Just how gay is "Death in Venice"?

A homoerotic "master text" or a cryptic parable of art, arrogance and self-deception? A fresh translation helps pry Thomas Mann's classic from too-literal interpretation.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Aug 10, 2004 | "Death in Venice" belongs to that group of short novels (or novellas, or long short stories) whose cultural importance is out of all proportion to their length. One thinks also of "Heart of Darkness," "Notes From Underground," "The Turn of the Screw," "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Bear," among others. And when you consider that the authors of each of those stories also wrote much longer works that hardly anyone ever reads, you can't help thinking there's a lesson there for would-be authors of Great Books.

Despite its portrayal of the glorious Adriatic port city as a cesspool of disease, duplicity and decadence -- well, actually, because of that portrayal -- Thomas Mann's mini-masterpiece (and Luchino Visconti's overripe 1971 film version) helped lure the aesthetes of the Western world back to Venice more effectively than any tourist-board brochure. (It certainly did more than Henry James' interminable "Wings of the Dove," which is also set there and bears some thematic similarities to Mann's story.) Today you'll pay upward of 400 euros a night to stay at the Hotel des Bains, on the Lido beachfront, where middle-aged Prussian novelist Gustav von Aschenbach pursues his ill-fated passion for a teenage Polish boy. The proprietors will be glad to confirm that, yes indeed, Mann himself stayed there in 1911 -- and so did a certain sailor-suited lad named Wladyslaw Moes (who was no older than 10 or 11).

Dare I even suggest that this fixation with the quasi-scandalous biographical incident behind "Death in Venice" -- now the subject of doctoral dissertations and entries in "Fodor's Italy" -- is, to some significant extent, missing the point? It can be difficult to remember that we're dealing with a work of fiction here, and an especially crafty and meticulous one at that. Like all of Mann's other books, "Death in Venice" is a nest of interlocking keys and symbols in which scarcely a word is wasted, a careful balance of opposing polarities and apparent contradictions in which no final, definitive interpretation can defeat all others. This is a book about Italy written by a German, a book about homosexual love written by a married man who fathered six children, a book about a man who debases himself and embraces his own death written by a man who lived to age 80 as the very embodiment of bourgeois literary respectability.

Whatever "Death in Venice" is, it isn't exactly autobiography. Mann went to Venice and apparently he saw a beautiful boy there. But he was traveling with his wife and brother, while Aschenbach is a solitary widower. Mann was 36, still a rising young writer, while Aschenbach is in his 50s, past the apogee of an illustrious career. And whatever Mann may have thought or felt about young Wladyslaw Moes, it did not drive him to die alone on the Lido, consumed by lust and fever.

There can be no question, however, that "Death in Venice" is a book about homosexual passion -- in the eyes of some gay literary scholars and queer-studies theorists, it has virtually become the book about homosexual passion -- and that fact has affected its reception all along. Generations of earlier scholars expended immense amounts of intellectual wattage trying to deny or rationalize the author's evident fascination with male-male ardor. Even today, some critical guides to "Death in Venice" explain it principally as an allegorical study of artistic creativity and its pitfalls, or as a modern interpretation of classical myth. These interpretations can be defended, but they tended to overlook the obvious fact that Aschenbach's predicament would never have seemed so dire or his obsession so doomed if its object had been a teenage girl instead of a boy.

Next Page: Saying that "Death in Venice" is about homosexuality is like saying "Heart of Darkness" is about Africa

• View blog reactions