A journey to death, in Venice

In ‘The Aporia of Bourgeois Art: Desire in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice’, Hayes and Quinby present a reading of Mann’s novella through ‘a discourse of desire (…) produced by a system of binary oppositions in which one term is privileged over the other’ (1). As Death in Venice progresses, there is an uncanny merge of these initially apparent binaries, seen in Aschenbach’s decline as he becomes increasingly obsessed by Tadzio.

 

‘[Tadzio’s head] was like the head of Eros, with the creamy lustre of Parian marble, the brows fine-drawn and serious, the temples and ear darkly covered by the neat right-angled growth of the curling hair.’ (2).

Fig. 1

When considering the text in Nietzschean terms, the tensions between Apollonian and Dionysian powers can be seen to manifest in Aschenbach’s obsession with Tadzio, who he sees as being ‘as beautiful as a young god’ (Mann, p. 227). There is a parallel to be drawn between Tadzio, object of Aschenbach’s desires, and Tadzio’s sisters, who are seen, defeminised, dressed in unflattering, ‘cloistral’ clothing, reaffirming the concept of the female body as an object of desire (Mann, p.219).

On his journey to Venice in part three, Aschenbach observes an old man, masquerading in youth by wearing make-up and a wig. There is arguably an explicit shift in Aschenbach’s perception of the ordered, socially correct, Apollonian world around him, into a disordered, Dionysian one, ‘increasingly deranged and bizarre’ (Mann, p. 211). Perhaps this marks the beginning of the end for Aschenbach, as though from his decision to travel to Venice, he is fated to his death. T. J. Reed suggests in ‘Death in Venice’: Making and Unmaking a Master, that Aschenbach is ‘the fated victim of a god, his vacation a necessary passage to death at an appointed place’ (3). Later, in part five, Aschenbach appears as a reflection of the old man, described as wearing a scarlet necktie and broad brimmed straw hat, almost exactly as the Dionysian figure had worn in part three.

‘The old man (…) could not carry the wine as his youthful companions had done, and he was lamentably drunk’ (Mann, p. 213).

Fig. 2

So follows a tension of Apollonian and Dionysian forces as Aschenbach’s own balance is shifted back and forth between the two, as he focuses his attention towards Tadzio, and then as he tries to leave Venice, only to return to the hotel and to Tadzio. The tensions are, perhaps, reconciled in Aschenbach’s death, by forsaking ‘classical Apollonian form’ (Hayes and Quinby), because, as Nietzsche suggests, ‘wherever the Dionysian voice was heard, the Apollonian norm seemed suspended or destroyed’ (4).

Fig. 3

---

Fig. 1: Statue of Eros stringing his bow, in the Musei Capitolini.

Fig. 2: Seated Dionysos holding out a kantharos, in the British Museum.

Fig. 3: Final Scene from the 1971 film, Death in Venice.

(1) Tom Hayes and Lee Quinby, ‘The Aporia of Bourgeois Art: Desire in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice’ in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 31:2 (Spring 1989), p. 159.

(2) Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. by David Luke (London: Vintage, 1990), p. 223.

(3) T. J. Reed, ‘Death in Venice’: Making and Unmaking a Master (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), p. 11.

(4) Freidrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy <http://evans-experintialism.freewebspace.com/nietzsche_birth_tragedy_part_B.htm>

--- 

Useful link

--

Laura Lovelock

Ah Venice!

Venice, the sinking and stinking ‘queen of the Adriatic’ is a deadly place in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). Behind the façade of the ‘splendid city’ flows the ‘murky labyrinth of canals’ that wind around the buildings like the rivers Styx, Acheron, Lethe, Phlegethon and Cocytus. Gustav Von Aschenbach’s fate, like Oedipus Rex, is apparent from the outset as the re-incarnated Charon ferries him across the water. The reader, like a Greek Chorus, shouts ‘stop!’ but Gustav carries on; he is drawn by the pleasure-filled image of ‘Ah Venice!’ articulated by the boat’s ‘goateed’ ticket master. Interestingly, the same phrase is used by Indiana Jones when seduced by an Austrian beauty in another decade.

Gustav Von Aschenbach is Mann’s lab rat in a literary experiment. The novella looks at the possibilities of homosexual emotion whilst, as David Luke notes, trying out ‘a kind of post-naturalistic, post-decadent aesthetic theory and practice.’ Gustav arrives at Venice; this quasi Thebes is a sick city with a mysterious disease lurking in the background. Gustav seems to solve the hushed-up riddle, but like Oedipus, he cannot escape the impending doom. Venice soon becomes a battle ground for an agon between, what Nietzsche calls, ‘two art-sponsoring deities’: Apollo and Dionysius.

Enter Tadzio, the ‘god-like’ beauty whose sculptural features attracts the gaze of the protagonist. The boy is ‘entirely beautiful’ with a ‘head of Eros’ and ‘the creamy lustre of Parian marble’ as if Winckelmann was describing him. Luke describes Tadzio as the ‘meeting point of the Apolline cult of disciplined sculptured beauty and the dark, destructive longing of Eros-Dionysius.’ Tadzio is statue-like; he is an êgolma (the Greek word for statue) meaning 'something to be gazed at' and Gustav desires to be a part of this creation. Even the name ‘Tadzio’ is formed by the fragments he acquires whilst eavesdropping.

Not all the characters are so beautiful. Mann creates a carnival of quasi mythical individuals. Voluptuous mouths and grotesque features re-appear like Wagnerian leitmotifs spelling out disaster for Gustav. The minstrel licks ‘the corner of his mouth’ like the ‘dandified old man’ who is himself an eerie reflection of what Gustav will soon become. Perhaps these numerous irruptions are manifestations of Dionysius, or even, death itself. The strange man in Munich, the ticket master and the gondolier all herald death with their strange and sometimes deformed characteristics. As we encounter these characters we suddenly think how they completely juxtapose with Tadzio - or maybe not. A closer look at Tadzio reveals his ‘jagged and pale’ teeth. Is it possible that this ‘moment’s ornament’ could be another irruption of Dionysius?  Luke locates Tadzio ‘between innocence and a certain half-conscious sensuous coquetry.’ But is this Gustav’s Tadzio – a product of his dreamy imagination?

Dionysius kicks Apollo off Gustav’s right-hand shoulder when, at the end of an orgiastic and highly erotic dream, the speaker notes that ‘the dreamer now was with them and in them, he [Gustav] belonged to the stranger- god.’ However, self-destruction soon follows when he loses ‘the rational freedom of the will’ as well as, what the Kantian tradition would call, ‘the specific dignity’ or Würde of a man. He fails to warn the family of the sickness! He succumbs to irrational behaviour! He stalks Tadzio without self-control! The Hyacinthus myth reverses when the beauty survives and the flying discus strikes one of his admirers. Aschenbach is no more! 

The death of Gustav symbolises a failure to combine the artistic spirits of Apollo and Dionysius. Bradbury and McFarlane use these deities when trying to describe the difficulty that arises in defining the nature of Modernism:  

It is one of the larger commonplaces of cultural history that we can distinguish a kind of oscillation in style over periods of time, an ebb and flow between a predominantly rational world-view (Neo-Classicism, Enlightenment, Realism) and alternate spasms of irrational or subjective endeavour (Baroque, Sturm und Drang, Romanticism). The resultant temptation is to regard ages as being identifiably one or the other: head or heart is in command, reason or emotion dominates, the cultural pattern is ‘naïv’ or ‘sentimentalisch’, Apollo or Dionysius claims allegiance. It may help us to understand Modernism if we recognize that these spirits can cross and interfuse. 

Fusing Apollo and Dionysius would form a new Janus-like god. In order for 'newness' to be achieved, death must occur. Bradbury and Mcfarlane note that the ‘war itself can be recognised as the apocalyptic moment of transition into the new’. In a way, Aschenbach was a relic and his failure to pacify the warring agon between Apollo and Dionysius was the cause of his death in Venice.

Nathan Llywelyn Munday

Works Cited

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912)

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1871)

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764)

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (1991)

Looking Beyond the Railings in James Joyce’s Dubliners.

In contrast to his most experimental Modernist work Ulysses (1922), James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners (1914) initially appears to contain more linear narratives of ordinary people in their ordinary lives. Through an analysis of the epiphany motif which is a prominent feature in all of his short stories, it is evident that this is not the case. Joyce’s characters experience moments of realisation in each story which he himself referred to as ‘epiphanies’. Traditionally an epiphany connotes an enlightening religious revelation. However, Joyce’s Dubliners reverses the conventional definition of the epiphany; they are far more ambiguous than the term suggests. This leads Kevin J. H. Dettmar to suggest that each character actually experiences an ‘epiphony’ and he argues that the ‘false epiphany […] is always ultimately subjective, the validity – the efficacy – of a character’s epiphany is available to scrutiny’. Joyce’s characters cannot move beyond paralysis and the epiphanies demonstrate the moment of recognition in which they realise this.

A close reading of ‘Eveline’ reveals Joyce’s epiphany/epiphony and is exemplary of the characteristics of Joyce’s short story collection. The eponymous protagonist is stuck in a state of paralysis in this story, fixed in a circulatory routine within ordinary domestic life: ‘Home! She looked round the room reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years’. Eveline is offered an escape from this familiarity in an alternative life in Buenos Ayres with an enigmatic sailor named Frank. Frank’s representation remains detached from the narrative so he does not gain the trust of either Eveline or the reader. The narrator’s description of her opportunity to escape paralysis appears predetermined by Frank: ‘She was to go away with him by the night boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her.’ It is clear that Eveline has little agency in her fate and it is suggested that Frank has constructed a similarly circulatory life for her in the ‘home’ which ‘he had waiting’. The ‘waiting’ home appears sinister similar to a predator waiting for its vulnerable prey.

Eveline’s epiphany results in her abruptly deciding to remain in Ireland, leaving Frank to sail off towards her abandoned future. Her decision is made on the dock when she feels that, ‘All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.’ The image of the seas tumbling reveal the inaccessibility of a better future as if she would drown before reaching Argentina. The iron railing is an image which effectively demonstrates the ambivalence of Joyce’s epiphanies. The railings are fragmented: made up of both solid bars and empty spaces. These empty spaces represent the possibility to break free from routine but it is impossible due to the physical barriers which break up the empty space. The fragmentary characteristics of railings, in that the bars physically represent a barrier to freedom, but this freedom can be seen through the empty spaces beyond the bars, displays a future that can never be reached. Eveline’s potential to escape is equally ambiguous and fragmented as it is not necessarily going to result in her liberation from paralysis. Joyce’s epiphanies are neither freeing nor caging as characters are left in a liminal state between bars/barriers and empty spaces.

The closing sentences of the story maintain the tone of ambiguity: ‘She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.’ Just as animals are evolved to their habitats, Eveline is unable to adapt to leaving Dublin. Additionally the image of a ‘helpless animal’ alludes to a caged animal unable to break free from captivity. The predatory undertones of Frank’s character culminate in the direct comparison of Eveline to a ‘helpless animal’. The emptiness of Eveline’s final gaze at Frank portrays this inability to abandon her home/habitat as she is both emotionally and physically holding on to Dublin. 

Joyce’s short stories demonstrate the physical railings of linear narratives but significantly the empty spaces in between which ultimately facilitate the reader’s epiphany that paralysis prevails.

By Sarah Lough and Niamh Hughes 

Colour and symbolism in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Blue and Green’

A Victorian lustre

 

Colour is powerful. It modifies our perception of objects in a way that is difficult to communicate through language. Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘Blue and Green’, first published in Monday or Tuesday (1921), makes an attempt at reconciling this power of symbolism with the modernist aim of representing reality through language using unconventional structures and forms.

‘Blue and Green’ portrays a conscious mind grappling with the myriad images that a ray of green light evokes. It is an investigation into consciousness and demonstrates how colour can be a catalyst for the conscious mind to perceive reality in different imaginative ways. Green gives the mind a link between a Victorian ornament (the lustre) and palm trees, parakeets and ponds. It is not as if the lustre has an outside context that informs the viewer’s perception of the object, as may be the case with an ornament taken from another country. The lustre’s transparency gives it a sort of neutrality that allows it to be modified by colour, almost as a blank canvas.

As the green light starts to fade with the coming of night, the viewer’s thoughts have rested on “the ruffled surface of ocean” where “the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky.”(1) By this time the mind has begun a narrative, in which the new blue light follows the water symbolism in evoking images of the sea, which continue until the end of the story. If the viewer’s meandering thoughts had commenced with the blue light rather than the green, then any number of other images (such as the sky, or bluebells) may have been induced. However, water has been firmly established in the viewer’s mind, finding its outlet through various water-related images. ‘Blue and Green’ is an effective representation of the mind’s journey from perceiving a glass ornament — that it may have perceived many times without event — to revelling in its imagination of the sea, all through the capacity for colour to profoundly affect consciousness.

The philosopher G. E. Moore outlined the immense difficulty of properly explaining colour in his essay ‘The Refutation of Idealism’: “that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us: it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent — we look through it and see nothing but the blue; we may be convinced that there is something but what it is no philosopher, I think, has yet clearly recognized.”(2) In true modernist fashion, however, Woolf does not attempt to explain colour but only to represent its effects on the working mind and its ability to adjust the perception of reality in a purely subjective way, since every mind would be affected in different ways.

(1) Virginia Woolf, ‘Blue and Green’ in Selected Short Stories, ed. Sandra Kemp (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 44.

(2) G. E. Moore, ‘The Refutation of Idealism’, in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Morris Weitz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), p. 27. 



Owen Harry 

Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf: A Feud Between Two Literary Generations

In a feud that lasted more than a decade, Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf went blow for blow until, perhaps, the dispute eventually became more personal than professional. Nevertheless, some interesting insights into the character and what makes a good character arose. For example, whilst Bennett believed that Georgian's were to be blamed because they were 'unable to create characters that are real, true and convincing' ('Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 1924, p. 4), Woolf locates the problem in the previous generation of the Edwardians as she believed that although they are able to supply a great deal of detail, they lack the ability to create complex characters. Of course Woolf is unable to leave this statement hanging; she must provide evidence. It is here that not only does Woolf provide evidence against Mr. Bennett, but also Mr Wells and Mr. Galsworthy too. On pages 13-14 of 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown', Woolf uses the figure of Mrs. Brown to argue that Mr. Wells would act in ignorance and would project her as perfectly happy and would omit her poor dress and anxiousness. She implies that Mr. Galsworthy would simply ignore or discard her, and she asserts that Mr. Bennett would do his best to avoid her. This is perhaps where it gets a little more personal, as Woolf extends this criticism of Arnold Bennett into his own work, using a paragraph from his novel, Hilda Lessways, as an example. Woolf boldly argues that Bennett, and the Edwardians in general, were materialists who were more preoccupied with outward details rather than the inner complexities of people and life. Woolf calls to abandon Edwardian interests in outside details and to instead embrace the internal complexities of that character in his/ her representation. In An Unwritten Novel (1921), Woolf not only gives voice to a "normal" middle aged woman (like Mrs. Brown), but also muses about the complexity of the soul and the inner self and wonders 'when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world [...]' ([p. 34). In more abstract works, such as Blue and Green (1921), Woolf uses literary impressionism to convey what is difficult to express through language, but which is ultimately a representation of one's innermost feelings as portrayed through objects, sounds and light- 'harsh cries', 'sharp blades', 'empty sky'. Even in these abstract works a high sense of reality is achieved; we know not who the narrator is, or if there is one, but we are able to sense emotions that are so true, so identifiable, that there is no need for the descriptiveness a writer such as Arnold Bennett may provide, for Woolf bares the inner complexities of the soul through the words she paints. 




Sammy Evans