Death in Venice and Other Stories (43 page)

The third strand of this thematic complex has to do with Mann's sense of the psychopathology of European civilization in the first half of the twentieth century. The destabilizing, destructive energies within the self can precipitate themselves in corporate conflict, war, and carnage. Self-loathing writ large can, in other words, become a national death wish. Asceticism and self-denial can produce a longing for willed, worshipped simplicity, for untrammeled mass hysteria. Implications of this kind can be felt in
Death in Venice
. We feel that the Dionysian orgy of Aschenbach's final dream could easily become a political orgy, could modulate into the any-order-is-better-than-none ethos of warmongering Europe.

If, then, these are some of the thematic energies of the stories, what of their literary mode? To begin with a point I have already made: there is, throughout these narratives, an interplay of (for want of a better word) realism and (again for want of a better word ) ideas. There are any number of vivid scenes, scenes that are expressive of both concrete particularity and philosophical import. One could think of Spinell's flight from the monstrously energetic baby at the end of “Tristan,” of Tonio Kröger‘s return to his hometown, of Aschenbach's attempt, in
Death in Venice
, to leave Venice, followed by his elated return when he discovers that his luggage has gone astray. On all these occasions, the sharply etched foreground is laid transparently against a play of ideas and concepts.

Second, it is important to register that the stories call upon structural statement to invest incidents with powerfully symbolic significance; in ways that are characteristic of the “Novelle” tradition, the shaped modality of the narrative invites us to be reflective readers. In “Tonio Kröger” the protagonist can never, it seems, break free from the tensions that haunt his adolescence. Hence so many details—phrases, events, characters—from his past recur throughout the text. Yet at another level, Tonio does make headway. At the end of the story, he manages to affirm his divided allegiances as the precondition for better art (and perhaps also better living). The last few lines of the letter he writes to Lizaveta, which forms the closing section of the story, almost exactly repeat the last few lines of the first section. The difference is that in the beginning the words are applied to Tonio by the third-person narrator; at the end they are written in the first person—he applies them to himself. The implications of this structural parallelism are absolutely crucial: Tonio has now truly become the narrator to and of his own experience. The moment of narrative self-consciousness wonderfully expresses the nature of Tonio's growth. Aschenbach's journey to Venice and into death is attended at every turn by fateful incidents (the dream in Munich of the jungle, with the mention of the eyes of the crouching tiger prefiguring the description of the cholera, the dandy on the boat who anticipates the Aschenbach who leaves the hotel barber with his hair dyed and his lips painted), by ominous figures (the tramp in Munich, the unlicensed gondolier, the street musician whose bared teeth suggest the skull forcing its way through the flesh). As is the case with “Tonio Kröger,”
Death in Venice
invites us to reflect on the narrative mode at work in the story. It is a supremely, almost claustrophobically, ordered account of the vulnerablity of order in human affairs. In this sense, it is a tale that calls itself into question. It could have been written by Aschenbach himself; and, in a sense, it is destroyed by him. The narrative statement of
Death in Venice
achieves a dizzying copresence of multiple meanings as levels of social realism, psychological analysis,
and philosophical rumination interlock. Moreover, Mann is superb at weaving into his work allusions to or quotations from other writers. One could think of the references to Greek thought and to Nietzsche in
Death in Venice
, of the Wagner quotations in “Tristan,” of the Schiller references in “Hour of Hardship.”

I hope, then, that these stories will give pleasure to the reader and that that pleasure will elicit multiple readings. “Tristan” is fascinating for the irony that sees both the limitations and the dignity of the contrasting characters (Klöterjahn may be coarse and clumsy, but his love for his wife is real; Spinell may be an attitudinizing aesethete, but he does understand the subversive intensity of Wagner's “Tristan and Isolde”). “Tonio Kröger” is memorable for its expression of intensely felt mood, of grief and outrage, of love and betrayal, and (as I have tried to suggest above) for its lucidity and clarity of structure. “The Child Prodigy” is extraordinary in its understanding of how and why it is that art is, in large measure, a social phenomenon, a performance at which the audience is not simply the dupe but also the creatively colluding partner. “Hour of Hardship” makes us understand the sheer attrition involved in Schiller's battle to force his tired, sick body to sustain mental creativity against all the odds.
Death in Venice
never ceases to enthrall by virtue of its ability to be at one and the same time the tragedy of the spiritually creative self and the painful fable of the degradation inflicted by sexual infatuation. And finally, “Man and Dog” is noteworthy for its splendid understanding of the complex interdependence between master and animal—and also for the delightful note to the effect that there are three categories of people that Baushan the dog cannot bear—policemen, monks, and chimney sweeps.

One final remark by way of conclusion. Thomas Mann writes superb German; he exploits the language's ability to create elaborate structures of statement, an architectonics of coordination and subordination. Time and again Mann proves himself to be the master of the many-layered statement. Jefferson Chase is splendidly alive to
the feel of Mann's German. Not even he, however, can capture the ambiguity of one particular phrase in
Death in Venice
, because that ambiguity only works in German. The phrase comes at the beginning of a sentence that describes Aschenbach's wish to plunge ever deeper into the darker recesses of cholera-ridden Venice. The phrase is “auf den Spuren des Schönen.” The first three words are unproblematic; they mean “on the tracks of.” But the last two words—”des Schönen”—pose the problem. They are a genitive, but of what noun? It could be either der Schöne, the beautiful male (that is to say, the boy Tadzio), or das Schöne, which means “the beautiful” (in the abstract). In English one has to plump for one or the other. Jefferson Chase is, in my view, right when he goes for “on the beautiful boy's trail.” But the ambiguity that is there in the German is the great ambiguity that destroys Aschenbach: when does the pursuit of the beautiful become the obsession with a physically beautiful body? When does the metaphysical slither into the physical? Aschenbach himself hardly knows. And the story in which he figures makes us uncertain too. But that uncertainty is the hallmark of the richness of this story and of the narrative genius this volume puts before us.

—Martin Swales

Bloom, Harold.
Thomas Mann
. New York: Facts on File, 2002.

Cohn, Dorrit.
Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Corngold, Stanley.
The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory
. Paperback reprint of 1986 original. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

Gay, Peter.
Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
. Paperback reprint of 1968 original. New York: Norton, 2001.

Hayman, Raymond.
Thomas Mann: A Biography
. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1996.

Heilbut, Anthony.
Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature
. Paperback reprint of 1995 original. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Jonas, Klaus W.
Fifty Years of Thomas Mann Studies: A Bibliography of Criticism
. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955.

Kurzke, Hermann.
Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Lehnert, Herbert and Eva Wessell, eds.
A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann
. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004.

Lukács, Georg.
Essays on Thomas Mann
. North Woodbridge, UK: Merlin Press, 1964.

Mann, Thomas.
The Letters of Thomas Mann 1889–1955
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Minden, Michael, ed.
Thomas Mann
. Harlow, UK: Addison Wesley Longman Higher Education, 1995.

Mundt, Hannelore.
Understanding Thomas Mann
. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

Prater, Donald A.
Thomas Mann: A Life
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Reed, T. J.
Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition
. Revised edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Swales, Martin A.
Thomas Mann: A Study
. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980.

Travers, Martin.
Thomas Mann
. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Wysling, Hans, ed.; Heilbut, Anthony, tr.
Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.