The One in The Couple

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The One in The Couple

In a Couple With a Foreigner

The short novel Death in Venice4F, by Thomas Mann, represents the structure of a lover in love with a foreigner. The impossible couple here includes the homosexual love between an old man and an underage boy. This love is impossible according to the Law of the community, which is why it needs violation of the Law and collapse of the values of the Society, in order for the love to be possible.
The hero of the novel is Gustave von Aschenbach, well known and recognized German writer, who is advanced in age and faces a creative crisis as a result of the disciplined, strictly controlled creative life. One morning, after the hard, but sterile creative session, takes a walk around the graveyards of Munich and sees a strange figure of a newcomer. The foreigner, dressed as a tourist, has a peculiar bearing, and reminds Aschenbach of jungles, tigers and southern countries. Exhausted from the pressure of writing, Aschenbach decides to take a trip to Venice. On the ship that travels to Venice, he observes a group of boys, and among them, a boy dressed as an old man, with fake teeth, wig and rouge, which upsets and disgusts Aschenbach. He runs way from the “young-old horror” as Mann’s narrator describes him, and gets on a gondola, which is to take him to the city. The gondolier is a criminal subject, as Aschenbach find out later “a man without a license”. The gondolier takes him to a wrong address, and doesn’t accept money for the ride, saying that his trip will be “paid out”. In the hotel, a Polish family with many children attracts his attention. Among the children, Aschenbach sees the beautiful face and body of the 14-year-old Tadzio. Aschenbach is thrilled by his appearance and very excitedly compares him with Greek gods and the ideal of male aesthetics. Aschenbach is obsessed with the young Tadzio, he follows his play on the beach, the strolls with his mother and the nannies, until he admits to himself that he is actually– in love with him. Tadzio becomes aware of the glances of the old German tourist, and gradually begins to look back at him. At the same time, in Venice cholera is spread, coming from the Indian ships. Although the local hotel owners deny the disease, more and more tourists leave the place. Aschenbach finds out about the devastation of the city, and although he wants to inform the Polish family about it, he abandons the romantic gesture of a savior, when he realizes that his most intimate wish is that neither he, nor Tadzio leave Venice. Even more so: to stay in the city where all the values have collapsed, and all life is destroyed, because only this collapse is a condition for their possible love. While the city is ruined by the disease, Aschenbach, obsessed by love, goes to a barber shop and has his hair dyed, with make up applied to his face, and is beautified to look like a young-old figure. The Polish family finds out about the disease and decides to leave, while Aschenbach dies from the cholera.
The first question is: why is the saga taking place precisely in Venice? Venice is a city built in water, and represents a victory of will over the forces of nature. But, at the same time, behind the glitter of the Venetian buildings, the death takes a peek to the city, which is sinking in the water. The cholera that devastates Venice originates from India, topos that represents not only the repressed impulses, the southern countries, but also the birthplace of Dionysius. On the other hand, Venice is portrayed as poly-lingual, tourists from many parts of the world are visiting: one can hear Russian, Polish, German, Italian words. This mixture of languages is another face of the defeat of the Name, celebration of the echo, as a bodiless voice. We shall return to this problem of the echo later, since it is crucial for the understanding of the impossible love between Aschenbach and Tadzio.
It is now interesting for us to see what is the role of the above mentioned myth of Dionysius, because Mann’s novel is best read through the formula: psychology + myth. In the novel there are lengthy paragraphs where Aschenbach is contemplating the battle between Apollo and Dionysius. In the 13 chapter of the novel, Aschenbach has a dream where Dionysius and Apollo have a fight. Dionysius wins and Apollo leaves. Dionysius dances passionately, driven to climax. Actually, the fight that takes place is a fight for reduction or multiplication of life.
As Deleuze says, there are two types of suffering: suffering for the sake of profusion of life and suffering for reduction of life. At the beginning of the novel Aschenbach is negating life for the sake of art. He transforms madness into fear, the pain into affirmation of life. He praises the rational self-discipline and represses his impulses. The idea does not serve life, but life serves the idea, and that is why the ideas seize and he becomes sterile. The necessary transformation leads to suffering and profusion of life, transformation of enjoyment into activity, but that means affirmation of the last principle– death.
The structure of a city under siege of cholera is a topos known ever since the Sophocles’s Oedipus. The cholera in Oedipus is connected to the patricide: the murder of the Father, and according to Apollo, the only remedy is justice for the murderer of the King and the Symbolic Order. The punishment for this crime is exile of the murderer, his departure into asylum, i.e. his transformation into a foreigner. Similar loss of the Symbolic Order is seen in Mann’s novel, where the madness of the unstable Society is seeking for restoration. The homosexual love, and the love between an old man and an underage boy is a threat for the social order, because this love in the code of the narration represents the end of the procreation. The annulment of the principle of the procreation, to certain extend means murder of the Mother, which is why the cholera in Mann’s novel is not related to the patricide, but quite on the contrary– with the matricide, the murder of the Mother.

Oedipus: patricide -> cholera
Aschenbach: matricide -> cholera

In this narration the Mother is absent, Aschenbach is the one that doesn’t have a mother. Kristeva says that this is exactly the key for structuring the foreigner. In the book “Foreigners to Ourselves” (1991:1-40) Kristeva invests in the theory of the foreigner. The foreigner, the one that is in exile, the fanatic of the lost, does not have a mother. In the “Stranger” by Camus, the alienation takes place after the death of the mother. According to Kristeva, this loss is crucial for the development of the homosexual drives. In the essay for Romeo and Juliet, Kristeva writes that in 1609, Shakespeare lost his mother, published the Sonnets, where he praises the homosexual love. (Page 219) Tadzio becomes not only an image of the Ideal Father, whom the Son is in love with, but also becomes God of Love, becomes Foreign God, as Mann’s narrator describes. That is a God who wakes the impulses of Aschenbach for unity with the Father, ultimately with the Symbolic Order. Return to the primal outcome of the child’s fantasy, realization of the couple: The Son + FatherMother. Aschenbach becomes a subject who seeks to find the lost community, that which has sent him in exile in Venice.
The potential lover Aschenbach craves to be subdued to his threatening Father, to the Foreign God, to the Symbolic Order, with the same zest he needs the defeat of that Order, in order for the love to be acknowledged. Aschenbach knows the secret of the city, which is ruined in cholera, but he doesn’t tell that to Tadzio, because he needs the crisis as much as he needs the love. The crisis for him is the condition for the possibility for love.
Earlier we said that the lover seeks to defy the Name. In order to explain this thesis, we will analyze a very interesting moment from Mann’s novel. When Aschenbach sees Tadzio for the first time on the beach in Venice, he cannot hear clearly the name, which the Polish family uses to address him. He recollects the echo of and he reconstructs the name: the boy’s name is probably Tadzio. The Polish words are alien to him, they are echos.

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4. Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig, 1912 (Macedonian translation: Smrt vo Venecija, Detska Radost, Skopje, 1997).

2018-08-21T17:23:34+00:00 November 1st, 2002|Categories: Reviews, Literature, Blesok no. 29|0 Comments