Thoughts on Thomas Mann

"It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," says the corpse of Thomas Mann on the back cover of my copy of Death in Venice. Here, as in the other work of Mann's that I've read - the stunning but as yet undigested The Magic Mountain - that death-dealing voluptuousness resides in the Slavic lands which, for Mann's Germans, at least, loom in the eastern distance with all the "rich, corrupt, profound" powers of the half-sublimated libido. Why? Why is a pre-pubescent Polish boy the unwitting agent of stolid Aschenbach's destruction? Why does the Slavic and feline Clavdia Chauchat so torment Hans Castorp, the mediocre bourgeois protagonist of Der Zauberberg?

It would be uncharitable of me to label Mann a racist for casting eastern Europe as civilization's senual Other. Rather, I imagine that he is playing with archetypes, exploring the richness of existing associations, much as I intend to do in this post.

The images of Death in Venice fascinate me: the sweltering, dissipated city of Venice - the European tropics, Tadzio - the terror of Greek sculpture come to life, the entwinement of disease and love, Eros and Thanatos - hardly a new idea, but a very rich one, I think. The repeated grotesque intermingling of young and old, vivacious and corrupt - as in the recurring image of men who arouse disgust by transgressing aesthetic and temporal boundaries. The Boundaries in question are ones that Mann seems to explore repeatedly: the discipline that art demands of the artist's natural powers; Aschenbach's iron will and his frail constitution - his terminal escapade marks the 'return of the repressed;' Nietzsche's infinitely productive opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian figures prominently.

It is something about the place of Slavic-ness in the European consciousness that is at issue in Mann's association of the Slavic with the sexual. Among the guests Aschenbach encounters in Venice is a Russian family, the men with "beards and big teeth," the women "listless and submissive." The Russians themselves are grotesque, their men evidently animalistic and concupiscent, their women dried-up husks.

The language of Death in Venice situates the sexual at the edges of civilization. Venice, that unreal city that hovers above the water - hot, wet, polluted like certain parts of the human physiognomy - is the setting. The cerebral Aschenbach has left his cerebral German home, lured to the lurid south by as-yet pallid images of sensuality and death.

In Venice, it is the water - stinking, polluted, but also undifferentiated, endless, eternal - that is the edge of contemplatability, the limit of self-preservation. "[Aschenbach] loved the sea and for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity - proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive - a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness." ; "The view of the beach, the spectacle of civilization indulging in carefree sensuality on the brink of the watery element . . ." Never have vacations held such danger.

In the ocean sex and death, life and corruption flow together, and rationality, civilization - but also life in the only way that we Europeans know it, dependent as it is upon its boundaries and exclusions - begin to crumble.

Death approaches from the East. The primal spirits of the Russian forests haunt the little glade that Western civlization has wrested from the darkness around it. Germany is the edge of that glade.

Whereas Chinese civilization presents itself to the European mind as an ageless, monolithic, infinitely complex Other looming out of the shadows of the past, complete and hermetically removed from the occidental experience, orientalized Russia is consummately liminal - the half-European land of half-civilized half-humans. The peasants are swill-soaked drunken louts, but the women, half-human and half-cat, stalk their prudish Western victims, pawing at the stitches that hold the perilously fragile Europeans together with their insides in and their outsides bespectacled and combed.

And so Tadzio, already bearing within himself the anti-seed of corruption (Aschenbach notes that the boy's discolored teeth belie the otherwise perfect image of vitality), catches the eye of the civilized German, whose fondness of art - a sort of bargain with the devil anyway (how I love Faust legends!) - is his undoing because the rigid forms of art nonetheless pull the artist toward dissolution in undifferentiated bliss - which is life in the womb - which is the yearning of Thanatos - which is death.