of the struggles, pains, doubts, and disgust that appear, sometimes day after day, month after month, in the records of his later years—but it is hard to imagine that life was easier in the period when he was still establishing himself. Long after success has come, many a morning is the scene of effort apparently unrewarded. Mann is frequently tired while he works and tired of his work; it goes forward only slowly, and he is dubious about its value.165 His anxieties about what he is writing are periodically allayed through evening readings to family and close friends, who almost invariably respond in ways that reassure him: “I read Chapter XXIII (on Munich) [Chapter 23 of Doktor Faustus], with great effort, because still weak, 25 pages. The attention was great. Clever and moving comments of Werfel on the themes and original composition of this largely conceived and vulnerable book.”166 The entries on the succeeding days make it evident how important these occasions were for Mann: he writes that the reading and subsequent discussion have restored his faith in the book and remarks that “the encouragement of the recent reading was bitterly necessary.”167 Mann’s strong positive impressions of the impact of his works, when they were read to his intimate circle and when they were presented to the broader public, sustained him through the frequently laborious and disappointing mornings—and it is interesting to speculate whether those closest to him took steps to ensure that he would always find the encouragement he so “bitterly” needed. Aschenbach, by contrast, has no such setting in which to hear the echo of his painfully crafted prose.

  Aschenbach’s afternoon walk follows, I suggest, a morning like many his creator had experienced and was to experience. Tired and strained, he has dutifully gone to his post (his desk) after breakfast—perhaps, like Mann, he has not slept well, but it is his duty to work, with or without sleep168—and he has failed to make progress with the literary problem confronting him. Because he is overwrought, the customary afternoon nap brings no rest, and he seeks refreshment from a walk through the English garden—where the oppressive weather matches his mood. As he waits for the tram that will take him home, a strange figure appears in the portico of the mortuary chapel, a man whose gaze challenges him and whose appearance inspires thoughts of travel.169 Moved by the premonitory daydream of a tropical swamp with its “lewd” giant ferns, Aschenbach makes an impulsive decision to break with his routine, releasing himself from the exceptionless imperatives the “obituary” sees as governing his conduct. Discipline begins to break before he leaves Munich, and the fracture continues through subsequent ep
isodes, through the unrewarding visit to the Adriatic island, the subsequent resolve to sail to Venice, the warning signals—ignored—of the fop and the gondolier, signals that might have alerted him to the fact that he is entering a world entirely alien to the orderly life he has lived.170

  The strength of that discipline in its original, unrelaxed state is illuminated by Mann’s own records of his struggles to craft his refined prose—but the clues are already present in the “obituary” account. Although the summation of Aschenbach’s career opens with a catalog of the major works—the “clear and powerful prose epic” on Frederick the Great, the “novelistic tapestry” of Maia, the powerful story “A Wretch,” and the passionate treatise on “Intellect and Art”—the focus turns quickly to the ways in which Aschenbach’s development has been guided by heroic self-discipline. The review of his forefathers, with whom he will later identify himself, emphasizes the austerity of their lives, and the characterization of those lives as “straff” (literally: taut, tense, stretched) is echoed in the verdict rendered by one of Aschenbach’s contemporaries: he had always lived as a clenched fist, never as a loose hand.171

  We are told, however, of a period in which the young writer had pandered to the tastes of the times—and, it is suggested, precisely his inherited discipline enabled him to overcome this weakness. He identifies himself with the austere and respectable ancestors—like them, he serves “decent society,” a soldier of a sort, protecting against hostile ideas that might attack its cherished values. (Mann sometimes emphasized the importance of the “soldierly spirit” in Death in Venice, commending those readers who perceived it.)172 Rejecting bohemianism, Aschenbach embraced a life of solitude, of suffering, and of struggle, and the intensity of his self-sacrifice could be read in the lines engraved on his face by his dedication to his art.173 Painstakingly, over weeks, months, and years of daily exertion, he crafted his masterworks out of innumerable small insights. The opening scene shows us a writer who has paid the price for his achievements, whose recent efforts have been thwarted, and whose discipline is—perhaps temporarily—exhausted.