Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Death in Venice (1912)

by Thomas Mann

I was not familiar with Thomas Mann’s novella until I read this new translation by Michael Henry Heim. In comparison with the previous translation by Stanley Applebaum this new one is much more poetic and evocative in language and phrasing, something pointed out by Michael Cunningham in the introduction. He compares this new version to the one by H.T. Lowe-Porter from 1930. “Heim’s Death in Venice is, generally, a more lyrical, sympathetic book—a slightly more intimate and personal book—than Lowe-Porter’s rather stern, disapproving one.” Given this ability to compare, the older translations make the protagonist into a character not unlike those in Russian novels, clownish and foolish to use Cunningham’s words, but ultimately done in by their own sense of decorum rather than anything external. What Mann has given the reader, through Heim, is not a tragic example or an object of pathos, but instead an everyman who is more in keeping with this time than he ever was in his own. As such, Heim has brought forward Mann and his character into the modern era without altering the original complexity of the language or the simplicity of the story itself. Rather than giving the reader an omniscient view of a wretched creature, Heim has translated the protagonist into a human being in which we can all recognize ourselves.

Part One begins in Munich a few years prior to the outbreak of World War One, something apparently everyone felt coming as the narrator says that particular year “had shown so ominous a countenance to our continent. The writer Gustav von Aschenbach was simply going out for a walk, unaware that his life as he had known it was about to change forever. After walking through the park he ends up waiting for a tram next to a cemetery, looking across the street at the mortuary and the tombstones awaiting customers with no one in sight and nothing moving. It’s a nice foreshadow as he contemplates the spiritual inscriptions surrounded by death. “As it happened, there was no one at the tram stop or thereabouts. Nor was any vehicle to be seen on the paved roadway of the Ungererstrasse . . . There was nothing stirring behind the stonemason’s fences, where crosses, headstones, and monuments for sale formed a second, uninhabited graveyard.” The image of the old man, waiting at the empty train station for death, is quite powerful. After finally seeing someone across the street, he is spurred into walking on and is suddenly overtaken by the urge to travel. His work is not progressing and he thinks perhaps a change will make the familiar more bearable when he returns.

Part Two is a brief interlude that delves into Aschenbach’s background, early talent that took him right away into the solitary life of a writer. At the same time, his writing was never a joyful process and his entire literary life has been spent living up to the expectations of his early promise. The perfection of his output is not the result of inspired muse, but the result of disciplined diligence in warding off even a whiff of failure. “It was a forgivable error . . . that the uninitiated should take the world of his [works] as the product of prodigious strength and unending stamina, but in fact they grew out of daily increments of hundreds upon hundreds of bits of inspiration . . . for years under the strain of a single work with a fortitude and tenacity.” What is fascinating to wonder, in a literary sense, is how much association there is between the writer Aschenbach and the author himself. A lengthy explanation of Aschenbach’s work by critics lauds his newfound objectivity, something that would seem to presage Hemingway.

          The power of the word by which the outcast was cast out heralded a rejection of all moral doubt,
          all sympathy with the abyss, a renunciation of the leniency implicit in the homily claiming that to
          understand is to forgive, and what was under way here, indeed, what had come to pass was the
          “miraculous rebirth of impartiality,” which surfaced a short time later with a certain mysterious
          urgency in one of the author’s dialogues.

In Part Three the author takes a couple of weeks to get his affairs in order, giving instructions to have his summer home in the mountains readied for his return from the Adriatic. But he is not happy with the weather there or the company, and so he travels on to Venice. On his way to Italy, aboard ship, the old man has his first sensation that something is wrong. “He had the impression that something was not quite normal, that a dreamlike disaffection, a warping of the world into something alien was about to take hold [of him].” Upon his arrival he has a second foreshadowing of death as he ascends the gangplank and boards a gondola, “so distinctively black, black as only coffins can be—it conjures up . . . death itself: the bier, the obscure obsequies, the final, silent journey.” After a disconcerting trip with a gondolier who, it turns out, had no license, Aschenbach makes his way to his comfortable hotel by the sea rather than the city proper, but is still haunted by visions of the various characters he’s seen on his trip thus far. While the weather is no better than it was on the Adriatic, he does spy a family from Poland that intrigues him, especially the young boy named Tadzio, and decides to stay. But a trip into town for a walk quickly dissuades him and he packs immediately in preparation to leave again. The next morning, however, regret sets in and another foreshadow of death, though less obvious, besets him.

          Was it possible he had not known or even considered how much it all meant to him? What that
          morning had been a pang of sorrow, a vague doubt as to the validity of his actions, was now grief,
          true pain, an affliction of the soul so bitter that it brought tears to his eyes more than once . . .
          What he found so hard to bear and even utterly intolerable at times was clearly the thought that
          he would never see Venice again, that this was a farewell forever.

But when he gets to the train station and learns that his luggage has been accidentally sent along with others from the hotel to Como, he is secretly delighted that he is now able to stay in Venice without embarrassing himself.

In Part Four his firm resolution to stay in Venice has caused another change in him, an even subtler foreshadow of death as he begins to luxuriate in each “new sunny day of loosely ordered leisure.” Normally, “Aschenbach did not care for pleasure . . . he soon felt restless and ill at ease and could not wait to return to his noble travail, the sober sanctuary of his daily routine.” His primary pleasure, however, is watching young Tadzio, and it soon becomes an obsession. At first it’s a fairly abstract obsession with the boy’s beauty, and he compares it to his writing. “What discipline, what precision of thought was conveyed by that tall, youthfully perfect physique! Was it not at work in him when chiseling with sober passion at the marble block of language?” But soon he imagines himself in ancient Greece, he as Sophocles and Tadzio his pupil. This soon turns to a series of comparisons with Greek mythology that, yet again, ends in death, as he watches Tadzio, “clad in white and with a bright colored sash, play[ing] ball on the rolled gravel court, but seeing Hyacinth who, loved by two gods, was doomed to death.” But the associations with Greece are not coincidental, as it is with that culture that he associates his own Dionysian desire for the boy rather than the Victorian perversion that his thoughts are leading him. “He whispered, the standard formula of longing—impossible here, absurd, perverse, ridiculous and sacred nonetheless, yes, still venerable even here: ‘I love you!’”

With that, Part Five, the lengthiest and final section of the novella, forges ahead to the conclusion. As Germans and other Western Europeans begin to disappear from the resort, he gradually learns a cholera epidemic is spreading through Venice that the Eastern Europeans are oblivious to. Aschenbach, in his own subtle way, has learned the truth but is equally powerless to leave as long as Tadzio and his family remain. By now the young boy is his sole hobby, even inspiring him to write for a brief spell while observing him on the beach. His rationalization of his behavior is beautifully constructed. “Like any man whose natural gifts aroused an aristocratic interest in his ancestry, he habitually called to mind his forebears . . . What would they say? But what for that matter would they have said about his life as a whole, a life diverging from theirs to the point of degeneracy, lived under the spell of art?” He continues by comparing his diligence at his writing desk to their bravery and heroism and emerges in his mind their equal, if not their better. What the old writer does recognize, however, is the symbolic death that he has already undergone. In considering warning Tadzio’s family about the epidemic he knows, “It would lead him back, restore him to himself, but there is nothing so distasteful as being restored to oneself when one is beside oneself . . . the thought of returning home, of coming to his senses, sobering up, resuming his drudgery and craft was so abhorrent to him that his face twisted into an expression of physical revulsion.”

The story ends on a beautiful and powerful, though not unexpected, symbolism as well as a literal ending that is far from sad. In Michael Cunningham’s introduction he articulates the very same idea that I had on reading the novella. “Mann seemed to be saying that yes, we all fade, we’re all going to the same place, and so we might as well go down in a blaze of love, however we may degrade ourselves in the process.” But there is also a powerful sense of change that pervades the character of Gustav von Aschenbach, one that reminds me of the character of Louise Mallard in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” In this sense, there was nothing else that could happen at the end. Aschenbach had already died to the person he had been, and there was no going back. The ending also uses the same kind of ocean symbolism that James Baldwin would use in “Sonny’s Blues” or that David Kaplan would use in “Doe Season” and that Kate Chopin would use literally in “The Awakening.” Given that, it not only makes sense but seems inevitable. I would argue with those who see in the protagonist a gay character, as that is hardly the point. The love Aschenbach has for Tadzio, whether courtly, paternal or otherwise, has no chance of being realized and thus the writer’s transformation is the reason for the narrative, not what he has transformed into. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is not about plot, it is about character, and is as rewarding as it is serious, a deliberate and artistically rendered portrait that is more important for how it is rendered rather than what it renders.