I feel bad if this is off topic from the underlying themes of this course or if this is a little over the top, but I can’t help but make art history connections when I read works of literature, especially works of literature that make allusions to antiquity. I also have a theory (a flawed one) that every story can be traced back to a historical precedent or to a traditional archetype, many of which started with the Greeks. The parallels between the art, literature, and philosophy of the ancient Greeks fascinates me, and I believe “Death in Venice” alludes to these parallels and incorporates them into its narrative structure in a unique way that gives the text greater meaning especially in the descriptions of Tadzio’s body, the use of epithets to describe the narrator, and the symbolism of the Venice canals in relation to the River Styx and the idea of death.
Ideal Bodies and Sculpture:
The notion of idealism pervaded Greek society. Platonic philosophical idealism focuses on the idea that objects can exist in a perfect form in the “ideal realm”, a divine level of consciousness beyond human capacity that can be transcended by things like the study of philosophy, reading the great Homeric epics, and the appreciation of art. Greek sculptors were obsessed with figuring out how to depict the perfect male body in statue form. In the Archaic period of Greek artistic development, sculptors were able to create the ideal male youth in statue but the stance looks awkward and unnatural, almost like a façade, with no emotional interiority to it.
[Kritios Boy]
In the Classical period, sculptors figured out how to portray bodies in a more natural stance, called contropassto. They figured this out by using precise measurements and proportions of form. THIS IS HUGE. Can’t emphasize it enough. Also important to note that many statues did not have specific identities, rather they were supposed to be archetypal representations of “youth” or “spear-bearer” or “warrior”, but of course there were exceptions to this.
[Dorophoryos, spear bearer]
In the third main phase of Greek art, the Hellenistic period, since sculptors had already figured out how to create the visual illusion of a naturally posed body, they began to attempt more to articulate the interiority of their subjects – to try to show emotion in the statue, giving them more individual personality. The Hellenistic period was concerned with more real life, natural subjects, and also more dramatic emotions and writhing or fluid body motions. They also began to show subjects’ true age instead of the idealized male youth.
[Boy with Thorn]
[Barberini Faun]
The point of all this is that sculptors were constantly trying to portray the idealized form of the male body. Depicting naturalness was dependent on artists finding precise and ordered measurements and proportions to sculpt the body in more “natural” LOOKING ways and how this historical and artistic progression came about.
What I kept noticing in “Death in Venice” were the descriptions of Tadzio’s “ideal” body, which reminded me of ancient Greek conceptions of the ideal male body as expressed through statues.
- “and a long-haired boy of about fourteen years. With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was perfectly beautiful. His countenance—pale and gracefully reserved, surrounded by honey-colored locks, with its evenly sloped nose, the lovely mouth, the expression of alluring and divine earnestness, was reminiscent of Greek statues from the most noble period, with all its perfection of form it had such a personal appeal that the onlooker thought he had never encountered anything similar either in nature or in art” (31-32)
- “One had abstained from cutting his arresting hair; like the statue of the Boy with Thorn it curled onto the forehead, over the ears, and even more so in the nape” (32).
- “Exhausted and yet in mental commotion, he entertained himself with abstract, even transcendental subjects during dinner, mulled the mysterious link between the orderly and the individual for human beauty to appear, departed from there to think about the general problems of form and art…” (34)
- “…it gave the already striking personage of the youth a historico-political backdrop that allowed him to be taken seriously in spite of his age” (39)
- “Eros mimicked mathematicians who showed dull children concrete models of abstract shapes: That way also the god liked to use the form and color of human youth to make the conceptual visible, decorating it with all the reflections of beauty whose sight made us burn with pain and hope” (54).
Does Aschenbach and therefore Mann use the allusions to Greek statues to legitimate the scopophilia of the narrator? Are the allusions to Greek art an argument for the naturalness of Aschenbach’s desires and his appreciation of Tadzio’s beauty? Especially because of the Greek practice of pederasty?
Epithets:
Homeric epic poetry constantly uses epithets, or short descriptions that are specific to certain characters, to give narrative structure and to facilitate oral storytelling so the orator can use the epithets as a guiding pattern of speech to fall back on as they think of the next part of the story in their mind. Epithets give clarity and stability to epic poetry and are usually always the same and repetitive. Common epithets in the Iliad and Odyssey include “rosy-fingered dawn,” “god-like Paris,” and “swift-footed Achilles”.
Towards the end of the novel, as Aschenbach increasingly pursues Tadzio throughout Venice, the narrator labels Aschenbach with a constantly changing variety of “epithets”:
- “the onlooker” (53)
- “the artist” (54)
- “the euphoric one” (54)
- the solitary one” (55)
- “the lonely one” (59)
- “the infatuated one” (65)
- “the adventurer” (67)
- “the confused one” (67)
- “the loner” (69)
- “the solitary one” (73)
Tadzio:
- “the beautiful one” (57)
- “the beautiful lad” (60)
- “the dear figure” (61)
- the beautiful boy (65)
- “the needed one” (65)
The epithets serve as inversion of the Homeric narrative structure. While they still provide a sense of clarity and description for Aschenbach they also create a splintered personality or a confused conscious. The changing epithets convey a sense of instability to his character and to the narrative instead of clarity and order like epithets in Homeric poetry. Also, Homeric epithets are usually positive descriptors for characters; they label something that they are known for and good at. Aschenbach’s are all negative and show his almost pitiful place situated in the story.
River Styx // Venice // Death:
According to Wikipedia, Aschenbach means “ash brook” !!!!!
[Charon]
- Pg. 25: “[The Venetian gondola], that strange vehicle, which seems unchanged from more fanciful times and which is so strangely black like normally only coffins are, reminds one of silent and criminal adventures in the lapping night, furthermore it is reminiscent of death itself, the bier, the drab funeral and the final, worthless ride.”
- Pg. 27: “It was a man of unpleasing, even violent physiognomy, dressed in blue sailor’s garb”
- Descriptions of the gondolier’s mouth, lips, and teeth
- Aschenbach asks to go to the vaporetto but the gondolier says no and stays his course. Aschenbach threatens to withhold his pay, but the gondolier says “You will pay. […] I row you well”
- When Asch gets off, the gondolier rows away because there are officials nearby and he doesn’t have a license, Aschenbach never pays: “‘The sir has had a free ride,’ said the old man and presented his hat. Aschenbach threw in some coins.”
- In Greek mythology, dead souls had to cross the river Styx to get to Hades. You needed to pay Charon, the ferryman of the underworld, with a coin to get across the river. In some Greek burial traditions you would put a coin in the dead body’s mouth so that they could pay the Charon’s fare.
- If you couldn’t pay the fare then you wandered the other bank of the underworld and couldn’t enter Hades
- What happens to Aschenbach is extremely similar to this myth. Doesn’t get to where he wanted to go, never pays, gets stuck in Venice
- When he tries to leave Venice — “Wonderously improbable, embarrassing, comically dreamlike experience: To see those places again within the hour from which one had tearfully departed forever, thanks to twists of fate!” (48)
- Aschenbach TRIES to leave Venice, but does fate hold him back?? Why does he stay back if he starts hearing about the cholera outbreak? Since he didn’t pay the gondolier is he stuck in a limbo-esque, purgatory-esque, afterlife existence on the opposite bank of the Styx? Until he physically dies and finally goes into the real afterlife, Hades?
- What about the disinfectant in the water? What about how Aschenbach eventually dies?
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