Death in Veniceand the Aesthetic Correlative

Abstract

M, Luch ofthe recent criticism of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (indeed, much of literary criti? cism in general) has taken an ethnographic turn. Critics are increasingly reading Mann's novella from explicitly cultural perspectives that include gender criticism and New Historicism.1 Critics who tend toward these approaches usually describe how the behavior of Gustav von Aschenbach (Mann's protagonist) revealing of or at variance with the cultural norms that prevailed at the moment of composition. According to John Burt Foster's politico-cultural reading, for example, The longing gaze of an elderly German writer at a Polish boy [Tadzio]... has raised a host of cultural issues.2 These include, among others, experiences of multiplicity in border regions and anxieties about the real effectiveness of both German and broader Western traditions and values.3 Robert Tobin, in a less metaphoric and more gender-based cultural reading of this novella, argues that the protagonist's behavior can be used to identify him (and his author) with early twentieth-century gay culture in Germany. Thus, Aschenbach's decision to go for a walk in the English Garden, according to Tobin, is . . . intriguing when viewed from a gay perspective, for that [specific] public park. . . has been a meeting place for male homosexuals since its construction at the end of the eighteenth century.4 Such cultural approaches have provided readers with new, expanded perspectives from which to appreciate this most enigmatic work. Through such readings, Aschenbach has emerged as a much more interesting and complex figure, and the setting of the novella has shown itself to be far richer than we might originally have believed. Collectively, our descriptions of Death in Venice are becoming increasingly thick, to borrow a term from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. There