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Death in
Venice The Call to
the Abyss Despite its
brevity, Death in Venice
tells a story that is as complex and deep as any that
Thomas Mann would develop more extensively in his vast novels. And he
achieves
this so economically and with such stylistic perfection that this short
novel
deserves to figure alongside masterworks of the genre like Kafka's Metamorphosis or Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan
Ilyich. All three are
beautifully crafted, tell a fascinating story and, above all, set up an
almost
infinite number of associations, symbols and echoes in the mind of the
reader. After reading and
rereading it on numerous occasions, we are
left with the unsettling feeling that the text is still withholding a
mystery even
from the most attentive reader. Something murky and violent, almost
abject,
which can be found in the protagonist and which is also a common
experience of
humankind: a secret yearning that suddenly reappears, frightening us,
because
we thought that it had been banished once and for all from our midst
through
the work of culture, faith and public morals, or simply as a result of
our need
to live together in society How can we define this
subterranean presence which works of
art usually reveal involuntarily, indirectly, a will-o'-the-wisp that
suddenly
appears without the author's permission? Freud called it the death
wish, Sade
desire in freedom and Bataille, evil. It is the quest for the integral
sovereignty of the individual that predates the conventions and rules
that
every society - some more, some less - imposes in order to make
coexistence
possible and prevent society from falling apart and reverting to
barbarism. The
core of any definition of civilization is that individual desires and
passion
must be reined in so that private desires, stimulated by imagination,
do not endanger
social organization. This is a clear and healthy idea whose benefit for
the human
race cannot be denied rationally because it has enhanced life and kept
at a
distance, usually at a great distance, the precarious and harsh
primordial
lives that preceded the horde and the cannibal clan. But life is not
formed
just by reason but also by passions. The angel that lives within men
and women
has never been able entirely to defeat the devil that also lives
within, even when
it seems that advanced societies have managed to do so. The story of
Gustav von
Aschenbach shows us that even these fine examples of healthy citizens,
whose
intelligence and moral discipline seem to have tamed all the
destructive forces
of personality, can succumb at any moment to the temptation of the
abyss. Reason, order and virtue
ensure the progress of human society
but they rarely suffice to make individuals happy, for instincts, that
are kept
in check in the name of social good, are always on the lookout, waiting
for an
opportunity to come out and demand of life both intensity and excess
that, as a
last resort, lead to destruction and death. Sex is the privileged
domain where
these transgressive demons lurk, in the recesses of our personality,
and in
some circumstances it is impossible to keep them at bay because they
are also
part of human reality. What is more, even though their presence always
implies
a risk for the individual and a threat of dissolution and violence for
society,
to exile them completely would impoverish life, depriving it of
euphoria and
elation - fiesta and adventure – which are also integral to life. These
are the
thorny issues that Death in Venice
illuminates with its twilight tones. Gustav von Aschenbach has
reached the threshold of old age as
an admirable citizen. His books have made him a celebrity but he
accepts this
fame without vanity, concentrating on his intellectual work, almost
completely
immersed in the world of ideas and principles, shorn of all material
temptation. Since he lost his wife, he has become an austere and
solitary man.
He does not have a social life and rarely travels. In the holidays he
retreats
into his books in a small house in the country outside Munich. The text
states
that 'he did not like pleasure'. This all seems to imply that this
famous
artist is confined within the world of the spirit, having quelled,
through culture
and reason, his passions, which are the agents of vice and chaos that
lurk in
the dark recesses of the human mind. He is a 'virtuoso' in the two
meanings of
the word: he is a creator of beautiful and original forms and he has
purified
his life through a strict ritual of discipline and continence. But one day, suddenly,
this organized existence begins to
crumble thanks to his imagination, this corrosive force that the French
very accurately
call' the mad woman of the house'. A furtive glimpse of a stranger in
the
Munich cemetery awakens in Von Aschenbach a desire to travel, and
peoples his
imagination with exotic images. He dreams of a ferocious, primitive,
barbarous
world, one completely opposed to his world of a super civilized man,
imbued
with a 'classic' spirit. Without really understanding why, he gives in
to
impulse and goes first to an Adriatic island and later to Venice.
There, on the
night of his arrival, he sees the Polish boy Tadzio who will turn his
life
upside down, destroying in a few days the rational and ethical order
that has
sustained it. He does not touch him or even speak to him; it is also
quite
possible that the faint smiles that Von Aschenbach thinks he detects
are
fantasies of his imagination. The whole drama develops away from prying
eyes,
in the heart of the writer and, of course, in those murky instincts
that he
thought he had tamed, and which, in the sticky and foul-smelling
Venetian
summer, are revived by the tender beauty of the adolescent. He comes to
realize
that his body is not merely the receptacle of refined and generous
ideas so
admired by his readers, but also harbors a beast on heat, greedy and
egotistical. To say that the writer
falls in love with or is engulfed by
desire for the beautiful boy would not be enough. Something happens to
him that
is much deeper: it changes his view on life and on men and women, on
culture
and on art. Suddenly ideas are relegated, displaced by sensations and
feelings,
and the body takes on an overwhelming reality that the spirit must
serve rather
than restrain. Sensuality and instincts take on a new moral
significance, not
as aspects of animality that human beings must repress to ensure
civilization,
but as sources of a 'divine madness' that transforms the individual
into a god.
Life is no longer 'form', and spills out in passionate disorder. Gustav von Aschenbach
experiences the delights and the sufferings
of a love-passion, albeit alone, without sharing it with the person who
is the
cause of these emotions. At first, realizing the danger that he is
running, he
tries to run away. But then he changes and plunges into the adventure
that will
bring him first to a state of abjection and then to death. The former
sober
intellectual, now disgusted by his old age and ugliness, goes to the
pitiful
lengths of putting on make-up and dyeing his hair like a fop. Instead
of his
former Apollonian dreams, his nights are full of savage visions, where
barbarous men indulge in orgies in which violence, concupiscence and
idolatry triumph
over 'the profound resistance of his spirit'. Gustav von Aschenbach
then
experiences 'the bestial degradation of his fall'.* Who is corrupting
who?
Tadzio leaves Venice at the end of the story, as innocent and
immaculate as at the
beginning, while von Aschenbach has been reduced to a moral and
physical wreck.
The beauty of the boy is the mere stimulus that starts up the
destructive mechanism,
the desire that von Aschenbach's imagination so inflames that it ends
up
consuming him. The plague that kills him
is symbolic in more than one sense.
On the one hand it represents the irrational forces of sex and fantasy,
the libertinage
that the writer succumbs to. Freed from all restraint, these forces
would make
social life impossible because they would turn it into a jungle of
hungry
beasts. On the other hand, the plague represents the primitive world,
an exotic
reality in which, unlike the narrator's world of the spirit and
civilized Europe,
life is instinctual rather than based on ideas, where man can still
live in a
state of nature. The 'Asian cholera' that comes to ravage the jewel of
culture and
the intellect that is Venice comes from the remote parts of the planet
'among
whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches', + and to some degree the
havoc that
it wreaks prefigures the defeat of civilization by the forces of
barbarism. This part of the story is
open to different readings. The
plague represents, for some, the political and social decomposition of
Europe that
was emerging from the joyful excesses of the belle époque and was
about to self-destruct. This is the 'social' interpretation of the
epidemic
that infiltrates the lakeside city in an imperceptible manner and
engulfs it,
like the poison of lust in the immaculate spirit of the moralist. In
this
reading, the epidemic represents the price of degeneration, madness and
ruin
that must be paid by those who' give in to the call of pleasure and
submit
their intelligence to the irrational dictates of passion. The man writing this is,
without a doubt, another moralist,
like von Aschenbach before his fall. Like his character - and it is
well known
that both Gustav Mahler and the author of Death
in Venice himself acted as models
for von Aschenbach - Thomas Mann also had an instinctual fear of
pleasure, that
region of experience that blots out rationality, where all ideas are
shipwrecked. Here are two romantics disguised as classical writers, two
men for
whom the passion of the senses, the euphoria of sex, is a supreme
moment of
pleasure that men and women must experience, albeit conscious of the
fact that
it will plunge them into decline and death. These licentious puritans
do not
have a trace of the joyful, ludic eighteenth-century view of sex as a
world of
play and entertainment, in perfect harmony with life's other demands.
The
demands of the body and the spirit were two realms that the eighteenth
century
merged and which, in the nineteenth century, the century of
romanticism, would become
incompatible. A symbol is, of itself,
ambiguous and contradictory; it is
always open to interpretations that vary according to the reader and
the time
of reading. Despite the fact that it is less than eighty years since Death in Venice was written, many of its
allegories and symbols are now
unclear to us because our age has emptied them of any content or made
them
irreconcilable. The rigid bourgeois morality that pervades the world of
Thomas
Mann and gives the fate of von Aschenbach a tragic air appears today,
in our
permissive society, a picturesque anomaly, just like the Asian plague,
with its
medieval resonance, which modern-day chemistry would soon defeat. Why
is it
necessary to punish so cruelly the poor artist whose only sin is to
discover
late in the day - and, what is more, only in the imagination - the
pleasure of
the flesh? And yet, even from our
perspective of readers living in a
time when our tolerance in sexual matters has made excess appear
conventional
and boring, the drama of this solitary fifty-year-old, so timid and so
wise,
who has fallen desperately in love with the Polish boy and who
sacrifices
himself in the flames of this passion, affects us and moves us deeply.
Because,
in the interstices of this story there is an abyss that can be glimpsed
and
which we immediately identify in ourselves and in the society in which
we live.
An abyss teeming with violence, desires and horrific, fevered ghosts,
which we
normally are not aware of except through privileged experiences which
occasionally
reveal it, reminding us that, however much we might try to consign it
to the
shadows and wipe it from our memory, it is an integral part of human
nature and
remains, with its monsters and seductive sirens, as a permanent
challenge to
the habits and customs of civilization. At a certain point in his
internal drama, von Aschenbach
attempts to sublimate his passion through myth. He moves it to the
world of culture
and transforms himself into Socrates, talking to Phaedrus about beauty
and love
on the banks of the Ilisos. This is a clever move by the author to
cleanse to
some extent the noxious vapors emanating from the pleasurable hell in
which von
Aschenbach finds himself, giving them a philosophical dimension, making
them
less carnal, broadening the scope of the story by providing a cultural
context.
Also, it is not gratuitous. Von Aschenbach was a living' classic', and
it is
quite natural for his consciousness to search within the world of
culture for
precedents and references to what is happening to him. But the abyss
that has
opened up beneath his feet, and which the writer plunges into without
any sense
of remorse, is not a site of pure ideas or the spirit. It is the site
of the
body, which he had regulated and disdained and which now is reclaiming
its
rights, freeing itself and vanquishing the spirit that had held it
captive. This demand has a
beginning but no end: awoken by any
stimulus - the beauty of Tadzio, for example - free to grow and become
immersed
in daily life in search of a satisfaction that the fantasy that fuels
it makes
ever more unattainable, sexual desire, that source of pleasure, can
also be a
deadly plague for the city. For that reason, life in the city imposes
limits
and morality on sexual desire, religion and culture looks to tame it
and
confine it. In the final weeks of his life, Gustav von Aschenbach - and
with
him the readers of this beautiful parable - discovers that these
attempts at
control are always relative because, as happens to him, the desire to
recover a
total sovereignty, which has been stifled by individuals for the
benefit of
social existence, re-emerges from time to time, demanding that life
should not just
be reason, peace and discipline but also madness, violence and chaos.
In the
depths of this exemplary citizen, von Aschenbach, there lurked a
painted
savage, looking for the right moment to come into the light and take
revenge. Lima,
September 1988 • Thomas
Mann, Death in Venice together with Two
Other Stories: Tristan, Tonia Kroger.
Penguin,
Harmondsworth, 1955, p. 76. + Death in Venice, p. 71. |