Friedemann’s life is negated by its ending. He sees—and the reader understands—that the serenity he had worked to acquire was a second best, that he had reconciled himself to a “twilight existence” without light and shadows.209 The fatal passion exposes that.
Does the same hold for Aschenbach, too? Was Mann recapitulating themes from his pre-Buddenbrooks period, albeit on a larger and more complex scale? There are important differences, both in the patterns of the previous life and the character of the passions evoked at their ending. Little Friedemann is an amateur, a consumer of the arts, whereas Aschenbach has been a distinguished creator; Friedemann’s yearning is for a relationship that might have all the dimensions of a marriage, that might have proved the enduring center of the life he might have had (but for the negligence of the nurse and the crippling fall); Tadzio points to nothing similar.210 Once we have freed ourselves from the overly simple idea that Aschenbach’s response to the boy’s beauty reveals the Dionysian tendencies he has repressed, tendencies essential to Truly Great Art, there is no basis for concluding that the incidents on the lido disclose the worthlessness of the disciplined work of creation that has filled his mature years.
Yet, as I have recognized (in section 5), for a period toward the end of his life, the discipline is broken. Like Friedemann and Leverkühn but unlike the Frau Konsulin, Aschenbach is active in his own decline. At the moment when he gives precedence to remaining in Tadzio’s presence, he explicitly disavows the values he has hitherto embraced. That is, to be sure, a blotch on his life, a disfigurement that detracts from its overall worth and success. We might consider, however, whether this is decisive for negating all value. Here it is instructive to compare Aschenbach with a fourth example from Mann’s fiction.
Whatever the ambiguities of Der Zauberberg—and they are legion211—the verdict on Hans Castorp’s cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, seems secure. Joachim dies as a “good soldier,” and he is honored, in the flatland, by a military salute fired over his grave.212 Throughout the early chapters, like Aschenbach (and his ancestors), Ziemssen shows an impeccable discipline, following carefully and conscientiously the steps prescribed for the cure of his tuberculosis. Hans’s flexible responses to the alluring but morally ambiguous Frau Chauchat contrast with his cousin’s determined resistance to the charms of their tablemate, Marusja, of the swelling bosom and the orange-scented handkerchief. Yet the discipline is broken. As his “sentence” to remain in the sanatorium extends, he becomes impatient to take up his military life. Advised by Hofrat Behrens that he must “serve” another five or six months, he announces his decision to leave. Behrens is blunt about Joachim’s condition and about the risks he is incurring: he tells the impatient young man that he is “throwing down his arms” and “deserting.”213 Joachim persists. He joins his regiment, begins his military duties, takes part in maneuvers—and becomes sick, intermittently at first. Then his mother telegraphs that she is bringing the young soldier back to the mountains. He dies there.
Despite the Hofrat’s blunt words, Joachim’s single revolt against discipline cannot be seen as a fatal undermining of the value of his life. Even if imperfect, his devotion to duty—his discipline—is admirable. He dies as a good soldier. In its contours, the pattern of his life is strikingly akin to Aschenbach’s: there are years of self-denying dedication to a chosen ideal—and a single fatal lapse from duty. Why, then, suppose that the cases are to be evaluated differently, that the distinguished author’s decades of devotion to his art are invalidated by the brief seduction of the last weeks?
Aschenbach’s moral lapse is, in fact, inconsequential. He does not gain from it what he had unrealistically fantasized (if it should even be seen as a serious fantasy), a Venice in which only he and Tadzio were left alive; indeed, he obtains no more than a few days’ reprieve before the Poles depart. His failure to warn has no impact on their well-being. Indeed, one could have suspected as much, for Tadzio and his sisters are under the watchful eye of a governess, so that the chances of their eating contaminated food—overripe strawberries, for example—are extremely low. Joachim Ziemssen, by contrast, drastically curtails his own life by his decision to leave the sanatorium. If we see this, as we should, as an excusable rebellion against his high ideals of service, can we simultaneously suppose that Aschenbach’s concealment of the truth signifies a form of corruption that negates everything he has done and been?
Joachim’s life goes on after the impetuous decision to return to the “flatland.” Equally, so does Aschenbach’s after his moral and physical collapse. The coda to Death in Venice reveals him learning of the impending separation from Tadzio. He nods, acquiescing, and, with what can be viewed as the renewal of his discipline, resumes his place on the beach. Horrified by Jaschu’s subjugation of Tadzio, he wishes finally to intervene, but, at just that moment, the boy is released. As Tadzio stands on the sandbar, Aschenbach looks on, “as at first,”214 when he had originally exchanged glances with the boy. In these last moments of his life, there are hints that the frenzy has passed, of a calmer mood and a return to his former self.
Hints only. I shall have more to say in chapter 3 about this closing scene, but for now I want to note a significant feature of the novella. It is framed, in the first sentence and the last, with a reference to Aschenbach’s, von Aschenbach’s, eminence. The coda abandons the moralizing—scornful—voice of the previous sentences. It begins with a recapitulation of his ennobled status and ends with the “shocked respectful world” learning of his death. In a sense, nothing has changed. This episode leaves no reverberations. Aschenbach has written virtually nothing more, one and a half pages on the “burning cultural problem,” and his reputation remains unaffected.
Unless, of course, he has, like Mann, confided his yearnings to Tagebücher, or until, some decades later, an aging Polish gentleman discloses his identity.215 The final piece of prose, apparently, betrays no change. It is certainly good, remarks the moralizing narrator, that the literary world only recognizes the beautiful work and not its sources—having, of course, just divulged the circumstances of and inspiration for Aschenbach’s last writing.216 We can, I suggest, distance ourselves from this earnest voice, with its determination to bring into the foreground of the writer’s life its last few weeks; we can insist that the life be seen as a whole and be grateful that these closing disfigurements occurred in a confined, even a quarantined, space.
To do that is to read Mann as responding to the complex of problems he adopted from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche but to see him as offering his own distinctive treatment of it. We can interpret him as making his own modifications of their judgments and evaluations, as providing his own seductive presentation of a conclusion akin to theirs, and as inviting us to reflect on his vivid example, to test the pessimistic assessment that comes so easily. Perhaps the test will prompt us to rethink. Perhaps it is hard to live a worthwhile life, but there is no inevitable disruption of the will, no contradiction in the ascetic ideal. Perhaps Gustav von Aschenbach is not to be conceived as a failure: the events of his death might be a minor deviation from the hard-won but triumphant perseverance of his life. We are easily persuaded into concluding that this death, so intricately presented to us, must negate what went before—but the larger invitation is to reflect on the exquisite presentation and judge Aschenbach for ourselves. If we accept the invitation, we may discover that Death in Venice is a more ironic work than is usually supposed. The disciplined life, even the imperfectly disciplined life, may be worth living.
TWO
Beauty
1
Early in Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community, the schoolmaster Rorlund borrows a famous New Testament phrase to characterize the large towns of the modern era: they present a beautiful exterior, but it only serves to conceal the rottenness within—they and their most respectable citizens are “whited sepulchres” full of “uncleanness.”1 Even if the suggestions of the previous chapter might permit the judgment that Aschenbach’s art lends worth to hi
s life, important questions about his social persona are left unanswered. For Aschenbach is not only the celebrant and defender of bourgeois values but one who has claimed to embody those values in his conduct. His obsessive passion for Tadzio reveals him to be a sham, an unworthy descendant of those severe ancestors whom he has attempted to emulate—as with Ibsen’s protagonist, Karsten Bernick (and many other Ibsen characters), the pleasing appearance masks the “uncleanness”: Aschenbach is distinguished from Bernick only by the fact that his mumbled and self-serving “confession” at the fountain is far less honest and courageous than Bernick’s forthright final acknowledgment of what he has done and been.
A less moralistic narrator, one who did not repudiate the maxim that “to understand all is to forgive all,”2 might appraise the mismatch between the writer’s desires and his conduct differently, not diagnosing any “foulness within” but seeing instead the deformation wreaked upon a sensitive but potentially healthy individual by a rigid and uncomprehending society. Aschenbach would emerge as a victim, a man forced to conform to prejudices about the limits of acceptable human nature and permissible conduct. His own acquiescence in the prejudices, the identification with the ancestors and the narrow values they defended, would be seen as emphasizing the intensity of the forces working to confine and distort him and the depth of their penetration.
Yet wherever the fault is taken to lie, in proclivities so “unnatural” they must be concealed or in social judgments so uninformed by understanding of human psychology and so inflexible in their application that they twist the lives of those unlucky enough to be at odds with them, the envisaged unity between artist and citizen, at least in this case, has broken down. Aschenbach fails to advance beyond Tonio Kröger’s predicament—he does not achieve that deeper identification in which the writer not only endorses and defends the bourgeois values but successfully lives them as well.
Mann’s two writer-protagonists reject Nietzsche’s condemnation of the “decent citizens,” the Bürger, as inevitably limited and crippled, part of a herd whose lives are worthless. To the figure of Zarathustra dancing on the mountains, Tonio counterposes the images of Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm dancing in a Danish resort. Even to have written The World as Will and Representation or to have composed nine symphonies (presumably Beethoven’s) would pale, Tonio Kröger thinks, beside the achievement of their living.3 These joyful bourgeois figures, Hans and Inge, are oblivious to the higher beauties art claims to discern or to create (Hans, rightly, reads books about horses rather than Schiller’s Don Carlos), but they embody beauty.4 Observing them, Tonio Kröger is moved to his Credo: although he, the artist, has seen the confusion of human life, its tragedy and absurdity, his deepest love is for those who are unconscious of these realities, for the “lightly living ones” whose philosophically innocent lives are beautiful. For Aschenbach, too, the elegant lives he observes on the lido and in the strange, ambiguous city appear as parts of an elysian landscape to which he has been magically translated, where a wonderful lightness of living is given to humanity—and where beauty is embodied in Tadzio.5
Death in Venice apparently follows Tonio Kröger in presenting the split between artist and citizen, a split reminiscent of Plato’s famous story of the division of humankind related in the Symposium.6 The artist is sensitive to the sources of value in human life, able to contemplate life’s beauties and to create beautiful representations of them. The citizens who live well embody those beauties in their lives—lightly, thoughtlessly, carelessly. No individual can manage both—even those who live well, live incompletely. Hence any attempt to go beyond what Tonio, the self-conscious outsider, already achieves must involve pretense, must be a confidence trick—a visit behind the scenes to the actor’s dressing room would reveal the repulsive spots under the costume. Aschenbach cannot be the good citizen he seems.
Important to the success of the novella was Mann’s skill in allowing his readers to observe the split from either side. His sardonic reassurance to Philipp Witkop that his story was “very respectable” expresses itself in a narrative voice, that of the moralistic “second narrator,” who issues the orthodox judgments and permits readers to think that Mann, like Aschenbach, buttresses the Approved Moral Point of View.7 Yet the novella can be read—probably always has been read by those with a less intolerant view of Aschenbach’s latent predilections—as a depiction of the deformation of a once-vulnerable youth who has been compelled, throughout his life, to confine and deny central elements in his character. Those who combine this latter interpretation with a reading of Mann’s surviving diaries will understand how closely Aschenbach’s sense of self-distortion resembles that felt by his creator. They will recognize Mann’s fidelity to the demand that the writer who is to be of service must place himself on trial.8
Connected though it surely is with his earlier fiction, Death in Venice should not, however, be regarded as a simple reprise of themes Mann had presented before: it is no more a recapitulation of Tonio Kröger (the Artist, even one who admires the Bourgeois World, is inevitably an Outsider) any more than it is a repeat of “Der kleine Herr Friedemann” (Discipline undone by Passion—again). If the later novella goes further, it is (as the last chapter proposed) because there are significant differences between Aschenbach’s years of discipline and their fruits and the tepid serenity Friedemann attains—and because Death in Venice probes a relation Tonio Kröger takes as given. From the first tense moments in which Tonio fears that Hans Hansen will not join him for the walk home from school, Tonio is presented as an outsider: it is no surprise when his letter to Lisaweta confesses that he stands between two worlds.9 Aschenbach successfully masquerades as a bourgeois—he “passes” well enough that the unctuous manager of the Hotel des Bains ascends with him to show him his room. On the face of it, however, the writer’s failure to ft into conventional society, for all his apparent success, has nothing to do with his role as artist: the incompatibility between artist and citizen, presupposed by Tonio Kröger (and by Tonio Kröger), is irrelevant to the issue. The elements of Aschenbach’s life do not ft together; his literary work and its aims are concordant with the persona he presents but not with the person he is—but the clash stems from his repressed homosexuality. Mann apparently decided on a change of theme, turning his attention to the plight of the closeted homosexual (or bisexual) male in prewar Wilhelmine Germany.
Or did he? In turning from the disciplined artist to the socially embedded man, I have already slightly amended the philosophical perspective that dominated the previous chapter: there the focus was on potential sources of value in human lives; here the issues have been posed in terms of values in general and of a specific value—beauty. Echoing the most famous sentence of Nietzsche’s first work—“Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world finally justifed”10—I have suggested the quasi-Platonic split: the artist perceives value and its beauty and renders what is valuable beautifully visible; the “blond and blue-eyed ones” live beautifully. Death in Venice explores the tension between artist and citizen, a tension taken for granted in Tonio Kröger, in terms of this perspective on the central philosophical question, a perspective that understands worthwhile lives as possessing beauty, as being themselves works of art. Citizens and artists whose lives appear to go well stand in different—complementary—relationships to beauty, but the relations necessarily exclude one another. To reveal the inevitability of exclusion, Death in Venice presents an apparent possibility of transcending the split between artist and citizen, a possibility heavily dependent on ideas in Plato and his successors,11 one that must ultimately fail. Although failure can be dramatically exhibited in an older man who is drawn to the beauty of a boy—a case of Knabenliebe—the homoerotic resonances only heighten the drama. The plot Mann discarded, the story of the seventy-four-year-old Goethe’s infatuation for the teenage Ulrike von Levetzov, would have sounded, if less strongly, the same tones.
The attempt at transcendence rests on transforming the roles
of artist and of citizen. Instead of thinking about the attitudes of actual citizens, cramped as they may be by widespread prejudices, we can envisage an ideal citizen, one whose evaluations and whose conduct conforms to the civic virtues, those virtues that allow human beings to lead worthwhile lives in harmony with one another. These ideal citizens may live as lightly as Hans and Inge, responding to the pull of what is just and good and beautiful without deep understanding of how their actions should be directed; thanks to their natural dispositions and the circumstances in which they are placed, particularly because they have been given a wisely crafted education, they grow into people who will naturally behave gracefully and well. Their accomplishments would be subverted were they to try to probe the psychological complexities of human behavior: that is why Hans should not read Don Carlos and why Aschenbach rightly turns away from “knowledge.” Actual citizens, although they may approximate the ideal of unselfconscious virtue, may sometimes be led astray by the faulty ideas about virtue current in their societies—in this respect their education fails them, and they deviate from the civic ideal. Consequently, real-life counterparts of Hans and Inge, who have unfortunately absorbed the prejudices of prewar Wilhelmine German bourgeois society, may misunderstand and scorn some of the passions of the Tonios and the Aschenbachs, may even be moved to talk of “whited sepulchres” or to applaud the judgment of the moralizing narrator who comments on the writer’s fall.
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