M.C. GARDNER
“Gustave Aschenbach was the poet spokesman of all those who labour at the edge of exhaustion; of those who are already worn out but still hold themselves upright; of all our modern moralizers of accomplishment, with stunted growth and scanty resources, who yet contrive by skillful husbanding and prodigious spasms of will to produce, at least for a while, the effect of greatness. “
One can easily substitute the name Thomas Mann for that of Aschenbach and suffer little loss of meaning. Mann knew the value of his own writings. He identified himself with the giants of the 19th century because he absorbed them and felt no diminishment in their presence.
In Death In Venice he finds the secret plague of the city the metaphor for the secret longings of his heart. Aschenbach will die for that longing but finds strength and beauty in his disease. Mann held that disease is not to be regarded as wholly negative. In his essay on Dostoyevsky we find: “but after all and above all it depends on who is diseased., who mad, who epileptic or paralytic: an average dull-witted man, in whose illness any intellectual or cultural aspect is non-existant; or a Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky. In their case something comes out in illness that is more important and conductive to life and growth than any medical guaranteed health or sanity… in other words: certain conquests made by the soul and the mind are impossible without disease, madness, crime of the spirit.”
Throughout the Dostoyevsky essay he finds parallels between the Russian and the sufferings of Zarathustra, his beloved Frederich Nietzsche. Speaking of Nietzsche he says: “his personal feelings initiate him into those of the criminal… in general all creative originality, all artist nature in the broadest sense of the word, does the same. It was the French painter and sculptor, Degas who said that an artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.”
Disease and criminality in Mann and in the creative spirit are beyond good and evil. They are windows to the revelation of the dark side of the moon – Mann’s heroes look into the soul’s abyss and rise infinitely beyond the bourgeois morality that condemns them:
Aschenbach had once given direct expression … to the idea that almost everything consciously great is great despite: has come into being in defiance of affliction and pain; poverty, destitution, bodily weakness, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstructions. And that was more than observation – it was the fruit of experience, it was precisely the formula of his life and fame, it was the key to his work.”
Throughout Death In Venice Aschenbach muses on the Platonic ideals of beauty and form. Rather than a subterfuge of his longing it is rather a release from the tyranny of Schopenhauer’s Will. Schopenhauer determined that the only “thing in itself” that he could sit down and near was what the Upanishads call the “Self.” The will was more intimate than even one’s physical body It was the only thing that was nomenon known. By this he meant that we did not experience will through the senses. It could never be an object set at a distance. You could never contemplate yourself contemplating. It was the only immediately known. The only “thing-in-itself” not filtered through Kant’s categories of understanding – the ordering principles of the human mind.
Mann reiterates this notion in his essay on Freud. “Freud showed that the psyche is unconscious of itself, and that consciousness is only a property that may be present at the psychic process, whose absence makes no difference to it.” Aschenbach’s only hope of redemption was to clothe his longings in cloak of art.
Schopenhauer showed the way: “In some men knowledge can break free… and stand free of the will and its aims, sheerly in and for itself …as a clean mirror of the world – which is the order and consciousness of art. Listen to the echo of Schopenhauer in, Aschenbach: “What discipline, what precision of thought were expressed by the tense youthful perfection of this form! And yet the pure strong will, which had labored in darkness and succeeded in bringing this godlike work of art to the light of day – was it not known and familiar to him, the artist? Was not the same force at work in himself when he strove … to liberate from the marble mass of language the slender forms of his art which he saw with eye of his mind and would body forth to men as the mirror and the image of spiritual beauty?”
Aschenbach’s reveries of Tadzio are the only things standing between himself and the abyss. It is only in their timeless evocation that the will is arrested from its suicidal dash through time. The beauty of the boy is an idea contemplated in eternity:
Mann, with Schopenhauer would aver: “This separate thing which in that general stream has been but the least vanishing particle, becomes, when so regarded, an epiphany of the whole – equivalent to the entire unending manifold of time.”