Aschenbach's Page and a Half of Choicest Prose: Thomas Mann's Rhetoric of Irony
Prior to his encounter with Tadzio, Gustav von Aschenbach in "Death in Venice" is not an artist to be creatively inspired by sensuous beauty. Rather, his motivation derives from a desire to be accepted and appreciated by his audience, his "whole soul, from the very beginning, [being] bent on fame." [1] Nor does Aschenbach create in moments of ecstasy: being called to the constant tension of his career, not actually born to it (9), he is able to write only through rigid isolation and self-discipline. But though he is able thereby to win "the adhesion of the general public and the admiration, both sympathetic and stimulating, of the connoisseur" (9), Aschenbach reaches a creative impasse, getting "no joy of [his work]-- not though a nation paid it homage" (7). And, one day, unable to check the motus animus continuus or source of eloquence within him, be wanders to the North Cemetery where be encounters a mysterious vagabond; and then, impelled to travel further, journeys to Pola and finally to Venice. On the steamer to Venice, Aschenbach asks his "own weary heart if a new enthusiasm, a new preoccupation, some late adventure of the feeling could be in store for the idle traveler" (19). He finds a positive answer in the person of Tadzio, the strikingly beautiful Polish boy with whom be becomes increasingly infatuated to the extent that he is unwilling to leave Venice despite its ominous forebodings.
At the end of the novella's third chapter, Aschenbach, realizing that leaving Venice is too difficult "for Tadzio's sake" ( 40), forsakes his4C closed fist" discipline and surrenders to his growing passions; the fourth chapter culminates in his confession "of love and longing" for Tadzio. In this crucial fourth chapter, which Thomas Mann describes as an "amazing chapter which in particular seems to me successful," [2] Aschenbach finds himself artistically inspired by Tadzio's beauty to compose his only prose during his prolonged absence from Munich. Seated on the Venetian beach in the shadow of his awning, our solitary felt in himself at this moment power to command and wield a thought that thrilled with emotion, an emotion as precise and concentrated as thought: namely, that nature herself shivers with ecstasy when the mind bows down in homage before beauty. He felt a sudden desire to write . . . . He would write, and moreover he would write in Tadzio's presence. The lad should in a sense be his model, his style should follow the lines of this figure that seemed to him divine. He would snatch up this beauty into the realms of the mind as once the eagle bore the Trojan shepherd aloft. Never bad the pride of the word been so sweet to him, never bad be known so well that Eros is in the word, as in these perilous and precious hours when be sat at his rude table within the shade of his awning, his idol full in his view and the music of his voice in his ears, and fashioned his little essay after the model Tadzio's beauty set: that page and a half of choicest prose, so chaste, so lofty, so poignant with feeling, which would shortly be the wonder and admiration of the multitude (46).
The Standard Interpretation
The standard interpretation of this passage among critics of "Death in Venice" is that Aschenbach page and a half of prose literally represents the supreme achievement of his oeuvre, a "Masterpiece" which all writers would long to create. The outstanding product is made possible, in this view, because Aschenbach has moved from his highly disciplined "closed fist" rigidity toward the chaotic richness of sensuous experience, attaining thereby a rare and delicate balance between egocentric isolation and complete bacchic surrender. Thus W. H. Rey writes that "In the beginning of Aschenbach emotional crisis there comes a moment when Tadzio's divine form inspires him to create . . . . Now art to him is not a rigid, cold, and passionate service as before, but an expression of joy and love . . . . In this moment of mental equilibrium which precedes Aschenbach's catastrophe, be accomplishes the ideal which Tonio Kroger had visualized: art as the miraculous unity of form and feeling, of self-conquest and self-surrender, or the sensual and the spiritual." Thus Aschenbach, though a "tragic" figure unable to reconcile extremes, "achieves artistic harmony in the supreme moment of his creative development" (Rey 203). Margaret Church finds this rare moment of equilibrium between order and chaos to be the only time in Aschenbach's life that he is able to create something of artistic value. "Mann says in the story," writes Church, "that a synthesis of beauty and truth is necessary for the artist to succeed fully in his work. Follow truth exclusively and you make a god in the image of yourself, as Aschenbach does in his early years; follow beauty exclusively and you make a god of something outside yourself, something subject to decay and rotting and disease, which leads to decay in yourself. Only once in a 'page and a half of choicest prose' does Aschenbach bridge the gap between the spirit and the body" (Church 648). Only in one moment of his entire life is Aschenbach truly able to create and combine passion and control, for "although be achieves fame, be is dissatisfied with his early work, and his final degeneration precludes all creative activity in the last period of his life. Only once in the still center does be achieve a page and a half of perfect prose” (Church 651). And even Horst Daemmrich, who allows that Aschenbach has created true art earlier in his life, remarks on the heightened achievement of the inspired work, "this encounter of sensuous plastic beauty [which] allows him to write a little masterpiece, a page and a half of polished prose, which adds a new dimension to his work by conveying the immediacy of his experience” (Daemmrich 37).
But whereas this literal construal of the "choicest prose” as the acme of achievement seems prima facie plausible, there are inescapable flaws in it. First, if Aschenbach has attained a "still center" at which be produces magnificent art, why is he necessarily unable to maintain this position- Why, that is, must he capitulate further toward bacchic chaos, given that be has reached the goal be has striven for his entire life. The issue here may turn on the extent to which Aschenbach is "representative" of the creative artist: if he is in some sense paradigmatic of the modem artist, it seems unreasonable to conclude that a creative balance must be so fragile and transitory, for this seems to belie our familiarity with artists who are productive over extended periods of time. Yet if, on the contrary, we view "Death in Venice" as simply a "Psychological study" of one particular artist, then the work's importance diminishes markedly. To so reduce the scope of the novella, as M. L. Rosenthal persuasively argues, "to speak only of the particular character Aschenbach would be a mistake. It would be to narrow the scope of this work unjustifiably, for as Aschenbach changes, a constant dialectical process of generalization goes on in the text (Rosenthral 51) Joseph Brennan adds that for Mann "art is the quintessence of humanity and the artist the most human of men," so an understanding of Aschenbach would presumably afford an understanding of man himself (Brennan x).
Attendant upon the instability of Aschenbach's "creative moment" is the quantitative meagerness of the output. The "page and a half" is extremely diminutive, particularly for a prose writer, given the extended period Aschenbach remains in Venice; if the movement toward chaos had been truly productive it would have seemingly yielded a more substantial result, Yet indeed, Aschenbach's act of writing seems to preclude the possibility of his producing any more than a page and a half. For rather than leaving him rested and satisfied, composing the passage leaves him a broken man, severely weakened and filled with guilt and self-loathing. "When Aschenbach put aside his work and left the beach, be felt broken-conscience reproached him, as it were after a debauch" (47). Surely we should hesitate to construe an act of writing linked to a debauch, which thereby foreshadows Aschenbach's further degeneration and death, as a supremely positive achievement.
Stylistic and Dramatic Irony
If we are unable to interpret Aschenbach's achievement as "ideal because of its quantitative meagerness and attendant debauchery, perhaps we may find another way to read the passage. That way, I propose, is to read the passage as ironic: that is, to see Aschenbach's page and a bait not as the highest ideal in art, but rather as a distorted and self-deceptive act. If we attend to the stylistic and narrative clues which Mann provides in the text, we find that the passage is nearly a paradigm of what Wayne Booth calls "stable irony," a "deliberate and intended effort on the part of the author to move us away from a deceptive surface statement to a different, more stable context of meaning" (Booth 5-6).
Two kinds of clue an author may provide to indicate that be is employing irony are stylistic clashes and contrasts in dramatic content. Noting that "clashes of style" are one clue for the presence of irony, Booth states that "if the speaker's style departs notably from whatever the reader considers the normal way of saying a thing . . . the reader may suspect irony" (Booth 67). Clearly Mann's style in his "amazing" fourth chapter clashes sharply with the realistic style of the novella as a whole: here we find that . the naked god with cheeks aflame drove his four fire-breathing steeds through heaven's spaces" (40) and that "the constellations circled in their spheres, and the murmuring of the night-girdled sea swelled softly up and whispered to the soul (41). And when Aschenbach writes, seated at his "rude table," be snatches up beauty "into the realms of the night, as once the eagle bore the Trojan shepherd aloft" (46).
A second clue for irony Booth notes is dramatic contrast, which "Occurs whenever in author deliberately asks us to compare . . . what a character says now and be says or does later. Any plain discrepancy will do, though it is true that conventions like the soliloquy or the epistolary technique in novels are particularly useful because especially sure" (Booth 63). The "choicest prose" passage is richly ironic in this sense, given Aschenbach’s subsequent moral, physical and spiritual deterioration. Booth shows further that one powerful way of seeing irony is in terms of the reader "unmasking an eiron, or detecting behind a 'mask character' or persona the lineaments of the true speaker" (Booth 33). As I shall demonstrate, Aschenbach both covertly and overtly adopts the mask of the Platonic Socrates, and it is through Socrates that we are ultimately able to understand the limits of Aschenbach’s "page and a half" and his attendant artistic dilemma and deterioration.
Thus in the stylistic clash, dramatic contrasts and masking of character, we have strong clues that the passage is to be read as ironic. But Booth advises us to also attend to the "intentions" of the author as a stage in our "reconstruction" of an ironic passage. We must, that is, ask if Thomas Mann (or the "implied" Mann) may have wanted us to read the passage ironically; whether irony is characteristic of the author. Here we seem on quite safe ground: Peter Heller argues cogently that the "structure of Mann's ideology is determined by his need for emotional oscillation. Mann's ambivalence is balanced. It requires a constant ironical movement between antinomies" Heller 764); and W. H. Rey shows that Mann "is a master of ambiguity, irony, parody, and self-parody," that Mann's concept of the artist . . . is based on artistic irony" (Rey 195). Indeed, given Mann's reputation, it is ironic that the passage in question has not been read ironically.
The Establishment of the Socratic Context
According to Booth, deciphering an ironic passage requires us to move from one "place" to another: in reconstructing the true meaning behind surface irony, we move to a new context in which we can find our bearings, a new "platform" we share with the author and from which we reinterpret the surface meaning. "The reader is asked simply to move from one platform, in which the speaker pretends to stand, to another one, on which he really stands . . . an obscure point that is intended as wiser, wittier, more compassionate, subtler, truer, more moral or at least less obviously vulnerable to further irony" (Booth 35-36). The new context which Mann establishes and from which we are able to comprehend Aschenbach's limitations and central dilemma is a "Socratic" context based on Plato's Phaedrus.
Mann establishes the Socratic context of the Phaedrus, thereby identifying and differentiating Aschenbach and Socrates, by employing the traditional poetic devices of plot, spectacle, diction, character and thought. The "plots" of "Death in Venice" and Phaedrus are similar in that both Aschenbach and Socrates, as city-dwellers, are led to the "outer world" of the country or the beach. Socrates apologizes to Phaedrus for his unfamiliarity with the country, saying "You must forgive me, I'm a lover of learning and the open country won't teach me anything, whereas men in the town do." (Phaedrus 230d). And Aschenbach, a city-dweller, rarely leaves his Munich: "Too preoccupied with the tasks imposed upon him by his own ego and the European soul, too laden with the care and duty to create, too preoccupied to be an amateur of the gay outer world, be bad been content to know as much of the earth's sphere without straying outside his own sphere" (6).
Mann employs the device of scenic setting, to place Socrates and Aschenbach. in "choice spots" away from their respective cities. Aschenbach’s spot on the beach "alone had power to beguile him, to relax his resolution, to make him glad" (41). And Socrates finds a lovely spot in which he is ironically "moved" to spin a discourse on love. For truly there seems to be a divine presence in this spot," he tells Phaedrus, “so that you must not be surprised if, as my speech proceeds, I become as one possessed. Already my style is not far from dithyrambic" (238d). Socrates' ironic possession and his accompanying dithyrambic style parallels Aschenbach’s "Page and a half of choicest prose;" and thus we find Mann employing the device of diction to establish ironic parallels between the two texts.
Mann employs the device of "character" to link Aschenbach to Socrates overtly. The first parallel is Aschenbach’s internal address to Jaschiu, the lad who kisses Tadzio: " 'But you, Critobulus,' be thought with a smile, 'You I advise to take a year's leave, that long, at least, you will need for recovery' " ( 33). As Lorraine Gustaffson shows, this passage links Aschenbach to Socrates through Xenophon's Memorabilia I, wherein Socrates addresses Xenophon on the dangers of beauty in terms similar to those of Aschenbach (Gustaffson 209-14). Thus Aschenbach dons the mask of Socrates, who becomes his "second self" or doppelganger. He retains this mask in his two addresses to Tadzio concerning beauty and the artist's "dilemma." As Isadore Traschen notes, Socrates parallels Aschenbach’s other doubles, the cemetery vagabond and the guitarist: both are significantly "snub-nosed," and the latter is described as a "bully," as is Socrates in the Symposium (Traschen 170).
But perhaps Mann differentiates Aschenbach from Socrates most clearly through the poetic device of thought. In his formulation of the dilemma of the artist, (pp. 72-73), which Mann refers to as "the core of the whole story" (Letters 76), Aschenbach departs radically from Socrates' conception of creation and communication. In his first "Phaedrus" address to Tadzio, Aschenbach echoes Socrates directly in claiming that whereas we cannot perceive truth, virtue or reason through the senses, we can so perceive beauty, and "beauty, then, is the beauty-lover's way to the spirit" ( 45). But in his second address to Tadzio, Aschenbach speaks of "we poets" (72), thus identifying himself not with Socrates but with those whom Socrates is criticizing: "For mark you, Phaedrus, beauty alone is both divine and visible, and so it is the sense way, the artist's way, little Phaedrus to the spirit." But it is a way of perilous sweetness, a "way of transgression, and must surely lead unto him who walks it astray " (72). It is dangerous because both knowledge and form, the two aspects of art, each lead inevitably to the abyss. "Knowledge is all-devouring . . . it has compassion with the abyss-it is the abyss." But form, for Aschenbach, is also destructive, for "by beauty we mean simplicity . . . a return to detachment and to form. But detachment, Phaedrus, and preoccupation with form lead to intoxication and desire . . . to the bottomless pit" (73). Thus Aschenbach formulates the dilemma which is at the heart of his deterioration. And in finding no way to escape the abyss, be ultimately succumbs to its power.
We have seen how Mann provides stylistic and substantive clues to encourage an ironic reading of the "choicest prose" passage, and how be employs poetic devices to establish a Socratic context for identifying and contrasting Aschenbach and Socrates. We shall now find that the Socratic context provides us with a framework for making sense of Aschenbach’s dilemma which, I suggest, derives from Aschenbach’s departure from Socrates' warnings about the art of writing. And thus our reading of the "choicest prose" passage as ironic reveals, ultimately, a ground for a new interpretation of the novella as a whole.
Socrates' Critique of Writing
In the Phaedrus, Socrates draws a crucial distinction between spoken and written communication, thus initiating what Erich Heller calls a "radical critique of writing." (Letters 76). Unlike Aschenbach, who construes the writer's dilemma as arising from the inevitable abyss revealed by both knowledge and form, Socrates argues that the writer's dilemma derives from his very employment of written language. Spoken dialectic, on the contrary, functions for Socrates as a superior alternative formal means of making sense of chaotic experience. It is writing itself, for Socrates, which distorts the original spoken dialectical use of language, isolating the writer in a web of self-deceptive silence, in which words are no longer alive. Aschenbach, a writer par excellence, is unable to see beyond the restrictive boundaries of his own art.
In distinguishing spoken dialectic from writing, Socrates argues that the former uses "living words" to create a loving union between two individuals, words which when implanted in the proper soul and nourished through rigorous question and answer allow the individual to grow toward the light of truth. Dialectic uses living language in that one engaged in dialogue must be able to respond to questions posed to him by his interlocutor. He may begin with one position, but he willingly risks that position for the sake of growth through dialectical synthesis. Each speaker in a dialogue enters into a reciprocal interaction which may allow him to attain a position from which be may see his earlier views as partial and restricted. Though dialectic does not guarantee the attainment of truth, it is man's best instrument for the attempt. As living speech, dialectic "selects a soul of the right type, and in it be plants and sows his words founded on knowledge . . . words which instead of remaining barren contain a seed where now words grow up in new characters which the seed vouchsafes for immortality" (Phaedrus 276e-277e). The words are thus selected to be proper for the listening world, for just as seeds do not grow in the wrong kind of soil, so words will not grow into mature ideas if they are not directed to the proper individual. Dialectic, in joining two individuals in a common pursuit of the truth, thus emerges as a union of souls, the highest form of love.
Writing, in sharp contrast to spoken dialectic, is merely the "shadow" of speech, a deceptive mode of seeming communication which isolates the writer in his blinding web of words. The words are "dead" in that they cannot respond to question, and hence can allow for no real growth. Writing is "analogous to painting," claims Socrates, in that "the painter's products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be educated, they go on telling you the same thing former" (Phaedrus 275d). Socrates refers to King Ammon's warning that "writing will implant forgetfulness in their men's souls" (Phaedrus 275a), and hence allow men to acquire only the semblance of knowledge. "It is not wisdom," claims Socrates, "but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing . . ." (Phaedrus 275b).
And whereas dialectic is directed toward an individual in an act of love, writing is rather scattered loosely and indiscriminately. "Once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts around all over the place getting into the bands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those with no business with it; it doesn't know bow to address the right people, and not address the wrong" (Phaedrus 275e). Rather than being an act of love, writing emerges as an act of lust, a non-reciprocal isolating act whose only satisfaction can be "adulation of the masses." As lust is an egoistic perversion of love, so writing is an egoistic perversion of dialectic. Thus Aschenbach’s "choicest prose," a paradigm of this admired writing, emerges, ironically, as a most deeply deceptive and destructive act. A surrogate for true communication between Aschenbach and Tadzio, it leaves the latter unmoved and the former debauched. And rather than rescuing Aschenbach from his deepening isolation, it promises only to bring further empty adulation from the masses to whom it is scattered.
Conclusion
In discerning Mann's rhetoric of irony, we are able to transcend Aschenbach's restricted perspective to the more encompassing and coherent Socratic context. Given Socrates' critique of writing, we are able to perceive Aschenbach’s self-proclaimed "dilemma" as arising not from the failure of all form to master chaos, but rather from Aschenbach’s own failure to recognize spoken dialectic as an alternative formal means of controlling chaotic experience. Aschenbach's isolation and attendant degeneration and death derive from his failure to escape his enslavement to the ideal of "choicest prose." Could be only forsake this deceptive and isolating web of writing, he could perhaps transcend his interiorized lusts and communicate openly with Tadzio as Socrates does with Phaedrus, through true dialectic, the highest form of human love.
Notes
1. Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice" and Other Stories, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, (New York: Vintage), p. 9. Further references to this text appear in the body of my essay.
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Works Cited
Booth, Wayne, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
Brennan, Joseph, Thomas Mann's World (New York: Columbia, 1942), p. X.
Church, Margaret, "'Death in Venice': A Study in Creativity," College English, 23 (May 1962), 648.
Daemmrich, Horst, "Mann's Portrait of the Artist: Archetypal Patterns," Bucknell Review, 14 (1966).
Gustaffson, Lorraine, "Xenophon and Der Tod in Venedig," Germanic Review,21(1946), 209-214.
Heller, Erich, The Ironic German: A Study of Thomas Mann (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1958).
Heller, Peter, "Thomas Mann's Conception of the Creative Writer," PMLA, 69 (September 1954), 764.
Mann, Thomas, "Death in Venice" and Other Stories, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, (New York: Vintage).
Mann, Thomas, Letters of Thomas Mann, selected and translated by Richard and Clara Winston, (New York: Knopf, 1971).
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds. The Collected Dialogues of Plato (New York: Pantheon, 1966).
Rey, W., '"Tragic Aspects of the Artist in Thomas Mann's Works," Modern Language Quarterly, 19 (September 1958).
Rosenthal, M. L. "The Corruption of Aschenbach," The University of Kansas Review, 14 (1947),
Traschen, Isadore, "The Use of Myth in 'Death in Venice,"' Modern Fiction Studies, 11 (Summer 1965).