Thomas Mann: day 2

--What is the heart of the matter of "Death in Venice" and Aschenbach's decline. Ask first what kind of life he had led--what were the principles of his art. He was all form, intellect, reason. Remember earlier that he had begun to suspect that there was not enough of joy in his work, and that he had this tought just as he decided to head off on vacation.
--Now, embracing the very abyss that he had denounced earlier in his own art, he loses his grip on civility. The final turning point is near the end, when A has the horrific dream, on the bottom of page 132. We look at this ceremonial kind of orgy of the senses, and we are reminded of the revels of The Bacchae in the play by Euripides. We are cast again into terms of classical Greece. The Bacchae, also called the maenads, are a group of women who conduct these strange rituals and orgies off in the woods, away from Greek the city center, in homage to "the stranger god" called Dionysus, god of wine and the carnivalesque.

A discussion of Dionysus that would have been known by Mann would have been in Frederich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. Apollo, the sibling of Dionysus, (also a son of Zeus) is the god of the sun, of dreams, but also of order. Dionysus is the god of wine, intoxication, and ecstacy. In a simplification, Nietzsche claims that true art is a seamless melding of the two elements, ecstacy and form, intoxication and control.
Now, if we look at Man's protagonist, it seems that in his mature literary life he is a slave to Apollo, seeing the formal elements of his work as the sole principla of art. What happens when he allows himself to experience passion is that he completely embraces Dionysus with no thought to Apollo any more, and past a certain point, is no longer able to control the form of his life or his art. Thus his dream echoes the worst excesses of the maenads: Yes, tthey were he, and he was they, when they threw themselves on the animals, tearing and killing, devouring steaming gobbets of flesh, when on the trampled moss-covered ground there began an unfettered rite of copulation in sacrifice to the god. His soul tasted teh lewdness and frenzy of surrender" (133). And we see, after that dream, A no longer cares about what the people around him think.
For Nietzsche the balance of the two--order and passion--is optimal in producing great art. Mann may be tryng to show through A a kind of negative example, offering his readers a kind of catharsis, or cleansing of the emotions through a vicarious example of another's experience.

Apollo--As principle of art, order.	Dionysus--chaos, ecstacy, passion
Aschenbach driven to work by tenacity, endurance, perseverance. But, "it seemed to him that his work lacked those earmarks of fiery, playful fancy . . ." (90).	Aschenbach driven by an inappropriate love for Tadziu loses both artistic and personal control.

-- We might say it is the height of irrationality to stay on in Venice despite the fact that he knew the truth about the sickness.
-- Another sign of irrationality is when, driven by vanity and hopes of recapturing a lost youth, Aschenbach allows himself to succumb to a makeover in the barber chair. He becomes an echo of the thing that horrified him most near the beginning of his travels--the old fop who dressed and acted younger thanhe was.

Suggest several approaches to interpreting the novel that might all be fruitful.

--look at the way the text has a commentary on European civilization at the turn of the C., at the ways that Venice has declined from a place of pure art, pure nature, into something crass, commercial, and self-interested. In one journey taken by A through the canals on page 110. Gondoliers in league with the hawkers of trinkets. And on the bottom of 124, with the beggar on the church steps, and the city keeping its secret out of greed. (Q: is there also something in the popular culture, represented by the street musicians, that epitomizes this decline?).

124- We get another description of Venice as a decrepit and immoral kind of city. Look at the contrast between the marble steps and the beggar, the antiques in the shop and the swindler who runs the shop.
125- when A knows he is past the point of no return, and catches himself stopping by Tadziu's door with his brow leaning against it.
--The Athenian code of love in which abject behavior is likely to result in praise. Of course, we are likely to see this as more rationalizing on the part of A.
126-30 - the band of street singers. Here (top of 127) the kind of music appeals to A in his state of passionate abandon. We get in the leader of this troupe another of the "red-haired types," this one on the doorstep of death.
129. The character of this laughter. Is it a laughter of the superiority of the poor at the ridiculousness of the gentry? The laughter at this place at the blissfully ignorant vacationers enjoying their leisure while a hideous infection spreads through the city?
130- Again with the types. The clerk a wool-clad Briton. Does this signify a more sober and responsible Northern type, perhaps less Dionysian?
And the leitmotifin the description of the journey of the Asian cholera from “the warm swamps of the Ganges Delta . . . where tigers lurked in bamboo thickets".
132. Memories of the radiant mysticism that began for Aschenbach his journey out of himself. Concluding that he will collaborate with the officials and stay quiet about the cholera.
132-33. The great Dionysian dream descends on him in the aftermath of the full realization of his own kind of diseased self. A self centered and reckless trajectory towards what he calls eros.
With the awakening from the dream, the imminence of death, there is an abandonment of precaution, a kind of rejection of shame as a counterpart to his obscession.
134. Near the top of the page A dreams of being sole survivors with Tadziu. Another inversion—death and decay hold promise/ the moral law seems totally useless.
135. One more leitmotif is that of strawberries--A's last meal, so to speak.