Deaths in Venice

by Philip Kitcher

  All this could be part of the film in which the composer Mahler-Aschenbach, weak of heart and sick at heart, makes a slow way to his place on the beach, accompanied by themes from the second movement of Das Lied. Serious strain is visible in his face as he looks on at the boys’ struggle, hearing the music with which the tenor sings of the howling ape. A version of Vere, but one afflicted with a serious cardiac ailment, he looks on as Claggart prepares to destroy Billy, to smash “Beauty.”

  It might end there, too, with the strain too much. Aschenbach-Mahler might collapse back into his chair, the Meister-Erzieher, the one who apprehends and communicates higher beauty, extinguished by the extinction of beauty’s embodiment—for Jaschu’s vengeance might go too far, leaving Tadzio breathless, lifeless on the sand, uniting him with Aschenbach in death. But that is not the end. Instead, the boy walks into the sea (the “infinite sea”?), wandering on the sandbar: separated from his companions and from the spectator, he gazes into the misty distance. There he is transformed.

  FIGURE 3.11. Tadzio on the sandbar, one of the final images from Visconti’s film. This frame captures the autumnal character of the deserted beach, with the unattended camera (specified in Mann’s description). Tadzio has not yet turned to beckon to Aschenbach.

  He looks back, as if inviting Aschenbach to follow, and the writer returns the gaze, as at first. The sea, into which Aschenbach is summoned is the counterpart of the enduring earth of which Mahler’s leave-taker sings, the seasonal rhythms of the one corresponding to the tidal motions of the other. We have come to the finale of Das Lied, to that extraordinary moment of hushed mystery before the voice breaks out in its final confession of appreciation and affirmation, of gratitude and love, of the acceptance of human life and human death.

  Some of these ideas and feelings have already been prepared earlier in the novella. Aschenbach has conceived the sea as a resting place before, in the thoughts of a comforting death as he sat in the mysterious gondola106 and, most explicitly, in a rare earlier moment of contentment at the lido.107 In chapter 3, we were told of his love for the sea, how it answered to the desire for rest of the overwrought artist, how in being undivided, without measure, and eternal it stood in opposition to his strivings, promising the respite of nothingness, of nonexistence. For a moment, he could even think of this promise of rest as the fulfillment of his vocation: “To rest in what is perfect (ideal, complete in itself) is the longing of those who strive for what is excellent, and is not nothingness itself a form of perfection?”108 At this moment, the figure of Tadzio crosses his vision of the sea—the boy intersects the blurred horizon, just as he will in his final pose. Aschenbach’s thoughts are redirected: he returns from the momentary desire for rest to the life of insatiable strivings, to the attempt to capture evanescent beauty.

  As Mahler and his leave-taker look on the mountains—and on the indistinct blue of the horizon—so Aschenbach looks on the sea. So, too, did his creator. An essay written in 1909 (“Sweet sleep!”) endorses the fictional writer’s seaside ruminations:

  The sea! The infinite!109 My love for the sea, whose vast simplicity I have always preferred to the demanding multiplicity of the mountains, is coeval with my love for sleep, and I am well aware of the common root of both predilections. I have in myself many elements of Indian thought, a large dose of a heavy and immoveable desire for that form or formlessness of what is complete, what is often called “Nirvana” or “Nothingness,” and, although I am an artist, I harbor a very nonartistic inclination to the eternal (zum Ewigen), which expresses itself in a dislike of division and measurement. What speaks against it, believe me, is self-critique and discipline, is, to use the most serious word, morality …110

  Aschenbach is recalled to his duty by the arrival of Tadzio not simply because of the boy’s beauty but because beauty is an occasion for the renewal of discipline, for the revival of “the will for the artistic work.”111 There comes a moment, however, when the call to discipline is rightly refused, when (as the essay on Schopenhauer puts it) someone can find, in his death, “life, the liberation from the fetters of his tired individuality.”112 Mann is referring to the death of Thomas Buddenbrook, who has struggled bravely and with intelligence to play a role for which he was ill-suited—but the point is fully general. Even for a writer, a distinguished and much-admired writer, there is a moment at which the call for more striving can be—should be—refused, when the desire for dissolution, for a final union with the “vast simplicity” of the cosmos becomes acceptable and compelling. That moment is prefigured in Aschenbach’s musings on his first morning at the beach—but he is not yet ready to declare “I have done enough.”

  The vision of the coda is different: Tadzio does not call him to a further exercise of discipline, a further celebration of beauty (beauty has, after all, just been defeated), but enters the sea—and is transfigured. From the embodiment of transitory beauty, he metamorphoses into something that will endure as long as the sea, an emissary of death, not hostile and threatening as others have been, but kindly, with the promise of that rest for which the tired artist had previously yearned. He is the friend of Der Abschied, the bringer of the farewell cup. He is also Hermes: the ambiguous god who so fascinated Mann, Zeus’s messenger, but also the protector of thieves, patron of subtle arts, diplomat, and trickster—now manifested to Aschenbach as the bearer of souls (Psychagog) to the realms of the dead.113 It seems to Aschenbach as if the boy-Hermes is beckoning to him, with a smile, and he “makes as if to follow.” Indeed, he does follow Hermes—knowingly and willingly—to death.

  The imaginary film would end here, with a sinking back into the beachside chair, a softening of the facial features into an accepting smile, accompanied by the closing measures of Das Lied. Perhaps these final moments would be punctuated by scenes of newspaper headlines announcing Mahler-Aschenbach’s death, of sad admirers slowly turning the pages of their copies of his books, scenes reminding us of the “respectfully shocked” world that hears of his demise. Those interpolated scenes would present Aschenbach’s links to the world that endures beyond him—but the last connection would be to the gently smiling boy on the sandbar and the sea stretching indefinitely behind him, before a closing shot of the composer’s face, serene and at rest, as the final chord of Das Lied fades into silence.

  The conceit of a film about Mahler-Aschenbach, a film attempting to be faithful to Mann’s novella, has been used to suggest a reading of the coda, of the ending toward which Mann struggled. Taking Aschenbach-as-Mahler seriously provides ways of giving substance to the interpretation and (I hope) ways of making it plausible, but the essence can be summarized without relying on the conceit or on the identification. At the end of Death in Venice, Aschenbach can accept the end of his strivings. His heart, worn out by his years of steadfast discipline, of dutiful service, is taxed beyond its powers by the threat to what he has tried to apprehend and to express—beauty is almost overcome before him. Aware of his finitude, of his inability permanently to cherish and protect what has been most important to him, he can nonetheless recognize himself as having lived and loved, as having struggled and created. He can see himself as connected with the enduring world he must now leave. He is not deceived: the connection is affirmed in the novella’s closing lines, in the shocked respect with which news of his death is greeted.

  Aschenbach has been gripped with a thought of his life as made worthwhile through the constant striving to affirm it, his efforts always shadowed by the prospect of a premature truncation. The pressure to move on from one work to the next, to struggle for new evocations of transient beauty and affirmations of their worth, is central to who he is—the mind must beat on, as he walks in Munich during that oppressive spring day, and it must revive itself when his reflections on the sea are interrupted by Tadzio’s presence on the beach. At the end, however, he and Tadzio are both changed, and he can accept the incompleteness of his work and his life. He can simultaneously hold the ideal of an indefinitely extending sequence
of accomplishments, whose realization would permanently embody the value central to his life, and accept the fact that his successes are only partial. His attitude is a mixture of affirmation and abnegation, the one grounded in recognition of what he has done and its reverberations in an enduring world, the other based on knowing that his work is incomplete and that the echoes he leaves will eventually diminish into silence.

  The philosophical attitude on death toward which Mann works and that (on this reading) he assigns to his protagonist develops further a theme emphasized in one of Schopenhauer’s many explanations of the abnegation of the will:

  Since a human being is nature itself, and indeed is nature in the highest degree of self-consciousness, nature being only the objectified will to live, so any person who has grasped this perspective and remains true to it may certainly and rightfully console himself for his own death and the death of his friend by looking back on the enduring life of nature, which he himself is.114

  Mann frees this thought from the dubious metaphysics, replacing the derivative claim that we are identical with the world that endures beyond us with the proposal that we are linked to it, connected in virtue of what we do, what we give or create. Our admittedly finite strivings are neither worthless (as Schopenhauer judges them) nor charged with some task of transcendent affirmation (which Nietzsche yearns to accomplish) but, at least potentially, capable of forging that connection to a larger whole, in the consciousness of which we can serenely accept our own passing. If we are fortunate, these strivings are enough.

  The attitude commended in this way is, however, hard to sustain, requiring as it does two distinct judgments that pull in opposite directions. For, on the one hand, the continued affirmation of life, expressed in the desire to strive for further connections to a world that will endure after those efforts cease, demands that the tasks at hand be perceived as important, while, on the other hand, the acceptance of life for what it has been and what it has accomplished presupposes a kind of completeness in what has already been done. Reconciling this tension is logically possible—you can see your connection to the larger universe as adequate but wish to enrich it further—but any such assessment is psychologically vulnerable to doubts about the value of what has been accomplished. Little wonder, then, that writers and musicians whose works sometimes present this attitude cannot always live by it.115

  To read the coda in this way is not mere fancy, even though the text of the novella does not compel it: like Hermes, Mann is a master of ambiguity.116 The perspective attributed to Aschenbach emerges, more fully formed, in the late masterpiece Visconti, insightfully if inchoately, uses as a foil. Toward the end of Doktor Faustus, Leverkühn’s father and his father-counterpart, Max Schweigestill—the paterfamilias on the farm that so resembles Adrian’s childhood home, the farm on which he has chosen to live—die almost simultaneously. The journey back to his birthplace for Jonathan Leverkühn’s funeral would be too long, but, despite illness and against medical advice, Adrian attends the corresponding local ceremony for Schweigestill. Accompanied by the devoted Zeitblom, he returns from the service to be greeted by the familiar pungent smell of the dead man’s pipe. “‘That endures,’ said Adrian. ‘Quite a while, perhaps as long as the house stands. It lingers on in Buchel [Leverkühn’s childhood home] too. The period of our lingering afterwards, perhaps a little shorter or a little longer, that is what is called immortality.’”117 The ordinary unpretentious endurance of Max Schweigestill, his continued connection with a world he has left, is symbolized in, although not restricted to, the odor of the tobacco, impregnated in the walls and woodwork of the house in which he has passed his entire life.

  Mann takes up the thought again in Zeitblom’s description of Leverkühn’s final work, The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus, a cantata the composer attempts to introduce to a small audience of friends at a soirée that precipitates his collapse. Zeitblom’s analysis is simultaneously a presentation of Leverkühn’s interpretation of Faust’s closing hours and an expression of the meaning of the composer’s own dissolution and death. Like Leverkühn, Faust brings his friends together. They share the farewell cup, and, like Mahler’s leave-taker, Faust insists on his departure. The cantata concludes with a passage for orchestra alone, music that penetrates the depths of despair, quite without comfort or redemption. Yet out of this terrible lament grows hope.

  It would be the hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair—not the betrayal of it, but the miracle that goes beyond faith. Hear the close, listen to it with me! One group of instruments after the other drops out, and what remains, with which the work dies away, is the high g of a cello, the last word, the last suspended sound, in a pianissimo fermata, slowly fading. Then there is nothing more. Silence and night. But the note that continues to hang and pulsate in the silence, the note that is no more, for which only the soul listens, and which was once the expression of sorrow, is no longer that but changes its meaning, and endures like a light in the darkness.118

  Leverkühn’s music, Aschenbach’s writings, Mann’s novels and stories, Mahler’s songs and symphonies, all are summed up in that fading high note on the cello, enduring after it has ceased, as Max Schweigestill’s pipe smoke endures. Endeavors may be unfinished, aspirations unsatisfied, accomplishments transitory or incomplete. It may matter, nevertheless, that they have been.

  8

  But what of us, we who are not Aschenbach nor Leverkühn nor Mahler nor Britten nor Mann? We too have projects, plans on a far smaller scale, that are indefinitely extensible into the future, and we live, too, with the certainty that they will remain incomplete, with the knowledge also that they, and we, have sometimes, perhaps often, failed. What bearing can Mann’s novella, or Britten’s opera, or Mahler’s Das Lied have on our situations or on our assessment of them? What significance can the reflections in which I have engaged have for thought about ordinary lives and the ordinary deaths that will terminate them?

  These questions come in two parts. First is a general worry, one that surfaced already in the second section of chapter 1, about the possibility that literature or music, or would-be philosophical commentary on literature and music, could inform serious thought about the worth of any human life, whether a form of ordinary human existence, an actual life of rare creative achievement, or the fictitious life of some idealized protagonist. Second is the doubt that the exploration of literature and music, or at least those literary and musical works that have been the focus of previous sections, has any significance for addressing philosophical questions, including the “central philosophical problem,” as they arise in connection with lives whose horizons are more limited, whose projects are more mundane. These concerns deserve a more thorough and extensive answer than I have hitherto attempted, and I shall close by trying to address them. Because the first is the more fundamental and sweeping, and because my efforts to meet it will supply resources for approaching the second, I shall begin by amplifying my defense of the possibility of philosophy that shows what cannot be stated in other, more “respectable,” ways.

  A useful starting point is Zeitblom’s urgent entreaty to listen to the close of his friend’s final composition (not, of course, a serious possibility for the readers of Mann’s novel, since the score of the Lamentation has not been provided).119 Zeitblom is doing what I attempted in the sixth section of this chapter, where I recommended listening to Das Lied von der Erde—and, indeed, listening in a very particular way. To foster the intended mode of listening, both of us must point to features of the focal works: we must prepare the listener for experiences and reflections we hope will ensue. For the point of our urgings is to bring our readers to a previously unanticipated perspective, a different Gestalt on life and on the factors that make a difference to its mattering. We envisage a process in which people are brought to see or hear or think or feel in novel ways, so that questions that had been viewed as unanswerable admit of solution. The source of skepticism about the philosophical import of works of art lies in
a conviction that a process of this kind could not have any serious standing, that judgments formed in this way would not be trustworthy, that feelings so produced would be baseless. However our own inclinations lead us to read a novella, to listen to a song-cycle, or to view a painting or film, however we are guided (manipulated?) by the pointers others supply in their exhortations to reading or hearing or viewing, it would be irresponsible to change our minds on any matter of importance.

  To come to terms with the roots of skepticism, it will be necessary to have some understanding of the kinds of psychological changes that (intense) experience of works of art might engender, at least an outline120 of the processes that occur, so that we have a sense of their character and of the depths to which they might reach. Before attempting a sketch, however, it is worth recognizing explicitly an apparent consequence of skepticism. Effectively, the skeptic conceives the contributions that works of art make to our lives in terms of their episodic effects: they give us passing pleasure or relieve us from boredom or induce a momentary sense of uplift we find agreeable—they are on a par with the baser satisfactions obtained from a glass of beer or a game of skittles, differing, if at all, only in intensity.121 Any lasting effect on people’s lives, a shifted perspective on themselves and their prior plans and aims, for example, would simply be gratuitous and unwarranted. To conceive the experience of art in this reduced way rubs roughly against the sensibilities of devoted art lovers—but friction can only motivate an attempt to respond to the skeptic; it cannot constitute an effective answer.