Freudian Analysis of Thomas Mann Death in Venice

Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is an easy subject for psychoanalytic criticism. Given that Freud’s theory of unheimlich (the uncanny) has been construed as a “latter-day theory of the sublime, of the imagination overwhelmed in a moment of bafflement but also exhilaration,” Aschenbach’s various obsessions make more sense (Sandner, 2004, p. 74). Of course, other aspects of Freudian discourse can be used as lenses through which to read Death in Venice, but unheimlich offers the broadest insight into Aschenbach’s overall character. The entire novella unfolds as a series of cascading coincidences, and if it were not set in the dreamy world of the Venetian archipelago, Mann’s novella would be less believable and even more surreal than it already is. Yet Venice offers the perfect landscape within which to explore the resurfacing of unconscious thoughts, dreams, desires, and fears that occupy the unconscious mind. The reader becomes trapped inside of Aschenbach’s own mind, seeing the strange characters he meets through his warped state of being. Primarily, the reader learns of Aschenbach’s triple obsessions: his obsession with his appearance and simultaneously, his youth; his obsession with Venice; and his obsession with Tadzio. Understood through the principle of unheimlich, Aschenbach’s obsessions intermingle to provide a portrait of an aging man consumed by a fear of losing his sexual and aesthetic potency.
For Freud, the uncanny was much more than uncanny coincidences or strange situations at the surface of daily life. Unheimlich has a dual function. It relates first to aesthetics, and paradoxically at the same time to “all that is terrible...all that arouses dread and creeping horror,” (Freud, 1919, p. 1). The juxtaposition of the beautiful and the terrible is one of the primary themes of Death in Venice. Through Aschenbach’s eyes, we see the most hideous of strangers starting with “a man of unpleasing, even violent physiognomy,” (Mann, 1912, p. 15). Mann mingles the grotesque and phantasmagoric with the sublime beauty of his surroundings in Venice and of course, the otherworldly, eternal, but ephemeral beauty of the young boy. As Freud (1919) points out, unheimlich must be understood by contrasting it with heimlich, the familiar. The familiar is stagnant and cannot give rise to the creative impulse that wells up when confronted with the uncanny, which is why writers like Aschenbach must occasionally uproot themselves and place themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, with unfamiliar people, languages, and foods. From an encounter with the uncanny, the writer theoretically delves into the unconscious, the repository of fears, phantasmagoria, and dreams, and then resurfaces in the familiar world with remarkable tales to tell.
Aschenbach has deliberately decided to go to Venice to exercise his mind and creativity as a writer. As such, Aschenbach offers a proxy for Mann himself. Being a place that is unfamiliar and strange, Aschenbach delves into the unheimlich because it provides his mind with the liberating stimuli he needs to create. He is quite aware of the impulse to delve into the uncanny and the unfamiliar, and to experience the uncomfortable, as when he states that he “regarded travel as a hygienic necessity, which had to be observed against will and inclination,” (Chapter 1). Aschenbach does not describe travel as pleasurable, but as something that is required to maintain his psychological health. With this in mind, the reader can much better understand Aschenbach’s motives throughout the story, and also understand Mann’s motives for writing it. If Freud (1919) were analyzing Mann himself, he would have stated as he does about the other literature he analyzes in his explication of unheimlich: “we know now that we are not supposed to be looking on at the products of a madman’s imagination behind which we, with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth,” (p. 7). Freud would have grasped that Mann’s novella needs to be taken at face value.
Aschenbach also feels one of the quintessential features of unheimlich through his surreptitious and forbidden encounters with the fourteen year-old boy Tadzio. Unheimlich specifically combines thrill and exhilaration with terror and horror (Sandner, 2004). Mann works with the same motivations a writer would have for creating any kind of horror or crime fiction. The ways the horrific can evoke deep, suppressed feelings is the goal of the work of art. From this perspective, Aschenbach’s death is only tragic in that he fails to produce one last novel to gift to the world. His infatuations would have led him to such a place of creative unfolding, for he is undoubtedly stimulated by the presence of Tadzio. Yet Aschenbach’s tragedy is his simultaneous disgust with his own body, which represents his fear of death. The lust for life that he feels when gazing upon Tadzio is the direct and absolute antithesis of what he sees when he looks in the mirror. “In view of that sweet youth that infatuated him his worn-out body disgusted him, his gray hair, the sharp features of his face caused him to feel shame and despair,” (Mann, 1912, p. 48). It takes no deep intertextual reading to understand that Aschenbach has touched upon the paradoxically sublime, Freud’s unheimlich.
Death in Venice describes the protagonist’s interwoven infatuations: with youth, with his own image, with the idealized male form, with Venice as the watery wonderland of the unconscious mind. By describing Tadzio in unrelentingly deified terms, comparing the boy to Greek gods, Aschenbach draws even greater attention to how he feels about his own decaying body. Having spent so much of his adult life seeing himself as a virile man, Aschenbach experiences a profound and terrifying wakeup call related to the loss of his potency, both his sexual potency and his potency as a writer. “Fear was the beginning, fear and lust and a horrified curiosity of what would be coming,” (Mann, 1912, p. 47). Driven by both fear and lust, Aschenbach succumbs to his ultimate death wish.





References

Freud, S. (1919). The ‘uncanny.’” http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf
Mann, T. (1912). Death in Venice. https://archive.org/stream/DeathInVenice/DeathInVenice-ThomasMann_djvu.txt
Sandner, D. (2004). Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Greenwood Publishing.