8.6.2010
(Still continuing my exploration of Thomas Mann's use of the literary
prefiguration technique, from part 1, with an afterthought, part 2, and part 3.)
The strange-looking traveler at the beginning of the story, the Venetian
musician, the gondolier and the fake youth are all instances of
prefiguration: they point, by analogy and by symbolizing, to later elements
in the story.
We can see that prefiguration is at work here not just from the parallels
themselves; it's not only the similarities in words, phrases and motifs
between, for instance, the appearance of the fake youth and Aschenbach's
tampering with his own looks; it's also the extra pointers that Mann lets
follow immediately on these instances of prefiguration: the perception that
the world drifts towards unreality, the feeling of an estrangement, the
advent of an atmosphere of dreamy dizziness. Furthermore, death symbolism
abounds whenever we see one of the personalized death figures: in the
description of the cemetery building before the wanderer appears (187); in
the references to coffin-blackness and soft indolence before the gondolier
sequence (206, 208); and in the hourglass imagery after the musician episode
(253). In addition, both the wanderer and the gondolier strangely disappear,
vanish in a rationally explainable, yet slightly unsettling manner, which
gives them an air of eerie unreality (192, 209). Finally, there's the power
they exert on Aschenbach's mind, which shows itself externally in the
challenging, irreverent posture and behavior of all three death-prefiguration
figures and on the psychological level in the inability of the protagonist to
resist the harmful influences which corrode his attitude and self-respect.
(I've looked into this aspect when I discussed the gondolier passage in my
last post.)
With the fake youth and the gondolier, Mann makes their function in his
narrative plan even more plain by having Aschenbach himself reflect on these
two figures, after his arrival in his hotel room: "So beunruhigten die
Erscheinungen der Herreise, der gräßliche alte Stutzer mit seinem
Gefasel vom Liebchen, der verpönte, um seinen Lohn geprellte Gondolier,
noch jetzt das Gemüt des Reisenden." (210) Why should these episodes
make Aschenbach unduly concerned? Without sensing some momentous meaning for
himself in their appearance, his disquiet would not be explainable. We are
meant to understand Aschenbach himself as reading a sign of what's to come
into these episodes. We might ask ourselves, of course, whether this sort of
veridical premonition is something that really takes place in the
world of the novella (that is, whether in Mann's fictional world such things
as veridical premonitions happen), or whether, as in the real world, there
is no such thing as knowing the future, but a person might be under the
impression that his feelings tell him something about what's in store
for him, and perhaps even unconsciously make it happen, in a self-fulfilling
prophecy pattern. In other words, is Mann having Aschenbach know his
fate, and perceiving it in the prefiguration characters, or does he portray
a mentally tired and overly sensitive old man seeing ghosts?
Unfortunately, he doesn't tell: "Ohne der Vernunft Schwierigkeiten zu
bieten, ohne eigentlich Stoff zum Nachdenken zu geben, waren sie dennoch
grundsonderbar von Natur, wie es ihm schien, und beunruhigend wohl eben
durch diesen Widerspruch." (210) Thus although Aschenbach finds on reflection
that there is nothing about them which couldn't be rationally explained,
still they seem deeply strange to him ("grundsonderbar"); yet he cannot
account for that strangeness, and that's what makes him nervous. This
is understandable enough, but it leaves open the question (and thus, I'd say,
the author deliberately leaves open the question) whether the grounds
of the strangeness then are in Aschenbach's psychological constitution or
whether the (fictional) world itself has a structure that includes such
things as death appearing as person and a mirroring of people's later fates
in the faces and behavior of others they encounter (that is, prefiguration).
Has Mann written the story of someone who lives (and dies) in such a world,
or has he written a story of someone who lives in the real world, but more
and more sinks into a deadly imaginary unreality?
The reflection on the prefiguration character of the fake youth and the
gondolier happens relatively close to their appearance in the story; there
is another such reflection; this one, however, comes very much later:
already close to the end of the text, Aschenbach remembers the cemetery
building and the wanderer figure from the scene in the very beginning; and
most revealingly, this happens in a moment that might, just might, have been
a turning-point: he has now learned the truth about the cholera epidemic,
and he ponders for a second the idea of leaving, and above all, warning the
Polish family and giving them a chance to leave in time as well. He
dismisses the thought, and the memory of the earlier scene seems to play a
role in the dismissal (though once more it remains unclear what is cause and
what consequence — is the recollection what causes his rejection of
the idea, or merely an expression that brings it into the light, in form of
a more observable behavior?): "Er erinnerte sich eines weißen Bauwerks,
geschmückt mit abendlich gleißenden Inschriften, in deren
durchscheinender Mystik das Auge seines Geistes sich verloren hatte" (256).
(The phrases here, "in deren durchscheinender Mystik das Auge seines Geistes
sich verloren hatte" are again near-precise quotes of the earlier passage,
compare 187: "sein geistiges Auge in ihrer durchscheinenden Mystik sich
verlieren zu lassen".) Also, there is a more obliquely made connection
here to the fake youth-prefiguration: the sentence: "[Er erinnerte sich]
jener seltsamen Wanderergestalt sodann, die dem Alterndem schweifende
Jünglingssehnsucht [...] erweckt hatte" refers to the wanderer, but it
also uses the old man vs. youth contrast that is played out in the figure of
the fake youth, and later in the cosmetically 'rejuvenated' Aschenbach
himself. Again, both allusions strengthen the coherence in the text between
these episodes of recurring motifs immensely.
These two reflection passages, then, confirm and underline the
prefiguration character of the episodes I have discussed. I think we're now
well set up to launch into some deeper analysis of the borders and
connections between reality and unreality within fiction that are so
artfully drawn here.
