Gustav von Aschenbach experiences the delights and the sufferings of a love-passion, albeit alone, without sharing it with the person who is the cause of these emotions. At first, realising the danger that he is running, he tries to run away. But then he changes and plunges into the adventure that will bring him first to a state of abjection and then to death. The former sober intellectual, now disgusted by his old age and ugliness, goes to the pitiful lengths of putting on make-up and dyeing his hair like a fop. Instead of his former Apollonian dreams, his nights are full of savage visions, where barbarous men indulge in orgies in which violence, concupiscence and idolatry triumph over ‘the profound resistance of his spirit’. Gustav von Aschenbach then experiences ‘the bestial degradation of his fall’.19 Who is corrupting who? Tadzio leaves Venice at the end of the story, as innocent and immaculate as at the beginning, while von Aschenbach has been reduced to a moral and physical wreck. The beauty of the boy is the mere stimulus that starts up the destructive mechanism, the desire that von Aschenbach’s imagination so inflames that it ends up consuming him.
The plague that kills him is symbolic in more than one sense. On the one hand it represents the irrational forces of sex and fantasy, the libertinage that the writer succumbs to. Freed from all restraint, these forces would make social life impossible because they would turn it into a jungle of hungry beasts. On the other hand, the plague represents the primitive world, an exotic reality in which, unlike the narrator’s world of the spirit and civilised Europe, life is instinctual rather than based on ideas, where man can still live in a state of nature. The ‘Asian cholera’ that comes to ravage the jewel of culture and the intellect that is Venice comes from the remote parts of the planet ‘among whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches’,20 and to some degree the havoc that it wreaks prefigures the defeat of civilisation by the forces of barbarism.
This part of the story is open to different readings. The plague represents, for some, the political and social decomposition of Europe that was emerging from the joyful excesses of the belle époque and was about to self-destruct. This is the ‘social’ interpretation of the epidemic that infiltrates the lakeside city in an imperceptible manner and engulfs it, like the poison of lust in the immaculate spirit of the moralist. In this reading, the epidemic represents the price of degeneration, madness and ruin that must be paid by those who give in to the call of pleasure and submit their intelligence to the irrational dictates of passion.
The man writing this is, without a doubt, another moralist, like von Aschenbach before his fall. Like his character — and it is well known that both Gustav Mahler and the author of Death in Venice himself acted as models for von Aschenbach — Thomas Mann also had an instinctual fear of pleasure, that region of experience that blots out rationality, where all ideas are shipwrecked. Here are two romantics disguised as classical writers, two men for whom the passion of the senses, the euphoria of sex, is a supreme moment of pleasure that men and women must experience, albeit conscious of the fact that it will plunge them into decline and death. These licentious puritans do not have a trace of the joyful, ludic eighteenth-century view of sex as a world of play and entertainment, in perfect harmony with life’s other demands. The demands of the body and the spirit were two realms that the eighteenth century merged and which, in the nineteenth century, the century of romanticism, would become incompatible.
A symbol is, of itself, ambiguous and contradictory; it is always open to interpretations that vary according to the reader and the time of reading. Despite the fact that it is less than eighty years since Death in Venice was written, many of its allegories and symbols are now unclear to us because our age has emptied them of any content or made them irreconcilable. The rigid bourgeois morality that pervades the world of Thomas Mann and gives the fate of von Aschenbach a tragic air appears today, in our permissive society, a picturesque anomaly, just like the Asian plague, with its medieval resonance, which modern-day chemistry would soon defeat. Why is it necessary to punish so cruelly the poor artist whose only sin is to discover late in the day — and, what is more, only in the imagination — the pleasure of the flesh?
And yet, even from our perspective of readers living in a time when our tolerance in sexual matters has made excess appear conventional and boring, the drama of this solitary fifty-year-old, so timid and so wise, who has fallen desperately in love with the Polish boy and who sacrifices himself in the flames of this passion, affects us and moves us deeply. Because, in the interstices of this story there is an abyss that can be glimpsed and which we immediately identify in ourselves and in the society in which we live. An abyss teeming with violence, desires and horrific, fevered ghosts, which we normally are not aware of except through privileged experiences which occasionally reveal it, reminding us that, however much we might try to consign it to the shadows and wipe it from our memory, it is an integral part of human nature and remains, with its monsters and seductive sirens, as a permanent challenge to the habits and customs of civilisation.
At a certain point in his internal drama, von Aschenbach attempts to sublimate his passion through myth. He moves it to the world of culture and transforms himself into Socrates, talking to Phaedrus about beauty and love on the banks of the Ilisos. This is a clever move by the author to cleanse to some extent the noxious vapours emanating from the pleasurable hell in which von Aschenbach finds himself, giving them a philosophical dimension, making them less carnal, broadening the scope of the story by providing a cultural context. Also, it is not gratuitous. Von Aschenbach was a living ‘classic’, and it is quite natural for his consciousness to search within the world of culture for precedents and references to what is happening to him. But the abyss that has opened up beneath his feet, and which the writer plunges into without any sense of remorse, is not a site of pure ideas or the spirit. It is the site of the body, which he had regulated and disdained and which now is reclaiming its rights, freeing itself and vanquishing the spirit that had held it captive.
This demand has a beginning but no end: awoken by any stimulus — the beauty of Tadzio, for example — free to grow and become immersed in daily life in search of a satisfaction that the fantasy that fuels it makes ever more unattainable, sexual desire, that source of pleasure, can also be a deadly plague for the city. For that reason, life in the city imposes limits and morality on sexual desire, religion and culture looks to tame it and confine it. In the final weeks of his life, Gustav von Aschenbach — and with him the readers of this beautiful parable — discovers that these attempts at control are always relative because, as happens to him, the desire to recover a total sovereignty, which has been stifled by individuals for the benefit of social existence, re-emerges from time to time, demanding that life should not just be reason, peace and discipline but also madness, violence and chaos. In the depths of this exemplary citizen, von Aschenbach, there lurked a painted savage, looking for the right moment to come into the light and take revenge.
Lima, September 1988