This African experience changed the personality of Marlow as it changed Conrad’s personality. It also changed his vision of the world, or at least of Europe. When he returns to the ‘spectral city’ with Kurtz’s packet of letters and the portrait, he contemplates at a distance and with contempt these people who are ‘hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.’17 Why this aversion to these people, ‘that trespassed on my thoughts’, these ‘intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew’? What, through his journey, he has learned about life and humankind has left him without innocence and without spontaneity, deeply critical and mistrustful of his fellow men. (‘Before the Congo, I was merely an animal’, Conrad confessed.18)
Marlow, who had hated lying before his journey to Africa, does not think twice about lying on his return, when he tells Kurtz’s betrothed that the last words he uttered were her name, when in reality he exclaimed: ‘The horror, the horror’. Was it a merciful lie, to console a woman who was suffering? Yes, that as well. But above all else, it was the acceptance that there are truths so intolerable in life that they justify lies. That is to say fictions; that is to say literature.
Madrid, October 2001
Death in Venice
The Call to the Abyss
Despite its brevity, Death in Venice tells a story that is as complex and deep as any that Thomas Mann would develop more extensively in his vast novels. And he achieves this so economically and with such stylistic perfection that this short novel deserves to figure alongside masterworks of the genre like Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. All three are beautifully crafted, tell a fascinating story and, above all, set up an almost infinite number of associations, symbols and echoes in the mind of the reader.
After reading and rereading it on numerous occasions, we are left with the unsettling feeling that the text is still withholding a mystery even from the most attentive reader. Something murky and violent, almost abject, which can be found in the protagonist and which is also a common experience of humankind: a secret yearning that suddenly reappears, frightening us, because we thought that it had been banished once and for all from our midst through the work of culture, faith and public morals, or simply as a result of our need to live together in society.
How can we define this subterranean presence which works of art usually reveal involuntarily, indirectly, a will-o’-the-wisp that suddenly appears without the author’s permission? Freud called it the death wish, Sade desire in freedom and Bataille, evil. It is the quest for the integral sovereignty of the individual that predates the conventions and rules that every society — some more, some less — imposes in order to make coexistence possible and prevent society from falling apart and reverting to barbarism. The core of any definition of civilisation is that individual desires and passion must be reined in so that private desires, stimulated by imagination, do not endanger social organisation. This is a clear and healthy idea whose benefit for the human race cannot be denied rationally because it has enhanced life and kept at a distance, usually at a great distance, the precarious and harsh primordial lives that preceded the horde and the cannibal clan. But life is not formed just by reason but also by passions. The angel that lives within men and women has never been able entirely to defeat the devil that also lives within, even when it seems that advanced societies have managed to do so. The story of Gustav von Aschenbach shows us that even these fine examples of healthy citizens, whose intelligence and moral discipline seem to have tamed all the destructive forces of personality, can succumb at any moment to the temptation of the abyss.
Reason, order and virtue ensure the progress of human society but they rarely suffice to make individuals happy, for instincts, that are kept in check in the name of social good, are always on the lookout, waiting for an opportunity to come out and demand of life both intensity and excess that, as a last resort, lead to destruction and death. Sex is the privileged domain where these transgressive demons lurk, in the recesses of our personality, and in some circumstances it is impossible to keep them at bay because they are also part of human reality. What is more, even though their presence always implies a risk for the individual and a threat of dissolution and violence for society, to exile them completely would impoverish life, depriving it of euphoria and elation — fiesta and adventure — which are also integral to life. These are the thorny issues that Death in Venice illuminates with its twilight tones.
Gustav von Aschenbach has reached the threshold of old age as an admirable citizen. His books have made him a celebrity but he accepts this fame without vanity, concentrating on his intellectual work, almost completely immersed in the world of ideas and principles, shorn of all material temptation. Since he lost his wife, he has become an austere and solitary man. He does not have a social life and rarely travels. In the holidays he retreats into his books in a small house in the country outside Munich. The text states that ‘he did not like pleasure’. This all seems to imply that this famous artist is confined within the world of the spirit, having quelled, through culture and reason, his passions, which are the agents of vice and chaos that lurk in the dark recesses of the human mind. He is a ‘virtuoso’ in the two meanings of the word: he is a creator of beautiful and original forms and he has purified his life through a strict ritual of discipline and continence.
But one day, suddenly, this organised existence begins to crumble thanks to his imagination, this corrosive force that the French very accurately call ‘the mad woman of the house’. A furtive glimpse of a stranger in the Munich cemetery awakens in Von Aschenbach a desire to travel, and peoples his imagination with exotic images. He dreams of a ferocious, primitive, barbarous world, one completely opposed to his world of a super civilised man, imbued with a ‘classic’ spirit. Without really understanding why, he gives in to impulse and goes first to an Adriatic island and later to Venice. There, on the night of his arrival, he sees the Polish boy Tadzio who will turn his life upside down, destroying in a few days the rational and ethical order that has sustained it. He does not touch him or even speak to him; it is also quite possible that the faint smiles that Von Aschenbach thinks he detects are fantasies of his imagination. The whole drama develops away from prying eyes, in the heart of the writer and, of course, in those murky instincts that he thought he had tamed, and which, in the sticky and foul-smelling Venetian summer, are revived by the tender beauty of the adolescent. He comes to realise that his body is not merely the receptacle of refined and generous ideas so admired by his readers, but also harbours a beast on heat, greedy and egotistical.
To say that the writer falls in love with or is engulfed by desire for the beautiful boy would not be enough. Something happens to him that is much deeper: it changes his view on life and on men and women, on culture and on art. Suddenly ideas are relegated, displaced by sensations and feelings, and the body takes on an overwhelming reality that the spirit must serve rather than restrain. Sensuality and instincts take on a new moral significance, not as aspects of animality that human beings must repress to ensure civilisation, but as sources of a ‘divine madness’ that transforms the individual into a god. Life is no longer ‘form’, and spills out in passionate disorder.