The Bitter Taste of Awareness
Cecilia Bien
Still, Death in Venice, Lucino Visconti (2001))
Death in Venice, for me, elicits a passing time in high school among precocious frenemies eager to apprehend—or rather, consume—form. At that age, per the archetypal naivete of American teens, our closest analogy was to Greek mythology: Gustav von Aschenbach had released himself into the Dionysian abyss. We had yet to learn that a carefully built credentialized existence is, for the artist, always on the tipping point of ruin.
Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (originally published in 1912, with new English translations following every few decades since then) follows Aschenbach, an aging writer who travels to Venice seeking inspiration and respite. He becomes infatuated with a boy, Tadzio, whose perfection awakens both artistic longing and inner turmoil. As a cholera outbreak spreads through the city, Aschenbach refuses to leave, ultimately succumbing to the illness while gazing at Tadzio on the beach. Such is the course of this tragedy: while there’s a certain healthiness to shocking the system, obsession ravages the soul.
Revisiting this, by some accounts, passé novella, twenty-five years after my first reading—today as a person who participates in cultural production and its encompassing discourses—presents the opportunity to both question and recontextualize its significance in a world that at once weighs differently and also has not changed at all. In a notebook entry from 1914, Thomas Mann described sympathy with death as seeing morality “not in reason and discipline, but in surrendering to what is harmful, so that one feels it moral to degenerate.”1 As ever, the simultaneous ambivalences of self-doubt, indulgence, and critical examination of one’s moral compass reveal the twin shadows of denial and self-sabotage.
Aschenbach self-establishes his bourgeois artistic identity through discipline and ambition. Between the lines, he can be read as having been a tryhard in his youth, developing an arrogant veneer in his adult life as a pretense for the repression, longing, and insecurities a downwardly mobile writer-artist from a family of officers and judges might embody. A present-day Aschenbach might find himself an outcast within the contemporary crowd, a mansplainer taking up too much space. One English translation is particularly blunt: Aschenbach was problematic.2 The boomer next door, his seat at the table is based on fading accolades worthy of a specific place and time and proximity to aristocratic privilege. Mann writes of him in his youth as already the one who kept the twenty-year-olds breathless with his cynicism about the questionable nature of art and artists.
But is a problematic character a problem in and of itself? If Mann constructed Aschenbach as his own mirror, do we hold either of them accountable for perpetuating an insipid ego, or can we tolerate a fictional character’s attitude as necessary to the structure of narrative form? Does contemporaneity demand that an artwork only be valued according to the whole person behind it? Susan Sontag called out, as early as 1966, that form and content are inextricably bound in criticism. Since the 80s, critique on the basis of form has required an automatic entanglement with critical theory and discursive production. As a consequence, contemporary criticism collapses the distinction of treating the moral judgment of fictional characters—and, inevitably, of their authors—as a way to evaluate the literature or artwork that holds them. Content eclipses form.
Aschenbach’s character traits, i.e. the ones that for many would determine his moral standing, can be read along conflicting timelines depending on a reader’s mood and lived experience. Interpretation and critique is subjective. The opportunity to choose how and which of his contradictions to follow in fact reflects the deftness with which Mann is able to make human what could otherwise be perceived as morally or ethically horrific by contemporary standards. Aschenbach’s inner conflicts are developed in real time along with the unfolding chronological narrative. We suddenly find ourselves empathizing with the blundering protagonist turned antihero, now unrequited admirer, as he grapples with his emotions. Mann, in any case, gets away with such contentious sentiments, by letting us know that Aschenbach believes feelings only settle for approximations and half-hearted perfection.
While Aschenbach aspires for self-possession through bourgeois attempts at correct living, he never claims to be a pillar of moral virtue. Mann makes us privy to his tone-deaf past, that he had made false moves, made a fool of himself, violating tact and good sense in word and deed. Yet our attachment to the morally ambiguous protagonist is automatic and affective. The problem is that we don’t know how to project it.
Mann already knows this, implicating us through Aschenbach’s fans. Two different contemporary translations describe the symptom: they perceive it to have a hundred different benefits to justify their adulation… sympathy3 is also described as, they believe they have discovered a hundred virtues to justify such enthusiasm… affinity.4 If the reader cannot derive anything more than sympathy or affinity for Aschenbach, Sontag’s borderline sycophant observation chimes as both praise and blame, in which she writes that Mann is “overcooperative”5 in “install[ing] within the work itself—albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony—the clear and explicit interpretation of it.”6 By embedding the possibilities of interpretation inside the narrative itself, Mann holds a mirror to the reader. How we interpret the moral dislocations of Aschenbach might tell us more about ourselves than of the fictional character.
It’s easiest to resent Aschenbach when he makes us confront our own complicity in holding up the status quo: buying Ryanair seats to get sloppy on spritzes at pavilion parties, innocently contributing to the city’s decay while upholding its facade, indulging in discourse du jour to remind ourselves that art is serious business. For us, the city of Venice is a backdrop, moving and responding along an Other, parallel network and community of its own issues and politics. We can enjoy our Venice for its looks. And later, we’ll trust our wits to opt out gracefully when we’ve aged out of the allure. Aschenbach was no longer in a mood for being self-critical; the taste and mental state of his years, self-respect, maturity and late simplicity kept him from analyzing his motives and from deciding if he did not act because of his conscience or because of weakness.
Detachment is a practice of self-preservation. Bystanding is a privilege. But denial only makes the heart ache deeper. For Mann, German politics were irrelevant to his work before 1914. Yet, in the subtext, Aschenbach reminds us of our shared liabilities when we detach from inescapable, everyday truths. The justifications for the ethics we co-opt according to the changing regulations of postmodernity, are to be on the right side of history in the mind’s eye. Delusion and regret for not acting correctly at the time may be inevitable, but can only be known in hindsight. Because passion, like crime, does not like everyday order and well-being and every slight undoing of the bourgeois system, every confusion and infestation of the world is welcome to it, because it can unconditionally expect to find its advantage in it. It’s not Aschenbach’s identity or behaviors that we find so contemptible, but rather an instinct that he might be just like us, or us like him. Nothing dulls the noble and able mind quicker than the biting and bitter taste of awareness…the deep conviction of the man who has become a master, his decision to deny that knowledge, to decline it, to completely ignore it…
Moral dilemmas aside, the most trenchant and contemporary drama lies in the tension between the projection of the Platonic ideal versus the disruptive force of alterity. Tadzio’s youth and androgyny is projected as Other. His admirer—and the author behind him—strip him of any semblance of subjectivity. When Aschenbach encounters him, the boy instantly fills the void of the aesthetic ideal. For the writer, the search is over. Aschenbach imagines that he beholds form as a thought in the mind of God and Tadzio becomes a manifestation of the perfect image—beauty incarnated in the world, but only within the confines of his gaze, effigy and mirror!—a projection of alterity7 that exposes the recurring pathology at the heart of aesthetic idealization.
In Venice, the writer's gaze onto the Other implicates himself. He is drawn into the image he constructs, becoming the spectacle he sought to only observe. His attempt to cosmetically restore his youth transforms him into a grotesque figure, a parody of the ideal he longingly contemplated from a distance. His lips, anemic only a moment before, swell raspberry-red and the furrows in his cheeks and around his mouth, the wrinkles under his eyes vanish beneath face cream and the glow of youth––the ideal returns as a caricature. Aschenbach’s tragedy is in his undoing, the spellbound lover left, agitated and confused, yet as happy as in a dream. The distinction between aesthetic projection and lived reality collapses—perhaps the universal malady of the contemporary art tourist, or contemporaneity in general.
Incidentally, the same instability between admiration and projection resurfaced in an encounter between Susan Sontag and Thomas Mann. Sontag recalls her meeting Mann at age fourteen, herself a precocious American teen. In her 1987 essay, Pilgrimage8 published in The New Yorker, she reflects decades later on her embarrassment in a moment of youthful reverence—that everything about the meeting with him has the color of shame. The essay ends with something of a moral lesson for the aging writer, who, in this case, is Sontag, and at times is also pedantic and clumsy with prose. She writes that she realizes the importance for tolerating the distance between a work and its creator. By coincidence, Sontag’s essay was referenced a few weeks ago, again in The New Yorker. Turns out there’s a timelessness to a broader anxiety of the writer’s failure to live up to expectations. And it turns out, overidentification is not an exception with Aschenbach or even Sontag, but rather a condition and risk that comes with unchecked idolization. On that note, dear artists, writers, viewers, readers, critics, fans and tourists: travel well, stay vigilant, and mind the distance.
1. Jensen, M. H.. The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of "The Magic Mountain". Yale University Press, 2025. Pg. 49.
2. Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice. Translated by Martin C. Doege. Digireads.com Publishing, 2018. Pg 9
3. Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice. Translated by Martin C. Doege. Digireads.com Publishing, 2018. Pg 8.
4. Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Ecco, 2005. Pg 16.
5. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. Pg 6.
6. Ibid.
7. In Return of the Real, Foster’s theory of ‘Projection of Alterity’ in art is such that a projection assumes that they who are perceived as ‘Other’ possess automatic access to the ‘Real’, and thus an automatic reverence for the Other is derived.
8. Sontag, Susan. “Pilgrimage.” The New Yorker, December 21, 1987, pp. 38–54.
Cecilia Bien is a writer and researcher based in New York and Vienna.