The echo is important for illumination of another principle. Tadzio is portrayed as a beautiful God, Narcissus. He is well aware of his beauty, he glances back at Aschenbach, and he smiles at him once: Tadzio is bearer of the defeating love that seduces. The myth about Narcissus, as it is known, says that when the nymph Echo fell in love with Narcissus, he rejected her in most cruel way. Out of sadness, she lost her body, and turned into an echo, into voice without body. At this point, we will refer to Kristeva’s thesis about the one in the couple. Falling in love with the Narcissus, Aschenbach looses his body, dies from cholera, and what remains behind is his voice, his echo. As a renowned writer in Germany, he turns into a voice without body. This structure shows that the couple Aschenbach– Tadzio is a couple where the Narcissus Tadzio destroys the body of the other, of Aschenbach, in order to remain one, complete, total entity.
Finally, the road to the demonic space of love leads through a few initiating codes. Entering into the reality of death, Aschenbach passes the water in a gondola, which reminds him of death. The gondola is black on the outside and soft on the inside. The gondolier is an association of Heron, who transports the bodies over the river Styx. His red hair is the same as the hair of the man who sells the tickets to Venice, and is also the same with the hair of the musician on the terrace of the hotel in Venice, which represents the liberation of Dionysius. Those demonic figures, as well as the first tourist that Aschenbach meets in Munich, who also has red hair, are figures of the foreigner, figures on the other side of the Order. But, symbolically, they represent liberation of the metamorphosis, similar to the one that Aschenbach lives through when as an old man he transforms into someone much younger. Just like the passenger on the ship to Venice, the “young– old horror”, that figure is incarnation of Dionysius, who is to mark the suffering for the sake of affirmation of life.
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Almost identical is the narration of Wuthering Heights5F (1847) by Emily Brontë: here is presented one more image of the uncontrolled, non– logo-centric love with the foreigner. The Wuthering Heights for Brontë is what Venice is for Thomas Mann: bare, horrific and forbidden landscape, landscape in crisis, uncanny landscape. The intentionally confused introductory chapters illustrate the family of the relatively rich Earnshaw, who owns the Wuthering Heights. Earnshaw already has two children, Catherine and Hindley, when he adopts Heatcliff. This moment marks the breaking of the social order, because Heatcliff assumes socially ambiguous status: he is of unknown, probably gypsy origin, and in the family receives the most privileged status among the children Earnshaw. After the death of the father, Heatcliff begins a love affaire with the sister and a relationship of humiliation and hatred with the brother.
Catherine states that her love for Heatcliff has such a character, that they are not two different subjects but one: “We are one person”, she says. Catherine legitimates the status of the foreigner, as the one that lives in every one of us. ”Regardless of what the souls are made of, mine and his are the same”. Kristeva points that the foreigner is a hidden face of my own identity, and my deepest hatred for the foreigner happens when I have to legitimate in relation to his/her own identity. According to Kristeva, the foreigner becomes a symptom that makes the couple impossible, that turns “us” into a problem.
Although Catherine loves Heatcliff, she decides to marry the rich neighbor Linton. This act is motivated not only by her need to be the “the most dazzling lady in the country”, but more by the hatred and humiliation that consists her love towards Heatcliff.
Hindley, Catherine’s brother, transforms the hatred towards the foreigner into a long series of humiliations. He demands that Heatcliff be placed with the servants. Catherine feels the same hatred, when she proclaims Heatcliff dirty, as opposed to the expected cleanliness of the one that is not a foreigner:
“If I marry Heatcliff, that would degrade me”– she says.
The economy of the foreigner, says Kristeva, is based on the simultaneous respect and criticism of his/her dissimilarity. The face of the foreigner is a witness of the uniqueness, exclusiveness, and dissimilarity. That face, those eyes, lips, cheeks witness that: “I am at least that unique, as is this foreigner, because I love him. But I prefer my uniqueness and exclusiveness, because I want to kill him. “ (Kristeva) That is the devastating role of the Subject in the couple, because the ancient need to make One where there are Two deepens with the challenging identity of the Other.
Heatcliff is constantly reminded that he doesn’t belong in the Wuthering Heights, as every foreigner is reminded that he/she doesn’t belong on the new territory. Kristeva says that the foreigner is the one who doesn’t respect his/her hosts– he/she considers them blind and narrow minded. He has developed a distance that separates him from the others. He doesn’t own the truth, but can always invent it. Heatcliff nurtures hostility towards the Heights, because he is the newcomer who remembers his old territory, he has biography, while the people of the Wuthering Heights are “victims of the mono-valence”, as Kristeva says. They have an estate and mediocre routine. He has a biography. Heatcliff leaves the Heights and returns rich, in order to be able to take revenge: he buys the estate; he marries Linton’s sister, and at the end of the novel makes Catherine’s daughter a servant. Sacrificed in the name of the foreigner in her (Catherine), Heatcliff’s continuous position is a mixture of enjoyment and horror.
The state of a foreigner in the case of Heatcliff is detected as permanent nostalgia for legality of the foreigner in him, but also as a paradox of the artist. He constantly wears masks that can make him what they want him to be. When Catherine marries the rich Linton, Heatcliff leaves and becomes rich. But, as he is obsessively tied to his aim, he displays the typical fanaticism of the foreigner, which is discussed by Kristeva. That fanaticism represents the need for him to become one with the land that he inhabits. And the fanaticism has two faces: extreme devotion and at the same time, extreme separation, nostalgia for the non-belonging. He, together with the others, witnesses his presence, where others cannot find him.
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5. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Croatian translation, Orkanski Visovi, Nakladni Zavod, Zagreb, 1976.