Aschenbach's Reading--and Ours:
Aspects of Decadence in Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice."

(A paper prepared for the annual meeting of the Linguistics Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota. The conference theme was "Decadence, Dissent, and Deviance." I gave the paper at  Minot State University, Oct 22, 2005)

I think I ran into Death in Venice, Plato’s Phaedrus, and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy about the same time, during the period that included with my earning—however precariously—a degree in chemistry and my three years in the engineering department of U.S. Navy destroyer.  I had heard about Plato in one of the two electives chemistry majors were allowed in the 1950’s I probably bought this anthology of Plato and this edition of Death in Venice in one of the little secondhand bookstores in Long Beach, where my ship, was homeported. I did not read Death in Venice in German, had have not since, though I had had at that time two years of scientific German and later passed an examination in it for my graduate studies and still enjoy puzzling along in facing page translations such as the one by Stanley Applebaum.
 
I got most of my reading guidance from a dictionary of world literature, which I read literally to pieces. When I did read primary texts, such as T. S. Eliot or Dostoevsky, I went seeking the “pure meaning” in dictionaries of world literature. I thought of literature as being about ideas, as philosophy with attractive flesh on its bones. I wanted literature, both in general, and as found in particular pieces, to be reduced to some sort of schematic. Death in Venice, with its multiple references to Plato and its implicit references to Nietzsche, was deeply fascinating.

I was also in the early 60’s, part of the generation emerging from the Eisenhower years. Copies of Ginsberg and Kerouac were passed from hand to hand. We had beatnik theme parties where we corked our faces black and wore berets. Yet I was so ignorant that when I read a Kerouac novel that talked about smoking “tea,” I thought they were smoking tea. Though the pill was not then available and the sexual revolution was a mere fantasy for most of us, my friends and I still wanted liberation or at least as much liberation as was consistent with a good job in a defense industry where we would be protected from the draft.

We sensed vaguely that there existed something called The Establishment out there, that had gotten it all wrong, that had deliberately concealed from us the True Meaning of Life. We vaguely thought we could recover the truth in some sort of heroic descent in some sort of underworld. If you would have asked me about decadence then, we might have told you that it was probably a term invented by our parents to fence us off from Truth. We read Blake to the effect that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. The short cut of hallucinogenic drugs was no more available to us than the sexual revolution. In short, I was an indifferent chemist, an uninformed but enthusiastic reader, and a closet decadent. If my parents had known what I was thinking, they would have been more alarmed than they were.
 
When I first read Death in Venice, I grasped that it was about an aging writer, some sort of Grand Old Man of Letters, who goes to Venice on a holiday and becomes so obsessed with a young Polish boy that he ignores the growing signs of Asiatic Cholera and so becomes infected and so dies. He is a pathetic old man wearing make up. Aschenbach had fallen into decadence, but decadence in my vocabulary was an attractive quality, and Mann’s dense and allusive language made it seem more so.

The references to Plato were intriguing. I had had the same experience many naive readers had, in working out the pronouns in The Symposium and The Phaedrus discovering that the “love” being analyzed in those early dialogs was love between older men and young boys. Our teacher, of course, had said nothing about this, and we were left to puzzle it out on our own.

What I knew about homosexuality came from locker room jokes about dropping the soap in the shower. Female homosexuality unimagined and unimaginable. I understood that the Greeks thought differently about such things than we did. Clearly these things were not decadent to the Greeks. So here was news falling sweetly on the ears of those wanting liberation from the dead hand of convention. I was pleased to find that in the abstract, it had picked up a certain cachet. I think I did what many readers and even some critics have done. I associated Aschenbach with Socrates. Pederasty in aristocratic Greek society somehow taken for granted and so Aschenbach’s attraction for Tadzio was somehow to be accepted. To this, I added the possibility that Mann’ was revealing his own repressed homosexuality. The story picked up aspects of a secret confession. Homoeroticism became the main theme of the story.
 
I have now read The Phaedrus, still not well I am sure, but diligently, and discovered quite another story. The dialogue starts out with a youth, named Phaedrus talking to Socrates about whether the lover or the non-lover is to be preferred in romantic relationships. The relationships in question are between older men and young boys, but this is assumed to be the only kind of romantic relationships there are. By lover, Socrates and Phaedrus mean a person emotionally committed to his lover, and by non-lover they mean a person emotionally detached. Phaedrus recalls a long speech by Lysias arguing in favor of the non-lover, that is in favor of detachment.

Such relationships, being free of “madness,” are being easier on the beloved. Both are making the point the hopeful but delusional point you could probably hear being made if you sat for an hour in the student union across campus: That is, if all either party expects is sex, they are not likely to be disappointed. But then as he is about to leave, Socrates is struck by his daemon that gives him only negative advice. He turns back to deliver a long speech arguing that all they have been saying about madness applied only to human variety. But there can be divine madness as well. In fact, four kinds of it: prophetic, initiatory, poetic and erotic.

Central to this speech is the famous comparison of the soul to a chariot pulled by two horses, one black and surly, the other noble and white. Woven in are Plato’s well-known theories of a timeless realm of absolute forms that we know from a previous life and that we can, by the study of philosophy, recover enough of to lead a enlightened life. Socrates discussion of the soul connects with the discussion of love at the point where Socrates shows how the lover, approaching his beloved in a tither, falls off the chariot, thus accidentally pulling back on the reins and taming the unruly steed. This scene, worthy of something in a Three Stooges sketch, brings the three parts of the lover’s soul into harmony where it can be joined to the soul of the beloved and the two souls can then “live in light always, happy of companions of their pilgrimage.”

The dialogue then concludes with a kind of coda arguing for a connection between ethics and rhetoric. The point common to both love and rhetoric is that cynicism is the great enemy. Properly disciplined, truth, love and emotion can live in harmony. Furthermore, there appears to be nothing “going on” as we say, between Socrates and Phaedrus. The dialogue is not about homosexuality at all and the point of the dialogue is not to promote a relaxed view of homosexuality but rather to promote love as a discipline that can bring about a kind of internal harmony.

Furthermore, when we look at the ways the story USES the Phaedrus, it seems clear that the pederastic aspects of the Plato are not to the point. The passages that follow Plato most closely are Aschenbach’s recollection of the setting of the Phaedrus: a plane tree, the scents of agnus castus, a running stream and a reference to the god Achelous and some nymphs. A page later, we find a passage that looks like quotation, so much so that Lowe-Porter puts it in quote marks, though it does not appear so in the original German. It begins The other passage that IS in quotes in the original begins “For beauty, Phaedrus, mark my words,--only beauty is both divine and visible to the human eye.”

This second (which Applebaum--apparently baffled--leaves unfootnoted) sounds like a distortion or at best like a parody of Plato. In it, the person speaking to Phaedrus renounces “all unraveling intellect.” Does that sound like Plato? This intellect, says the Aschenbach’s Socrates, lives in “sympathy with the abyss." He says that “Unfettered innocence and form are said to be “worth striving for” but a sentence later these things are said to “lead to intoxication and lust and emotional sacrilege.” Applebaum tells us that Mann was no careful student of Plato and got much of his Platonism from Schopenhauer’s paraphrases or the German equivalent of Cliff Notes.

But it is difficult to imagine anyone—let alone Thomas Mann—garbling Plato this badly. It seems clear to me that Aschenbach is simply babbling. His wild misreading of Plato, far from being a key to understanding the story, is part of his general deterioration under the double influence of sexual obsession and Asiatic cholera,

The same thing is true when we turn to Aschenbach’s meditations on Dionysius, who ever since Nietzsche has been considered in conjunction of Apollo. In the case of The Birth of Tragedy, I can date my first reading fairly precisely, because when I bought it, I wrote the place and date inside the front cover: Seattle, April, 1959. I was in Seattle to be sworn in on my way to Officers’ Candidate School in Newport Rhode Island, to be transformed into an officer and a gentleman, a position to which I am still aspiring.

Nietzsche was only a name, vaguely associated with dark and forbidden schools of thought, but that was enough and so carried it back to my grungy room in the YMCA and read the first dozen pages or so, and though I began the book many times in the next 30 years, I seldom got further than those dozen pages and never beyond my patent misunderstanding of the essay, which I thought was an argument in support of the Dionysian intoxication as an antidote to a culture deep in the thrall of Apollonian reason. That fit nicely with my quest to liberate the world, beginning with myself. This was the reading I carried over into Death in Venice when I began to put the two books together in the chaotic chambers of my mind in the 1960’s.
 
That reading--or as I hope to show—misreading---is one shared by people who should know better. Applebaum thinks that Aschenbach at the beginning of the story, has developed into a “thoroughly, official Apollonian” who encounters his natural enemy Dionysius who is symbolized by the man with the prominent Adam’s apple in the cemetery, AND the disgusting old man on the ship from Pola, AND the surly mysterious gondolier, AND the leader of the street musicians. However, neither the word Apollo nor the word Dionysius appears in the novella, and the only explicit connection is the long dream sequence at the end, which appears to be a paraphrase of Euripides The Bacchae.

It is easy enough to see how readers—amateur and professional—have been tempted into this simplistic mapping an inadequate reading of Nietzsche onto an inadequate reading of Death in Venice. In reviewing Aschenbach’s early accomplishments, the narrator describes how Aschenbach “renounced sympathy with the abyss” and “achieved a new austerity.” After Aschenbach makes one attempt to leave Venice and then exploits a luggage mix-up as an excuse to return, he looks at Tadzio with a new ecstasy that appears at first to be liberation. The narrator says that “memory dredged up ancient thoughts that had been preserved since childhood but had never before been animated with any fire of their own."This fire evidently is responsible for the outburst of creative energy Aschenbach has on the beach, where inspired by Tadzio, he composes a page and half of prose making a definitive statement about an artistic controversy raging on the continent. In the movie, this takes the form of a haunting melody drawn from Mahler.

So I read Death in Venice and Nietzsche as making one  united cry, Death to Apollo, long live Dionysius. That Aschenbach ends up a pathetic creature seemed somehow beside the point. Perhaps I might have granted that, eventually, some sort of “balance” might be required, but when Apollo held all in thrall, as I thought he did for Aschenbach--and as I was sure he did for myself--clearly the first step was to give the claims of Dionysius their long overdue day in the sun. There would be plenty of time later on to worry about balance.

But I have now made my way all the way through The Birth of Tragedy and predictably found it to be much different—and much better—than the artificial construct I had made of it all those years. As most of you know, The Birth of Tragedy is not a hymn to intoxication at all, but a hymn to tragedy, diatribe against Socrates and Euripides who, Nietzsche thought had undone the balance between Apollo and Dionysius already achieved by Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Furthermore, Apollo, in Nietzsche’s view is not a figure of reason at all, but symbol of the “dream life,” the patron saint not of Euclid or even Aristotle, but of the plastic arts and of narrative--the patron saint of Homer. In Nietzsche's view, the balance between Apollo and Dionysius, eminently achieved in the early Greek tragedy, was destroyed by Socrates persuasive portrait of “theoretical man,” a pallid automaton, driven by syllogisms, proof and counter-proof, and fallen into a shallow optimism. Reason is bad in Nietzsche’s view, not because it is Apollonian, but because it is Socratic.

Thus Nietzsche’s essay IS about decadence, our current topic, that is, about the decay of western culture since Socrates and how that that original high and holy sense of tragedy might be reborn through the German Spirit. The last half dozen pages are among those violently misread by the Nazis a few decades after Nietzsche died, and lifted from their context, they are spooky to read.

Thus, we see that Nietzsche’s essay not so much about reason on one hand and and madness on the other, as about logic on one hand and a balance of song and dream on the other. If there is a duality in Death in Venice, it is between discipline and indulgence, with Aschenbach too disciplined at the beginning and too indulgent at the end, but discipline and indulgence are not Nietzschian categories. Rather than seeing the story as Thomas Mann reading Nietzsche, we will get further seeing Aschenbach misreading him.
 
So--let us count the ways we have addressed the issue of decadence, acknowledging as ShaunAnn did earlier, that the etymological root of word is the Latin decedare, to decay:  1) my decay into vaguely revolutionary habits of thought; 2) Phaedrus’ decay into cynicism, from which he is rescued by Socrates vision of love based on achieving a disciplined and harmonized soul; 3) Aschenbach’s decay into a distorted and simplistic reading of Plato; 4) Nietzsche’s analysis of the decay of Western culture, under the influence of Socrates, from the high-water mark of Aeschylus and Sophocles; 5) Aschenbach’s decayed reading to the Dionysius myth, 6) Aschenbach’s decay from a productive if limited artist into a pathetic and driven creature on a hopeless homosexual quest.
 
We are led, I think, to two conclusions. One has to do with our attitudes to decadence itself. I believe and I—and many of my generation—erred in trying too hard to eliminate moral categories and abolish discriminatory labels. We romanticized Aschenbach. I was determined not to judge Aschenbach, determined see decadence as a term invented by what we then called the establishment and have since been taught to call hegemony. I thought what great art did was break down the barriers between good and evil, or as Nietzsche said, pass Beyond Good and Evil.
 
What I did NOT see was that the greatest art renders good and evil comprehensible, not by breaking down barriers between them, but by allowing us to see across the very legitimate dividing lines between them. My generation labored under the misapprehension that if we could be sufficiently non-judgmental, we could be more open to life in all its fullness--that judgment cuts us off from life. In striving to be “non judgmental,” we tried to establish a moral system in which things were, as we said, “neither good or bad but only different.”

 Now I agree that being open to life in all its fullness is very good thing. But some parts of life can be seen in all their fullness only from the outside, because stepping inside them muddles our view of those things—and of everything else besides. We can see some things only if we call them by their rightful name and some cases the right name is decadence. We honor Aschenbach and Thomas Mann as we recognize that Aschenbach DOES decay. I think we are to read that page and half of inspired prose not as something for which a soul was well lost, but as a purple patch, rhetorical fireworks that quickly faded away.

My second conclusion has to do with reading. It may be that Aschenbach’s fall is not his yielding to his latent homosexuality, not his overcorrecting a too-well developed devotion to discipline. Both those though are certainly involved, but the primarily fall, and the source of tragedy if Death in Venice can be said to be tragic, is his conceiving Tadzio as a source of pure beauty—trying to pull the Plato’s ladder of love up into the tower behind him.
 
Thus his most important failure is a failure of reading, and it is haunting similar to my own early struggles as a reader, when I sought “pure” interpretations of everything I read, seeking at the earliest moment to reduce them to abstract schema and quick formulas. All my efforts to see Death in Venice as a fleshing out of Plato and Nietzsche were misguided. Ultimately, efforts to use literature to illustrate philosophy, or psychology, or ideology, including sexual ideology, have been ultimately disappointing.

In the end we must give ourselves to texture and structure of the story, what Henry James called the “quality and quantity of felt life,” what Flannery O’Connor called the “what-is.” That term occurs in a book called Mystery and Manners, a very useful book, even though it partly an artificial construction of Sally Fitzgerald, who carved it out of scattered prose pieces O’Connor published in obscure periodicals or prepared for her infrequent talks she gave to college audiences. The relevant sentence is: “The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in face of what-is. What-is is all the writer has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and the writer will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.”

The wisest and most productive reading now seems to me to the kind we first respond to images and to language that force themselves upon us that gather us in perhaps for reasons we cannot at first articulate. Even in my earliest readings of Death in Venice, I found the most memorable paragraph was the one describing Aschenbach’s gondola ride into the city. Repeated reading has only deepened my attachment to its texture, though and now I can see every phrase echoing and reinforcing structural concerns. Now, rather than seeing the Mann’s novella as a story about Plato or Nietzsche, or Mann’s repressed homosexuality, I see it as a story about gondola rides. Let me close by reading that paragraph:

Who could avoid experiencing a fleeting shudder, a secret timidity and anxiety upon boarding a Venetian gondola for the first time or after a long absence? The strange conveyance, handed down without any changes from th days of yore, and peculiarly black--the other thing that black is a coffin--recalls hushed criminal adventures in the night, accompanied by the quiet splashing of water; even more, it recalls death itself, the bier and the dismal funeral and the final taciturn passage. And have you observed that the seat in such a boat, that armchair painted black like a coffin and upholstered in a dull b lack is the softest, most luxurious and enervating seat in the world. . . . Lulled by the tepid breath of the sirocco, resting on pillows and cradled by the yielding element, the traveler closed his eyes in enjoyment of an indolence that was as unaccustomed as it was sweet. "The ride will be a short one," he thought. "I wish it would last forever!" A gentle rocking indicated that he was drifting away from the crowd and the babel of voices.