Deaths in Venice by Philip Kitcher

Author:Philip Kitcher [Kitcher, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004130, Literary Criticism/European/General, MUS028000, Music/Genres & Styles/Opera
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

THREE

Shadows

1

In the spring of 1912, Thomas Mann wrote to congratulate his brother Heinrich on the completion of a play, adding: “I would be glad to report something similar about my novella, but I cannot find the ending.”1 What exactly was the difficulty? Could Mann have been uncertain about whether Aschenbach should live? Was he torn between cleaving more closely to the actual events of his own visit to Venice and the version in which his protagonist dies there? Almost certainly not. The premonitions of death, the shadows that fall across Aschenbach, are already marked in the earliest pages of the story, and there is no reason to think that these were added at a late stage in writing, after Mann’s thoughts had settled on an ending—his constant method was to work slowly and steadily, almost doggedly, making only small revisions.2 Furthermore, an earlier letter to Heinrich makes it evident that death itself could not have been the issue, since the novella already bears the title—Der Tod in Venedig—by which we know it.3 By the time of the letters, he had clearly reached the final chapter, for, despite his surmise that Heinrich might not approve of the whole, he expected his brother to warm to parts of it, citing, in particular, the “classical chapter” (“ein antikisierendes Kapitel”; chapter 4). The problem he faced could not have been that of deciding if Aschenbach should die but rather how. The difficulty was to discover the right death for his protagonist, a death that would show what it—and the life that preceded it—meant. Perhaps Mann wondered if the story should continue after the collapse at the fountain—and solved his problem by writing the coda?

Death hangs over Aschenbach from the beginning. It is already present in the traveler who suddenly appears at the cemetery chapel, whose pose is that of Hermes, bearer of souls to the realm of the dead: this manifestation of Hermes is malign, threatening, and challenging, and Aschenbach is duly disturbed (as we shall see, the harbinger of death can come far more gently).4 Death appears too in the mysterious gondolier, whose “strange vessel” reminds Aschenbach of a coffin and conjures up in him thoughts of an easy, even pleasurable, end.5 Tadzio’s delicate appearance reinforces the idea of premature death, and, as Aschenbach lingers in the plague-ridden city, he is conscious of death as a possibility for the boy and for himself. By assigning many different characters to a single singer, Britten intensifies the idea that they are all emissaries of death, the last of whom, the hotel manager, prefigures Aschenbach’s imminent end by claiming powers to decide matters of mortality: “Who comes and goes is my affair.”

Aschenbach must die—but how? The question comes in a mundane form, “What is the cause of his death?” and a more interesting one, “What is the significance of the coda to the novella, the ending Mann ultimately chose?” The latter will be a principal focus of this chapter, but it cannot be addressed without explicit consideration of the more pedestrian issue.

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