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)