Summary:
Gustave Aschenbach, a contemporary intellectual, visits Venice for a vacation from modern Munich and falls in love with a young boy, Tadzio, whom to him represents the perfect image of human beauty and innocence. Supported with images and both historical and mythical figures from Greek mythology, Mann extols the opinion of Socrates that beauty "is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can bear to perceive," and that a physical manifestation of the divine, of virtue and truth, would overwhelm the senses, condemning the observer to "perish and be consumed by love, as Semele aforetime was by Zeus." This doomed observer is Aschenbach, and to his intellectual senses Tadzio represents all that is beautiful and divine in nature. Thus Aschenbach becomes consumed by his love for the boy; his common sense and capability for reason are dissolved by his passion for the physical object which he has been seeking for all his life in the form of the written word. He realizes that "language could but extol, not reproduce, the beauties of the sense," and though he is vaguely conscious of the his own impending demise, the desire for his beloved overwhelms him, and his death is one of an inebriated but happy man.
The character and life of Aschenbach is meant to represent that of Mann or any great literary figure, and the story contains within it many of Mann's own opinions on society and what it means to be a writer. An autobiographical twinge arises from the thoughts of Aschenbach, and the story is in fact derived from Mann's own visit to the Lido.
Quotes:
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?
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist’s highest joy.
For beauty, my Phaedrus, beauty alone, is lovely and visible at once. For, mark you, it is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can perceive through our senses, or bear so to perceive. Else what should become of us, if the divine, if reason and virtue and truth, were to speak to us through the senses? Should we not perish and be consumed by love, as Semele aforetime was by Zeus? So beauty, then, is the beauty-lover’s way to the spirit - but only the way, only the means, my little Phaedrus.
Awe of the miracle filled his soul new-risen from its sleep. Heaven, earth, and its waters yet lay enfolded in the ghostly, glassy pallor of dawn; one paling star still swam in the shadowy vast. But there came a breath, a winged word from far and inaccessible abodes, that Eos was rising from the side of her spouse; and there was that first sweet reddening of the farthest strip of sea and sky that manifests creation to man’s sense. She neared, the goddess, ravisher of youth, who stole away Cleitos and Cephalus and, defying all the envious Olympians, tasted beautiful Orion’s love. At the world’s edge began a strewing of roses, a shining and a blooming ineffably pure; baby cloudlets hung illumined, like attendant amoretti, in the blue and blushful haze; purple effulgence fell upon the sea, that seemed to heave it forward on its welling waves; from horizon to zenith went great quivering thrusts like golden lances, the gleam became a glare; without a sound, with godlike violence, glow and glare and rolling flames streamed upwards, and with flying hoof-beats the steeds of the sun-god mounted the sky.
Troops of small feathery white clouds ranged over the sky, like grazing herds of the gods.
...language could but extol, not reproduce, the beauties of the sense.
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry.
He delighted, as always, in the scene on the beach, the sight of sophisticated society giving itself over to a smiple life at the edge of the element.