Death in Venice

"Now we are going to get into much more idiosyncratic choices. One of the things about novels is our response to them is subjective. A great writer prepares a great experience, but the experience is going to vary from reader to reader. There has to be an elective affinity between the novel and your own preoccupations and character: intellectual, emotional, and philosophical. I’m really interested in two philosophers who are, in some sense, enemies of literature: Spinoza with his downplaying of the imagination and the sense of beauty and individuality, and Plato. Plato banished the artists from his utopia, particularly the epic poets who were the novelists of his day. “Philosophy is not a 9-5 job.” And yet, the great irony is that Plato is the greatest literary artist of the western philosophical canon. He writes his dialogues with characters and scenes and sometimes even plots, particularly in the Symposium . I’m really interested in novels that are deeply Platonic, and Death in Venice is deeply Platonic. The dialogues of Plato lurking in the background are the Symposium and, even more importantly, the Phaedrus. I love the Phaedrus. I think it is magnificent on every level. It’s so strange. You have to wonder what Plato was going through when he wrote it, because he reverses himself on many things. He actually calls attention to this reversal. He sets it out in neon, because he has Socrates deliver first one speech and then say, ‘No, no, no, everything I’ve said is off.’ Plato has Socrates completely reverse himself and deliver a second speech. Martha Nussbaum says Plato must have been in love, and I tend to think that’s true. If he was in love—or if some other strange thing had happened in his life—that would make him completely reverse himself philosophically. For a real philosopher, life and philosophical thought are knit together. Philosophy is not a 9-5 job. There’s much evidence that that was true for Plato, and some of the evidence is to be found in the Phaedrus . “I’m really interested in novels that are deeply Platonic, and Death in Venice is deeply Platonic.” What he reverses himself about is the philosophical usefulness of certain forms of madness; he reverses himself on whether reason is all that we need to make intellectual and moral progress. In the Phaedrus, he says that we need a certain kind of madness. He calls it being possessed by the gods, but we can call it ‘intuition.’ To be struck by insights that we didn’t get to by way of argument and that we can’t make other people understand by way of argument. In Socrates’s second speech of the Phaedrus, he says that there is good madness and bad madness. There is religious genius, aesthetic genius, and romantic genius, and all these depend on a kind of good madness, residing in powerful anomalous experiences that yield a new sense of the world. You can’t make the insights you arrive at accountable to others who haven’t shared the experiences themselves, and these new insights bring about a complete discontinuity with the rest of your life. Plato says it’s a good madness, when it opens one up to truth. Truth is what makes the difference. So if you go through a religious conversion, or fall madly in love, or are gripped by an artistic intuition, it can lift you up out of your life. Your friends think you’ve gone mad, and in some sense you have, but that madness alone can channel a certain kind of truth. This a-rational detour that Plato explores in the Phaedrus is quite at odds with the bulk of his arguments, and it provides the context for Death in Venice . You see, the rub is that, from the inside, you can’t tell whether you’re in the grip of the good madness or the bad madness. With an argument, when you’re reasoning your way to a conclusion, you can put it out there and people can criticise it. If you’re a reasonable person, you’ll be open to their criticisms and revise your beliefs in light of them. That’s what it is to make rational progress — which is a thing that Plato is usually arguing for. But in this kind of thing that he’s calling madness, you can’t make it understandable to others, because the only way to understand is to be inside the experience, which is, by its nature, unsharable. So there is no way to correct the just as forcefully rendered untruths that are yielded. The good madness opens one up to truth, while the bad kind closes one off in private delusion, but from inside the experience you just can’t tell the difference, and so it’s very tricky. That’s what Death in Venice is all about. Von Aschenbach has been an artist but a very formulaic one. He’s had great acclaim, but he’s never been struck by the divine madness. And then he is struck. In Death in Venice —as in Plato’s Phaedrus —an erotic madness and artistic madness are merged together; for von Aschenbach the instrument of this merging is Tadzio, a young boy. The mad experience is falling in love with beauty, as embodied in this young boy. What the novel is really asking us to contemplate or judge is: is it the good, or is it the bad kind of madness? “It’s an incredibly moving novel and I love the movie adaptation by Visconti as well ” Von Aschenbach writes the most beautiful music of his life in the presence of this boy. But he also behaves in a mad way and also, maybe, in a very irresponsible and reprehensible way, not warning the boy’s family of the danger they are in from the sickness that’s spreading through Venice and that will eventually kill von Aschenbach. There are echoes from the Symposium , too, from Diotima’s speech about how she had saved the city from the plague. Socrates, in the Symposium, puts forth a rationalized view of eros—not mad at all—and he says that he’d learned this view from Diotima. And this is the view that he reverses himself on in the Phaedrus. This is a problem that I find so very interesting: How eliminable is intuition, even in the most rational pursuits, like mathematics? That’s what Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, which I’ve also written a book about— Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt G ö del— are all about. Those theorems offer a proof that we can never dispense with intuitions—which may prove to be faulty, yielding dreadful paradoxes, even within mathematics. Mathematics can’t be completely tamed by formal systems with their algorithmic rules, that purge our mathematics of these intuitions—in Plato’s language, being struck by the gods. Mathematics can’t proceed without this madness, let alone such other aspects of the good things in life, like romance and art. This is a question that I am terrifically interested in and Death in Venice dramatizes it brilliantly. It’s an incredibly moving novel and I love the movie adaptation by Visconti as well, even though its dialogue gets a bit heavy-handed at times. But it’s able to get to the heart of the Phaedrus-inspired paradox visually, which is an achievement. My students tend to hate the movie, which saddens me. But at least they like the book. That’s true, but Mann actually quotes the Phaedrus several times in the novel, thereby indicating that Plato is there. He talks about the path the cholera has taken—he replicates exactly the Dionysian path in the Euripides play, The Bacchantes —so he is certainly playing with the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy. But then so did Plato play with this dichotomy—not surprising since, if Nietzsche is right, this dichotomy lay at the heart of classical Greek culture. In the Phaedrus there is a passage where Plato says that if anybody tries to enter the halls of the Muses without the gift of madness, his art will come to nothing. He reverses himself on the question of whether reason alone grants the path to truth in an amazing way, and in a way that, I think, Mann felt very deeply, inspiring him to produce a slim novella that is quite miraculous."