Effigy and Mirror!

A walk along the beach

Again in our reading for this week I was reminded of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I know it keeps coming back to me and I probably should blog about something else, but the imagery Mann presents is just too similar, and the ending on the beach seems almost to reference the poem. Indeed, Prufrock was on the same journey: his obsessive, passionate drive for youth and beauty paralyzed him; he brought his death upon himself, just as Aschenbach does. What I'll focus on in my entry to stray from simply comparing the two works is the importance of scenery and place in Death in Venice on our main character, who is surely not a hero but, like J. Alfred, a negative example.

Mann calls emphatically upon the senses in Death in Venice, and setting plays a key role in understanding plot and motivation. The longer Aschenbach stays in Venice, the madder he becomes. Mann describes Venice as "a city half fairy tale, half tourist trap" (104), an insiduous vehicle for Aschenbach's decadence. Spending days at the beach, the sun tans him, and "the bracing salt air [makes] him more susceptible to emotion" (89), as if the salt and salt are exfoliating his old persona from him, corroding away his harsh exterior that, in a way, protected him. Raw, affected by nature and not kept in-doors in his rainy cottage in the mountains, Aschenbach feels for the first time, and begins to change from a man who "did not care for pleasure" (76) to one who is truly intoxicated by emotion. The corroding effect the beach has on him translates into his every action, and "emotions from the past, early, delightful dolors of his life were now reappearing in the strangest of permutations - he recognized them with a perplexed and puzzled smile" (91). He's not unhappy about this realization, but rather a bit clownish, unsettlingly cheerful and dangerously obsessed with youth.

And here on the beach, like Prufrock, does he move like "a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas." He has no interactions with others in the novella, besides when he is catered to and waited on, and we only hear his voice when he thinks. He doesn't speak to the object of his desire, Tadzio, who actually even waves "crabs that go sideways" (79) at him on the shore. Mann could have simply said "crabs," but he included "sideways," reminding us that Aschenbach is not moving forward (nor backward even). So affected by his physical surroundings, he turns inward and, as he is alone in his travels, away from the familiar remindings of who he is and what he does, he becomes insecure. Cripplingly insecure.

So is Mann suggesting that travel is a devilish institution that should be avoided? Many more than Aschenbach surely find their deaths in Venice. I'm not sure that Mann makes an absolute statement, but he certainly complicates things for us. In fact, Aschenbach almost made it out of Venice - by happenstance, he remained (though joyously). It seems to me Mann is commenting more on our attitudes about traveling, rather than the act itself, for when traveling, we become frighteningly aware of ourselves as environments, as places; what we do always affects others, and what we have inside our minds, and even our bodies, we always put out into the external world. Aschenbach is a writer: his "duty" is to insight hope, love, fear, etc. into minds and hearts of others, but it seems that when he experiences these emotions himself they paralyze him, and he cannot return home. If, however, he chose to live outwardly, and embrace the world around him rather than let it corrode at his very being, he might have avoided being etherized, and perhaps the camera Mann places on the beach at the end of the novella , a reminder of how we look at the world - through another lens than our truth-telling eyes - would not need to exist in this separate reality.