Deaths in Venice

by Kitcher, Philip;

  36. Briefe (1948–1955) 3:248; the letter was written on March 13, 1952.

  37. Essays (1933–1938) 4:281.

  38. Essays (1926–1933) 3:189–190. Unlike his twenty-year-old self, the mature Mann is well able to distinguish between enthusiastic uplift and a more restrained and probing engagement with Schopenhauer’s ideas. In my view, that distinction was already available to him when he wrote Buddenbrooks, so that the portrait of Tom’s reading is not intended to reveal any sensitivity to Schopenhauer’s complex ideas but simply the power of a voice that speaks to a man in great distress. Tom—like his creator—is an autodidact reading at a turbulent time.

  39. GKFA 13.1:79; BU 91. Mann’s attention to the details of his surroundings introduces a beautiful irony. For, in Schopenhauer’s own discussion of the occasions on which the subject achieves some understanding of the world as it is, the world as will, the division of appearance into individual objects dissolves—“As soon as knowledge, the world as representation, is canceled, nothing remains except pure will, pure impulse” (WWV 1:234)—and hence, someone who achieved this state would be unaware of the ordinary circumstances in which it occurred. I suspect Mann intended to signal the overheated state of the callow reader and thereby to separate, as he does in the sketch of 1930, the “passionate-mystical” reading from the more “properly philosophical.” The thought of this as a unique reading experience is preserved in the later autobiographical sketch. Indeed, Mann uses almost the same words.

  40. Essays 4:285.

  41. In 1925, Mann wrote a discussion entitled “Marriage in Transition,” in which he took stock of “the metaphysical experience that prepared Thomas Buddenbrook for death,” writing of the freeing from the individual (the dissolution envisaged by Schopenhauer) and the willingness to accept death. Tom and Aschenbach are both viewed as fugitives from the discipline of life and its ethical constraints, intoxicated into passionate acceptance of death—a standpoint Mann claims to have “understood from time to time with one part of my being” (Essays 2:275).

  42. See, for example, T. J. Reed, Death in Venice: Making and Unmaking a Master (New York: Twayne, 1994); Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Epoche—Werk—Wirkung (München: Beck, 1997); Martina Hoffmann, Thomas Manns Der Tod in Venedig (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995). Manfried Dierks offers a more extensive range of Nietzsche influences in chapter 1 of his Studien zu Mythos und Psychologie bei Thomas Mann, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003), but still emphasizes the role of The Birth of Tragedy. In downplaying that role in my subsequent discussions, I aim not so much to criticize the work of these excellent scholars (from whom I have learned much) as to liberate our approach to Mann’s novella from a prevalent perspective—and thereby to open up alternative ways of reading it.

  43. During the writing of Doktor Faustus, Mann was often occupied in reading Nietzsche or works about him. In the period between April 10 and April 16, 1944, he took up the posthumous writings (Der Wille zur Macht), reading them together with Human, All Too Human (TB [1944–1946] 43–45). He returned to the Nachlass on January 7, 1945 (TB [1944–1946] 147). The inspiration drawn from Nietzsche in the 1910 essay on the “pure (absolute) writer” (see n. 19 and accompanying text) is from Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. We do not know exactly what he read in his youth (before the encounter with Schopenhauer). Perhaps it included The Birth of Tragedy, but the autobiographical sketch of 1930 offers contrary indications.

  44. Essays 3:187–188. It seems highly doubtful to me that reading The Birth of Tragedy would have generated that influence, for apart from the Versuch einer Selbstkritik it has none of the stylistic features that would make Mann, especially the young Mann, hail Nietzsche as decisive for German prose. The writings from Human, All Too Human on are a very different matter. In the late essay on Nietzsche, Mann cites Jenseits von Gut und Böse and Zur Genealogie der Moral as the highpoints of Nietzsche’s achievement (Essays 6:63).

  45. Essays 3:188. Again, these are hardly words likely to be inspired by reading The Birth of Tragedy—and, if they are accurate, they suggest that Mann would not have taken over, uncritically, the distinctions and theses of that book. The attacks on Christianity, especially the most pointed ones, come much later in Nietzsche’s career, as do the attack on Wagner and the “revaluation of values.” Mann’s own late assessment of The Birth of Tragedy takes up the perspective of the later anti-Wagner foreword: Mann refers to Nietzsche’s first work as a “prelude” to his philosophy, written in a mood of romantic enthusiasm quite foreign to his mature tone (GKFA 19.1:198; Essays 6:68).

  46. Essays 3:188–189. As Mann goes on to say, to read in that way would be an embarrassment.

  47. GKFA 13.1:92–93; BU 103.

  48. For an admirable example of an approach of this sort, see Reed, “The Art of Ambivalence,” in Making and Unmaking.

  49. See, for example, “The Art of Ambivalence” (in Reed) or Dierks, “Untersuchungen zum Tod in Venedig,” in Studien zu Mythos und Psychologie.

  50. See Robert Pinsky, trans., The Inferno of Dante (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), 113, 115; the crucial passages in the Commedia (printed on the facing pages of Pinsky’s edition) are 11:79ff. and 101ff. The Aristotelian principles of organization are already introduced, although not yet attributed to “the Philosopher,” much earlier in the canto; see 11:22ff.

  51. The review was originally published in Galaxy in March 1873. It is fully reprinted at http://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol3/issue2/jameshmm.htm.

  52. See, for one clear example, book 1, chap. 62.

  53. I draw the distinction from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. For further elaboration of it, see below.

  54. Hermann Broch pursues this novelistic strategy (to my mind with great skill and success) in his trilogy Die Schlafwandler (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp [Taschenbuch], 1994). I am indebted to Bence Nanay, for convincing me that similar things could be said on behalf of Musil, and to Jeremy Adler for some illuminating conversations about James.

  55. Both La nausée and Huis clos contain many passages that, however exciting philosophically, are mechanical as fiction—characters are simply used as mouthpieces for ideas.

  56. Broch, Die Schlafwandler, 719.

  57. The particular case of Mahler will be examined in chapter 3.

  58. My list reflects my own idiosyncratic tastes, and surely others would offer different exemplars. I should note explicitly that, although I used Dante to introduce the second level of philosophical involvement, the Commedia can also be viewed as exploring philosophical questions bequeathed by the philosophicotheological tradition, in ways parallel to those followed by the post-Enlightenment figures in my catalogue. A similar claim could be made for Milton.

  Is philosophical illumination found only on the highest peaks of the world’s literature and music? I think not. If a literary or musical work is to succeed in philosophical showing, it must surely exhibit genuine understanding and intelligence—in James’s terms, it must have “brain”—but that is entirely compatible with its falling short of the very high standards set by the writers and composers in my (perhaps idiosyncratic) canon. Good, but lesser, works of fiction are worth appreciating for their philosophical suggestiveness: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, many of Iris Murdoch’s novels, Pascal Mercier’s Perlmanns Schweigen. Even though my focus in this book is on one of the masters of German prose and one of the greatest late romantic composers, it should not be concluded that philosophy by showing occurs only in such rarefied regions of the cultural landscape. For Twain, see Jonathan Bennett’s superb essay “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” Philosophy 49 (1974): 123–134. The Alice books are not only full of local puzzles that have intrigued philosophical logicians but also invite reflection on what life in a world bereft of any apparent order would be like. Murdoch’s double career as philosopher and novelist has inspired a few courageous interpreters to look for philosophical themes in her fiction, despite Murdoch’s own—famous—claim that philosophy
and literature are entirely different and separate. See, for example, her interview with Bryan Magee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m47A0AmqxQE. My last example, almost certainly unknown to most English readers, is a taut and suspenseful novel—almost a piece of crime fiction—at whose center lies a complex of questions about aging, failure, and honesty, questions with filiations to those that occupy Mann in Death in Venice.

  59. This contrast is emphasized by Murdoch in the interview cited in the previous note.

  60. Antonio Damasio has defended a view of this type in several works from Descartes’ Error (New York: Putnam, 1994) on. For my purposes, it is not necessary to adopt the details of Damasio’s specific views—or any of the positions held by the neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists who have been influenced by him. The point is, rather, that everyday changes of belief, accompanied or promoted by emotional responses, can no longer be dismissed as regrettable lapses.

  61. The weak answer to this question, enough for my purposes, would allow some examples of genuine philosophical thought to involve imagination and emotion as essential constituents. Those who accept a position like that defended by Damasio (ibid.), in which “cold” cognition is a pathology, will favor the strong answer, according to which the popular model of philosophical thought (a sequence of pure belief states) is a myth.

  62. Plainly, my imagined skeptic has very definite tastes, since the strictures would eliminate some of the greatest philosophical stylists, including Plato, Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, William James, (the later) Wittgenstein, and Russell.

  63. The point is fundamental to the pragmatist tradition, expressed forcefully in Peirce’s early essays. It is encapsulated in the image offered by Neurath, in a passage made famous by Quine, who chose it as the epigraph for Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass..: MIT Press, 1960): “Wie Schiffer sind wir, die ihr Schiff auf offener See umbauen müssen, ohne es jemals in einem Dock zerlegen und aus besten Bestandteilen neu errichten zu können” (Über Protokolsätze).

  64. Moira Gatens has written in illuminating ways about the ability of fiction to cause a mode of vivid imagination that is philosophically fruitful. See her brilliant essay “The Art and Philosophy of George Eliot,” Philosophy and Literature 33 (2009): 73–90, to which I am much indebted. In suggesting that the arousal of the imagination should be combined with further reflection and discussion, I allude to an approach to ethical method I articulate and defend in chapter 9 of The Ethical Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). Gatens’s work and my own can be seen as elaborating Dewey’s insight that “the arts, those of converse and the literary arts which are the enhanced continuations of social converse, have been the means by which goods are brought home to human perception.” John Dewey, Experience and Nature, vol. 1 of John Dewey: The Later Works (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 322.

  65. I follow Bernard Williams’s judgment about the centrality to philosophy of this question, expressed in the opening pages of his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

  66. In particular John Stuart Mill, who develops the thought that the worthwhile life must be fashioned and freely chosen by the person who lives it. For discussion, see my essay “Mill, Education, and the Good Life,” in John Stuart Mill and the Art of Living, ed. Ben Eggleston (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). From a very different starting point, Kant arrives at a related appreciation of the need for autonomous choice, and similar ideas were articulated by Wilhelm von Humboldt (from whom Mill explicitly drew).

  67. Mann’s philosophical development moves through the sequence of works given in the first section of this chapter, from “Der Wille zum Glück” and “Der kleine Herr Friedemann” through Buddenbrooks and Tonio Kröger to Der Tod in Venedig. As I shall hope to show, the novella is particularly rich. Yet even more philosophically insightful work was to come, in Zauberberg, Joseph, and Faustus. I hope the present discussion will prepare the way for a future attempt to make that apparent.

  68. Whether Mann ever read either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake carefully enough to appreciate their kindred interest in philosophical issues about what makes lives worthwhile must be a matter of speculation. Diary entries reveal that he read in Levin’s early introduction to Joyce (February 21, 1942; TB [1940–1943] 396), possibly prompted by Joyce’s recent death, that he knew enough about Joyce’s prose to recognize that they shared a penchant for parody (September 19, 1943; TB [1940–1943] 627), that he knew enough about “Finnigans Wake” [sic] to worry that it might be the work of genius of the times and that his own work might seem stale and traditional by comparison (August 5, 1944; TB [1944–1946] 85), and that he was happy to find himself included (with Henry James, Proust, and Joyce) among the four greatest writers of the age (October 29, 1945; TB [1944–1946] 270).

  69. Essays 4:43.

  70. Essays 4:46–50. The view of Wagner as uninfluenced by Schopenhauer, to which Mann objects (46) is now fully corrected by an articulated account of Tristan. See Roger Scruton’s admirable Death-Devoted Heart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Of course, the influence of Tristan (and the “Tristan chord”) on the young Mann was profound—as Frau Klöterjahn’s performance of the piano transcription clearly testifies (GKFA 8.1:350ff.). I suspect that Mann’s youthful preoccupation with Tristan as paradigm for Wagner’s works lies behind his judgment of Wagner as the artistic fulfillment of Schopenhauer—in the interpretation I develop below in the text, Wagner, like Mann himself, can be granted more philosophical independence.

  71. WWV 1, book 4, particularly §§56, 59, 61.

  72. For the “Schopenhauer ending,” see Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 363.

  73. For extensive defense of the interpretation I offer here, see Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  74. King Lear 5.3.291; the line is spoken by Kent, Cordelia’s closest male counterpart.

  75. Nietzsche’s characterization of Wagner as a great “miniaturist” (The Case of Wagner §7; NW 6:28) seems initially absurd, one of the provocative paradoxes for which he is famous (and for which Mann celebrated him). There are many moments in the Ring that bear Nietzsche out—but the simple phrase Brünnhilde sings in farewell to her father is one of the most moving.

  76. Mann was plainly fascinated with the Ring from his youth—witness the story “Wälsungenblut”—but as he grew older it became ever more central to his (critical) appreciation of Wagner. In 1944, he wrote in his diary that “the triad-world of the Ring is my musical home,” despite which he confessed his continuing fascination with the Tristan chord (played on the piano). A few months later he recorded that he had been “gripped” by some parts of Tristan; the contrast recurs in September 1945: “The union of voices and orchestral music at the end of Götterdämmerung is far more successful than the Liebestod, where one would prefer to have the orchestra alone” (TB [1944–1946] 106, 232, 256; see also the praise of the “epic-mythical” sound of Rheingold, TB [1946–1948] 112, and Erika’s judgment on the close of Rheingold—“That delights you,” TB [1946–1948] 280). In 1949, he returned to Tristan, with “deepest admiration,” responding especially to the drama of act 1 (TB [1949–1950] 104, 108).

  77. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1992), 276.

  78. At the close of the “Nausicaa” and “Ithaca” episodes. On Sandymount strand, where Bloom has been a keen observer—unlike Stephen (in “Proteus”), whose perceptions are overloaded with his own literary and philosophical preconceptions (“signatures” he imports to try to find meaning in his experiences)—Bloom dozes off, turning from Gerty MacDowell back to Molly. That turn is echoed in the last exchanges of the “Ithaca” catechism.

  79. I defend this approach to Finnegans Wake in my Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans W
ake (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  80. See, in particular, the exchange between Stephen and his (dead) mother in “Circe,” which I take to play a role parallel to that of Bloom’s closing vision of his (dead) son Rudy.

  81. Portrait, 158.

  82. Ulysses (“Calypso”).

  83. Ulysses (“Ithaca”).

  84. Finnegans Wake 113:13.

  85. Particularly evident in the closing pages and, particularly, in ALP’s penultimate one-word sentence—“Given!”—in which she declares that her husband has kept his promise (to give her “the keys to [her] heart”). See Finnegans Wake 628:15, 626:30–31. For a far more extensive explanation and defense of this interpretation of the Wake, see my Joyce’s Kaleidoscope.

  86. Essays 4:285. Mann might be read as anticipating Harold Bloom’s notion of “strong misreadings” in The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and generalizing it to philosophy.

  87. Essays 4:285.

  88. Although I shall focus on Death and Venice and its precursors, the concern plainly persists through the great works of Mann’s maturity: Zauberberg, Joseph, and Doktor Faustus. Those novels deserve far more extensive treatment than I can offer here.