13.6.2010
(This continues my discussion of the literary prefiguration technique
in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice from the previous post; look for links to the
earlier parts there.)
As we've seen, Mann uses prefiguration to point us, prefiguratively, to
two different elements of the story: death, and decline of a sense of the
appropriate. The strange traveler in the opening scene (at the Munich
cemetery), and later the gondolier and the Venetian musician all can be seen
as personalized appearances of death, while the fake youth is an
anticipation of Aschenbach himself.
Of all the characters in the novella, these four are most clearly the
symbol-bearers, a characteristic which a careful interpretation should take
into account. If the author uses them all in a roughly similar way, then
he'll probably have intended to express something with that common use.
(It's worth a speculation whether Tadzio, the Polish boy, also belongs in
that category. Just as the death figures, he has a part in leading
Aschenbach to give in to the fatal attraction of the place and conditions
which will kill him, and as they do, he may be taken to both symbolize an
abstract concept, namely that of beauty, and to trigger an episode of
Aschenbach's late life, namely that of yielding to pleasure wherever he
goes. However, compared to the other prefiguration figures, the boy is much
more continuously and coherently present in the plot, and seems decidedly
more tangible as a character than they are. At any rate, he is more
multi-dimensional compared to them.)
Let us make a distinction between two kinds of prefiguration: the
death personalizations on the one hand and the fake youth on the other.
Both sorts represent an episode in Aschenbach's late life: the former his
death, the latter his vain attempt to appear youthful and interesting to
someone who's much younger.
Both have an association with unreality, both carry a strong sense of
giving in, of Aschenbach losing grip. Only the fake youth, however, is
connected with his obsession with the boy (by the "Liebchen" talk). The
fake youth sequence is also the passage with the most explicit references
to a drift away into unreality. The death figures exert their influence more
by attraction, or at least by attracting attention, and by refusing to comply.
(Most strongly the gondolier, in his direct disobedience, 207–208, but
it's also a characteristic of the wanderer, returning very determinedly
Aschenbach's gaze, 188, and the musician, defiantly insisting on the official
account of the sickness outbreak, 250–251.)
But the main distinguishing aspect seems to be that they operate on
somewhat different levels. Wouldn't we say that one's death is something
different from one's behavior (even more when what we're talking about is
behavior only in a particular respect). Symbolizing death is on a different
order than symbolizing a specific foolishness. Or is it?
We may take the specific instance of foolishness here as standing in for
a tendency in Aschenbach: that of yielding to the attraction of pleasure,
the dolce far niente, and generally everything that helps him escape
the strict regime of his life, the order that he himself has imposed on it
(often characterized by terms invoking reason, worth and discipline). This
tendency, it seems, is connected to (and perhaps in a way deeply entangled
with) another: that of drifting into unreality, of getting besotted,
intoxicated, infatuated, and with it more and more losing grip on reality
as the plot develops.
This, I want to suggest, is why there are two different kinds of
prefiguration in Death in Venice. They connect the various strands
in the story: the theme of Aschenbach's continuous yielding, his drift into
unreality, and the inevitable moving toward his death. By being
prefigurations, they tie together earlier and later passages, thus they are
in part what constitutes these strands in the first place. But by
being all instances of the same literary technique, they also make it clear
that the strands themselves are not there coincidentally, that they are
interconnected. And finally, all strands run together in the single, final
and defining end point of the story: the protagonist's eventual death.
To put it into a somewhat broad and sweeping thesis, then: the different
uses of prefiguration in Mann's novella all illustrate a single, common
theme that runs through it: yielding to all sorts of influences, drifting
away from reality, and dying finally come to the same thing — and so
they're all presented using the same technique.
