The Aporia of Bourgeois Art Desire in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice

The Aporia of Bourgeois Art: Desire in Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice"
Author(s): TOM HAYES and LEE QUINBY

Source: Criticism, Vol. 31, No. 2 (spring, 1989), pp. 159-177
Published by: Wayne State University Press
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TOM HAYES and LEE QUINBY
The Aporia of Bourgeois Art:

Desire in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice
Death in Venice is undoubtedly a central text in Thomas Mann's

oeuvre and in contemporary literary criticism. It is also, and this is not
exactly the same thing, an exemplary text of "high" modernism, one
that questions the moral and aesthetic "certainties" of bourgeois cul
ture. On the one hand the novella has been read as a cautionary tale,
an apologue showing that even the most Apollonian artist may give
way to Dionysian excess and sink into a slough of despond. In this
reading Death in Venice charts the irruption of the Freudian id and
elicits sympathy for an artist suddenly engulfed by his "base" desires.
On the other hand, from its inception, there have been those, such as
Stefan George, who have argued that the novella challenges such no
tions of baseness by celebrating the spiritualized male friendship de
picted in Plato's Phaedrus.
In the following pages we want to show how both of these read
ings are circumscribed within a discourse of desire in which desire is
the desire to attain the unattainable.1 In this discourse, desire pro
duces and is produced by a system of binary oppositions in which
one term is privileged over the other: first-order sense experience is
opposed to representation of that experience. Content is thus op
posed to form, or in Nietzschean terms, the Dionysian to the Apol
lonian, impulse to repression, transgression to conventionality. Narra
tive form reproduces these polarities of desire: Classical art privileges
the Apollonian; Romantic art privileges the Dionysian. Post-Roman
tic, "high"-modernist art reaches an impasse in which the Apollonian
and the Dionysian are both privileged and denigrated—hence its
overwhelming sense of irony. This impasse is "figured" by the plight
of the artist who is alienated from bourgeois values as well as from a
"true" self seen to be "outside of" or marginal to those values. The
artist figure is thus caught in a situation where immediacy, which is
always transgressive, must be sacrificed in order to create art, the
monumentalization of self. This art always yearns for its other, al
ways longs to recapture Dionysian exuberance. Yet to do this is to
forsake classical Apollonian form, to accept death in dissolution. Such
a formulation, which separates mind and body, which sees man as
Criticism, Spring 1989, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, pp. 159-177.

Copyright © 1989 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48202.
159
160 Desire in Death in Venice
head, mind, spirit and woman as flesh, body, emotion, is reinscribed

in Death in Venice in the relationship between Gustave Aschenbach
and Tadzio.
This dilemma of desire, we argue, is the aporia of bourgeois art,
which, in the era of "high" modernism, is itself represented as a crisis
of representation and subjectivity. Our intervention is to situate this
crisis within a genealogy of desire.2 We want to show its double in
volvement, its simultaneous subversiveness of patriarchal values and
its re-appropriation of the very subversion it produces. By focusing
on the desiring subject and the subject of desire in Death in Venice we
will examine connections between representations of homoeroticism
and masculinist assumptions implicit in the partriarchal ideology that

produces and is produced by bourgeois art. Such a reading locates
connections between homophobia, misogyny, and artistic production
within the mentality produced by—and necessary for—the power
structures within bourgeois culture.3 For the representation of this de
sire is always already inscribed with the binary opposition of sexual
difference. It is always an objectification of the Other, an appropria
tion of alterity that inevitably valorizes repression and/or sublima
tion and sees Western culture as fallen from an idealized, spiritual
ized version of ancient Greek culture.
Throughout Death in Venice assumptions of sexual difference
within this discourse of desire are called into question only to be reaf
firmed. For example, Aschenbach's desire for Tadzio places in ques
tion the series of polarities upon which heterosexuality is constructed,
the oppositions masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual, and
the conflation of the two in the opposition of masculine/homosexual,
which Jonathan Dollimore has examined in his essay on homophobia
and sexual difference.4 But while Aschenbach's homoeroticism unset
tles these polarities, the moral context of the story perpetuates them,
for in Aschenbach's aestheticized desire for Tadzio the first term of
each of these binary oppositions is privileged and associated with the
Apollonian and/or "masculine" virtues of rationality, order, and re
straint, while the second term is devalued and associated with the
Dionysian and allegedly "feminine" characteristics—receptivity, de
sire, hysteria, the overflow and redundancy of speech.5 Such opposi
tions reflect, support, and maintain misogynistic values in patriarchal
societies. In effect, such binary opposition recapitulates the misogyn
istic story of the Fall, as does Aschenbach's demise. In patriarchal so
cieties, "femininity" seduces men to their deaths.
In this context, the displacement of femininity in the novella oper
Tom Hayes and Lee Quinby 161
ates in concert with the simultaneously homophobic and homoerotic

discourse that runs throughout. As Harold Beaver has argued, in or
der to decenter and expose the homophobic sexual system of bour
geois society we must "reverse the rhetorical opposition of what is

'transparent' or 'natural' and what is 'derivative' or 'contrived' by
demonstrating that the qualities predicated of 'homosexuality' (as a
dependent term) are in fact a condition of 'heterosexuality'; that 'het
erosexuality,' far from possessing a privileged status, must itself be
treated as a dependent term."6 Death in Venice raises this possibility.
Yet as Aschenbach moves towards death, the aesthetic and sexual
categories of bourgeois society are broken down only to be aestheti

cized and displaced onto "a long-haired boy of about fourteen" (p.
25).7 This coupling of death and desire reestablishes heterosexuality
as the "natural" form of sexuality and homosexuality as "derived."8
The ideological significance of this displacement becomes evident
when we consider Mann's own statements about the novella's homo
eroticism. In a 1920 letter to his openly homosexual friend Carl Maria

Weber Mann explained that the theme of Death in Venice "is inherent
in the difference between the Dionysian spirit of lyricism, whose out
pouring is irresponsible and individualistic, and the Apollonian,
objectively controlled, morally and socially responsible epic. . . . what
I originally wanted to deal with was not anything homoerotic at all. It
was the story—seen grotesquely—of the aged Goethe and the little
girl in Marienbad whom he was absolutely determined to marry."
But Mann changed the setting and the gender of the love object be
cause he wanted to "carry things to an extreme by introducing the
motif of the 'forbidden love.'"9 Mann's Nietzschean of a
concept
Dionysian/Apollonian split points to the underlying contradictions of
sexual difference in which the story embroils us and shows that their
binary opposition tends to be resolved in favor of the Apollonian. As
his words suggest, despite his interest in portraying Dionysian trans
gression, its polarized relationship to Apollonian responsibility
(re)produces commitment to a rigidly channeled eroticism, an overde
termination that constructs "frightful" fantasies such as those As
chenbach himself experiences.
The English translations of the novella accentuate this resolution
toward the Apollonian. For example, in the passage where Aschen
bach is said to wish to ease the tension of his desire for Tadzio, the
sexual suggestiveness of the phrase "lag nahe und drangte sich auf"
is lost.10 Kenneth Burke's translation states that Aschenbach wishes to
put the relationship "on a sound, free and easy basis,"11 while H. T.
Lowe-Porter says Aschenbach wishes to place it "upon a blithe and

friendly footing" (p. 47). Something closer to the sexual innuendo of
the German text may have been captured if the passage had been
rendered: "to have things lie more intimately and pressingly upon
each other." The German text teems with such double entendres and
homoerotic allusions.
We get something of the flavor of this in the
English translations when we are told that Aschenbach's imagination
is haunted by visions of "Hairy palm-trunks" rising "near and far out
of lush brakes of fern, out of bottoms of crass vegetation, fat, swollen,
thick with incredible bloom"
(p. 5), and again when we are told that
Aschenbach espouses "an intellectual and virginal manliness, which
clenches its teeth and stands in modest defiance of the swords and
spears that pierce its side," of whom "the figure of Sebastian is the
most beautiful symbol, if not of art as a whole, yet certainly of the art
we speak of here" (p. II).12 Such phrases—at once sympathetic and
disdainful—prepare readers to accept the tragedy of Aschenbach's
desire for Tadzio even as the language pushes toward a parody of the
conventions of romantic love to the point where readers are led to
distrust their initially sympathetic reactions to Aschenbach's di
lemma.13
Aschenbach's demise is both tragic and comic. The text renders our
view of his efforts to regain his youthful appearance ambivalent, and
we simultaneously suffer with, laugh at, and are shocked by his infa
tuation with this young boy. By sustaining an ambivalent reaction to
these questions, at times the irony verges on burlesque. Such irony
interrogates bourgeois culture's heterosexist assumptions.14 But within
the context of patriarchal culture, Aschenbach's desire for Tadzio has
tragic dimensions as well, for Tadzio is not the cause of either As

chenbach's obsessional desire or his paranoid constraint; he repre
sents, rather, a disruptive return of Aschenbach's repressed eroticism
which results from the social proscriptions and personal inhibitions
that maintain the patriarchal social order. Aschenbach's aestheticized
desire for the boy re-enacts the bourgeois family's complex Oedipal
feelings in which he, as the "father," mourns for his own imminent
death at the hands of the "son," even as his obsession threatens to
destroy that "son." Apollonian civilization breeds such discontents.
This ambivalent desire for Tadzio crystallizes in Aschenbach's reac
tion to the first time the boy recognizes him with a smile, the descrip
tion of which points to a self/other identification of the two: "With
such a smile it might be that Narcissus bent over the mirroring pool,
a smile profound, infatuated, lingering, as he put out his arms to the
'
reflection of his own beauty (p. 51). We might suppose that Tadzio's
smile would thrill the love-sick Aschenbach, but instead he is "shak
en" by it. "Reproaches strangely mixed of tenderness burst from him:
'How dare you smile like that! No one is allowed to smile like that!'"
(p. 52) Aschenbach's retreat from Tadzio's smile, his inability to re
ceive the boy's full gaze, suggests that the form his desire takes main
tains itself only as long as he possesses the exclusive (phallic) power
of the gaze.15 Thus Tadzio's smile, as the sign of his own empower
ment, shatters Aschenbach's illusions of wholeness.16 Aschenbach,
too fully a subject of the patriarchal order in which Eros is con
structed around the hierarchical oppositions of sexual difference, is
"quite unmanned" as he "whispered the hackneyed phrase of love
and longing," only after fleeing from Tadzio. This fear of emascula
tion takes its revenge when Aschenbach risks Tadzio's death rather
than disclose the threat of the cholera epidemic to the boy's mother.
Aschenbach's erotic desire is deeply implicated in a thanatoid im
pulse against Tadzio, and his failure to warn the boy or his mother is
a form of Oedipal revenge.
Eros and Thanatos fuse in the novella's final passage and once
again a smile marks the moment. Yet this time, at the point of death,
as Aschenbach meets Tadzio's gaze "It seemed to him the pale and
lovely Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned" (pp. 74-75).
With these words, the narrator appears to lay to rest the deeply con
flicted self that Aschenbach represents, but not without encasing this
final moment in textual irony, for unlike the "shocked and respectful
world [that] received the news of his decease," readers have been
made privy to the connections between Aschenbach's erotic obses
sion and unfulfilled desire, his career as a writer, and his death. The
gaze of Tadzio as feminized Other is a Medusa gaze that implicitly
brings on Aschenbach's death.
Details of Aschenbach's marriage highlight the connection between
his homoerotic repression and his authorial career. He "married
young . . . but after a brief term of wedded happiness his wife had
died. A daughter, already married, remained to him. A son he never
had" (p. 14). Aschenbach's minimal familial background short-circuits
assumptions that he had never experienced conventional family life
as an adult and calls attention to his "normality." And this, in turn,
encourages us to see his love for the seemingly fatherless Tadzio as
all the more scandalous. Tadzio, the son he never had, suggests an
idealized image of Aschenbach as the fatherless boy he never was
but yearns to have been. Such yearning nostalgically reflects a desire
to experience childhood, the imagined fullness of a mimetic, maternal,

logocentric world that opposes the discipline, detachment, and re
straint valorized by the creator "of the dialogue between Frederick
and Voltaire on the theme of war" (p. 15).
Tadzio's association with the maternal world of speech, as con
trasted with the paternal world of writing associated with Aschen
bach's literary career, derives from his name, with its "melodious
sound" and "long-drawn-out u at the end" (p. 32). Because Aschen
bach cannot understand the boy's language, the "mingled harmo
nies" of his words "raised his speech to music" (p. 43). As the narra
tor informs us early on, Aschenbach's mother was the "daughter of a
Bohemian musical conductor" (p. 8), and it was from her that the
blood of the Dionysian poet flowed in him. But Aschenbach's career
is marked by a complete denial of the Dionysian, his style exhibiting
"an almost exaggerated sense of beauty, a lofty purity, symmetry,
and simplicity, which gave his productions a stamp of the classic, of
conscious and deliberate mastery" (p. 13). Classicism's repression of
the Dionysian returns first with a vengeance in his infatuation for
Tadzio and culminates in a bacchanalian dream in which "one and
all the mad rout yelled that cry, composed of soft consonants with a
long-drawn M-sound at the end, so sweet and wild it was together,
and like nothing ever heard before!" (p. 67).
Once the Dionysian has irrupted in desire for Tadzio, Aschenbach
initially attempts to sublimate it through his reading of Plato's Phae
drus. His effort to local eternal, universal truth in the Phaedrus is
hence another attempt to resolve the binary opposition of his desire
in favor of the Apollonian. Alice van Buren Kelley has argued from a
traditional humanist point of view that Aschenbach's failure to heed
the lesson of the dialogue—that passion and reason must be recon
ciled—leads to his demise.17 But as Frank Baron has pointed out,
"Mann's parodistic treatment questions the wisdom of rejecting sym
pathy with the "abyss," or of ignoring knowledge and irony, and of
the exaggerated emphasis on morality, dignity and form."18 What we
are arguing is that Aschenbach's rejection of "sympathy with the
'abyss'" is inevitable in a paradigm that opposes Dionysian passion
to Apollonian reason and that his plunge into the abyss in equally in
evitable within the binary logic of bourgeois discourse. When he
drifts into a Platonic reverie that dramatizes the idea of writing as an
autoerotic act (pp. 43-46), he struggles to see Tadzio as pure form di
vorced from content, from articulated meaning; indeed, his inability
to understand Tadzio's native tongue, Polish, fulfills Aschenbach's
earlier disappointed desire to go somewhere where he could hear
people "speaking an outlandish tongue" (p. 15).

Aschenbach's emphasis on form over content epitomizes patriar
chal culture's practice of privileging mind over body. As his reverie
intensifies, it is internalized and identified with the writing process it
self. "Was not the same force at work in himself when he strove in
cold fury to liberate from the marble mass of language the slender
forms of his art which he saw with the eye of his mind and would
body forth to men as the mirror and image of spiritual beauty?" (p.
44) This ambivalence of form in Aschenbach's work was been care
fully prepared for; his writing exhibited "the aristocratic self-com
mand that is eaten out within and for as long as it can conceals its
biologic decline . . .; the sere and ugly outside, hiding the embers of
smoldering fire . . .; the gracious bearing preserved in the stern, stark
service of form" (p. 11).
When Aschenbach first sees Tadzio he thinks that "with all this
chaste perfection of form it was of such unique personal charm that
the observer thought he had never seen . . . anything so utterly
happy and consummate" (pp. 25-26); after his eyes meet Tadzio's he
contemplates "general problems of form and art" (p. 28); and as he
watches Tadzio bathing he conjures up mythologies "of the birth of
form, of the origin of the gods" (p. 33). Form, then, corresponds, in
Aschenbach's mind, the mind of a quintessentially bourgeois artist, to
the aristocratic and, above all, "masculine" and/or "spiritual" vir
tues, whereas content is associated with the potentially decadent
"feminine" body and the "outlandish" Polish tongue. The narrator's

reference to Tadzio as "a masterpiece from nature's own hand"
(p. 31) betrays a desire to compete with nature for control over expe
rience, but, as Mark C. Taylor has noted, the battle for such mastery
"is always self-defeating."19
Gradually Aschenbach's repressed fantasies come to dominate his
mental life. His reading of the Phaedrus, entered into at the peak of
homoerotic desire, reinscribes the underlying contradictions implicit
in the polarity between the Dionysian ("maternal") world of orality
and the Apollonian ("paternal") world of literacy.20 He imports into
his reading of the dialogue the story of how Semele, mother of Dion
ysus, was consumed by Zeus when she asked to mate with him in his
true form as a god. Zeus's appropriation of Semele's reproductive
power allegorizes the myth of the bourgeois artist's sublimation of
desire in art.21 The consequences of this displacement became appar
ent in the later bacchanalian dream, but for now the focus is on spir
itual beauty and pure form. Aschenbach's reading of the Platonic dia
logue ends with the "sly arch-lover," Socrates, telling Phaedrus "the
subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the be
loved; for the god was in the one but not in the other." The narrator
draws attention to this idea by telling us that it is "perhaps the ten
derest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of
all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows" (p. 46). Yet in the ac
tual dialogue Socrates
says that lovers reach out after their beloved
"in memory" and "are
possessed by him, and from him they take
their ways and manners of life, in so far as a man can partake of a
god." Truly "spiritual" lovers believe their beloved is the source of
their inspiration and so "the draughts which they draw from Zeus
they pour out, like bacchants, into the soul of the beloved, thus creat
ing in him the closest possible likeness to the god they worship"
(253b).22 Although Aschenbach certainly aestheticizes his own desire,
he makes no attempt to instruct Tadzio in the ways of Apollonian art.
Instead he feels "a sudden desire to write. ... in Tadzio's presence."
Believing that "Eros is in the word," he proceeds to fashion "his little
essay after the model Tadzio's beauty set" (p. 46).
At this serene moment when Apollonian form triumphs over Dion
ysian content, Aschenbach's fate is sealed. His transference of Eros
into writing—no less than Plato's famous attack on writing—violates
the very principles articulated in the passage Aschenbach summarizes
(cf. Phaedrus 274-78). When he attains the perfect form, the perfect
embodiment of the "masculine" ideal, he also ensures his own de
struction, for at that moment he severs whatever connections he may
still have with the maternal world of speech, the principle of commu
nity and self-fulfillment which is made possible through recognition
of the Other. Previously we were told that Aschenbach is "A solitary,
unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, [who] has mental expe
riences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those
of a gregarious man" (p. 24), and in the same paragraph where he
decides to write in Tadzio's presence we are told that "our solitary
felt in himself at this moment power to command" (p. 46). In retalia
tion, this repressed femininity, this denial of the Dionysian impulse,
rises up in his imagination as a most un-Platonic bacchanalian vi
sion.23
Having reachedhis career pinnacle and having attained a sublime

Apollonian style, Aschenbach attempts to liberate himself from com
pulsive toil (associated with his strict Prussian father) and repair the
damage done to his psyche by the denial of Eros (his musical Bohe
mian mother). But because bourgeois desire demands that transgres

sive impulses be either repressed or sublimated, the threat of their
release activates a death wish. His fantasy is one of absolute self
sufficiency, of becoming his own father (he "felt a father's kindness"

toward Tadzio [p. 34]), which spurs his narcissism and his death-ob
sessed Apollonianism.24 "Tadzio's teeth," Aschenbach notes, "were
imperfect, rather jagged and bluish, without a healthy glaze, and of

that peculiar brittle transparency which the teeth of chlorotic people
often show" (p. 34). Chlorosis, it should be noted, is not a gender
neutral term; Webster's Third defines it as "an iron-deficiency anemia
in young girls characterized by a greenish color of the skin, weak
ness, and menstrual disturbances." Therefore Aschenbach's pleasure
in Tadzio's frailty is part of a misogynistic desire that a love object,
whether male or female, remain forever young; this denial of mortal
ity inexorably pushes one toward death.
Envisioning total satisfaction, the complete eradication of tension
and psychic conflict, Aschenbach embraces the oblivion and death
heralded by "the two apocalyptic beasts" above which he sees the
first of several portentous, sexually ambivalent men. These men, all
of whom are snub-nosed (pp. 4, 22, 60), recall Socrates's snub-nose, a
traditional symbol of satyrs, which is referred to throughout the Phae
drus. There the opposition between the Apollonian and the Diony
sian is dramatized in the allegory of the soul where the hooked
nosed horse driven by the charioteer is contrasted with the snub
nosed one (253d-e). Aschenbach himself, of course, has an
"aristocratically hooked nose"

(p. 15), representative of his repressed
and repressive Apollonianism. Tadzio's classically Greek "brow and
nose," which descend "in one line" (p. 25), represent the perfect
blend of Apollonian and Dionysian elements, while his mother's
"rather sharp nosed" physiognomy (p. 27) is suggestive of phallicized
motherhood. Such imagery marks an opposition between the Diony
sian and the Apollonian which, in its dissociation of the sensual from
the aesthetic, leads Aschenbach to reject the sensual as unseemly and
to lock himself into a sense of the self as separate. Having withdrawn
into a shell of individual autonomy, having become alienated from
his body and from the emotions associated with bodily pleasure, hav
ing shut himself off from contact with others and the Other, he de
nies his dependence on the human community, denies the loss of the
mother, and tries to monumentalize himself in works such as The Ab
juct. Thus the chronology of Aschenbach's demise parallels the rhe
torical structure of the Phaedrus, which recapitulates the transition
from orality to literacy and thereby dramatizes the psychological

iety that accompanies separation from the mother.
But the parodic use of the Phaedrus as an allegory of Aschenbach's
fate also undercuts the tragic implications

of his plight as an Apol
lonian artist who is destroyed by Dionysian impulses. The tragic con
sequences of Aschenbach's infatuation with Tadzio reinforce the
homophobic strictures and repressions of bourgeois morality, thus
supporting the story's value as a cautionary tale in which Dionysian
transgression is linked with Aschenbach's corruption. But the comic
implications of this infatuation place in question the binary opposi
tions upon which heterosexist morality is constructed. They also
place in question a reading of the novella which suggests that As
chenbach's fate is a consequence of the failure to sublimate base de
sires. Yet the novella's comic dimensions are also circumscribed by
bourgeois morality. No carnivalesque alternative appears possible in
the logic of the narrative, or, as we have shown, in the binary logic of
desire in a patriarchal society. On the one hand, we might feel that
Aschenbach could "free" himself from repression, yet if he is to be an
examplary bourgeois artist, that path is sealed off even from his fan
tasy life. And when he endangers Tadzio with his silence Aschen
bach also blocks off the path of sublimation by transgressing the
principle of the Oedipal triangle whereby the son internalizes his re
bellion against the father as conscience and sublimates the homosex
ual love for the rival into altruistic social feelings. Therefore when he
regresses to a pathological narcissism characterized by both grandios
ity and worthlessness, Aschenbach embraces psychic death.25 His
conformity to the paradigm of bourgeois morality reveals an aporia of
that paradigm—it generates desire, then valorizes both release from
and control over that desire.
As he attains greater technical mastery of his art, Aschenbach re
moves himself ever more from his "origins," and this, in turn, pro
duces an ever deepening sentimental nostalgia—a desire to return to
childhood, to maternal care, to the Golden Age. Yet the voice of the
narrator also distances us from this retrogressive movement. This
voice stands as a reminder of the historical difference between
Goethe, the progressive artist working under Napoleon's Confedera
tion of the Rhine, and Aschenbach who, like Mann, worked under
Wilhelmine imperialism in the years before the first World War.
Georg Lukacs has observed that "It was Mann's fate to be born into
the age of decadence, with its peculiar ambience in which one could
transcend the decadence only by imaginatively realizing its extreme
moral consequences" (p. 29). But the belief that art can transcend
decadence places aesthetics in the category of the sacred, thus assum
ing a binary opposition between art and reality. It is through such an
assumption that the voice of the narrator, even (perhaps especially)
in its detachment, lends itself to the belief that one can be "above the
fray."
In this respect Aschenbach's relationship to Tadzio parodies the
romantic myth Paul de Man has seen reflected in the Hegelian topos
of the "Beautiful Soul." Aschenbach aestheticizes Tadzio, and the
narrator's seemingly detached commentary encourages us to watch
the gradual demystification of romantic idealism from a safe distance.

From such a perspective Romanticism represents the point of maxi
mum delusion from which we are encouraged to feel superior as we
watch Aschenbach go through the regressive states of "the agony of

the romantic disease." But, as de Man has explained, this demystifi
cation is "the most dangerous myth of all" because it assumes that
there is a single universal and eternal truth that we, either conjointly
with an author (by means of our ability to "grasp" his or her inten
tion) or independently (by means of our own superior insight), may
possess.26
The narrator's ambivalent assault on bourgeois sensibility, like
Mann's problematic relationship to German imperialism was fraught
with contradictions that hold out the promise of resistance to, yet still
mirror, aspects of the fantasy world that accompanied the rise of fas
cism. Such a fantasy world, which may be seen as the objective cor
relative of Nazism, has been shown to be intensely misogynistic and

homophobic. It is built, in part, upon a reification of women's role
into the idealized world of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche, and a corresponding
appropriation of women's sexuality. As Klaus Theweleit has shown in
his examination of Freikorps writings, the representation of women
under fascism exemplifies "masculine" flight from the "feminine"
and fear of ego dissolution.27 Aschenbach's aestheticization of Tadzio
is, like the narrator's corresponding aestheticization of Aschenbach, a
displaced, intellectualized aspect of this misogyny that is seductive to
a refined consciousness embarrassed by overt homoeroticism.28 For
this aestheticization is part of a mentality that sees people as objects.
Indeed fascism, in this sense, may be seen as the reductio ad absur
dum of capitalism, the triumph of a consciousness which fetishizes
people as commodities to be bought, consumed, or discarded.
Historians have recently begun to examine the symbiotic relation
ship between such a mentality and homophobia, which appeared so
blatantly under fascism. Their analyses differentiate the persecution

of homosexuals within other eras from the form it has taken within
bourgeois culture. Foucault has marked a moment of the deployment
of sexuality that medicalized divisions between "normality" and
"perversion" with the publication of Carl Westphal's article on "con
trary sexual sensations."29 In 1871 Germany outlawed sexual acts be
tween males. As Richard Plant has shown, under the Weimar Repub
lic the German Homosexual Rights Movement struggled against such
legislation, and Mann supported that struggle.30 Plant further ob
serves, however, that proponents of homosexual rights sometimes
employed arguments that furthered the medicalization of homosexu
ality; such arguments were especially accessible to homophobic ap
propriation. For example, Nazis used the work of the well-known
sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, a homosexual who advocated reform
of anti-homosexual legislation, to justify persecution on the basis of
abnormality.31 And Plant also points out that since the end of World
War II Nazi persecution of homosexuals has been virtually ignored
while the practice of "homosexualizing the enemy" has been exten
sively promoted.32 Misogyny and homophobia persist, then, because
the discursive practices that perpetuate them have not been decon
structed and because the forums of power from which they are gener
ated have not been overturned. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White
have pointed out, "Only a challenge to the hierarchy of sites of dis
course . . . carries the promise of politically transformative power."33
Therefore it is not surprising that the homophobia and misogyny
inscribed within the stylistic forms of bourgeois literature are perpe
tuated even in Mann's parody of those styles. The parodic rendering
of Ignatian exercises—the spiritual journey upward—as artistic disci
pline, leads not to mystical union with God the Father but to morbid
self-absorption; and the portrayal of the romantic hero's quest as
travel adventure—the secular journey downward—with its overlay of
naturalistic reportage wrapped in meditative irony, retains, even as it
ridicules, the linguistic formulas of masculine selfhood. The Venetian
setting also carries this duality. As Michael Moon has observed, "in
the early years of this century Venice had a unique reputation as the
stock place for refined upper-class men to 'disintegrate' and give into
their suppressed homoerotic longings (consider Mann's Death in Ven
ice . . .) [and] . . . male-homosexual tourists commonly made contact
with men of Venice's large lower-class population of gondoliers and
sailors, some of whom engaged in prostitution,"34 and as Valentine
Cunningham has pointed out, "Venice is where literary time-travel
lers traditionally go for cultural transgression, labyrinthine transac

tions and narcissistic posturings in a world of dubious reflections and
subtle mirror-images."35 Yet this signifier of transgressive sexuality
and artifice is also a center of European ethnocentrism, imperialism,
and patriarchal authority. Similarly, Aschenbach's aestheticization of
Tadzio is counterposed by the association of Tadzio's body with the
cholera epidemic, thus equating Aschenbach's homoerotic desire with
disease and death—with the medicalization of homosexuality. And
the spiritualized male homoerotic desire of the Phaedrus is parodied
in the primitive physicality of Aschenbach's Dionysian vision: "The
females stumbled over the long, hairy pelts that dangled from their
girdles. . . . [and] shrieked, holding their breasts in both hands; coil
ing snakes with quivering tongues they clutched about their waists.
Horned and hairy males, girt about the loins with hides, drooped
heads and lifted arms and thighs in unison" (p. 67). This Dionysian
dream, which includes a cannibalistic ritual and a sexual orgy, rein
forces rather than subverts the bourgeois ideal of necessary sublima
tion.36
Aschenbach's repressed, aestheticized longings "humanize" him,

but it is precisely those longings that are produced by and produce
the misogyny and homophobia endemic to the "subject of desire." As
long as such a work incorporates binary oppositions of sexual differ
ence, it will reinscribe bourgeois sexual and artistic "normality." Sig
nificantly, it is the narrator, not Aschenbach, who refers to art as fem
inine in sexually menacing metaphors: "She gives deeper joy, she
consumes more swiftly. . . . she will in the end produce in them a fas
tidiousness, an over-refinement, a nervous fever and exhaustion" (p.
15). Thus the feminine nature of art inevitably debauches, or so it

seems to the ironic narrator whose implicit self-parody points to an
identification with Aschenbach even while it attempts to differentiate
between them. Aschenbach is an objectification of contradictions that
the narrator parodies yet perpetuates.37 Aschenbach's dreams, his
reading of the Phaedrus, and his homoerotic desire for Tadzio all pro
vide glimpses of subversive forces that challenge the hegemony of
masculinist discourse and patriarchal values. But the potential of
those forces to subvert is turned back upon itself, placing in doubt the
merit of their subversion rather than querying the basis of their con
struction in partriarchal discourse. In this sense we may take the
abandoned camera that witnesses but does not—indeed cannot—
record either Jaschiu's humiliation of Tadzio or Aschenbach's final
collapse as an emblem of the novella's aporia of desire.
City University of New York and Hobart & William Smith Colleges
Notes
1. Juliet Flower MacCannell has pointed out that "if the machine of cul
ture is literally driven by the excess of desire over satisfaction, then obtaining
satisfaction from the system is tantamount to halting the drive, the source of
(symbolic) power." "Oedipus Wrecks: Lacan, Stendhal and the Narrative

Form of the Real," in Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in
Narrative Theory, ed. Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1983), p. 936.
2. Michel Foucault characterizes
his studies on sexuality as a genealogy
of "desire and the desiring subject," an analysis of the "practices by which
individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves as subjects of de
sire, bringing into play between themselves and themselves a certain rela
tionship that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being, be it
natural or fallen." The Use of Pleasure, Vol. 2, The History of Sexuality, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 5.
3. In her brilliant analysis of male homosocial
Eve Kosofsky Sedg desire
wick has shown how
"homophobia directed by men against men is misogyn
istic." Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), p. 20. This point is relevant here because re
luctance to treat the ideological and thematic
meanings of homosexuality in
Death in Venice combines fear and hatred
in a way that shows the suppres
sion of male homoerotic desire to be what Gayle Rubin has seen as "a prod
uct of the same system whose rules and regulations oppress women." "The
Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex," in Toward and
Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
1975), p. 180.
4. See "Homophobia and Sexual Difference," Oxford Literary Review,
8.1-2 (1986), 5-12.
5. Albert Braverman and Larry David Nachman have argued that the
Apollonian/Dionysian opposition of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy informs a

dialectic of decadence in Death in Venice. "The Dialectic of Decadence: An
Analysis of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice," The Germanic Review 45

(1970), 289-98. However, their analysis does not deal with issues of sexual
difference implicit in this opposition. As Sedgwick notes, the word "deca
dence" itself is often simply a euphemism for "homosexual" (Between Men
222 n.8).
6 "Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes)," Critical Inquiry, 7
(1981), 115.
7. All quotations from the novella will be cited in the text from Thomas
Mann, Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New
York: Vintage Books, 1960), unless otherwise specified.
8. Ed Cohen has ways in which
explored depictions of male homoerotic
desire in Oscar Wilde's
counter work
dominant (hetero)sexual hegemony in
"Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation,"

PMLA, 102 (1987), 801-13. Our argument suggests that the portrayal of male
homoeroticism does not in and of itself constitute a challenge, although it has

the potential to do so. However, that potential is diminished if it fails to see
connections between misogyny and homophobia and/or if it reinvests the
work with heterosexist values. Jeffrey Meyers moves in this direction when
he argues that Death in Venice portrays homosexuality as the link between
creative genius and self-destructiveness. Homosexuality and Literature,
1890-1930 (London: Athone Press, 1987).
9. Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955, selected and trans. Richard and
Clara Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 102-04. Richard Win
ston has noted that Mann
had a "special tenderness for prepubescent boys."
Thomas Mann:
Making The
of an Artist, 1875-1911 (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1981), p. 268. Mann himself referred to his "sexual inversion" and of
ten spoke and/or wrote frankly about his homoeroticism. example, after For
a trip to Venice in 1896 he wrote to Otto Grautoff: "How am I to free myself
from sexuality? By eating rice? . . . Here and there, among a thousand other
peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to
allegedly 'very beautiful' girls, and not only to girls" (quoted in Winston,
Thomas Mann, p. 97).
10.
Der Tod in Venidig und andere Erzahlungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1950), p. 44.
11. Death and Venice, trans. Kenneth Burke (New York: Modern Library,
1970).
12. Saint a third-century
Sebastian, Roman soldier, was ordered killed by
his lover, theemperor Diocletian, when it was discovered that he was a
Christian. After his recovery from being shot many times by archers, Diocle
tian ordered him beaten to death.
13. Paul de Man has suggested that this kind of irony results from "a
problem that exists within the self" that the writer exploits in the form of
self-duplication. When an author like Mann ridicules and/or invites readers

to ridicule a character like Aschenbach, de Man suggests, "he is laughing at a
mistaken, mystified assumption he was making about himself." Blindness and
Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn., revised
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 211, 213-214.

Mikhail Bakhtin points out that Mann's Doktor Faustus is "thoroughly per
meated with reduced ambivalent laughter." He quotes Mann's own comment
on the
history of the creation of the novel: "Therefore I must introduce as
much jesting, as much ridicule
of the biographer, as much anti-self-important
mockery as possible—as much of that as was humanly possible!" and then
adds that "reduced laughter, primarily of the parodic type, is in general char
acteristic of all of Mann's work. In comparing his style with that of Bruno
Frank, Mann states: '. . . In of style 1 really no longer admit anything
matters
but parody.' It should be pointed out
that Thomas Mann's work is profoundly
carnivalized." Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 179-180 n.26. But as

Linda Hutcheon has
"Parody, which
shown, deploys irony in order to estab
lish the critical distance
necessary to its formal definition, also betrays a ten
dency toward conservatism." A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth

Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 68.
14. Mann's brother Heinrich, who accompanied the Manns on the trip to
Venice that inspired the novella, satirizes the hypocrisy of a middle-class
professor in his 1904 novel Professor Unrat (filmed as The Blue Angel), but
this melodramatic farce does not challenge the heterosexist assumptions of
bourgeois society.
15. Jacques Lacan has analyzed the relation of the gaze to sexual domina
tion in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), and Michael Moon has ap
plied this analysis to the manifestation of "visual terrorism" in "Sexuality

and Visual Terrorism in The
Wings of the Dove," Criticism, 28 (1986), 427-43.
16. The reading process may also be said to shatter our illusion of such
wholeness. That is the exchange between Aschenbach and Tadzio replicates
the exchange between reader and text; we read a text "as if," in the words of
Robert Con Davis, "by giving attention to it, we look into it and master or
possess it as an object. But while reading, in fact, we are focused upon and
held by a Gaze that comes through the agency of the object text. Thus held
in the act of reading ... we are not masterful subjects; we—as readers—then
become the object of the Gaze." "Lacan, Poe, and Narrative Repression," in
Lacan and Narration: The
Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, ed.
Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), p. 988.
17. "Von Aschenbach's Phaedrus: Platonic Allusion in Der Tod in Venidig,"
JEGP, 75 (1976), 228-40.
18. "Sensuality and Morality in Thomas Mann's Tod in Venidig," The Ger
manic Review, 45 (1970), 124.
19. Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984), p. 15; Taylor later adds that "The one who deferentially appreciates
the masterpiece admits that he is not completely in control of the experience
he undergoes. . . . Just as a master can be lord only over a subjected servant,
so a masterpiece can rule only in relation to obedient or even servile appre
ciation. This interplay of mastery and servitude opens the work to the other,
which it struggles to dominate, repress, or exclude" (pp. 89-90).
20. "As long as the structure of the ego is Apollonian," Norman O. Brown
has argued, "Dionysian experience can only be bought at the price of ego
dissolution. Nor can the issue be resolved by a 'synthesis' of the Apollonian
and the Dionysian; the problem is the construction of the Dionysian ego."
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959; rpt. New
York: Vintage Books, nd), p. 175. De Man has deconstructed "the pseudo
polarity of the Apollo/Dionysos dialectic that allows for a well-ordered te
leology." Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,

and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 83-85; and Jacques
Derrida has shown how "at the moment of already tying the episteme and
the logos within the samepossibility, the Phaedrus denounced writing as the
intrusion of an artful technique, a forced entry of a totally original sort, an ar
chetypal violence." Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Bal
timore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 33; see also pp. 34, 39, 50,
97-98, 103; Stanley E. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authorityof In
terpretative Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), pp.
37-41; de Man, Blindness and Insight, pp. 137-38, 288, and Martha C. Nuss
baum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philoso
phy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 225 and n.52. Francis
Barker has termed the process by which discourse substitutes itself for the
body-object, "as the text is substituted for the flesh," "a metaphysics of
death." The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (New York: Me
thuen, 1984), p. 105.
21. Kelley argues that Aschenbach's inclusion of the Semele reference
shows that he believes that "there is a decided feeling that Beauty[,] because
it can be revealed through the senses, is somehow suspect" (p. 235).
22. Quoted from R. Hackforth's translation in The Collected Dialogues of
Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1961). The valorization of Greek homosexuality is controver

sial. In Greek Homosexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), K. J. Dover
maintains that it was a form of mentorship for boys in training who were ap
prentices in the virtues of Athenian citizenship, but in The Reign of the Phal
lus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), Eva
C. Keulsargues that we should not let this blind us to the way it reinforced
patriarchal and misogynistic aspects of Athenian society.

23. In Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' "Bacchae" (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press,
1982), Charles Segal has explained how "Dionysus' cult gives to
women a power and an importance that were denied them, on the whole, in
fifth-century Athens. Yet it does so in a complex and ambiguous way. Diony

sus releases the emotional violence associated with women and gives it a for
malized place in ritual, a ritual not in the polis but in the wild .... Dionysus
is felt to have a special
affinity with women not only because he symbolizes
the repressed emotionality associated with the female but also because he
himself spans male and female" (p. 159).
In his essay "Freud and the Future," Mann discusses Dionysiac religious
practices and the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen, who originally correlated
Dionysian with a primordial

worship Great Mother cult. Essays, trans. H. T.
Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), p. 318. Bachofen distin
guished between a "higher" Apollonian "spiritual" masculinity and a "low
er" Dionysian "phallic" form. See Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of
Consciousness, trans. R. F. Hull
C. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1954),
pp. 90-92; and Brown, pp. 126, 174, 280.
24. Brown believes that the Spinozan causa sui project is, like the Oedipal
project, "in essence a revolt against . . . the biological principle separating
mother and child" (p. 127). Aschenbach may be seen to stand at the end of a
long tradition of male literary figures, including Satan, Dr. Frankenstein, and
Ahab, who deny the mother and thus become, in Brown's words, "morbidly
involuted" (p. 129).
25. On the way in which the Oedipal triangle produces and is produced
by bourgeois ideology see, in general, Brown as well as Gilles Deleuze and

Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hur
ley and others (New York: Viking, 1977), and, more specifically, Jessica Ben
jamin, "The Oedipal Riddle: Authority, Autonomy, and the New Narcis
sism," in The Problem of Authority in America, ed. J. Diggins and M. Kann
(Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 196-200, and Leo Bersani, A
Future for Astynax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown,
1976), pp. 120-23.
26. Blindness and Insight, p. 14.
27. Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen
Conway (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987).
28. In her extension of George Bataille's application of Hegel's analysis of
the master-slave relationship to an understanding of how eroticism centers
around maintaining tension between life and death of self, Jessica Benjamin
has argued that death is "a throwback to the original oneness with the
mother. Such
merging or boundary loss is experienced as psychic death once
we havedifferentiated—the proverbial return to the womb." "Master and
Slave: The Fantasy of Erotic Domination," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of
Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow and others (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1983), p. 285.
29. The History of Sexuality, vol, 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 43.
30. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (New York:
Henry Holt, 1986), p. 207.

31. Plant, pp. 30-34.
32. Plant, p. 15.
33. The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, p. 201.
1986), Even such an astute semiotician and celebrator of the
carnivalesque as Julia Kristeva has perpetuated the identity between fascism

and homosexuality. Cf. her problematic remark that "We know the role that
the pervert—invincibly believing in the maternal phallus, obstinately refus
ing the existence of the other sex—has been able to play in antisemitism and
the totalitarian movements that embrace it." About Chinese Women, trans.
Stanley Mitchell (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), p. 23. Juliet Flower
MacCannell has noted that "Kristeva attempts to trace the origins of Fascism,
particularly anti-Semitism, to an abnormal, 'abject' response to the (for her
necessary) Oedipal triangle. . . . She finds that abjection is aboriginal in the
person of the Jew because of his God, his emphasis on manhood, and the re
pression of the maternal, and that therefore he is the 'origin' of his own per
secution, since what he
has 'repressed' returns to kill him: the death drive
and the mother."
Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious (Lin
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 34 n.ll.
In his discussion of Mann's homoeroticism Ignace Feuerlicht has noted that
Mann contendedthat homosexuality was characteristic of Nazism. "When
his son
Klaus, a homosexual and an antifascist, protested in an article against
the identification of homosexuality and fascism, Mann did not agree, only
added, 'debatable.'" "Thomas Mann and Homoeroticism," The Germanic Re
view 57 (1982), 93.
34. Moon, p. 439.
35. "Back to Shiftwork," TLS (September 18-24, 1987), p. 1025.
36. Citing the work of Marcel Detienne, Richard Halpern has noted that
"Maenadic worship directed its inverting energies against both the Attic state
and the household. Practiced solely by women, the central ritual practice of
maenadism was omophagia, or the eating of raw meat, which rejected cooking
both as the basis of the state religion and as the duty of a wife. Omophagia
exemplified the thoroughgoing primitivism of maenadism, which, by revert

ing from culture to nature, temporarily evaded the patriarchal structures of
both polis and oikos." "Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask," in Rewriting
the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed.
Margaret W. Ferguson and others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1986), p. 90.
37. As Terry Eagleton has explained in reference to Conrad's Secret Agent,
modernist prose operates in "a naturalistic mode which ... in its self-parodic
quality, detaches itself ironically from its own vision. It is, as it were, natural
ism to the second power—an Olympian, dispassionate view of reality which
then views in precisely
itself the same light in order to distance itself scepti
cally from its own presuppositions." Against the Grain: Selected Essays
1975-1985 (London: Verso, 1986), p. 25.

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The Aporia of Bourgeois Art: Desire in Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice"

Author(s): TOM HAYES and LEE QUINBY

The Aporia of Bourgeois Art:

Death in Venice is undoubtedly a central text in Thomas Mann's

Criticism, Spring 1989, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, pp. 159-177.

head, mind, spirit and woman as flesh, body, emotion, is reinscribed

and masculinist assumptions implicit in the partriarchal ideology that

ates in concert with the simultaneously homophobic and homoerotic

geois society we must "reverse the rhetorical opposition of what is

categories of bourgeois society are broken down only to be aestheti

eroticism. In a 1920 letter to his openly homosexual friend Carl Maria

Lowe-Porter says Aschenbach wishes to place it "upon a blithe and

tragic dimensions as well, for Tadzio is not the cause of either As

made privy to the connections between Aschenbach's erotic obses

to experience childhood, the imagined fullness of a mimetic, maternal,

earlier disappointed desire to go somewhere where he could hear

people "speaking an outlandish tongue" (p. 15).

"feminine" body and the "outlandish" Polish tongue. The narrator's

Having reachedhis career pinnacle and having attained a sublime

mian mother). But because bourgeois desire demands that transgres

sufficiency, of becoming his own father (he "felt a father's kindness"

imperfect, rather jagged and bluish, without a healthy glaze, and of

"aristocratically hooked nose"

from orality to literacy and thereby dramatizes the psychological

fate also undercuts the tragic implications

the gradual demystification of romantic idealism from a safe distance.

watch Aschenbach go through the regressive states of "the agony of

relative of Nazism, has been shown to be intensely misogynistic and

blatantly under fascism. Their analyses differentiate the persecution

lers traditionally go for cultural transgression, labyrinthine transac

Aschenbach's repressed, aestheticized longings "humanize" him,

tidiousness, an over-refinement, a nervous fever and exhaustion" (p.

15). Thus the feminine nature of art inevitably debauches, or so it

(symbolic) power." "Oedipus Wrecks: Lacan, Stendhal and the Narrative

Apollonian/Dionysian opposition of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy informs a

Analysis of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice," The Germanic Review 45

"Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation,"

homoeroticism does not in and of itself constitute a challenge, although it has

self-duplication. When an author like Mann ridicules and/or invites readers

Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn., revised

(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 211, 213-214.

(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 179-180 n.26. But as

dency toward conservatism." A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth

Venice that inspired the novella, satirizes the hypocrisy of a middle-class

plied this analysis to the manifestation of "visual terrorism" in "Sexuality

polarity of the Apollo/Dionysos dialectic that allows for a well-ordered te

leology." Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,

versity Press, 1961). The valorization of Greek homosexuality is controver

patriarchal and misogynistic aspects of Athenian society.

fifth-century Athens. Yet it does so in a complex and ambiguous way. Diony

Dionysian with a primordial

by bourgeois ideology see, in general, Brown as well as Gilles Deleuze and

Henry Holt, 1986), p. 207.

carnivalesque as Julia Kristeva has perpetuated the identity between fascism

particularly anti-Semitism, to an abnormal, 'abject' response to the (for her

necessary) Oedipal triangle. . . . She finds that abjection is aboriginal in the

exemplified the thoroughgoing primitivism of maenadism, which, by revert

Margaret W. Ferguson and others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

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