Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach by Philip Kitcher (review)

Philip Kitcher’s volume, based on the Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures that he delivered at Columbia University in 2009 and appearing in print 100 years after the original publication of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, follows a century of critical and scholarly writing on the novella, the powerful cascade of which hardly appears to be abating. Kitcher undertakes the task of tilling the overtaxed soil in which parallels between the author and his protagonist have been examined, and he confronts the challenge by persuading the reader to see not just the demise, but also the life of Gustav Aschenbach through a new set of lenses. The study accomplishes its goal by bringing together diverse voices that speak to one another: the “deaths in Venice” of the title are not merely those constructed by Mann himself or those presented in the well-known adaptations—Benjamin Britten’s opera (1973) and Luchino Visconti’s film (1971)—but also those present in the works of Gustav Mahler, the composer on whose physiognomy Aschenbach’s was based. Mahler’s life, art, and death inform Kitcher’s readings of Mann, which take as their point of departure the serious engagement of both with philosophical problems that they believed not to have been successfully resolved by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

The central and crucial premise of Kitcher’s new reading, the possibility of which he attributes to Visconti (hence defending the Italian director from his harshest critics while at the same time not seeking to veil the weaknesses of the film) lies in the possibility that Aschenbach does not die of cholera—that he in fact does not die a tragic, sordid death—but rather that his death is the culmination of a highly worthy life cut short by a frailty whose seed had accompanied the esteemed writer since his birth. Kitcher follows this path to move away from the particular and the historical toward the universal, rejecting what he calls “the sexual reading” of Aschenbach, not, to be sure, in a prudish or homophobic fashion. Kitcher neither denies the sexual nature of Aschenbach’s attraction to Tadzio (e.g., by interpreting it strictly figuratively) nor downplays the suffering of Aschenbach’s and Mann’s contemporaries who shared their attraction to individuals of the same sex. Rather, for Kitcher, the sexual interpretation is simply insufficient, because it views art and ideas as mere masks for the libido, denies that the sexual impulse is also shaped by culture, and proclaims Aschenbach as “thoroughly self-deceived” (94), rather than only partially (and perhaps necessarily?) self-deceived, as Kitcher claims.

Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia; not surprisingly, his strategy aims at elevating Mann’s novella to the status of a philosophical text; he argues that Death in Venice, and indeed the other sources, both musical and cinematic, that he examines, represent the highest degree of philosophical engagement, because their creators develop their own answers to philosophical questions rather than simply being derivative of allegedly more serious philosophical writings. He argues for the distinct role of literature, film, and music as “philosophy by showing,” which is necessary as an imaginative counterweight to academic philosophy’s abstractions. Many readers will find themselves retracing familiar ground at certain points, only to find themselves suddenly in very new surroundings. This study is profoundly interdisciplinary, arguing for a “broader view of the activity of philosophizing,” (15) situating it not merely in cognitive work, but in the emotional and the psychological realm as well. Kitcher lauds the unique contribution of the arts to philosophical thinking, asserting a general claim that he demonstrates in insightful and persuasive readings that show how Mann and Mahler counter Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s answers to the problem of human finitude. Kitcher pushes the boundary between criticism, literature, and philosophy, even proposing a hypothetical variation of Visconti’s film with a coda accompanied no longer by the Adagietto of...