Just how gay is "Death in Venice"?

Gay readers were understandably enraged by scholarly efforts to aestheticize the queerness out of "Death in Venice," and the post-Stonewall academic revolution has produced a valuable corrective. But the reliance on biographical detail -- whether it's Mann's encounter with young Moes in Venice (which, like Aschenbach's with his Tadzio, amounted to nothing) or the struggle with sexual identity revealed in Mann's letters and diaries -- has risked tumbling out of the gondola in the other direction. The fact that "Death in Venice" is based to some degree on an event from Mann's life, and even the fact that Mann himself may have been homosexual or bisexual, do not mean that the book is only about those things, or that it amounts to no more than an anguished Freudian confession thinly coated with imagination.

At the risk of sounding like a middlebrow hetero liberal, let me insist that it would be unfortunate if future generations read "Death in Venice" as a "paradigmatic master-text of homosexual eroticism," in the phrase of critic and novelist Gilbert Adair. It can no more be boiled down to such a formulation than "Heart of Darkness" can be described as being entirely about colonial Africa, or "The Old Man and the Sea" as about fishing.

If anything, the homoerotic component of the story -- and Mann's tortured relationship to his besotted protagonist -- become clearer than ever in Michael Henry Heim's new translation of "Death in Venice." A UCLA linguist justly acclaimed for his Chekhov translations, Heim has thrown open the windows of Aschenbach's gloomy hotel and let the sea breezes in. As novelist Michael Cunningham writes in his introduction, Aschenbach seems like a more comprehensibly human and sympathetic character here, and Mann's ironic treatment of him less overtly cruel (and frankly funnier), than in H.T. Lowe-Porter's deeply coded, overly British translation. Mann's dense, overgrown language feels lighter, more burnished with Venetian beauty, than ever before in English.

(Cunningham's presence here, by the way, feels like a faintly cynical marketing ploy on the part of the publisher. His introduction is genial but insubstantial, and while he's too much of a gentleman to mention it, he must be aware that his own work bears almost no resemblance to Mann's and that he's been invited for one reason only -- he's the best-known gay novelist of the moment and "Death in Venice" is now coded as a gay book.)

The plot, if you want to call it that, is the same as always. (And if you object to my revealing what happens in a literary work published 92 years ago, you may exit now.) Aschenbach, the repressed and perhaps depressed literary celebrity best known for what sounds like a tedious historical novel about Frederick the Great, is inspired to travel after an enigmatic encounter with a mysterious stranger in a graveyard. He ends up in Venice, which is roasting in summer heat and beginning to suffer a cholera epidemic. He becomes fascinated with the beautiful young Tadzio and passes up numerous opportunities to leave, spending his evenings shadowing the boy (and his nunlike, almost sexless sisters) through the streets and canals of the Renaissance city. But he never approaches Tadzio or even speaks to him, and on the day when Tadzio and his family plan to leave the Hotel des Bains, Aschenbach dies in a beach chair, the boy apparently "beckoning to him," inviting him outward into "the promising immensity of it all."

None of that can begin to express the multiple layers of Mann's narrative. Here, for instance, is one of the central passages in the progress of Aschenbach's obsession (and one of the best examples of the loveliness of Heim's translation). He is watching Tadzio on the beach, while still trying to convince himself that his interest is solely aesthetic or platonic. Mann moves almost effortlessly from a total identification with Aschenbach, while he contemplates the boy's beauty, to a position of sardonic distance from Aschenbach's increasingly inane self-justifications. It's as if Mann empathizes -- indeed identifies -- with his passion, but can't bring himself to condone it:

"[Tadzio] would stand at the edge of the sea, alone, removed from his family, quite near Aschenbach, erect, his hands clasped behind his neck, slowly rocking on the balls of his feet, staring out into the blue in reverie, while little waves rolled up and bathed his toes. The honey-colored hair fell gracefully in ringlets at the temples and the back of the neck, the sun glimmered in the down of the upper spine, the fine delineation of the ribs and symmetry of the chest stood out through the torso's scanty cover, the armpits were still as smooth as a statue's, the hollows of the knees glistened, and their bluish veins made the body look translucent. What discipline, what precision of thought, was conveyed by that tall, youthfully perfect physique! Yet the austere and pure will laboring in obscurity to bring the godlike statue to light -- was it not known to him, familiar to him as an artist? Was it not at work in him when, chiseling with sober passion at the marble block of language, he released the slender form he had beheld in his mind and would present to the world as an effigy and mirror of spiritual beauty?"

Next Page: Is Tadzio real? For that matter, is Venice? Isn't the whole story a passionate hallucination?

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