3.7.2010
This takes up the
discussion that ended my last post on Der Tod in Venedig. I
wrote that the developments in the story cannot be explained as driven by
external events alone, without reference to their connection with
Aschenbach's inner condition and personal history; but equally, that
looking at psychological forces won't suffice either, for that wouldn't do
justice to how the text is crafted.
What follows from this is that we cannot read the story as a psychogram,
as a report on events that merely show the decay of a strong personality;
much less can we view it as a drama where external forces drive the
protagonist into disaster. None of these readings does justice to the setup.
The mistake in both of them would be to assume that the events that make up
Death in Venice happen in the real world, or at least in a world that
is sufficiently like the real world. But that's not so: the development of
the novella doesn't follow the logic of the real world. It follows the logic
of its fictional world, and that logic is different.
Just in what respects is it different? No dark magic is going on (none of
the prefiguration characters has supernatural powers, nor does anything
happen in the plot that cannot be fully rationally accounted for), and
there are no obvious artificial coincidences (such as di ex machina).
Still, the world of the novella is very different from the real world. It
has a consistently restricted focus on the main character (nothing happens,
or at least we learn about nothing which happens, without significance for
Aschenbach), nothing is accidental, it is almost as if all developments
were following a pre-determined scheme. And of course, that's not
accidentally so.
Crafting a fictional world provides the author with the opportunity to
arrange external events so that they exhibit a relationship to the inner
goings-on in their protagonists. Such relationships between the external and
the internal can be of many kinds: the external events can be specially
arranged so as to expose the psychological setup (i.e. the author
deliberately puts a protagonist in a situation in which aspects of her
psyche become clearly visible, are expressed in her views and actions, and
so on); the external might be arranged so as to express moods and
emotions (for instance, when the protagonist is sad and in generally
depressed moods, his surroundings are depicted in a corresponding way, it is
dark, cold and it's raining, tree leaves are falling down, birdsong is dying
away, etc.); or finally the external can symbolize elements of the
internal (such as a house that starts showing cracks and paint peeling off
in correspondence with the decay of the relationships in the family that
lives in it).
In short, the setup of the external (i.e. external with respect to the
people in the story, the protagonists) environment and events is far from
accidental, it has a function in the story. That accounts for the
selectiveness in literary texts: the author doesn't just describe
any elements of the surroundings of their protagonists, but only those
which matter, i.e. which fulfill one of the tasks I have listed above. It
also explains the focus on the main person, and generally the
directedness, that is, the impression that we gain that in this
fictional world everything follows a scheme, that the plot rolls into a
pre-determined direction.
So much for the relationship between the inner and the outer; this goes
some way in the direction of answering the first of the two questions I listed earlier; what
about the second, which had to do with the underlying valuation?
