Online Journal

• 6.6.2010

  Prefiguration of death (in Venice), contd. again

  (This continues my exploration of Thomas Mann's use of the literary prefiguration technique, from part 1, with an afterthought here, and part 2.)

  At his arrival in Venice Aschenbach takes a gondola to the hotel; the gondolier who steers the boat is described in detail, and again there are notable similarities with traditional depictions of personalized death figures: "Er war ein Mann von ungefälliger, ja brutaler Physiognomie [...] kurz aufgeworfene[r] Nase [...] eher schmächtig von Leibesbeschaffenheit [...]. Ein paarmal zog er vor Anstrengung die Lippen zurück und entblößte seine weißen Zähne." (207) Many of the details in his physiology (including, apart from the quoted details, the red eyebrows), posture (looming from a heightened position) and some in his clothing (namely, the straw hat, which he wears in an audacious-looking manner) are vaguely recurrent from the earlier description of the traveling stranger, the one who was seen by Aschenbach in the beginning of the story (compare 187–188), and who aroused his desire to travel, to escape from the life of his daily routines. (And as we will see in a moment, this is again a character that has the power to easily overcome resistance from good reason in Aschenbach and let him yield to desire for comfort.)

  In addition to these parallels, Mann makes the gondolier sequence even more suggestive by beginning it with a meditation (told from the ironical distance of the narrator) about the death symbolism in Venetian gondolas. This passage is so masterfully crafted that it deserves to be quoted at some length:

  "Das seltsame Fahrzeug, aus balladesken Zeiten ganz unverändert überkommen und so eigentümlich schwarz, wie sonst unter allen Dingen nur Särge sind, es erinnert an lautlose und verbrecherische Abenteuer in plätschernder Nacht, es erinnert noch mehr an den Tod selbst, an Bahre und düsteres Begängnis und letzte, schweigsame Fahrt. Und hat man bemerkt, daß der Sitz einer solchen Barke, dieser sargschwarz lackierte, mattschwarz gepolsterte Armstuhl, der weichste, üppigste, der erschlaffendste Sitz von der Welt ist? [...] auf dem nachgiebigen Element in Kissen gelehnt, schloß der Reisende [i.e., Aschenbach] die Augen im Genuß einer so ungewohnten als süßen Lässigkeit. Die Fahrt wird kurz sein, dachte er; möchte sie immer währen!" (206)

  Mann expressly connects here the themes of Aschenbach's tired yielding to pleasurable idleness and his drifting towards his eventual death. (And has one noticed the beauty of the imagery here? "plätschernde Nacht"...)

  Ample interconnections can be found between this passage and others I have already looked at. Not only is there a correspondence between the description of the gondolier and that of the wanderer at the beginning of the novella. There is also the later episode of the Venetian musician at the hotel, whose depiction bears the same sort of similarities (esp. 249–250), and who can be taken as well as the other two figures as a personalization of death. Moreover, embedded into the gondola sequence itself is a short episode in which Aschenbach's boat is accompanied by a gang of musicians, with an explicit mention of the guitar and the mandolin (both are instruments which recur in the later scene, in particular the guitar, which is played by the death-prefiguring musician; 208–209). Also, Aschenbach's giving in to pleasure, and his deliberately seeking Venice for its allure in this respect, can be found many more times in the text (most expressly at 229: "Nur dieser Ort verzauberte ihn, entspannte sein Wollen, machte ihn glücklich."; I have already discussed other locations, such as at 200, in a related post). Further, both the wanderer and the gondolier seem to vanish immediately once they've made their impression on Aschenbach, at the first moment he looks elsewhere (192, 209). And finally, the death-personalization figures (i.e. the wanderer, the gondolier and the musician) seem to have a certain power over Aschenbach which is well worth exploring:

  When Aschenbach notices that the gondolier is taking him all the way to the hotel, and not just, as ordered, to the vaporetto station, he makes an unsuccessful attempt at asserting his will; the gondolier easily out-talks him, and Aschenbach yields. It's clear, however, that it's not the powerlessness of his situation that makes him yield (he is, after all, alone on the water with the gondolier and would certainly be on the losing end of a physical struggle); his resistance doesn't seem full-blooded to begin with, and what mutes it comes to shine through quickly enough: "Wie weich er übrigens ruhen durfte, wenn er sich nicht empörte. Hatte er nicht gewünscht, daß die Fahrt lange, daß sie immer dauern möge? Es war das Klügste, den Dingen ihren Lauf zu lassen, und es war hauptsächlich höchst angenehm." (208) He seems to be under a spell ("Bann der Trägheit", 208), and once more it's not fully clear whether that is caused by forces in the external world of the novel or by something from within the constellation of Aschenbach's personality traits, his personal history and physical fatigue. (I've started to sharpen that question in one of my previous posts.)