Portrait of the Artist

Portrait of the Artist January 27, 2015

Many things contribute to the fidgety discomfort one feels one reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. There’s our entry into the mind of Gustav Aschenbach, an aging, highly sensitive, very famous writer. There’s the Lolita infatuation he has with Tadzio, a “beautiful” Polish boy whom Aschenbach watches from his beach chair, chases through the streets of Venice, stalks and stares at. 

Aschenbach justifies his passion as an aesthete would, as an expression of his super-human artistic temperament. He mythologizes the boy of his dreams; he finds justification in the example of heroic Greek pederasty; he turns his worship of Tadzio into an artistic project:

“he longed to work in Tadzio’s presence, to model his writing on the boy’s physique, to let his style follow the lines of that body, which he saw as godlike, and bear its beauty to the realm of the intellect, as the eagle had once borne the Trojan shepherd to the ether. Never had he experienced the pleasure of the word to be sweeter, never had he known with such certitude that Eros is in the word than during those dangerously delightful hours when, seated at his rough table under the awning, in full view of his idol, the music of his voice in his ears, he formulated that little essay—a page and a half of sublime prose based on Tadzio’s beauty—the purity, nobility, and quivering emotional tension of which would soon win the admiration of many. It is surely as well that the world knows only a beautiful work itself and not its origins, the conditions under which it comes into being, for if people had knowledge of the sources from which the artist derives his inspiration they would oftentimes be confused and alarmed and thus vitiate the effects the artist had achieved.”

But the satire of romantic aestheticism is uncomfortable also because it rings so utterly true. Mann knows his aesthetes, and he knows that there is a deep connection not only between art and Eros but between the romantic temperament and death. As he boards a gondola on his arrival in the city, he thinks: “Who has not battled a fleeting shudder, a secret dread and anxiety upon boarding a Venetian gondola for the first time or after a prolonged absence? That strange conveyance, coming down to us unaltered from the days of the ballads and so distinctively black, black as only coffins can be—it conjures up hush-hush criminal adventures in the rippling night and, even more, death itself: the bier, the obscure obsequies, the final, silent journey.” 

The sea fascinates because it holds the promise of utter silence and absorption, a unity with some all-encompassing something, the communion with the All that is indistinguishable from death: “He 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. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection.”

And Mann knows too that artistic necrophilia is cruel. Aschenbach is self-conscious enough to see that “Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.”


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