Deaths in Venice

by Kitcher, Philip;

  89. As, most prominently, in Joseph, Das Gesetz, and Der Erwählte.

  90. I have heard many presentations by colleagues and friends who have done this for the visual arts and for music: I think particularly of talks by Michael Fried and Robert Harrist, by Alfred Brendel, Elaine Sissman, and Carol Plantamura. As chapter 3 will consider at greater length, the critical illumination can proceed by explaining the technique through which particular effects are achieved (analytic mode) or by making connections between aspects of the artwork and other phenomena, including different artistic creations (synthetic mode). My treatment will primarily be synthetic in character.

  91. As already remarked, this sort of philosophical work has a distinguished history in the French and German intellectual traditions. In recent decades, thanks to pioneering essays by Stanley Cavell (see, in particular, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Must We Mean What We Say? [New York: Scribners, 1969]), it has flourished in Anglophone philosophy. Important work has been done by Alexander Nehamas, Robert Pippin, Joshua Landy, Martha Nussbaum, Candace Vogler, and Moira Gatens.

  92. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 306.

  93. This characterization occurs in a letter to Hedwig Fischer, the wife of Mann’s publisher, in a letter of October 1913, in which he expresses his wish to avoid the charge of “optimism,” leveled at Königliche Hoheit. Perhaps we should be cautious about the views expressed in this letter, since, as Peter de Mendelssohn notes, Mann was worried that Hedwig Fischer might have reservations about a book in which “Knabenliebe” (love of boys) played so central a role (dMM 2:1479).

  94. A point well made by David Luke in the introduction to his translation of the novella: L xli.

  95. Many writers choose “Apollinian” as the adjectival form of “Apollo”; I see no reason to modify the third vowel.

  96. As later discussions will make clear, I am not rejecting the idea of Nietzsche’s influence on Mann’s novella but merely opposing a particular—very popular—way of understanding that influence.

  97. For a reading close to that I have outlined, see Martina Hoffman, Thomas Manns Der Tod in Venedig: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte im Spiegel philosophischer Konzeptionen (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), esp. 78–92. T. J. Reed (Reed, esp. 154–155), Manfred Dierks (“Untersuchungen zum Tod in Venedig”), and André von Growicka (“Myth Plus Psychology,” trans. in K 115–130) all offer more complex versions of the role of The Birth of Tragedy, and its celebrated dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, in Death in Venice. Given the many insights of these distinguished commentators, it may seem folly to suggest, as I shall, that the importance of this particular Nietzschean work has been overrated.

  98. As Reed lucidly points out (Reed 149).

  99. Reed’s title for his chapter on Death in Venice, “The Art of Ambivalence,” is entirely apt.

  100. GKFA 8.1:588; LP 72, K 60, L 260, H 135–136.

  101. GKFA 8.1:567–586, passim; LP 56–70, K 47–59, L 245–259, H 104–133. To achieve naturalness, the English translators often place the identifying adjective elsewhere: thus, instead of the somewhat awkward “So the confused one knew and wanted nothing more” (that would remain close to the German phrase; GKFA 8.1:567), they offer “It came at last to this that his frenzy left him capacity for nothing else” (LP 56), “Entangled and besotted as he was, he no longer wished for anything else” (K 47), “So it was that in his state of distraction he could no longer think of anything or want anything except” (L 245), and “Thus the addled traveler could no longer think or care about anything but” (H 104). Only Heim captures the designating phrase used as substitutes for name (“Aschenbach”) or pronoun (“he”).

  102. As Reed points out (Reed 163).

  103. Dorrit Cohn, “The Second Author of Death in Venice,” trans. and repr. from Cohn’s Probleme der Moderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983) in K 178–195. Cohn’s excellent and sensitive discussion raises the issue whether the second narrator is to be identified with part of Aschenbach’s own psyche. If that is so, it is a voice Aschenbach—like Mann—can sometimes regard with ironic detachment. One of the stylistic advances of Death in Venice is Mann’s skill in developing various distinct modes of narrative presentation and weaving them together. That occurs quite evidently in the “Greek idyll” section of the novella (chapter 4) and in Aschenbach’s Socratic ruminations. The more important separation, however, recognized by Cohn, lies in the differentiation of ethical points of view, in juxtaposing a voice that issues the judgments of conventional piety (the voice of the ancestors) with another that refrains from moralizing. In his later fiction, particularly in Joseph und seine Brüder, Mann was to elaborate the separation of narrative voices with extraordinary subtlety, distinguishing high religious style from critical religious discourse, sometimes treating both with irony, setting quasi-historical narrative beside a critical perspective on historical evidence, in ways that provoke readers to ponder the stability of judgments parts of the tetralogy appear to take for granted. The embryonic form of this complexity is already in the earlier novella.

  104. The point holds, even if Apollonian art is unstable, a “camp of war” needing constant defense—and thus offers a “severe form of education, suitable for battle” (NW 1:41). If there is a single passage The Birth of Tragedy that might have affected Death in Venice, this would be my candidate. For, as we shall see below, the idea of military discipline is central to the portrait of Aschenbach.

  105. NW 1:37.

  106. NW 1:61–62.

  107. The kinship with Schopenhauer on art as disclosing reality through some kind of apprehension of the will and the concomitant breakdown of individuation runs through the early sections of The Birth of Tragedy. For the praise of Homer, see NW 1:60; the German text involves a nice play on anschaulich and anschauen.

  108. Since we lack any example of Aschenbach’s prose, it is impossible to tell how significant an Apollonian artist he is—and it may seem (or be) absurd to compare his readers to the vast numbers who have heard or read the Iliad or the Odyssey. The point, however, is that we cannot take the characterization of Aschenbach as an Apollonian writer as a sign of his artistic failure (and, moreover, if we take the finely contrived style of Death in Venice as an evocation of Aschenbach’s own writing, he would deserve high praise for his artistry). To use Nietzsche’s own metaphor, there can be great monuments on either side of the gulf that divides epic from tragedy—even if those on one side reach up toward the clouds of illusion and those on the other are founded in reality.

  109. It would be very hard to argue rigorously that Aschenbach’s passionate interest in Tadzio fits into the metaphysics of The Birth of Tragedy, that it accords with an apprehension of reality as pure will (or anything similar). In practice, the commentary on Death in Venice tends to assimilate Nietzsche’s complex distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian to something like the simple contrast between intellectual detachment and raw emotion. For a novella about the subversion of detachment by the eruption of violent emotion, Mann would hardly have needed Nietzsche.

  110. Of course, this may not be the one Mann used in the years leading up to his writing Death in Venice, and his notations in it may have been made at times during which he was occupied with different projects: material on Schopenhauer or Wagner or the late essay devoted to Nietzsche, for example.

  111. Despite the numerous citations of Nietzsche in Mann’s published writings, his letters, and his diaries, the principal reference to The Birth of Tragedy of which I am aware comes from the late essay in which Nietzsche’s first work is characterized as a “prelude” (Vorspiel) to his philosophy (GKFA 19.1:198; Essays 6:68).

  112. The most radical version of this hypothesis would suppose that he never read The Birth of Tragedy with any great care. To accept that version would require some explanation of the allusions to Dionysos in the novella (perhaps through citation of Nietzsche in some secondary source or simply through reading Euripides?). For the present purposes, I am content with
the more modest claim of the text.

  113. Essays 3:188–189.

  114. Essays 3:189. It should be noted, however, that, as the judgment about the disastrous impact on German thought indicates, Mann wrote this passage at a time when particular aspects of Nietzsche’s prose would have jarring resonances for opponents of the Nazis. Perhaps he would not have made exactly the same assessment in 1912. Nevertheless, the approach to reading Nietzsche is akin to that offered in the Betrachtungen—the artist who will be for Nietzsche what Wagner was for Schopenhauer must develop a special form of irony (GKFA 13.1:93).

  115. A feature of Mann’s reading habits is also revealed by the entries in the diaries. Especially when he takes up works with significant intellectual content (as in the cases of Goethe, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche), Mann frequently records that he read “in” the pertinent volume. The examples are too numerous to list completely, but typical are entries for August 21, 1942: “After the (bad) lunch, in Human, All Too Human (TB [1940–1943] 465); and April 4, 1948—“In the evening, in The World as Will and Representation in connection with part of a conversation with [Bruno] Walter” (TB [1946–1948] 269). That is an approach to reading well suited to Nietzsche’s later works, with their sequence of pithy aphorisms, but not to The Birth of Tragedy.

  116. These will be considered more extensively in chapter 2.

  117. In some editions, but by no means all, the coda is set off from the previous text (the quasi-Socratic speech) by inserting a blank line. Thus the Fischer Taschenbuch (Schwere Stunde und andere Erzählungen [Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991], 264) and the Luke and Koelb translations mark the break (L 261, K 61); GKFA 8.1:589 does not, and neither do the Lowe-Porter or Heim translations (LP 73, H 138). It should be noted, also, that Lowe-Porter does not number the chapters, separating them only by blank lines. Thus for her a line break would mark a new chapter—which Mann clearly did not intend. Reed’s edition of the German text for English readers inserts the break. My own reading favors the demarcation, on the grounds of a significant shift in style, narration, and mood.

  118. Chapter 3 will attempt a more extensive analysis of this coda.

  119. As I shall suggest in chapter 3, this may be a further ambivalence of the novella. Most readers take it for granted that cholera is the cause of Aschenbach’s death.

  120. Aschenbach’s position is clearly that of Mann’s other outsiders, perhaps most notably Detlef, the protagonist of “Die Hungernden.” We learn very early that Aschenbach had never known the careless easy-going attitude of youth—instead, he is vividly compared to a tightly clenched fist. GKFA 8.1:509; LP 9, L 201, K 8, H 13.

  121. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), lecture 5.

  122. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 141–142.

  123. Plato Republic 4.420b; PW 95.

  124. Famously, the education of the philosopher-guardians culminates in recognition of the Form of the Good. The process is dramatized in Plato’s myth of the cave.

  125. Plato Phaedrus 247 d–e; PW 525.

  126. Plato Phaedrus 250b, d–e; PW 527–528.

  127. The most extended treatment of this theme is given in the Symposium (another dialogue on which Mann drew for Death in Venice); Plato Symposium 208e–209e (PW 491–492), citation 209d.

  128. Nietzsche, unlike Schopenhauer, would allow for the possibility of a solution but would insist on the extraordinary difficulty (if not impossibility) of either formulating it or realizing it at the present stage of human culture.

  129. For Schopenhauer’s respect for Plato, see WWV 1, book 3, §31, where Plato and Kant are hailed as the two greatest Western philosophers (WWV 1, 1:222). The recognition of the Form (or Idea) is liberated from the causal connections of our experience through the power of a work of art, so that we partially break free from the world of appearance and grasp reality (§34; WWV 1, 1:233, 234, 239). Schopenhauer’s account of how this works depends on his “correction” of Kant and his intricate aesthetic theory.

  130. Schopenhauer supposes that Will is objectified not only in animals but also in other organic things and in inanimate nature. He views the laws of nature as expressions of a particular type of objectification of the will—in the regularities of the development of plants, in the laws of magnetism and gravitation, for example (WWV 1, book 2, §21; 1:154). Complex organisms are composed of entities at many different levels and thus subject to the pull of Will in many different directions (§27; 1:196–197).

  131. The demands are issued in the preface to the first edition and often repeated thereafter; see WWV 1:8, 9. It is important to recognize the extent of what Schopenhauer asks for: the first volume (WWV 1) is a sequential argument for the pessimistic conclusion; the second (WWV 2) consists of a series of chapters providing commentary on aspects of WWV 1, keyed to specific chapters and sections; the second volume concludes with an appendix reviewing the problems Schopenhauer finds in Kant’s views. The reader has to go through all of this material twice and also to read an earlier essay (“On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason”). There are good reasons to think Wagner followed Schopenhauer’s instructions. Whether Mann did is far less certain.

  132. See Essays 4:282. The chapter on death is WWV 2, §41.

  133. Essays 1:17.

  134. One reason for the lack of contemporary philosophical interest in Schopenhauer is that reading him carefully requires some sympathy with and knowledge of Kant’s brilliant and difficult ideas—and also a willingness to entertain the ideas of a wide-ranging and original critic. Kantians are often irritated by the presumption of “correcting” their favorite thinker.

  135. Schopenhauer is unusually well-informed about Indian thought and is wide ranging in his artistic and literary references (in marked contrast to Kant, of whom he quite reasonably remarks that art was foreign to him and “according to all appearances, he had little sensibility for beauty” [WWV 1, 2:645]; Kant is excused on the grounds that he probably had scant opportunity to see a significant work of art!). In addition, Schopenhauer shows a surprisingly broad knowledge of contemporary developments in science and medicine (see, for example, WWV 1, 1:179), his preference for Goethe over Newton on light and colors notwithstanding. Schopenhauer begins his attack on the abuses of Kant’s ideas by his philosophical descendants with a critique of Fichte, the author of “the most senseless, and because of that alone, the most boring book” (WWV 1, 1:65). Other post-Kantians, particularly Hegel, originator of the “windbag philosophy,” come in for even more scathing treatment.

  136. Essays 4:287.

  137. See WWV 1, book 2, §27 (esp. 1:197–204); and WWV 1, book 4, §54 (esp. 2:348–358).

  138. Thomas Mann, Briefe an Otto Grautoff und Ida Boy-Ed (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1975), 30.

  139. Diary entries of February 28, 1947; April 1, 1947; and November 17 1948. TB (1946–1948) 102, 110, 306.

  140. As his marginalia and underlinings show, Mann read Nietzsche’s “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” with enormous attention and interest. He probably viewed that essay as the same sort of productively passionate critique displayed in the polemics against Wagner, operating partly in reaction against Schopenhauer’s conception of the best possibility for human life and partly in accordance with the constraints Schopenhauer had imposed.

  141. A possible exception to this claim might be generated from recalling the most famous sentence of The Birth of Tragedy, the twice-occurring “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that life is justified” (§§ 5, 24; NW 1:47, 152). Nietzsche would later mock his own positive assertion (see, for example, the “Attempt at Self-Criticism”; NW 1:17).

  142. Nietzsche’s many-sided works allow quite different critical perspectives and have thus acquired a rich and varied philosophical literature discussing them. The reading I introduce here and develop in later sections and chapters is intended to conform to the interests and attitudes I have ascribed to Mann. For alternative versions, from which I have learned much, see Ale
xander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1983).

  143. GKFA 13.1:87 (BU 98).

  144. Diary entry of April 7, 1948 (TB [1946–1948] 246).

  145. This concern continues in Mann’s later fiction with an explicit juxtaposing of general philosophical views with the lives of characters who espouse (and imperfectly embody) those views: it permeates Mann’s weighing of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment claims in Zauberberg and Doktor Faustus.

  146. As Mann had recognized from early on: witness a letter to Grautoff (November 8, 1896), in which he praises a poem Grautoff had written as expressing more intensely the theme of “Der kleine Herr Friedmann”—the desire for “neutral Nirvana and peace” and the dissolution through sexuality (Briefe Grautoff-Boy-Ed, 79).

  147. Reed cites Mann’s preparatory notes to suggest a sympathetic reading of Aschenbach’s asceticism (which he links to his own version of the Platonic themes in the novella) and suggests that the final version moves to a harsher judgment (Reed 160). On the account I shall offer, the positive evaluation of Aschenbach’s asceticism remains present and should be considered in reaction to Nietzsche’s classic discussion of the ascetic ideal.

  148. Lowe-Porter opts for “hold fast” (LP 9), Luke favors “stay the course” (L 201), Koelb chooses “endure” (K 8), and Heim picks “persevere” (H 14).

  149. Diary entry of February 19, 1938; TB (1937–1939) 179–180. At the evening meal, the couple apparently discussed their anniversary. Mann records his horror and confusion about his life (the life they had shared): “I said, I would not want to repeat it, the painful had too much dominated. I fear I may have caused K. [Katia] pain. Such judgments about life, one’s own life, that is, however, identical with oneself (for I am my life), make no sense.”