Death in Venice: An Interpretive

Death in Venice: An Interpretive Reading

Thomas Mann's Death in Venice is about the artistic process, and the self-delusion of an artist who believes that he can struggle with art without ever being touched by its seductive charms. In the story a famous German writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, has come to the final stages of his career without ever really understanding what it means to be touched by the tragic beauty of art, and his struggle with that art, when he suddenly comes face-to-face with beauty and tragedy in his own life, makes him reevaluate the meaning of his life, his career, and the art which has eluded him for so long. In this paper a brief discussion of Aschenbach's journey toward an ultimately self-destructive discovery of self will show how Mann developed the story to indicate the power of passion in art and to point to the failure of his main character to fully come to grips with such passion either in his art or in his own personal life.

The story is a simple one. Mann begins his book by showing Aschenbach, in a moment of struggle with his writing, taking a walk just as a storm brews -- and coming to a cemetery where he inspects some religious symbols. He is met through a chance encounter by a character who (by appearance) can be interpreted to represent a kind of demon, perhaps Satan himself. Thus, Aschenbach is found to be at a crossroads when art seems to be dying within him, as decadence sets in and the tempter approaches. He decides to take a trip to clear his head. During his travels, Aschenbach considers his theory of artistic expression, which consists primarily of a defiant overcoming of chaos, passion, and emotion, through an orderly, disciplined imposition of will. He comes across a group of youthful revelers and is shocked to see that one of them is an old man pretending to be young. The image disturbs him. He reaches Venice and comes to meet a beautiful young Polish boy named Tadzio, only to fall madly in love with the boy, although he never has direct actual contact with him. He discovers that a cholera epidemic is occurring in Venice, and as he wanders about town, shadowing the youthful boy and reminiscing on how grotesque he has become, he eats a piece of fruit that gives him the dread disease. He dies on the beach as he is trying to rise out of his chair and go to meet the boy.

Mann's story is reflective of an artist who has come to realize that his art has been false since it has not come from a place of true emotion and passion. The story has parallels with Euripides' The Bachae, in which the hero Pentheus is repressed in his artistic approach to life until he comes to inject elements of Dionysian revelry into his life, whereupon he dresses up in youthful clothes (like the old man Aschenbach met on his journey), and throws himself into life. In a passage in which Aschenbach quotes Plato's Phaedras, he also makes his own realization that he has been repressed because he hasn't accepted the beauty of emotion and passion into his art. His attraction to the boy Tadzio has made him aware of this since he struggles against that attraction and tries to repress it even as it wells up within him. He can't bring himself to turn away from the attraction, but neither can he act on it. He becomes disgusted with himself even as he comes to accept his plight as an artist.