Just how gay is "Death in Venice"?

Of course this passage describes an erotic infatuation. It also describes the self-delusion of an artist; Aschenbach almost seems convinced he has created the boy himself, out of "austere and pure will." Perhaps he has. Here and elsewhere, Tadzio is described as a piece of classical statuary, a mythical or godlike figure who is pale and translucent, indeed almost dead. (At two different points Aschenbach imagines that Tadzio will not live long, which he finds a satisfying, even pleasant notion.) This points us toward several of the other levels of Mann's story. Aschenbach's journey from repressed northern Europe into the fecund South is various things: a voyage from consciousness into the Freudian depths, from Apollonian discipline to Dionysian hedonism, from heterosexual "normalcy" into homosexual "deviance," from daily life into the realm of classical mythology. Perhaps most crucially, it is an allegorical journey into the underworld, the land of the dead.

From the first chapter of "Death in Venice," when Aschenbach sees the red-headed stranger in a Munich graveyard, a man who looks as if he has a deformed face and who is "baring his long, white teeth to the gums" (and who will reappear in Venice, although Aschenbach does not recognize him), it's hard to say how much of the story can be taken literally. Or rather, since we are always delicately balanced between Aschenbach's consciousness and the narrator's, we become aware that the tale can be considered simultaneously literal and symbolic. This semi-diabolical graveyard apparition plunges Aschenbach into a hallucination in which he sees "a tropical quagmire beneath a steamy sky -- sultry, luxuriant, and monstrous," filled with "beds of thick, swollen, and bizarrely burgeoning flora" and "outlandish stoop-shouldered birds with misshapen beaks." Is the enigmatic tale that follows -- the aging fop with false teeth Aschenbach meets on the ferry, the gondolier who refuses to follow instructions and disappears without being paid, the stinking canals and sunless sky of Venice, the reappearances of the color red, the lifeless perfection of Tadzio -- anything more than the further elaboration of Aschenbach's fever-dream of tumescence, desire and decay?

I am not so much inveighing against Gilbert Adair's homoerotic master-text analysis -- which carries more weight today than Mann's contention that the story was principally about the problem of "the artist's dignity" -- as I am suggesting that the lasting power of any work as densely wrought as "Death in Venice" can never be summarized by a single idea. As Mann scholar James W. Jones explains in his fine article for glbtq, an online encyclopedia of gay culture, it is now clear that the author wrestled with homoerotic feelings all his life and found much of his creative impulse in them, even as he thought them destructive and dangerous.

It doesn't follow from that, however, that the "meaning" of "Death in Venice" has been settled. It is a tale of psychological, cultural and geographical descent into the unacknowledged nether regions. For Mann that surely meant the same-sex love he was afraid to acknowledge and accept, but he also had in mind the division between his upright burgher's existence and his yearning for a sensual, "artistic" life, and between the sensibility of his Bavarian father and half-Brazilian mother. For every reader the question of whether Aschenbach's homosexual passion is at the root of his dilemma, or is yet another of Mann's symbolic keys, will appear in a different light -- as will the question of whether the Venice he visits is a real place or a Stygian landscape of death. At the very least, I can promise you that Aschenbach's story no longer feels antique; in this illuminating new English version, "Death in Venice" comes back to life.

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