The Borders of Things

The Mannly Thing to Do (Lust and it's Metaphors)

Last night I finished Thomas Mann’s short story/novella “Death in Venice.” I found this to be a remarkable piece of literature. It has a very tight and appealing formal structure (reminiscent of Flaubert) and a unique blend of psychological narrative, aesthetic reflection, and social commentary. For contemporary readers, the (translated, unless you can read German) prose may be a little laborious, but it’s worth the struggle.
One very interesting element of the text is the amount of interpretation it is able to sustain. (Keep in mind that these comments of mine are not coming from extensive research, simply a reading of the text and some reflection upon it). For instance, one can read it as a story about art. One can read it as a commentary on life/death. One can read it as an apocalyptic critique of Western society and culture (in the vein of TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”). One can read it as a treatise on forbidden (predatory?) love. One can read it ways I have not mentioned and as all of these things simultaneously.
I am particularly fascinated with its connecting forbidden desire with Western culture. Gustave, the old and renowned writer upon whom the story centers, falls for a young, god-like child name Tadzio. By “young” and “child” I mean exactly that – I think the story identifies him as being around 14. Tadzio is quickly given the role of Gustave’s muse; he is presented as an aesthetic object whose beauty inspires the artist to make more art. This has a clear precedent: Renaissance sonneteers always were writing about some beauty somewhere (male or female, as in Shakespeare’s sequence), and critics have spent a lot of time analyzing the objectification that occurs in this type of relationship. But “D. in V.” disrupts this idealized process, since Gustave cannot stop with Tadzio merely being an inspiring presence. He becomes obsessed with this child, essentially begins to stalk him, and realizes that his behavior has become deviant.
Even in his deviance, Gustave relates it back to the beginnings of Western culture, citing Socrates comments on the lover and the beloved in the “Phaedrus.” And this is where the story really becomes, I think, brilliant. For what is our cultural heritage? What does its history look like? Is it really a story of pedophilia, of “beauty” turning to “desire” turning to “lust”? What is the difference between “high art” and the pornographic?
Perhaps I am offering a fairly radical interpretation here, but it’s really an intense 60 some pages. There are a lot of connections that would be interesting to follow through. Obviously, Freudian Sublimination -- see the story of Apollo and Daphne. Also, I think Nabokov’s Lolita would be a great comparative read.
Have any of you read this story? What do you think about it? And do you think the themes I’ve talked about have any relationship to Andy Montgomery’s obsession with the Totten brothers?