Aschenbach does not operate in a world of illusory objects: the gondolas, the strawberries, and the red bow on Tadzio’s swimsuit are all perfectly real. He lives, however, in a world permeated by values and attributed significance. The elderly fop is disgusting, and Aschenbach wonders how his comrades tolerate him; the scene at the beach, even before Tadzio appears, is peaceful and satisfying.191 His fellow guests at the hotel and the large international public that applauds his writing would surely share these judgments, treating them as natural and “proper.” Aschenbach, who has repudiated bohemianism, has thought more deeply about what is worthwhile and has made a conscious decision not only to endorse judgments of this kind but to articulate and to defend them, to make them clear and luminous for bourgeois society as a whole. He is, like his ancestors, a public servant, even a soldier, who guards the culture others take for granted, who understands possible challenges to it and dedicates his writing—and his life—to combating them. Or, to vary the comparison, he is akin to the Platonic philosopher-guardians whose informed judgments make the worthwhile life possible for the many who do not probe or question. He has taken some of the steps Schopenhauer envisages, guiding his conduct not by thoughtless assimilation of the values accepted around him but by considering and endorsing the cultural tradition in which he stands. Aware of the fragility of that tradition, he devotes himself to maintaining it and, in so doing, translates a broad sympathy for the unreflective Bürger (Tonio Kröger’s “blond and blue-eyed ones”) into a disciplined—ascetic—life.
Aschenbach treads a path to asceticism, but he does not reach the state Schopenhauer envisages. He does not abnegate the Will. Rather, he endeavors to force his will in a particular direction, one in which egoism gives way to concern for a wider form of human life and extended sympathies become frozen in a sense of duty. In his maturity, he acquiesces in the moral principles of his society, aspiring to an art that will support them, whose beauty will be a means of moral education and inspiration. The novella shows us how the asceticism is undermined. On a Schopenhauerian reading, we could view the anatomy of Aschenbach’s decline as vividly exemplifying the claim that, even in a sensitive and self-conscious person, the orderly channeling of the will toward stably valued objects is impossible. It is, of course, especially apt, given the prominence of the destructive power of sex in Schopenhauer (especially as Mann read him), that Aschenbach’s decline is brought about through the revival of his sexuality.
Similarly, Aschenbach’s discipline, the asceticism that falters and collapses in Venice, can be read through a Nietzschean lens, even though it does not conform to any of the types into which Nietzsche divides the ascetic ideal. Aschenbach is a writer, an artist, but it would be uncharitable to characterize him as Nietzsche contemptuously does as a “valet of some form of morality or philosophy or religion.”192 Even if he serves as protector of the values of bourgeois society, the role has been deliberately chosen, alternatives have been canvassed and even experienced, before the turn away from “sympathy with the abyss.”193 Perhaps he has not thought things through with the keenness of that “steely-eyed knight,” Schopenhauer, a man able to find his own self-conception, but Aschenbach, like Nietzsche’s ascetic philosopher, sacrifices delights others take for granted to the daily demands of his routine (“his rigid, cold, and passionate duty”), thereby affirming his choice of role.194 Like the ascetic priest, the writer dedicates himself to the care and cure of a potentially sick society—for him, the artist’s role is to educate the community and to cure it of its moral ambiguities, its tendencies to laxity.195 Aschenbach’s striking discipline testifies to his faith in “the blessing of work” and the curative power of “mechanical activity,” remedies prescribed by the priest-physician.196 For Nietzsche’s ascetic priest, of course, life is validated not through its mundane qualities but in its relation to something beyond, something transcendent, and the ascetic life becomes a “bridge” to this further entity. Although Aschenbach shares in the fin-de-siècle turn away from faith in transcendent deities, his Platonic sympathies incline him to a similar picture of his own life: the artist, too, points to “entities beyond,” to wisdom and goodness, entities only apprehended through beauty. Artists search for wisdom, not what the world thinks of as “knowledge,” “science,” or “truth,” for, echoing Nietzsche, Aschenbach has turned away from the fourth (and last) form of the ascetic ideal, perhaps the “noblest,” but also one attuned to a society in decline, to people possessed by a propensity for self-belittlement, to an age in which it is all too easy to succumb to moral laxity: for the sciences offer a cheerless prospect of human life and worth, one that James captures in his bleak image.197
Aschenbach’s discipline, his solitary struggles to serve as an artist—as his austere ancestors have served in their own roles—his attempt to achieve complete purity of language, his self-deceived recapitulation of Socratic views about beauty as a means, present him as a composite of exemplars of Nietzschean versions of the ascetic ideal. So, just as the novella can be read as a concrete presentation of Schopenhauer’s theses about the will—shorn of their metaphysical underpinnings and developed psychologically—it can also be taken as a many-sided elaboration of Nietzsche’s treatment of asceticism, one that vividly shows the self-mutilations asserted in the philosophical treatment. Better still, in accordance with Mann’s own sense of the creative writer as making his own “strange brew” of ingredients borrowed from a passionate reading of philosophy, Death in Venice can stand as an original piece of philosophy, one that modifies and mixes themes from both influential predecessors and demonstrates their shared conclusion about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of finding value in human life. Aschenbach’s iron discipline might be viewed as an attempt to live a worthwhile life—a heroic attempt, for Nietzsche recognizes the striving for self-affirmation that moves some of the figures he considers—but, in the end, it is undercut by the ways in which the culture and tradition in which he stands have framed the writer’s efforts, foisted upon him ideals he cannot live by—and thus it inevitably fails.
So far, so plausible. Mann begins to emerge as an original philosopher, one who explores positions related to, but distinct from, those of the thinkers whose ideas he borrows. Yet there is more. The voice of the previous paragraph is, like that of the moralistic judge at the fountain, an explicitly philosophizing narrative voice. In this case, it presents the views of an outsider who observes the frailty of the lives of those who live lightly, and it assesses them from a vantage point to which they do not aspire. Voices of this sort are heard often in Mann’s fiction, and they belong to figures who look on, hungrily, at a world from which they are excluded. Tonio Kröger’s comparison should be remembered: they are like those “specially prepared” papal singers. Perhaps, then, there is room for ironic distance, a separation of the philosophical summary from the novella, a distance that will allow us to see what the case of Aschenbach actually shows.
7
In defending the idea of a third grade of philosophical involvement, I proposed that the important philosophical contribution of art, of fiction, or drama, or music might lie not in the saying but the showing. Connecting Mann’s novella to themes in Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, revealing how he mixes and amends their ideas, is not itself problematic, but it easily seduces us into accepting a conclusion analogous to theirs. It is profitable to read Mann as presenting these themes for his readers’ reflection, but I want to resist the thought that he should be taken to endorse them or that he intends his readers to make any such judgments. Our reaction to Aschenbach might be to conclude that he exemplifies the thought of the unruliness of the will, the inevitable failure of human attempts to define and pursue values, or some contradiction at the heart of the ascetic ideal. Before we arrive at that evaluation, however, we might reflect on the ways in which Mann frames the anatomy of Aschenbach’s decline.
The “obituary” chapter informs us that Aschenbach already emerged as a writer in his late teens and earl
y twenties. A decade later, his fame had grown to the extent of making it necessary to provide only short replies to the many letters addressed to him—and, in the dedication to his correspondence, there are already signs of that disciplined routine we associate with him. Supposing that the raw mistakes of his youth were made during this first period, it would follow that at least two decades of his life were devoted to the disciplined pursuit of his art and that these decades were those in which he produced the four major works attributed to him, through the daily accumulation of small insights, the painstaking and often painful crafting of exquisitely elegant sentences. Viewed more globally, then, this is a life dominated by successful application of a constant will, by an asceticism that maintains itself. The novella is largely devoted to a period of a few weeks, an epilogue to Aschenbach’s career. It is an episode, one that surely does not ft well with the overall pattern of his career. Does the fact of a problematic ending necessarily invalidate the shape or nullify the worth of a human life? In what ways has Aschenbach actually failed, and in what precisely does his failure consist? What alternative, if any, is revealed in Venice to disclose the inadequacy of the values by which he has lived?
Those who think seriously about medical policies and about the best use of the resources provided by our increased understanding of the human body and its frailties often recognize the extraordinary disconnection between life and the process of dying, a disconnection that contemporary medicine permits and even encourages. With a tangle of tubes and a clutter of machines we strive officiously to keep alive people who have lost the psychological and physical capacities that were once central to their sense of themselves. They gain extra hours and days, even months and years, a prolonged existence sharply at odds with what they were, what they wanted to become, and with the reflective judgments they would have made about how medicine should be employed for human benefit. As the ancients already appreciated, part of living a good life is having a good death, and there is no doubt that some contemporary deaths are protracted enough to cast a shadow over the life that came before—many thoughtful people rightly fear the incongruity of a terminal mode of existence they could never endorse as their own.
To cast a shadow is not, however, to nullify the value of the person’s life and its accomplishments. Those who observe the lingering of the shell of someone they have loved are rightly pained and appalled by the contrast between the vital past and the horribly diminished present—yet, when it is all over, the vivid sense of the beloved returns, and the person lives on in memory, defined by the aspirations and actions that preceded the mockery of the final stage. That stage becomes an episode, a regrettable period tacked on to a life whose value—or lack of it—is determined by quite other considerations.
Mann’s sensitivity to life is at its sharpest in his sensibility toward death, and some of the most penetrating moments in his fiction focus on deaths at odds with the lives that came before. His novels contain relatives of the medical examples I have chosen in my efforts to liberate from premature philosophizing our thinking about Aschenbach’s death: the death of the Frau Konsulin in Buddenbrooks and the lingering of Adrian Leverkühn after his collapse in Doktor Faustus. In neither instance, I suggest, does the character of the end of the life play a decisive role in assessing its worth.
Bethsy Buddenbrook, née Kröger, we are told, “made, like all the Krögers, an extremely elegant appearance”198—her early life is that of one of the great society ladies in the small but prosperous commercial town (modeled on Lübeck) in which she resides. After the death of her pious husband, however, she turns away from the social sphere, honoring his memory by her own new-found religious zeal. Her death begins quietly, with symptoms that might well signal an ordinary respiratory infection, but builds in a long crescendo of pain. As her trajectory toward death becomes undeniable, the family assembles at her bedside:
The movements of the sick woman had increased. A terrible unrest, an inexpressible fear and sense of need, an inescapable feeling of being abandoned and of helplessness without limits, must have filled this body, destined for death, from the top of the head to the soles of the feet. Her eyes, these poor, beseeching eyes, complaining of pain and seeking relief, sometimes closed with the rustling motions of the head from side to side, sometimes opened with a shattered expression or widened so much that the little veins of the eyeballs bulged red with blood. Yet there was no lapse into unconsciousness!199
The hypersensitive Christian cannot endure the scene and stumbles out, appalled at the travesty of his mother’s life displayed in its closing.
The grotesque death of the Frau Konsulin is entirely at odds with the elegance of her early life and the piety of her widowhood. Yet the discord between the living of her life and the painful mode of leaving it does not nullify its potential value. What we make of Bethsy Buddenbrook—and what those who survive her make of her—depends on the success of what came before. Was her care for her family and its elegant traditions, for the society in which she achieved her prominence, enough to make her existence worthwhile? Was her devotion to the charitable work of the church and to its evangelical mission sufficient? If the circumstances of her death are pertinent in taking up these questions, that is because they provoke reflections on the transience of some of the qualities she has exemplified: the woman whose head moves chaotically on the pillow has lost all the grace and elegance the Konsulin so carefully preserved; the piety appears to bring little relief in her suffering (although there are ambiguities in her final words to the beloved dead whom she thinks of herself as joining). The shadow cast by this death does not deprive the life of value but, at most, calls to our attention those features of it that antecedently undermined its worth: perhaps the ephemeral nature of the social distinctions the young Bethsy Kröger and Bethsy Buddenbrook had enjoyed, perhaps the shallowness of a religious commitment induced by modification of her social role. By the same token, the closing episode of Aschenbach’s life might be viewed as bringing into prominence characteristics of his career that raise doubts about its success.
Adrian Leverkühn is, like Aschenbach, an artist, one whose life ends in an episode quite at odds with the twenty-four-year period of his creativity. After his collapse at the soirée whose official rationale is the presentation of his final oratorio—the Lamentation of Faustus—Leverkühn is delivered over to maternal care, first to his landlady and “surrogate mother,” Frau Schweigestill, and then to “Jonathan Leverkühn’s brown-eyed widow,” who takes her “lost [literally, “gone astray”] son back to his child-hood.”200 He lives on for ten years in his reduced condition. According to his biographer, Serenus Zeitblom, there are reasons to think that residues of the composer’s former dignity caused him to be vaguely aware of his state and to be horrified by it, prodding him to attempt suicide.201 Halfway through the decade in which he lingers toward death, Zeitblom sees him again, on the occasion of Leverkühn’s fiftieth birthday, when the former composer presents to his long-time friend a face devoid of recognition, an “Ecce Homo face” whose mouth is “opened in pain” and whose eyes are “unseeing.”202
There is little temptation to suppose that the terrible reduction of Leverkühn’s last decade negates the value of his accomplishments any more than the similar fate that befell Nietzsche undermines the worth of the life preceding his collapse. These endings are travesties as grotesque as the close of the life of the Frau Konsulin, and they are far more protracted. Yet they raise no serious questions: rather, as Zeitblom accurately sees and rightly fears, what threatens the project of his friend’s life is the possibility that his music will vanish, that the political circumstances of the times have deprived it of the chance to attain its proper place in the musical culture of Germany and the world. Moreover, unlike the death of Frau Buddenbrook, Leverkühn’s collapse is not fortuitous: it is intimately connected with his artistic creativity, the reckoning he must pay for his extraordinary achievements.203 Of course, readers must rely on Zeitblom’s judgment that t
hose achievements are the work of genius, but, whatever else this eminently decent biographer may have been deceived about, it is hard not to trust him on this point.
Aschenbach, by contrast, receives no such detailed account of his artistic works, and the voice of the “obituary” is measured and not that of a friend whose homage and dedication are unswerving.204 Consequently, there is more space to wonder if this final episode exposes something lacking in the writings of his maturity, that the infatuation and the death to which it leads reveal that the “obituary” judgments are flawed or over-blown.205 Over ten years before conceiving Death in Venice, Mann had already explored the possibility that a final episode might undermine a life centered on dedication to art.
The eponymous central character of “Der kleine Herr Friedemann,” left at the age of one month in the charge of a nurse with a liking for the bottle, fell from the changing table, and the accident distorted his physical development. Learning, as he grows through adolescence, that young women, however friendly and sympathetic, will never feel any romantic sparks for him, he reconciles himself to a life of physical comfort ministered to by his unmarried sisters, of respectable work, and, above all, of immersion in the arts. On his thirtieth birthday, as he sits in the garden with a book on his knee, looking up into the sunny sky, he reflects: “That has been thirty years. Now will come perhaps ten more, or even twenty, God alone knows. They will quietly arrive and pass by, just as years past have done, and I look forward to them with peace of mind [Seelenfrieden].”206 Little Friedemann’s serenity is shattered by the arrival in town of a married woman for whom he develops a violent passion. Thinking back on the contented musings of his thirtieth birthday, he understands the peace he has lost and knows that, despite his efforts to defend his quiet contentment, he is now gripped with an “irresistible force,” one that will drive him into “the abyss.”207 There is no holding back. Conscious of his own folly, he reveals his adoration, is curtly rebuffed, and, in humiliation and self-disgust, drowns himself.208
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