The extreme complexity of the story is very well emphasised by the intricate structure of the narration, by the overlaid narrators, scenes and times that alternate in the tale. Communicating vessels and Chinese boxes are the techniques used to build this highly functional, subtle narrative. The river Thames and the great African river (the Congo, although it is never given a name) are the two locations woven by the story. Two rivers, two continents, two cultures, two historical times, between which the main character-narrator, Captain Charlie Marlow, moves as he recounts his old African adventure to four friends one night in London by the river. But, in this binary reality, in which there are two women associated with Kurtz – the ‘barbarous and proud’ black woman and his delicate white fiancée – there are also two narrators, since Marlow tells his story within the narration of another narrator-character (who speaks of a ‘we’ as if he were one of the friends listening to Marlow), this anonymous and furtive presence whose function is to blur the story, dissolving it in a mist of subjectivity. Or better, in a mist of subjectivities, which intersect and draw apart, to create the rarefied atmosphere in which the story takes place. An atmosphere that is at times confused and at times nightmarish, in which time thickens, seems to stop and then jumps, in syncopated fashion, to another moment, leaving intervening gaps, silences and inferences. This atmosphere, which is one of the book’s greatest triumphs, is achieved through the powerful presence of a dense prose, which is at times grandiloquent and torrential, full of mysterious images and magical-religious resonance. One might say that it is impregnated with the abundance of vegetation and the steam of the jungle. The English critic F. R. Leavis deplored what he called the ‘adjectival insistence’ in the prose,16 something that for me is one of the essential attributes of this style as it seeks to de-rationalise and dissolve the story into a climate of complete ambiguity, into the rhythm and flow of dream-like reality. This atmosphere reproduces Marlow’s state of mind, for what he sees in his African journey to the posts and factories of the Company leaves him perplexed, confused, horrified, in a crescendo of excess that makes Kurtz’s story, the absolute horror, quite believable. If it were told in a more measured and circumspect style, then that inordinate story would seem simply incredible.
This African experience changed the personality of Marlow as it changed Conrad’s personality. It also changed his vision of the world, or at least of Europe. When he returns to the ‘spectral city’ with Kurtz’s packet of letters and the portrait, he contemplates at a distance and with contempt these people who are ‘hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.’17 Why this aversion to these people, ‘that trespassed on my thoughts’, these ‘intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew’? What, through his journey, he has learned about life and humankind has left him without innocence and without spontaneity, deeply critical and mistrustful of his fellow men. (‘Before the Congo, I was merely an animal’, Conrad confessed.18)
Marlow, who had hated lying before his journey to Africa, does not think twice about lying on his return, when he tells Kurtz’s betrothed that the last words he uttered were her name, when in reality he exclaimed: ‘The horror, the horror’. Was it a merciful lie, to console a woman who was suffering? Yes, that as well. But above all else, it was the acceptance that there are truths so intolerable in life that they justify lies. That is to say fictions; that is to say literature.
Madrid, October 2001
Death in Venice
The Call to the Abyss
Despite its brevity, Death in Venice tells a story that is as complex and deep as any that Thomas Mann would develop more extensively in his vast novels. And he achieves this so economically and with such stylistic perfection that this short novel deserves to figure alongside masterworks of the genre like Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. All three are beautifully crafted, tell a fascinating story and, above all, set up an almost infinite number of associations, symbols and echoes in the mind of the reader.
After reading and rereading it on numerous occasions, we are left with the unsettling feeling that the text is still withholding a mystery even from the most attentive reader. Something murky and violent, almost abject, which can be found in the protagonist and which is also a common experience of humankind: a secret yearning that suddenly reappears, frightening us, because we thought that it had been banished once and for all from our midst through the work of culture, faith and public morals, or simply as a result of our need to live together in society.
How can we define this subterranean presence which works of art usually reveal involuntarily, indirectly, a will-o’-the-wisp that suddenly appears without the author’s permission? Freud called it the death wish, Sade desire in freedom and Bataille, evil. It is the quest for the integral sovereignty of the individual that predates the conventions and rules that every society – some more, some less – imposes in order to make coexistence possible and prevent society from falling apart and reverting to barbarism. The core of any definition of civilisation is that individual desires and passion must be reined in so that private desires, stimulated by imagination, do not endanger social organisation. This is a clear and healthy idea whose benefit for the human race cannot be denied rationally because it has enhanced life and kept at a distance, usually at a great distance, the precarious and harsh primordial lives that preceded the horde and the cannibal clan. But life is not formed just by reason but also by passions. The angel that lives within men and women has never been able entirely to defeat the devil that also lives within, even when it seems that advanced societies have managed to do so. The story of Gustav von Aschenbach shows us that even these fine examples of healthy citizens, whose intelligence and moral discipline seem to have tamed all the destructive forces of personality, can succumb at any moment to the temptation of the abyss.
Reason, order and virtue ensure the progress of human society but they rarely suffice to make individuals happy, for instincts, that are kept in check in the name of social good, are always on the lookout, waiting for an opportunity to come out and demand of life both intensity and excess that, as a last resort, lead to destruction and death. Sex is the privileged domain where these transgressive demons lurk, in the recesses of our personality, and in some circumstances it is impossible to keep them at bay because they are also part of human reality. What is more, even though their presence always implies a risk for the individual and a threat of dissolution and violence for society, to exile them completely would impoverish life, depriving it of euphoria and elation – fiesta and adventure – which are also integral to life. These are the thorny issues that Death in Venice illuminates with its twilight tones.
Gustav von Aschenbach has reached the threshold of old age as an admirable citizen. His books have made him a celebrity but he accepts this fame without vanity, concentrating on his intellectual work, almost completely immersed in the world of ideas and principles, shorn of all material temptation. Since he lost his wife, he has become an austere and solitary man. He does not have a social life and rarely travels. In the holidays he retreats into his books in a small house in the country outside Munich. The text states that ‘he did not like pleasure’. This all seems to imply that this famous artist is confined within the world of the spirit, having quelled, through culture and reason, his passions, which are the agents of vice and chaos that lurk in the dark recesses of the human mind. He is a ‘virtuoso’ in the two meanings of the word: he is a creator of beautiful and original forms and he has purified his life through a strict ritual of discipline and continence.
But one day, suddenly, this organised existence begins to crumble thanks to his imagination, this corrosive force that the French very accurately call ‘the mad woman of the house’. A furtive glimpse of a stranger in the Munich cemetery awake
ns in Von Aschenbach a desire to travel, and peoples his imagination with exotic images. He dreams of a ferocious, primitive, barbarous world, one completely opposed to his world of a super civilised man, imbued with a ‘classic’ spirit. Without really understanding why, he gives in to impulse and goes first to an Adriatic island and later to Venice. There, on the night of his arrival, he sees the Polish boy Tadzio who will turn his life upside down, destroying in a few days the rational and ethical order that has sustained it. He does not touch him or even speak to him; it is also quite possible that the faint smiles that Von Aschenbach thinks he detects are fantasies of his imagination. The whole drama develops away from prying eyes, in the heart of the writer and, of course, in those murky instincts that he thought he had tamed, and which, in the sticky and foul-smelling Venetian summer, are revived by the tender beauty of the adolescent. He comes to realise that his body is not merely the receptacle of refined and generous ideas so admired by his readers, but also harbours a beast on heat, greedy and egotistical.
To say that the writer falls in love with or is engulfed by desire for the beautiful boy would not be enough. Something happens to him that is much deeper: it changes his view on life and on men and women, on culture and on art. Suddenly ideas are relegated, displaced by sensations and feelings, and the body takes on an overwhelming reality that the spirit must serve rather than restrain. Sensuality and instincts take on a new moral significance, not as aspects of animality that human beings must repress to ensure civilisation, but as sources of a ‘divine madness’ that transforms the individual into a god. Life is no longer ‘form’, and spills out in passionate disorder.
Gustav von Aschenbach experiences the delights and the sufferings of a love-passion, albeit alone, without sharing it with the person who is the cause of these emotions. At first, realising the danger that he is running, he tries to run away. But then he changes and plunges into the adventure that will bring him first to a state of abjection and then to death. The former sober intellectual, now disgusted by his old age and ugliness, goes to the pitiful lengths of putting on make-up and dyeing his hair like a fop. Instead of his former Apollonian dreams, his nights are full of savage visions, where barbarous men indulge in orgies in which violence, concupiscence and idolatry triumph over ‘the profound resistance of his spirit’. Gustav von Aschenbach then experiences ‘the bestial degradation of his fall’.19 Who is corrupting who? Tadzio leaves Venice at the end of the story, as innocent and immaculate as at the beginning, while von Aschenbach has been reduced to a moral and physical wreck. The beauty of the boy is the mere stimulus that starts up the destructive mechanism, the desire that von Aschenbach’s imagination so inflames that it ends up consuming him.
The plague that kills him is symbolic in more than one sense. On the one hand it represents the irrational forces of sex and fantasy, the libertinage that the writer succumbs to. Freed from all restraint, these forces would make social life impossible because they would turn it into a jungle of hungry beasts. On the other hand, the plague represents the primitive world, an exotic reality in which, unlike the narrator’s world of the spirit and civilised Europe, life is instinctual rather than based on ideas, where man can still live in a state of nature. The ‘Asian cholera’ that comes to ravage the jewel of culture and the intellect that is Venice comes from the remote parts of the planet ‘among whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches’,20 and to some degree the havoc that it wreaks prefigures the defeat of civilisation by the forces of barbarism.
This part of the story is open to different readings. The plague represents, for some, the political and social decomposition of Europe that was emerging from the joyful excesses of the belle époque and was about to self-destruct. This is the ‘social’ interpretation of the epidemic that infiltrates the lakeside city in an imperceptible manner and engulfs it, like the poison of lust in the immaculate spirit of the moralist. In this reading, the epidemic represents the price of degeneration, madness and ruin that must be paid by those who give in to the call of pleasure and submit their intelligence to the irrational dictates of passion.
The man writing this is, without a doubt, another moralist, like von Aschenbach before his fall. Like his character – and it is well known that both Gustav Mahler and the author of Death in Venice himself acted as models for von Aschenbach – Thomas Mann also had an instinctual fear of pleasure, that region of experience that blots out rationality, where all ideas are shipwrecked. Here are two romantics disguised as classical writers, two men for whom the passion of the senses, the euphoria of sex, is a supreme moment of pleasure that men and women must experience, albeit conscious of the fact that it will plunge them into decline and death. These licentious puritans do not have a trace of the joyful, ludic eighteenth-century view of sex as a world of play and entertainment, in perfect harmony with life’s other demands. The demands of the body and the spirit were two realms that the eighteenth century merged and which, in the nineteenth century, the century of romanticism, would become incompatible.
A symbol is, of itself, ambiguous and contradictory; it is always open to interpretations that vary according to the reader and the time of reading. Despite the fact that it is less than eighty years since Death in Venice was written, many of its allegories and symbols are now unclear to us because our age has emptied them of any content or made them irreconcilable. The rigid bourgeois morality that pervades the world of Thomas Mann and gives the fate of von Aschenbach a tragic air appears today, in our permissive society, a picturesque anomaly, just like the Asian plague, with its medieval resonance, which modern-day chemistry would soon defeat. Why is it necessary to punish so cruelly the poor artist whose only sin is to discover late in the day – and, what is more, only in the imagination – the pleasure of the flesh?
And yet, even from our perspective of readers living in a time when our tolerance in sexual matters has made excess appear conventional and boring, the drama of this solitary fifty-year-old, so timid and so wise, who has fallen desperately in love with the Polish boy and who sacrifices himself in the flames of this passion, affects us and moves us deeply. Because, in the interstices of this story there is an abyss that can be glimpsed and which we immediately identify in ourselves and in the society in which we live. An abyss teeming with violence, desires and horrific, fevered ghosts, which we normally are not aware of except through privileged experiences which occasionally reveal it, reminding us that, however much we might try to consign it to the shadows and wipe it from our memory, it is an integral part of human nature and remains, with its monsters and seductive sirens, as a permanent challenge to the habits and customs of civilisation.
At a certain point in his internal drama, von Aschenbach attempts to sublimate his passion through myth. He moves it to the world of culture and transforms himself into Socrates, talking to Phaedrus about beauty and love on the banks of the Ilisos. This is a clever move by the author to cleanse to some extent the noxious vapours emanating from the pleasurable hell in which von Aschenbach finds himself, giving them a philosophical dimension, making them less carnal, broadening the scope of the story by providing a cultural context. Also, it is not gratuitous. Von Aschenbach was a living ‘classic’, and it is quite natural for his consciousness to search within the world of culture for precedents and references to what is happening to him. But the abyss that has opened up beneath his feet, and which the writer plunges into without any sense of remorse, is not a site of pure ideas or the spirit. It is the site of the body, which he had regulated and disdained and which now is reclaiming its rights, freeing itself and vanquishing the spirit that had held it captive.
This demand has a beginning but no end: awoken by any stimulus – the beauty of Tadzio, for example – free to grow and become immersed in daily life in search of a satisfaction that the fantasy that fuels it makes ever more unattainable, sexual desire, that source of pleasure, can also be a deadly plague for the city. For that reason, life in the city imposes limits and morality on sexual desire,
religion and culture looks to tame it and confine it. In the final weeks of his life, Gustav von Aschenbach – and with him the readers of this beautiful parable – discovers that these attempts at control are always relative because, as happens to him, the desire to recover a total sovereignty, which has been stifled by individuals for the benefit of social existence, re-emerges from time to time, demanding that life should not just be reason, peace and discipline but also madness, violence and chaos. In the depths of this exemplary citizen, von Aschenbach, there lurked a painted savage, looking for the right moment to come into the light and take revenge.
Lima, September 1988
Mrs Dalloway
The Intense and Sumptuous Life of Banality
Mrs Dalloway recounts a normal day in the London life of Clarissa Dalloway, a dull upper-middle-class lady married to a Conservative MP, and the mother of an adolescent daughter. The story begins one sunny morning in June 1923, as Clarissa is walking through the centre of the city and ends that same evening when the guests at a party given at the Dalloways’ house are beginning to leave. Although during the day one tragic event occurs – the suicide of a young man who had returned from the war with his mind unbalanced – what is significant about the story is not this episode, or the myriad small events and memories that make up the story as a whole, but the fact that all this is narrated from inside the mind of one of the characters, that subtle and impalpable reality where life becomes impression, enjoyment, suffering, memory. The novel appeared in 1925 and was the first of the three great novels – the others are To the Lighthouse and The Waves – in which Virginia Woolf would revolutionise the narrative art of her time, creating a language capable of persuasively imitating human subjectivity, the meanderings and elusive rhythms of consciousness. Her achievement is no less than that of Proust and Joyce: she complements and enriches their work through her particular feminine sensibility. I know how debatable it is to apply the adjective feminine to a work of literature, and I accept that in innumerable cases the use of such a term is somewhat arbitrary. But for books like La Princesse de Clèves or for authors like Colette or Virginia Woolf, it seems absolutely appropriate. In Mrs Dalloway, reality has been reinvented from a perspective that mainly, but not completely, expresses the point of view and condition of a woman. And for that reason, it is the feminine experiences of the story that are most vivid in the reader’s memory, that seem to us essentially true, like the example of the formidable old woman, Clarissa’s aunt Miss Helen Parry, who at eightysomething years old, in the hubbub of the party, only remembers the wild and splendid orchids of her youth in Burma, which she picked and reproduced in watercolours.
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