‘Death in Venice’: On Art, Beauty and Decay

A review of ‘Death in Venice’, by Thomas Mann; 1912.

Some years ago while reading the Times Literary Supplement I came upon a review of a biography of Thomas Mann’s son and his difficult relationship with his father. It was titled ‘Mann’s inhumanity to Mann’: not bad, as headlines go. Death in Venice concerns a different kind of inhumanity, yet one also wrought by an older man on a younger one. It deals with a famous writer named Gustav von Aschenbach and his obsession with a boy, a ‘lovely youth’ called Tadzio. Aschenbach is a disciplined, solitary type who at the start of the story feels a vague longing for escape. He travels to Venice, lovingly described by Mann:

‘He saw it once more, that landing-place that takes the breath away, that amazing group of incredible structures the Republic set up to meet the awe-struck eye of the approaching seafarer: the airy splendour of the palace and Bridge of Sighs, the columns of lion and saint on the shore, the glory of the projecting flank of the fairy temple, the vista of gateway and clock.’

And here, in Venice, Aschenbach spots Tadzio, a boy of otherworldly beauty, and his interest becomes infatuation. The boy comes to represent the living, unattainable embodiment of artistic perfection. He is a symbol, for Mann, of an ideal of beauty that seduces and destroys.

Here, in Venice, Aschenbach spots Tadzio, a boy of otherworldly beauty, and his interest becomes infatuation.

As Aschenbach yearns to possess Tadzio, decay looms ever larger. The setting, with its crumbling façades, sweltering atmosphere and pervasive stench, reflects Aschenbach’s inner collapse. The aesthetic splendour of Venice hides the rot at its core. The city, intoxicating but morbid, is a place where beauty masks degeneration. When cholera breaks out, Aschenbach chooses to remain in the city, and his physical and moral slide runs in parallel to the creeping spread of the contagion.

Aschenbach keeps yearning for transcendence, but his desire makes him weak. He aspires to the eternal and sublime, drunk on Platonic notions of form and perfection, but his aspiration eats away at his integrity. The tension at the heart of Death in Venice springs from this: from the twin capacity of beauty to uplift and enslave. Aschenbach’s decision to stay is his surrender. His discipline and restraint abandon him. He is undone by his fixation.

The tension at the heart of Death in Venice springs from this: from the twin capacity of beauty to uplift and enslave.

Mann writes in a tight, sophisticated style, blending philosophical musings with vivid description. ‘Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry,’ he writes. ‘But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.’ His narrative voice is, for the most part, cool and analytical; yet it captures from to time Aschenbach’s feverish emotions, which at intervals seem to rise within the protagonist, as when he first seeds Tadzio:

‘His recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture-pale, with a sweet reserve, with clustering honeycoloured ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity.’

Death in Venice is a claustrophobic read. We find ourselves trapped inside the mind of one whose artistic obsession bleeds by degrees into a far darker wish to possess and consume. Mann tells his story with a certain intensity, but there is an ironic edge there, there in the way Mann describes the writer’s vanity, his stiff propriety, his absurd attempts to seem youthful. All these point to what Goya captured in his famous aquatint, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (‘The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters’); only in Death in Venice it is not that reason forsakes Aschenbach but that desire, overwhelms it. This is a tragic, brilliant story that lingers long after the final page.