Death in Venice

Thomas Mann wrote Death in Venice in 1912 in a single sustained burst after returning from a trip to Venice where, by his own admission, he experienced something like what he gives to his protagonist. He was thirty-six. He had recently married, recently achieved fame with Buddenbrooks, and was struggling with a longer work. Venice loosened something. The novella that came out of it is one of the most formally achieved pieces of prose in twentieth-century European literature.

Gustav von Aschenbach is a distinguished German author, known for discipline, severity, controlled art — he is the kind of writer who produces prose of "such sustained grandeur" that it has become school reading. He goes to Venice for a holiday, meets a beautiful Polish boy named Tadzio, and cannot leave. The cholera creeping through the city from the east provides the external plot; the internal plot is the dissolution of a man who has built his entire life on form and control.

What Mann is doing is precise and merciless. Aschenbach's obsession is not presented sympathetically or condemned morally; it is presented clinically, as a case history that happens to be structured like a Greek tragedy. The references to Plato's Phaedrus — to Socrates' argument that beauty is the one form of the divine that the senses can perceive — are not decorative. Mann is asking what happens when the Apollonian artist encounters the Dionysian reality beneath his art: the answer is disintegration.

The style enacts the theme. The early prose is formal, architecturally controlled. As Aschenbach deteriorates, the sentences loosen; the mythological references multiply and become less ironic; the famous scene in which Aschenbach has his hair dyed and his face painted is narrated in a tone of horror that is also, unmistakably, a kind of ecstasy.

Gustav von Aschenbach — a disciplined German artist who has achieved greatness through the suppression of everything that might destabilize his work. Mann draws the character with some self-portrait: Aschenbach's aesthetics, his work ethic, his Germanness, are all available to Mann's irony. His dissolution is the novel's argument about what discipline costs and what it leaves unreached.

Tadzio — the Polish boy, approximately fourteen, who is seen entirely through Aschenbach's gaze and is never individualized. He is not a character in the ordinary sense; he is an aesthetic object who becomes, in Aschenbach's increasingly mythologized perception, a figure from classical antiquity. That he is an actual child, with a mother and sisters and Polish companions, is the irony that the novel never lets the reader forget even as Aschenbach loses sight of it.

The Figures of Death — Mann populates the novella with a series of uncanny older men who seem to Aschenbach like figures from mythology: the stranger in the Munich cemetery who triggers his desire to travel; the ancient fop on the Pola steamer who disgusts him; the gondolier who brings him to the Lido; the street singer with the laughing death-face. These figures are not allegorical in a mechanical sense, but they accumulate into an insistence: death has been present from the first page.

No. 1 · The opening mythological vision. Before Aschenbach's situation in Venice has fully developed, Mann gives him a vision of a primeval jungle swamp — humid, rank, full of crouching tigers — which is the first eruption of the Dionysian into his controlled consciousness. The vision comes while he is waiting for a tram in Munich, triggered by looking at a stranger. It is the novel's first indication that what follows is already latent.

No. 2 · The cosmetic transformation. In Part Four, Aschenbach allows a hotel barber to dye his grey hair, paint his face, and redden his lips — he emerges looking like the repellent old fop from the Pola steamer who disgusted him in Part Two. Mann's narration does not comment; it simply describes. The reader does the work of understanding what has happened: Aschenbach has become the thing that nauseated him, which was always his destination.

No. 3 · The final beach scene. Aschenbach watches Tadzio playing on the beach one last time. The boy moves toward the water and gestures — ambiguously, perhaps toward Aschenbach, perhaps away. Aschenbach slumps dead in his beach chair. The death is handled in two sentences. Mann refuses the operatic ending the classical allusions have been building toward; the actual death is quiet, unwitnessed, and slightly absurd.

Translation matters enormously in a novella of this formal precision.

Read this if you are…

• Anyone interested in modernist literature: this is one of its founding texts, and it is a hundred pages.
• Readers who want to understand what Mann is doing in The Magic Mountain before committing to 700 pages; the same obsessions are here in miniature.
• Anyone interested in the relationship between artistic discipline and the Dionysian — what order costs, what it suppresses.

Skip it if you are…

• Uncomfortable with the subject matter: the obsession involves a fourteen-year-old, and while Mann renders it with clinical irony rather than sympathy, the discomfort is the point, and some readers find it a point they'd rather not experience.
• Looking for psychological realism: the characters are closer to mythological figures than to people, and the novella is structured as an argument, not a representation.

Read it in a single sitting if possible — it is three hours, and the cumulative pressure of the novella's formal control is part of the experience. Note the recurring figures who seem to be variations on the same death-figure; Mann plants them across all five parts.

The Platonic passages — Aschenbach's thoughts about beauty and the divine — are not ornamental. They are Mann's ironic deployment of Plato's argument: the idea that beauty leads to transcendence is being tested against the reality that it leads to the Lido and a beach chair.

• Thomas Mann — The Magic Mountain (1924). The longer companion: the same themes — illness, the appeal of dissolution, European civilization's self-destruction — developed at full scale over twelve years Mann spent after writing this novella.
• Gustave Flaubert — A Sentimental Education (1869). The nineteenth-century case history of obsession that ends not in death but in the deeper death of having wasted everything.
• Rainer Maria Rilke — The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). The poetic parallel: a German artistic sensibility confronting Paris, beauty, dissolution, and death in the same years Mann was in Venice.

1. Aschenbach is presented as a great artist precisely because of his self-discipline. Does Mann suggest his dissolution was latent in that discipline all along, or is it an external attack?
2. Tadzio is never individualized as a character. What would change if Mann gave him interiority? Why doesn't he?
3. The recurring death-figures (the stranger, the old fop, the gondolier, the street singer) accumulate before Aschenbach fully understands his situation. Is death present in Venice, or is Aschenbach bringing it with him?
4. The Platonic framework — beauty as the one divine form available to the senses — is both what Aschenbach uses to justify his obsession and what Mann uses to diagnose it. Is Mann endorsing Plato, critiquing him, or both?
5. The cosmetic scene is the novella's most disturbing moment. What has Aschenbach actually become at that point?
6. The ending is two sentences. What does Mann gain by refusing the operatic death the allusions have been building toward?