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

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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>

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Laura Lovelock