Death in Venice

The subtractive test finds almost nothing loose in the first, third and fifth chapters. Each death figure is required: the red-haired stranger at the Munich chapel who starts the journey, the painted old man on the steamer who is Aschenbach’s own future, the gondolier who rows him where he does not mean to go and vanishes, the singer whose laugh is the plague’s. Each answers the others, and the last chapter gathers them. The failed departure, the luggage sent astray, is the hinge on which choice becomes fate; it cannot go. The charge falls on the second chapter and parts of the fourth. The account of the works and of their ethic of endurance, the motto “Durchhalten”
“Hold out” (II), is needed in substance, since the fall is measured from that height, but it is told as an essay and could be shorter; and the Platonic set pieces run longer than the action requires.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds. A discipline of form and dignity, built as a defence against the self, does not master the forces it holds down; it stores them, and they return as the god it refused. The man whose art is praised for having overcome knowledge and pity ends painted by a barber in the image of the old fop he despised. A second disclosure runs beside the first and is social: Venice conceals its cholera for the sake of trade, and Aschenbach, told the truth by an English clerk, keeps it to himself so that the boy will stay. The city’s lie and the lover’s are one lie. The book also shows, against its own Platonic apparatus, how much self-flattery the language of beauty and education can carry. Held below the top because what is disclosed is a type, the artist, more than a whole human condition, as in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of both kinds. Dread: the stranger at the chapel, the vision of a tropical swamp with a crouching tiger’s eyes, the gondola black as a coffin, and the dream of the stranger god in the fifth chapter, with its flutes, its torches and its herd of revellers, the book’s height of terror. Beauty: the first sight of Tadzio, the sunrise passages of the fourth chapter raised toward hexameter, and the boy on the sand bar at the end, pointing out to sea. The death is quiet and grand at once. What holds the axis below 9 is that much of the transport is mediated by irony. The hymnic passages are a pastiche the narrator half mocks, and the elevation is often watched rather than undergone. That is the design, and it costs some height.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Myth here is built, not evoked. The structure of the Bacchae runs under the plot: a stranger god arrives from the east, a man who has refused him is taken, and the city falls with him; the cholera comes, the book says, from the delta of the Ganges, the god’s road. The death figures are one Hermes in many coats, the guide of souls, and the gondolier is a Charon who rows without licence and is not paid. Tadzio is drawn as Hyacinthus and Narcissus and at the last as the beckoning guide. Socrates and Phaedrus under the plane tree are reenacted and then parodied in the square. The particular stays particular: a Polish boy in a sailor suit, a hotel, a barber, strawberries. The allusion can feel applied, a scholar’s apparatus, but the archetype bears the load: remove the Dionysian pattern and the plot no longer moves.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The inheritance is the German Novelle of the nineteenth century, with its turning point and its single incident, and Mann’s own Tonio Kröger (1903), which had set the artist against life. The turn is to fuse the realist novella with a mythic substructure and to tell it in a high classical voice that is the hero’s own manner, so that the style is put on trial with the man. The stake was considerable: a famous and respectable author in 1912 publishing a novella of an old man’s passion for a boy, with the self-portrait plain. The case against is formal conservatism. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, written the same autumn, broke the Novelle open; Mann kept its shape and its periods intact and put the risk in the subject and the irony. The turn is real and its cost was paid, but it is not the largest swerve of its decade.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The narration is in Aschenbach’s own style, measured, dignified and classical, the style the second chapter praises; it is therefore the instrument of the fall as well as its record, and as he loses himself the prose keeps its composure, which is the horror. In the fifth chapter the narrator steps back and judges, in the moral tone Aschenbach himself had used of others, so that the form performs the doubleness of form the book discusses. The five chapters fall like the acts of a tragedy, with the turn in the third and the catastrophe in the fifth, and the leitmotifs bind them. A novel would explain; a lyric would not judge; the novella in this voice does both and lets each undercut the other. Held below 9 because the essay of the second chapter is container more than instrument.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence over promise. More than a century of return, across literary study, German studies, classics, psychoanalysis and queer criticism, has not exhausted it. The questions stay open and the text makes them: how far the narrator is Mann, Aschenbach or a third voice; whether the ending is punishment, release or apotheosis; whether the Platonic discourse is wisdom or alibi; whether Tadzio returns the gaze. The prose rewards return at the level of the period and the leitmotif, and first readers miss most of the echoes. Held below 9 because a book of this size, much of it turning on one antithesis, Apollo and Dionysus, form and abyss, yields somewhat less on each return than the largest novels, and some of its depth is the critical apparatus it invites.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The field is German prose fiction of the early twentieth century, beside Kafka, Rilke’s Malte and Musil. The intrinsic force: the book showed that a novella could carry Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Plato’s Phaedrus as working structure, and it fixed the modern type of the artist undone by beauty. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Visconti’s film (1971) and Britten’s last opera (1973) were both made from it; Aschenbach passed into the common vocabulary of writing about art and eros; and Mann’s own The Magic Mountain was conceived in 1912 as its comic counterpart, so that the major novel grew from it. The case against: it did not reorganise the form. Kafka redirected the shorter fiction of the century; Mann’s novella confirmed a high manner rather than opening a new one, and its influence on writers is diffuse and hard to name book by book.

Score: 8.6 / 10

A survival of 114 years, in the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text survives whole, as Mann published it, with nothing lost and no question of version; nothing is charged. Presence: continuous and very wide, read and taught in German and in many translations without a lapse, and kept present by the film, the opera and the association with Mahler that the film fixed. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a moment, Europe in the spring of an unnamed year before the war and a Lido hotel of the Belle Epoque, but as setting, not as a production era, and the book has outlived it. Held off the top of its step because its presence, though wide, is not of the widest kind, which belongs to the most read novels of the period.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Mann’s German. The command is of the long periodic sentence, balanced and ironic, which holds judgement and sympathy in one clause; of the leitmotif, carried in physical detail, the red hair, the snub nose, the bared teeth, the straw hat, across figures who are never said to be one; and of register, from the dry biography of the second chapter to the near-hexameters of the fourth and the clinical plainness of the cholera report. The first sentence sets name, rank and date in one official cadence: “Gustav Aschenbach oder von Aschenbach, wie seit seinem fünfzigsten Geburtstag amtlich sein Name lautete …”
“Gustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach as he had officially been named since his fiftieth birthday …” (I). The last closes in the voice of the newspaper, on “eine respektvoll erschütterte Welt”
“a respectfully shaken world” (V). Charged for passages mannered beyond their need, where the irony blunts the scene. The making bears the load.

Score: 9.1 / 10

One law governs: what is refused returns in another form, and every element is double. Take the two most distant elements: the Munich cemetery of the first chapter, with its stonemasons’ yards and its Byzantine chapel, and the beach of the last, with the boy at the edge of the water. They obey the same law: each is a threshold where a guide appears and Aschenbach follows. The realism and the myth do not alternate; they are one surface read two ways, so that the barber is a barber and a priest of the god at once. The range is wider than it looks: essay, travelogue, comedy of hotel manners, Platonic dialogue, plague chronicle and dream. Held below 9 because the narrator’s moral turn in the fifth chapter has been read as a change of law rather than an application of it, and that reading has some purchase.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged as a novella, and not punished for its length beyond what it holds. Consciousness, fully, with the artist’s vocation and its ethic. Eros, age and the body, down to the cosmetics and the dyed hair. Death, as a guide and as a disease. The city, as commerce, tourism and official concealment, and Europe in a year of threat. The sacred, in the god’s return. Class and nation, lightly, in the Polish family, the hotel society and the English clerk. The natural order, in the sea, the sun and the swamp of the east. All of it is integrated through one consciousness. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, below 8, is vantage and count: labour, the family across time and history as lived are present only as background, and one man’s mind in one summer holds the rest.

Score: 7.9 / 10