Literature and music play a role, arguably a necessary role, here. From his early fiction on, Thomas Mann undertook that role, perhaps not as the artist (specifically: Dichter) who would be the fulfillment of Nietzsche, as Wagner was of Schopenhauer, and, indeed, more as a writerly fulfillment of his great trinity (Schopenhauer-Wagner-Nietzsche) than as an artistic evocation of Nietzsche alone.67 In Death in Venice, he explored the value of a particular type of life: Aschenbach’s and, potentially, his own: true to the declaration of “Bilse und ich,” Mann placed himself on trial. The succeeding sections of this chapter and parts of the next two will scrutinize his painful self-exposure. Before we begin that examination, however, I want to conclude my response to skeptics who doubt the possibility of philosophy in either a literary or musical mode by briefly considering two other examples. In artistically pondering the problem of how to live, Mann was by no means alone. Among his fellow travelers were a respected predecessor (Wagner) and a little-known contemporary (Joyce).68
Although there is an important insight in his claim, Mann overstated when he wrote, “the acquaintance with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is the great event in the life of Richard Wagner.”69 A great event to be sure—and one that, as Mann clearly saw, could be embodied in the drama and music of Tristan.70 In other works, however, particularly in the Ring, Wagner took up the challenge he found in Schopenhauer, offering an independent response to it. The drama of the tetralogy grows out of a world of careless, unthinking beauty and grace—just as the music grows from the opening arpeggios to erupt in Woglinde’s joyous song. Neither the blind hedonism of the Rhinemaidens—initially as light hearted as the “blond, blue-eyed ones” whom Tonio Kröger so admires—nor the inchoate, dreamy wisdom of Erda can provide anything of real value. Wotan aspires to more, and, in his tangled efforts to fashion a world of enduring worth, inevitably flawed, despite his successive self-mutilations—the losses of Siegmund and Brünnhilde, the resignation of his recasting himself as the Wanderer, the defeat at the hands of Siegfried—his failure mirrors the predicament diagnosed by Schopenhauer.71 Yet Wotan’s failure is not the end of the Ring—although Wagner toyed with a “Schopenhauer ending,” he replaced it with something different, a close in which Brünnhilde does not simply “see the world end.”72
The world the Ring presents to us is one in which aspirations to construct something permanently valuable are inevitably defeated, in which a reversion to blind hedonism or bleak darkness is always threatened, yet it is one in which single incidents of love and noble sacrifice are nonetheless deeply worthwhile.73 Brünnhilde’s final action, with its compression of love for her father, Wotan, for her dead husband, Siegfried, and for the virtues she has admired and tried to promote, redeems nothing. Valhalla collapses in fames, the waters of the Rhine rise in a destructive food, and the world returns to its vapid primordial state. A shallow interpretation might stop there, with the recognition that Brünnhilde (perhaps like an overindulged teenager?) has created chaos. Any interpretation of this sort is oblivious to the drama Wagner constructed and deaf to the music he wrote.
For what Brünnhilde has done matters—just as Cordelia’s acts of love and forgiveness matter, even though they do not prevent the bleak ending (“All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly”).74 Like candles in an enormous darkness, the acts in which Brünnhilde and Cordelia express love and compassion for their tortured fathers are transitory—the candles are snuffed out and glimmer no longer, but the fact that they have burned brightly is significant. Brünnhilde’s benediction to her father (“Ruhe, ruhe, Du Gott”), her voice “gentle and low,” cannot be forgotten, and it prepares the hearer for the orchestral music that swells when the voices cease, bringing Götterdämmerung (and the Ring) to its close.75 The postlude recalls three major motifs associated with possibilities for the world that has just been consumed—one conjuring the blithe joy of the Rhine-maidens, one recalling Wotan’s striving for a value beyond hedonism, and one celebrating the promise of the hero, Siegfried, whose funeral pyre Brünnhilde has lit. All these once promising possibilities might be viewed as mere failures, but, in the closing orchestration, they glow with a new vitality and warmth. For they are framed with a theme that has been heard exactly once earlier in the tetralogy, at the moment when Sieglinde, wretched and yearning for death, learns of the child she is carrying and renews her commitment to life: the words she sings—“O höchstes Wunder!”—are charged with uplift by Wagner’s setting of them, and now, at the very end, he not only deploys the motif to illuminate the inevitably frustrated efforts to create a world of real worth but extends it to reach a cadence in which sadness mingles with consolation. Interpretive words are inadequate to the thought and feeling expressed—they can only gesture. One has to listen to understand how Wagner offers his own original response to Schopenhauer’s challenge.76
Joyce does not begin from the problems posed by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; by contrast, he is more sympathetic to the Aristotelian catalogue, although he protests its elitism, its presumption that only the exceptional—the Stephen Dedaluses of the world—can find lives of genuine worth. Young Stephen aims to fly high, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man closes with his determination to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race.”77 Like the son of the mythical father whom he invokes, Stephen misjudges his fight, and when the reader meets him again in the opening chapters of Ulysses, he is bruised and dislocated from his fall. His own aimless wanderings through Dublin contrast with those of a very different figure, Mr Leopold Bloom, a man whose life has lost a direction it once had. Anchored in the ordinary exchanges of a Dublin day, his senses open to frequent grime and occasional beauty, his sympathies often aroused by the pains and discontents of others, Bloom the wanderer gropes toward a possible rediscovery of the life—an ordinary life, but one with structure and value—from which he has gone astray. Molly Bloom’s famous closing affirmation points to the possibility of that return, as do Bloom’s own amorphous ruminations on the two occasions when he falls asleep78—but there are no guarantees.
The problem of how lives can attain any worth or meaning hangs over Joyce’s prose fiction. Dubliners scrutinizes the variety of ways in which human lives may fail (although, for the Conroys, as for the Blooms, there may be possibilities of renewal). A Portrait considers a life in prospect, when it may appear, especially to a precociously talented young man, that value can only be the result of some exceptional achievement. Ulysses replaces that perspective with the view from middle age, when the “straight way” has been lost and the valuable life, grounded in very ordinary successes, joys, and human relationships, needs to be found again. Finnegans Wake offers the view from the end, when there is no longer any question of serious change but only a continued examination of what has been, one that recognizes the flaws and the blotches but hopes to find that it has, after all, been worthwhile.79
Joyce absorbs part of the Aristotelian perspective, recognizing social activity, virtue, contemplation, and friendship as potential components of the good life. Yet he distances himself from Aristotle’s own understanding of these sources of value, most obviously in allowing more scope to physical pleasures and a very different catalogue of primary virtues (although Bloom shares more with Odysseus than readers might initially suspect, his dominant virtue—sensitivity and kindness to others—has no great weight in either Homer or Aristotle). The most fundamental divergence from Aristotle, however, lies in Joyce’s repudiation of commitments to elitism and perfectionism. Stephen errs in thinking he must fly high—as he begins to learn in Ulysses, what he principally needs is to feel the emotion named by “the word known to all men”:80 value can be grounded in the ordinary life. To be worthwhile, that ordinary life can even be messy and misshapen. Despite all that has been, including what has been on June 16, 1904, Bloom and Molly may yet live valuable lives, and their marriage, as it is, may be central to the value of those lives.
The possible worth of the ordinary li
fe, even of the flawed ordinary life, is prefigured in a brief scene at the center of A Portrait, when Stephen, having confessed to his sins, returning to the family kitchen, observes the food bought for Sunday breakfast (“White puddings and eggs and sausages”), and sees it as embodying the beauty of life.81 A similar sensuous appreciation of beauty introduces us to the perceptive Mr Bloom, as he appreciates the contrast between the “gelid light and air” of his own kitchen and the gentle warmth of the early summer day outdoors, as he imagines the tang of the breakfast kidney, and discerns phonemes in the cat’s mewing.82 Eighteen hours later, in the same kitchen, ordinary cups of cocoa (albeit with the extraordinary sacrifice to his guest of the cream intended for Molly’s breakfast) will begin a movement, not toward any deep friendship (still less the reunion of a spiritual son with his spiritual father), but a few moments of ordinary—but valuable—companionship between Bloom and Stephen.83
Is that really enough? I read Ulysses as offering a vivid account of the worth of the ordinary and Finnegans Wake as a deep interrogation of the theme. Through the swirling dream of Joyce’s last work, readers are brought again and again to rejoice in the everyday, to laugh at its comic mistakes and misunderstandings, and, finally, to recognize the possibility that even flawed relationships may center lives of real value. Even though people wander off course, lives that are blotched and sometimes squalid can nevertheless attain genuine worth. We can “see life foully”84 and still endorse it. After defeat, humiliation, failures of courage and fidelity, there can still be occasions of forgiveness, moments of generosity, and even affirmation.85
Wagner and Joyce do not argue. They do not even present precisely articulated theses about the worth and value of human lives. Nevertheless, they do philosophy, real philosophy that can lead listeners and readers to improved perspectives on a (if not the) central philosophical question. The philosophy lies in the showing. Instead of a rigorously connected sequence of clear and precise declarative sentences, we are offered a rich delineation of possibilities—accompanied by a tacit injunction: Consider this.
This philosophical method, the method of showing, is not so far from some excellent work by professional philosophers. Some years ago, the eminent philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright told me rather ruefully that her husband, Stuart Hampshire (himself an extremely distinguished philosopher), complained that she never offered arguments for her views. After some reflection, I suggested what I intended as consolation as well as diagnosis: Cartwright’s typical strategy is to describe, exactly and in rich detail, some scientific work of a type overlooked by orthodox philosophical accounts; by considering the phenomena she portrays, her readers are expected to recognize the superiority of the precise claims about the sciences she offers as replacements for orthodoxy. Wagner and Joyce show us that works of music and literature can take Cartwright’s first step. The further consideration is up to us, as we listen and read.
Mann would not have put it that way, but he was attuned to the possibility of philosophy as showing. In the 1938 essay on Schopenhauer, after asking his readers to excuse his youthful portrait of intoxicated reading, he continues by proposing that an artist can make use of philosophy: “one can think in the overall conception of a philosopher, without in the least thinking along that philosopher’s own lines, or, as I would put it: one can make use of his thoughts—and thereby think as he would never have wanted to think.”86 Mann’s own early “use” of philosophy depended on his previous encounter with both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—thus yielding the “strangest mixture”—and, he adds, that this was caused “less by the teaching of morality and wisdom, which is the intellectual flower of their vitality, than by the vitality itself, the essential and personal substance—so by its passion more than by its wisdom.”87 Passionate reading may find its expression in a work of art—a music drama or a piece of fiction—one that captures vividly part of the essence of a philosopher’s view or, even more interestingly, a strange brew distilled from several philosophers, and thus embodying philosophical ideas of a completely novel type. Mann does not explicitly claim that his own novels and novellas achieve this. I do.
A concern with the question whether and how lives can be worthwhile pervades Mann’s early writings, subsuming his reflections on the apparent conflict between artist and citizen, his examinations of the predicaments of outsiders.88 Given the influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the aspiring young writer—as well as his early passion for Wagner—it might appear that his philosophical explorations are likely to be more Wagnerian than Joycean. Lübeck provided a counterweight, preventing a plunge into the realm (the abyss?) of the “epic mythical”: insofar as he harnessed myths for expressing his own perspectives, Mann treated them from an ironic distance.89 Tonio Kröger’s long-winded attempt at self-explanation reveals both a Wagnerian and a Joycean side to his creator. Grounding a life of value in the extraordinary, the gigantesque, the cosmically inflated, is the absurd fantasy of sick and deformed outsiders—yet the return to the ordinary is inadequate, a shallow denial of the challenges posed by the passionate philosophers. How, then, to go beyond Plato and Aristotle, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Wagner and Joyce?
Death in Venice is one of Mann’s attempts to answer that question, one interrogation of life and of himself, inspired by experiences that seemed ripe for transformation so as to illuminate issues about the worth of human lives, issues barbed into his consciousness. The task of the philosopher-critic is to highlight the contours of the author’s efforts—as Cartwright’s descriptions foreground phenomena that have been overlooked. Like the skilled art or music critic who teaches us to attend to particular lines or specific themes and modulations, the aim is to render more apparent what has been shown.90 Taking the philosophical import of the arts seriously constructs a space in which something more conventionally identifiable as philosophy may operate. On the one hand lie the abstract treatments of philosophy, the catalogue of Aristotle’s Ethics, or the challenge posed by Schopenhauer. On the other is the rich variety of literary, musical, artistic sources. Philosophical criticism consists in bringing them into relation with one another, of showing how the elaborated presentations of a novel or an opera bear on the problems and schematic answers of philosophical treatises.91 Its task is to prepare the reader or listener to read or listen differently, in a way that will prepare for recognition of what is presented as a potential way to embody value and thus to serve as a basis for judgment, for endorsement or rejection. In Dewey’s apt phrase, philosophy serves as “a liaison officer, making reciprocally intelligible voices speaking provincial tongues.”92
That service might be rendered in the sober style supposedly essential to philosophy, through distillation of the literary source into precise claims and theses, setting them within a preparatory map of the overall interpretation so as to acquaint readers with the contours of the argument, and thus enabling them to know, at each stage, exactly where they are headed. Although my aim in presenting the cases of Aschenbach from different angles is often to clarify and make precise, I have resisted suggestions that I should take on the role of a fussy tour director and guide the reader’s footsteps. If, as I have already claimed in this section and will propose further at the end of chapter 3, literature and music build new ways of conceiving the world and our place in it, a skilled liaison officer should not insist in advance on the form of any eventual understanding: philosophical criticism functions best if it allows for the possibility that the reader may use the critic’s suggestions to conceive things differently, to build a perspective the critic has not anticipated. If it is not always evident in the following pages just where the interpretive work is pointing, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Although I believe that, in the end, it will be completely clear how my various suggestions hang together, the aim is not to convince readers of particular theses but to provide materials through which they can transcend what I have written.
3
Death in Venice was described by its author a
s a “tragedy,”93 and a natural conclusion is that the tragedy consists in the failure of Aschenbach, both as presumptive good citizen and as writer. Aschenbach’s supposed moral degeneration will occupy us later: for the moment, it is enough to emphasize that it should not be immediately and casually identified with the eruption of longing directed at Tadzio.94 My first concern is with his unmasking as a writer whose reputation exceeds his accomplishment, an exposé commonly supposed to rest on ideas formulated by the young Nietzsche. Many careful readers attribute to Mann the second grade of philosophical involvement and identify Nietzsche’s first work, The Birth of Tragedy, as a philosophical text lurking behind the novella. Some critics suppose further that Mann derived from that work a fundamental Nietzschean thesis, namely that great art requires a synthesis of two factors, to be labeled the Apollonian95 and the Dionysian.96 The first is connected to form and detachment, possibly to formalism. The latter is linked to passion and intoxication, to ecstasy and rapture. Death in Venice introduces us to a writer who has resolutely resisted the Dionysian, repressing the passions within him. In Venice, these impulses erupt and cannot be bridled, so that they lead to his moral dissolution and physical collapse. Aschenbach sees that his work was pale and ephemeral; his death is a tragic repudiation of it.97
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