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TLS Spr 21 Notes 14 Barry Stocker Department of Humanities and SocialScience [email protected] Faculty of Science and Letters http://barrystockerac.wordpress.com SPRING 2021 TOPICS IN LITERATURE AND SOCIETY ITB 213E NOTES WEEK FOURTEEN THOMAS MANN. DEATH IN VENICE (1912) THOMAS MANN (1875-1955) Mann’s father was a merchant in the Free City of Lübeck on the Baltic Sea, who was a member of the city senate. His mother was from Brazil (of Portuguese and German origin). This combination of solid German upper class background and southern outsider is often reflected in Mann’s fiction, most obviously in the novella ‘Tonio Kröger’ (1903) which joins an Italian first name with a German surname. He moved to Munich with his family after the death of his father. This is a part of Germany very distinct from Lübeck, Catholic rather than Protestant, southern rather than northern. He also made long visits to Italy with his brother Heinrich, himself a notable novelist. Three of Mann’s own children were notable as writers (Klaus, Golo and Erika). There was enormous talent in the family, but also great psychological suffering: two of Mann’s sisters committed suicide as did his son Klaus. Mann married his wife Katia in 1905 (an event celebrated in Mann’s novel Royal Highness, 1909), who was from a very wealthy and highly cultured Jewish family in Bavaria. This connection perhaps was part of the motivation for Mann’s four part novel Joseph and His Brothers (referring to the Biblical story of Jacob and his 12 sons, 1933). The marriage appears to have been happy, but Mann’s diaries show that he struggled to repress his same sex desires. Homosexuality was illegal in German until the late 1960s and Mann apparently never wished to be part of the mostly covert world of gay men. He nevertheless hints at this side of his desires in his writing. Mann first novel was Buddenbrooks (1901), a tale of a merchant family on the Baltic, also drawing on his experience of Munich. The other major novels are Magic Mountain (1924), which draws on Mann’s experience of a Swiss mountain sanatorium and Doctor Faustus (1947), the story of a composer who believe he has become a great artist because he has sold his soul to the devil. Mann’s essays from the First World War, collected as Reflections of a nonpolitical Man include comments on Nietzsche’s attitudes towards German politics and culture. Mann moved from a conservative position to a more socialist point of view after 1918. He left Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933 and became well known internationally as a German opponent of Naziism during WW2, because of his radio broadcasts in Britain and the USA. 2 Death in Venice Thomas Mann wrote this as the result of a holiday in Venice shortly after the death of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), a key figure in the history of classical music. The connection with Mahler is emphasised in the novella in the name of the writer who is the main character, Gustav von Aschenbach. The description of his appearance is modelled on that of Mahler. We can see how deep Mann’s interest was in classical music from his novel Doctor Faustus, which is the life of a composer, and incorporates discussions of philosophy of music, in a dramatic story of a composer who appears to have either become insane or sold his soul to the devil in exchange for genius. Like Mann, Mahler had a deep interest in Nietzsche, setting the ‘Midnight Song’ from Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the 4th movement of his 3rd symphony. Nietzsche refers to Richard Wagner’s death in Venice (1883) in Ecce Homo, which was certainly part of the associations Mann is using in his novella. Another association is that Aschenbach’s first name ‘Gustav’ links him with the French writer Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), most famous for his novels Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education. Flaubert is known as someone who gave his life to writing and a perfectionist style in which every word is perfectly in place. This certainly fits with Aschenbach. Mann’s holiday in Venice was with his wife his brother, the novelist Heinrich Mann. He was impressed by a beautiful Polish boy he saw on the holiday, who became the model for Tadzio in the novel. Many incidents in the novella are based on incidents in Mann’s holiday and like Aschenbach, Mann was seeking to revive his writing energies through a period of relaxation. We should not see Mann as simply writing autobiographical material though. As with most fiction, whatever comes from real life is transformed in an imaginative context, drawing on many other elements. The intense labour of turning elements from many places into a unified work of art is a theme in Death in Venice. Aschenbach, a widower detached from human relations since the death of his wife, is himself aware of deep exhaustion from creating literature which is perfect in its unity. He is certainly different from Mann in that he is referred to as someone who writes without irony, presenting everything very directly, at least after his earliest ventures into writing fiction. Mann’s approach is ironic in this novella and throughout his career. That is Mann always writes in a way that gets deep into the consciousness of his characters, but aways with some sense of distance and detachment so that he is presenting a limited view of the world, not endorsing it. There is always some sense that a character’s words and point of view are lacking and are flawed, or in Aschenbach’s case in particularly comes from an obsession which has taken him over. The novella refers to the ancient Greek attitude to same sex relations, which gave some 3 value to the idea of a man inspiring a very young man who is an army colleague through an erotic bond, or to the older man who loves a very young man whom he is also educating and protecting. Greek mythology shows male gods falling in love with beautiful young boys, most famously in Zeus’ love for the shepherd Ganymede who joins the world of the gods as his cup bearer. Mann refers in the novella to Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus which discusses the issue. The idea that the lover who represses the physical side of love has a higher type of soul, than the lover who gives way to physical desires appears in the Phaedrus. After Aschenbach falls in love with Tadzio, his thoughts turn twice to the Phaedrus. The first time, his thoughts are quite close to what Socrates says in the Phaedrus but taking Socrates’ words to be a justification of seduction which is a dubious interpretation, because of the reservations we have mentioned that Plato speaking through Socrates has about physical love between men. The second passage in which Aschenbach thinks about the Phaedrus clearly goes much further than Plato in endorsing surrender to a wild intoxication with any kind of eroic desire. Anyway, at this point Aschenbach seems to be more addressing Phaedrus the beautiful young man in Plato’s dialogue than using Plato’s own thoughts. In the dialogue, Socrates meets Phaedrus on a hot summer midday just outside the city of Athens, in a place full of associations with the gods. This connects with the end of the novella. Aschenbach is a bit outside the city itself, as a very grand hotel by the lido (beach around the lagoon of Venice), on a very hot day watching Tadzio as his mind is full of associations with Greek gods and mythology. It is clear that Socrates is very attracted to Phaedrus and that the conversation is connected with his desire. However, the desire gives energy to Socrates’ wish to take Phaedrus away from thinking which does not value truth and morality, and does not form part of a seduction in the normal sense. Socrates speaks of the lover who loses his mind and follows the beloved around, just as Aschenbach follows Tadzio around Venice, though this may not indicate approval as for Plato control of the passions by reason is very important . Socrates, as Aschenbach suggests, sees the highest stare of mind in the lover who is led to thoughts of perfection, but this is not a ruse to seduce Phaedrus as Aschenbach imagines. Perhaps Plato creates some ambiguity in which we can imagine Socrates seducing the much younger man, but as indicated the message of the dialogue is that it is better to avoid physical love. Tadzio’s age in the novella, 14, is the age which the Greek lover of boys would typically value. As it was normal for girls to marry at 14 this was not a great deviation from norms of the time, but of course it may seem very disturbing too us now for good reasons. The story starts in Munich, as Aschenbach feels that he has lost some of the energy necessary for his writing. Mann indicates that 4 Aschenbach’s genius is more based on self-discipline than natural energy, so that Aschenbach’s writing is based on using short bursts of energy rather than an innate capacity to write. We learn that Aschenbach developed his writing as a lonely young man educated at home, so writing is linked with distance from other people. He was cynical about writing and writers as a young writer. Presumably the suggestion is that the young Aschenbach thought that writing was linked with energies are not purely moral and that burst through into full consciousness when Aschenbach sees Tadzio in Venice.
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