Discipline dissolves through the progressive loosening of the connection between Aschenbach’s will and its considered objective, by means of the substitution of a rival object. For much of the novella, he can convince himself that his aims are entirely compatible—as he becomes aware of the importance to him of the rival goal, being in Tadzio’s presence, he thinks of it as part of the process of restoring his creativity. So he can endorse the substitution until the moment when he is forced to choose between his prior aims and ideals and the opportunity to gaze on the beautiful boy, when he must decide whether to warn Tadzio’s mother. At this point, and only at this point, he self-consciously repudiates aspirations central to his earlier self. The initial resolve to travel south is not undisciplined because it implies some direct abnegation of his commitments—it might be necessary for him to rest from his labors and to recoup his strength, if he is to overcome the artistic obstacles before him. A good soldier can leave his post if, by doing so, he recognizes that he is advancing the broader cause. Yet Aschenbach’s impulsive decision is not guided by any such disciplined considerations but is instead the product of a fantasy that erupts in him outside the mortuary chapel. We only fully understand that fantasy for the seduction it is when we look back on it from the perspective of the later dream. After the moral collapse, the deliberate substitution of Tadzio’s presence for the aims that have guided his mature life, the conscious complicity in the guilt of those who mask the plague that has corrupted Venice, and the “lewd” ferns of the tropical swamp that initially beckons Aschenbach to go south have been transformed into the copulations, “mixing without boundaries,” of the obscene creatures in the vision that possesses him.174 The small lapse of discipline of the original impulse has given way to an abandon so complete that it can no longer be denied. Aschenbach can only acquiesce to what he has become and submit himself to the skills of the hotel barber, who will substitute an exterior rejuvenation for the artistic revival the writer has, officially, been seeking.
On the Adriatic island, on the ship to Venice, in the gondola, at the lido under the scirocco, Aschenbach deceives himself about the contributions his sojourn in an alien and disturbing environment will make to his central project, a potential recuperation that will enable him to resume the disciplined practice of his art. Standing at the rail of the unprepossessing ship that will take him to Venice, he has a sense of “dreamlike alienation”—but, at that moment, the voyage begins, and he reconciles himself to the course he has chosen, to revisit the “extraordinary fairy-tale” city for which he is bound.175 His momentary suspicion that the gondolier who takes him to the lido may be a criminal arouses a brief residue of the old discipline—considerations of pride and duty, fleetingly recalled, impel him to question the strange and sinister boatman. His protest and queries, however, are easily brushed aside, and, once again, Aschenbach relaxes in acquiescence.176 The Hotel des Bains initially promises the opportunity for the intended artistic rejuvenation: the mysterious gondolier (who operates without a license) gives way to the professionally welcoming staff; Aschenbach is shown to a well-appointed room with a sea view. He begins to recover from the disturbances of the journey, the observations he has made, “at once less focused and more penetrating” because he has traveled alone, begin to settle as he contemplates the sea. Fastidiously and carefully, he dresses for dinner, arriving, nonetheless, a little early in the hall. The guests, the proper clientele of an elegant hotel, have assembled. It is the moment at which recovery might begin.
Looking up from the newspaper he has casually selected, Aschenbach surveys the scene. The defender of bourgeois order can applaud the smooth operation of conventions and modes of dress; the novelist can appreciate the vivid diversity of the hotel guests. His activity of conjectural national classification is interrupted, however, by an arresting vision. Polish is spoken nearby, and Aschenbach looks toward the group: a governess with three girls and a younger boy. “With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was completely beautiful.”177 Struck by that beauty, he muses over dinner, not altogether coherently—the thoughts of the solitary traveler are, if penetrating, unfocused—on issues about art and beauty, finding at the end of his reflections that they resemble the apparent insights vouchsafed in dreams, appearing shallow and unprofitable in the sober light of day.178 Here, in embryo, the next phase of his self-deception is already present. The beautiful boy can be seen as a means to Aschenbach’s ultimate goal, an occasion for artistic inspiration within the domain of pure form and beauty to which he has, with self-conscious discipline, directed himself.
The next day, Aschenbach’s wonted discipline begins to lapse in a small but telling way: seated at the beach, with his travel writing-case on his knee, he sets himself to the task of answering his correspondence, a chore that taxes him daily—“The forty-year-old writer, tired as he might be from the strains and vicissitudes of his creative work, still had to deal with a daily correspondence bearing postage stamps from around the world.”179 (Mann’s own entries in the surviving diaries make clear the burdens he felt in the years of his success.)180 After a quarter of an hour, Aschenbach sets work aside, neglecting part of his “duty,” to survey the scene at the beach. At its center, of course, is the captivating boy, whose name—Tadzio—he soon divines and who increasingly attracts his “fatherly” attention.
“Fatherly,” of course, is Aschenbach’s own word, used to normalize his feelings as he looks on at the seaside panorama.181 The attraction to Tadzio must be assimilated to the standards of bourgeois decency to which he has dedicated his literary gifts, either in the fashion of the dinner-table reflections, vague musings on form and beauty, or in the guise of permissible (paternal) admiration. Later in the day, however, as Aschenbach resumes his normal routine, taking tea on the Piazza San Marco and following it with the standard afternoon walk, he becomes dimly aware that Venice is not restoring him to a condition in which he can resume his labors. In another quick decision, he makes plans to leave—and the old discipline starts to revive in his resistance to the spell of the city.
On the morning of his departure, however, he delays, setting his own official plans at risk, and as he arrives at the station, his will is completely defeated by itself. Mann’s narrative suddenly assumes the immediacy of the present tense, evoking Aschenbach’s confusion and distress. “Completely torn, he enters the station. It is very late; he has no time to lose if he wishes to catch the train. He wants to [or wills to do this] and he wants not to [wills the opposite]. [Er will es und will es nicht.]”182 To will contradictory things is to guarantee the defeat of the will, but the contingent misdirection of the baggage provides Aschenbach with the chance to fathom his deeper wishes, and he returns to the lido with “wild joy.” From his hotel window, he sees Tadzio below on the beach and understands why the departure had been so painful for him. He raises his hands in a relaxed gesture of welcome and calm acceptance.
At this point, a reader might think that the failure of the trip to fulfill its original purpose ought to be evident to Aschenbach himself—but that is to ignore the strategies of self-deception that enable him to disguise the character of his feelings and thus provide further opportunities for the sapping of the will. Being in Tadzio’s presence has come to be accepted as a goal, but, in the character of the musings at the first night’s dinner, one that will promote his earlier object of restoring himself to artistic service. Self-deception survives the potential revelation of the confused attempt at fight. Aschenbach’s frayed literary creativity, devotedly classical as it has striven to be, can be repaired and renewed by returning to the living source, to the joyous apprehension of pure beauty. The style of the fourth chapter, its classical allusions expressing Aschenbach’s own sense of living a Greek idyll, enters into the form of his self-misunderstanding. Echoing Socrates, he tells himself that “only beauty is visible and worthy of love”—Mann amends only very slightly the words of the German translation of the Phaedrus he read183—and that the perception of b
eauty is the means to the work of the intellect (or spirit—Geist). Inspired by this thought, Aschenbach decides to write, his apparently new topic (“a burning problem of culture”)184 approached with erotic pleasure in language. The aftermath, however, finds him exhausted, as if after debauchery.
Self-deception begins to crumble, as the conception of his delight in Tadzio’s presence as a pure renewal of sensitivity to classical beauty proves at odds with the feelings provoked. So, too, with the thought that Aschenbach’s relation to the boy can be slid into the standard compartments of approved bourgeois conduct. On the morning following his sudden impulse to write, he forms the intention to normalize his connection to Tadzio, to lay a—fatherly?—hand on the boy’s shoulder and engage him in brief conversation. His will fails him, and he becomes aware of an instinctive burning up of the discipline that has been central to his existence—the discipline recently imitated, or perhaps parodied, by his construction of a daily routine in which mornings are dedicated to the beachside contemplation of beauty.
The emotions felt in the wake of his writing and after the failure to speak to Tadzio—the sense of guilt, the agitation—echo the confusion Aschenbach had felt at the railway station. Try as he may to preserve the classical idyll, the mythical resonances turn in ambiguous and dangerous directions. Finally, after an evening on which the Poles have not appeared at dinner, Aschenbach is pacing restlessly in front of the hotel, when the family returns. Perhaps prompted by the older man’s own unprepared expression of joy and admiration, Tadzio smiles at him, a smile that so shakes and disarms Aschenbach that, rushing into the garden, he confesses to himself his love for the boy.185
From the loosening of his will to pursue the central project of his life—his painstakingly crafted writing—Aschenbach has taken on the objective of being in Tadzio’s presence as an allegedly secondary end, one that will restore his capacity for artistic service. The illusion is shattered by the smile. Henceforth, he must admit that his will is independently directed toward Tadzio, but, even as he modifies his behavior to follow the Polish family in their walks through the city, he need not yet concede that this objective takes precedence. Only when it becomes clear that remaining in Tadzio’s presence requires an act of concealment on his part, only when he repudiates the attitudes that had constituted his mature self, by explicitly rejecting what he sees as a purifying and decent form of behavior, by explicitly endorsing the deceit of the Venetian authorities, and by recognizing his own complicity in their guilt, only then does he break with his earlier values. It is an open-eyed rejection of what he has been: “What were art and virtue worth to him, compared with the advantages of chaos? [Was galt ihm noch Kunst und Tugend gegenüber den Vorteilen des Chaos?].”
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My presentation of Mann’s anatomy of the breakdown of discipline deliberately highlights particular episodes and concepts, tracing the ways in which Aschenbach’s will is directed and redirected and understanding the changes in terms of their deviations from his central conception of himself and of what is valuable. These formulations connect Mann with questions explored by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, with the former’s sense of the impossibility of realizing a vision of one’s life that would give it worth, particularly with the diagnosis in terms of the blindness and rapacity of the will, and the latter’s delineation of the difficulties imposed by culture and history on those who aspire to live well. My summary hopes to make plausible the thought that Death in Venice exhibits the second grade of philosophical involvement, that it can be read as simultaneously showing, in the milieu of haute bourgeois society, the inevitable failure and frustration of the individual will and the contradiction within the ascetic ideal.
Or something more …? For Mann does not simply take over from Schopenhauer the idiosyncratic “correction” of Kantian metaphysics, nor does the asceticism exemplified in his protagonist quite correspond to the categories and judgments offered by Nietzsche. In Mann’s Venice, the philosophical landscape is importantly—and ambiguously—transformed.
Schopenhauer founds his pessimism on a particular development of transcendental idealism, one that sees the world of our experience as an illusion—the veil of Maia, as he often calls it, with a gesture at the Indian philosophy that so impresses him. Behind the veil is the world of real entities, mischaracterized by Kant as “noumena” but properly seen as undifferentiated Will. Not only do Mann’s annotations of The World as Will and Representation show no great interest in this heady and obscure metaphysical picture, but there is no trace of it in Death in Venice, not even when Aschenbach’s ruminations are least well focused. Schopenhauer’s “Will,” undifferentiated and objectified in myriad ways from magnets to men, is replaced by the psychologically familiar will of a complex and sensitive human protagonist. Mann conceded that he had made use of philosophical ideas in ways that were foreign to his sources, and one of his important transformations was to turn Schopenhauer the metaphysician into “the psychologist of the will”—an eminently pardonable transformation given Schopenhauer’s propensity to exploit the ordinary connotations of his chosen metaphysical term “Will.”186
In fact, Schopenhauer can be read—or creatively misread?—in ways both less metaphysically charged and pertinent to the themes of the novella, specifically to the breakdown of discipline traced in the previous section. Book 4 of The World of Will and Representation oscillates between claims about the world’s metaphysical structure and theses about the character of values: in Reality, the world is Will; values are constituted by the ethical stance, which transcends the boundaries dividing individuals to achieve deep and enduring sympathy. A reader sensitive to that oscillation, a reader who had been much moved by book 4—Thomas Mann, perhaps—might recognize an opportunity for “correcting” Schopenhauer, as Schopenhauer claimed to have “corrected” Kant. The world of experience, this reader might suggest, is one in which objects are marked as valuable, as worth pursuing: Aschenbach lives in a world divided, apparently naturally, into the worthy and the unworthy, the desirable and the undesirable, the beautiful and the squalid. To conceive the world in that way—as Aschenbach does, as Mann’s readers do, and as Mann himself typically does—is an illusion. For the markings, the signs of “value” that prevail among any group of individuals or in any individual’s experiences are the results of prior decisions and aspirations based on sympathies that are inevitably incomplete and partial. Instincts and desires press chaotically in different directions. Rival yearnings take precedence at different times. Desire once satisfied leads either to a new act of will or else to boredom. Nothing remains permanently or stably valued—the ideal condition of deep or enduring sympathy is unattainable. In consequence, any attempt an individual makes to force the will in a particular direction, to set a goal that will last, must bridle the conflicting desires that urge rival courses of action. Because of the strength of some forms of the will, particularly the sexual drive, disciplined control is impossible, and the best response is to rise to so clear an awareness of life as a condition of permanent striving, of endless suffering, that one recognizes the need for compassion with all those who experience the unceasing conflicts of desire, even if feeling that unbounded compassion and acting from it are impossible for us.
The philosophical view just outlined is not Schopenhauer’s—it amends him in fundamental ways, just as he amended Kant (although by abandoning the basic metaphysics rather than reframing it)—but it retains important themes from The World as Will and Representation, setting them more univocally in the psychological idiom toward which book 4 so often tends. Instead of thinking of the human organism as permeated by the operation of Will at different levels, generating an “enduring struggle” between our higher aspirations and the “lower forms” of Will present in our physical and chemical constitution, the psychological conflicts that assail us can be recognized without dabbling in their “ultimate causes”—as Mann pointedly does by identifying the sexual drive as a paradigm of our internal division, interpre
ting Schopenhauer as “tortured” by the power of his sexual urges, which constituted a “diabolical disturbance” of his efforts to achieve pure contemplation and the abnegation of the will.187 Schopenhauer often presents the thesis that the satisfaction of desire is transitory as a self-standing psychological claim: “possession takes the charm away: the wish reappears in a new form, the felt need recurs.”188 He declares that values arise from acts of willing that express the particular features of the individual: instead of recognizing something as good and wanting it on the basis of our recognition, our will leads us in various directions, and we label our (fleeting) ends as good.189 To the extent that human beings can modify their aspirations through genuine understanding, they do so by taking on a condition of universal sympathy, in which the sufferings of all others are felt as keenly as their own, and, because this state is unbearable—it is as if we were forced to go over burning coals, with never an opportunity to rest in a cool place—the only option is asceticism, the abnegation of the will, and the first step is the conquest of the sexual impulses.190 The metaphysics goes; the psychological theses remain.
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