Interview with Philip Kitcher, Author of “Deaths In Venice”

I don’t know much about philosophy, but Philip Kitcher does. I was intrigued by his book, Deaths
in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach(buy from Columbia UP or Amazon), which
focuses on the philosophical connections found in Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice, and
film and opera versions of it. I wrote to him to ask him for an interview about his book, and he
graciously agreed.

First of all, Philip, could you tell us a little about why American readers today would want to
read Death in Venice? For some reason, Thomas Mann does not seem to be as widely known among
English-speaking audiences as one would expect of a writer of his stature. Or am I wrong?

Death in Venice is one of the great pieces of short fiction in any language. It’s been translated
into English many times, and some of the recent translations (those of David Luke, Clayton
Koelb, and Michael Heim) are excellent. It’s brilliantly written and fascinatingly many-sided.

I’m not sure how many American readers read Mann these days — when I was young, he was
clearly viewed as one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, and much more accessible than
Proust or Joyce. Buddenbrooks is the great 19th century German novel (even though it was
published in 1901 — German literature was late in moving into the nineteenth century). The Magic
Mountain and Doctor Faustus would have to be on anyone’s list of the 50 great novels in world
literature. There are other masterpieces, too, for example, Joseph and his Brothers (a tetralogy
which is really neglected these days).

You start out your book with a bit of scene setting about Thomas Mann’s life in 1911–1912,
the period he worked on and published Death in Venice. How old was he and who were
comparable writers of the time?

Mann was in his middle thirties. His great contemporaries were Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Robert
Musil. By 1912, Mann had already had one major success (Buddenbrooks) and had followed it up
with an influential novella (Tonio Kröger). Musil had published a controversial early novel (The
Confusions of Young Törless), but his vast, unfinished masterpiece (The Man without Qualities)
would only appear many years later. By contrast, Proust, Joyce, and Kafka were on the verge of
publishing their first notable works: Swann’s Way would appear in 1913, Dubliners in
1914, Metamorphosis in 1915, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916.

In your book you write, “To record the experiences of his author-protagonist Aschenbach,
Mann crafted a new prose style, increasing the length and syntactic complexity of his
sentences, the richness of his vocabulary.” Was this somewhat like the difference between the
early and later works of Henry James?

That’s a very interesting comparison. In both instances, the style evolves and enables the author to
deal in rich ambiguities. Although there are points of more or less rapid change, I don’t think
there’s any sharp division into “early” and “late” periods.
But Mann and James achieve their effects quite differently. The prose of Death in Venice is
crystalline, apparently lucid — until you realize the multiple possibilities of irony and the
juxtaposition of different narrative voices. By contrast, in The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl,
James deploys the groping language of everyday interactions to suggest the possibilities latent in the
situations his characters encounter. Mann’s novella takes place under a southern sun that may trick
us into thinking that all is as it seems; James takes us through the fog of complex interpersonal
relations.

You write that Mann made a distinction between a man of letters and a writer. How would
that play out, for example, in the case of Edmund Wilson?

For Mann, the term ‘Dichter’ — literally “poet,” but better translated as “man of letters” — inherits
an especially honorable status from German tradition, and he wants to claim that honor for people
who write in prose. In my view, Edmund Wilson deserves that honor. The serious writer is to be
distinguished from the journalist who discusses books in the newspapers (in the “Feuilleton” section
of German newspapers).

We learn from your book that Mann was fascinated by the role of the artist as artist versus
that of artist as citizen. This is fascinating in that in Mann’s later life he had to confront the
rise of Nazism in his homeland. Could you tell us a bit about how Mann perceived the outsider
and what relation that might have had to his years of exile from Germany, when he was
literally outside his country?
In one of his most famous statements during the period of his exile, Mann claimed that the true
Germany was wherever he was. By 1933, when he left his homeland, he had won the Nobel Prize
(1929), he was no longer an outsider, but an extraordinarily successful writer. His fascination with
the predicament of the outsider, and his explorations of the thought that the artist must always be
outside bourgeois society, occur in his early short fiction.

Those explorations are well developed in Tonio Kröger, and Death in Venice pursues them in a very
specific form: Can you simultaneously be a fulfilled artist and an upstanding member of bourgeois
society? Despite all his fame, despite the high regard in which many people held him from the
1920s to the end of his life (1955), Mann continued to wonder about that question.

One of the main arguments of your book is stated here, “Mann merits our attention as a
contributor to the philosophical discussions in which his sources were engaged.” How would
he compare to, say, Joseph Conrad, whose works seem to engage philosophical ideas but who
was, perhaps, not as widely read in philosophy as Mann?

Perhaps I have a blindspot about Conrad, but I don’t view him as having anything like the same
philosophical significance as Mann.

It’s not just that Mann, like virtually all German intellectuals of his day, was steeped in a rich
philosophical tradition and had read large chunks of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but that he was
also much more subtle and creative in exploring philosophical questions. A better English-language
comparison would be Henry James — whose brother, of course, was one of America’s greatest
philosophers.

For those of us not familiar with Arthur Schopenhauer, could you tell us a bit about him and
why you contend that much of the commentary on Mann emphasizes the influence of
Nietzsche on Mann while underemphasizing that of Schopenhauer?

Schopenhauer wrote a large book, The World as Will and Representation, which starts by trying to
develop and correct Kant’s transcendental idealism, but quickly goes off in a very creative and
provocative direction. Kant had contrasted the world of experience, the phenomenal world, with the
world of “things-in-themselves,” about which we cannot say much. Schopenhauer replaces the
notion of the thing-in-itself with that of the Will, which he views as the ground of everything there
is. This Will is destructive and forever unsatisfied. The sciences are able to disclose facets of its
manifestations in experience, but the only access we have to ultimate reality is obtained through art,
particularly through listening to music. Human life is inevitably and permanently unsatisfying, and
the best we can do is to abnegate our will (our will is the most prominent manifestation of Will in
us).

Schopenhauer’s early career was a spectacular failure — while Hegel was attracting hordes of
students, his lectures (down the hallway) were attended by a pitifully small number. Yet, well
before the end of the nineteenth century his big book was all the rage with young German
intellectuals. In Buddenbrooks, one of the central characters turns to Schopenhauer at a crisis in his
own life, and Mann’s description there mirrors his own unforgettable experience of reading
Schopenhauer in the mid-1890s.

Nietzsche, whom he’d read earlier, and whom he always saw as a “great ironist”, also profoundly
influenced Mann. Because Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, distinguishes two types of
art — Apollonian and Dionysian — and because Death in Venice seems to allude to this,
commentators have drawn all sorts of conclusions about the novella. Their commentaries are
handicapped by many difficulties: often by very simplistic readings of Birth of Tragedy, by the fact
that this would hardly be an influential work on someone who saw Nietzsche’s great strength to lie
in his irony, and by the fact that Mann’s own copy of the work (in the Zürich archive, devoted to
Mann) shows none of the markings that record his engagement with books that fascinated him.

Could you please tell us what you mean by “philosophical fiction”? Would some of the works
of Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Thornton Wilder, or Theodore Dreiser fall into that
category?

Philosophical fiction shows us possibilities that change our presuppositions and starting points.
Philosophers like to emphasize their dedication to reasoning. But chains of reasoning always have
to start somewhere, and we typically pick up those first premises, unreflectively, in our early
education. Works of literature have philosophical significance when they remove our blinkers,
enabling us to conceptualize things in new ways and to appreciate possibilities we had not dreamed
of.
Of the authors you list, I think Hesse clearly writes philosophical fiction. The others don’t seem to
me to generate the shift of Gestalt I take to be the diagnostic effect of the genre.

You write, “I propose a broader view of the activity of philosophizing, one in which what goes
on in the mind of the subject cam involve a range of different psychological processes.” Would
that mean that works such as Mrs. Dalloway, Moby Dick, and The Golden Bowl are
philosophical fiction?

The Golden Bowl, certainly — and Martha Nussbaum has explored some of its philosophical
depths. My friend and colleague, Edward Mendelson, has a beautiful chapter in his book, The
Things that Matter, in which he discloses philosophical ideas about love in Mrs. Dalloway. I suspect
that Moby Dick, too, can be mined for its philosophical significance.

I was struck by this passage in your book, “Passionate reading may find its expression in a
work of art.” Please tell us more.

In an essay on Schopenhauer he published in 1938, Mann confesses that his philosophical reading
was not concerned to fathom the exact details of the author’s meaning, but more a “passionate”
search for the moving ideas, which he hoped to assimilate and develop. I take him to have read both
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in this “passionate” way, and the reading prompted passages in Death
in Venice (and in some other writings, too). The attempted capturing of the “spirit” of a
philosophical treatise is thus expressed in a literary work.

Likewise, this passage made me want to ask you to elaborate, “Taking the philosophical
import of the arts seriously constructs a space in which something more conventionally
identifiable as philosophy can operate.” What do you mean there, and are any contemporary
writers producing philosophical fiction these days?

If you think literature and music can contribute to philosophy, then the commentator can engage in
the project of trying to show the philosophical significance of particular pieces of fiction or pieces
of music. That would be a kind of literary criticism in which something more conventionally
philosophical is done — namely, ideas are identified, made explicit, elaborated. Much of what I’m
attempting in my book is literary criticism of this type.
You write of philosophical criticism, “Its task is to prepare the reader or listener to read or
listen differently, in a way that will prepare for recognition of what is presented as a potential
way to embody value and thus to serve as a basis for judgment, for endorsement or rejection.”
That is a rather austere view of art, isn’t it? Doesn’t seem to leave much room for pure
enjoyment.

Yes, it’s very austere. And it would be a mad view to propose that the only legitimate form of
criticism or of reading is philosophical. But to say that one way to read a literary work is to consider
it philosophically is emphatically not to say that it’s the only way. My emphases here reflect the fact
that at least one very intelligent and knowledgeable reader of Deaths in Venice — Leo Carey —
makes just this fallacious inference.

In fact, I’m all for lots of ways of reading. The pleasures of reading are various, and the great critics
do a lot to spread them. I want to make a case for an additional way of reading — one that is austere
and serious along the way, but (in my experience) brings its own enjoyments in its train.

Is part of the reason that Mann does not seem to have a huge audience in the English-
speaking world is that his works come across as too severe for non-German readers? You
write, for example, of Death in Venice, “Central to the life whose final weeks comprise the
bulk of the novella is the concept of discipline.”

At various times, including the time of his exile, Mann has had a huge audience in the English-
speaking world. I’m not sure that he always comes across as “severe” — some of his scenes are
very funny. Moreover, my view of the centrality of Aschenbach’s discipline is an interpretive
suggestion: many people would look at Death in Venice differently (although I suspect that few
people would find comic touches in it or question, the judgment that its tone is “serious”).

If you read Mann’s diaries, it’s very clear that, during his time in the U.S., he was an immense
public success. He gave public readings to which people flocked. The translations of his novels sold
very well. The early ones (those of Mrs. Lowe-Porter) were sometimes rather inaccurate, but they
often captured the elegance of his writing. In recent years, translators have given us more exact
renderings, while preserving the gloss of Mann’s prose.
Is Mann much read in Germany itself these days?

If you go into any German bookstore, you’ll find long shelves full of paperback copies of his fiction
— typically all the novels, and four volumes of short fiction. Used German bookstores always have
significant numbers of his works. I suspect that the “reading public” is currently more excited about
other authors, newer figures or some of Mann’s contemporaries who have stood in his large
shadow. But I’d bet virtually every German undergraduate has read Death in Venice, and probably
some of the other works I’ve mentioned.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the late critic who enjoyed a prominence unlike any literary commentator in
the English-speaking world, described Mann as a “monument.” I think that’s right: every serious
reader has read him, but, today, probably fewer people return to him than was once the case.

You write, “In Mann’s Venice, the philosophical landscape is importantly — and ambiguously
transformed.” How so and to what end?

Mann has taken the problem central to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche — “How to live?” — and
confronted their answers with the figure of Aschenbach. Aschenbach can be viewed from many
sides, so that we arrive at various possible judgments about the worth of his life. That ambiguity is
the source of novel answers to the philosophical problem, answers Mann invites us to consider and
to develop.

Could you give us examples from the last 20 years of works of art that exemplify what you say
here, “the important philosophical contribution of art, of fiction, or drama, or music might lie
not in the saying but the showing”?

This is very hard, because there seem to me few examples as striking as those that come from the
early part of the twentieth century. There are some of Pinter’s plays from the 1970s (but those are
significantly older). From my point of view, the outstanding examples in prose fiction are by W.C.
Sebald (Austerlitz and especially The Emigrants).
Would you please elaborate on this, “we may discover that Death in Venice is a more ironic
work than is usually supposed?”

Too many commentaries stop with the more obvious ironies and ambiguities, not seeing how Mann
invites us to question things that are often taken for granted. Mann plants seeds of doubt about
Aschenbach’s literary merit — but he also subtly undercuts the narrative voice that offers that
“detached” judgment.

He invites his readers to suppose that Aschenbach dies of cholera — but then quite knowingly frees
Aschenbach completely from the normal symptoms, and drops clues that, throughout his life, he has
suffered from some life-threatening condition (for example, a weak heart). One of the core critical
principles of my book is that there’s far less clarity in the novella than you might think. To use my
previous image: the sun shines brightly, but the light can easily dazzle you.

You refer to “the deformation wreaked upon a sensitive but potentially healthy individual by
a rigid and uncomprehending society.” But isn’t it part of the tragedy that Mann creates that
Aschenbach is not merely gay, but is attracted to a boy and not a grown person? Doesn’t that
suggest that society is not rigid and comprehending but necessarily protective of vulnerable
youth? Doesn’t the fact that Tadzio is so much younger than Aschenbach problematize the
older man’s passion and thereby further enrich the story? After all, Aschenbach is so
obsessed with Tadzio that he chooses not to warn the boy’s family about the danger of cholera
in Venice, thereby endangering not only the boy himself but his entire family. How
“sensitive,” then, is Aschenbach? And is the narrator really “moralistic” in expressing
disapproval of Aschenbach at times?

There’s no doubt that Aschenbach lapses. His moral failing lies (as I and several other
commentators agree) in his decision not to warn the Polish family about the presence of cholera in
Venice. But is he a sexual predator? Surely not. Forcing himself on the boy would be intolerable to
him.

In fact, I spend a long time reconstructing Aschenbach’s sexuality in light of Mann’s own complex
attitudes and the disciplined homosexual identity expressed by the young poet, August Platen
(highly influential on the young Thomas Mann). What Aschenbach wants from Tadzio is extremely
limited. He wants to gaze on the beautiful boy, again and again and again … At the very most, there
might be a tender, but restrained, embrace at parting, or the most chaste form of a kiss.

The “moralistic” narrator gives a gleeful, even exultant, judgment of Aschenbach, very late in the
novella, when Aschenbach has collapsed in a rubbish-strewn piazza. But this judgment doesn’t
indict him for having followed an adolescent boy. Rather, his disordered state, his collapse, seems
so at odds with the dignified writer and public figure.

As for Aschenbach’s “sensitivity”, it seems evident that he was a delicate child, and that his literary
career has been built on cultivating a refined sensitivity to beauty. Overwhelmed by Tadzio’s
beauty, to which he is so sensitive, his moral sensitivity is blunted, so that he decides not to tell
Tadzio’s mother of the potential danger to health. In his quasi-Socratic ruminations just after the
narrator has done his moralizing, Aschenbach recognizes how aesthetic sensitivity can be in tension
with moral sensitivity (again, I spend some time in the book, explaining and reflecting on this
passage).

How old is Tadzio reckoned to be? If he is well under 18, shouldn’t we regard Aschenbach as
a rather disturbed person albeit one nonetheless to be pitied?

He’s about fifteen. If Aschenbach is to be regarded as “rather disturbed”, then we should take a
similar view of his creator, since we know (from Katia Mann’s memoir) that Thomas Mann was
fascinated by the real-life version of Tadzio — and from the diaries that he was much taken with
other “hübsche Jungen” (pretty boys). It seems to me dangerous to conceive Aschenbach in the
image of the leering, salivating pedophile. As I’ve argued, what he wants is decidedly non-
threatening.

You make the point that in Luchino Visconti’s film version of Death in Venice, Tadzio comes
across as a flirt. In Mann’s novella, does he seem more of a spoiled, petulant weakling? How
are readers to take him?

This raises an interesting point. In the novella, we don’t really see Tadzio (or anyone else for that
matter) — we see Tadzio as he appears to Aschenbach. The boy is the embodiment of beauty, and
that beauty is necessarily ephemeral (the boy has fragile teeth). At most he is conscious of his own
charms, and mildly coquettish. Spoiled, he may be. “Petulant” is much too strong. He’s no
weakling, although he may not be as robust as his friend/adversary Jaschu (who is probably a bit
older).

Readers can’t “take” Tadzio. Viewers of the film, however, have an independent perspective, and
the Tadzio Visconti gives us is flirtatious. That separates him from the figure Mann’s Aschenbach
perceives.

You write, “Aschenbach, as far as we can tell, does no serious harm.” But isn’t the point of the
book that this can be so only because of societal strictures?

No. Aschenbach’s discipline breaks down in one respect, but it is pretty formidable. You don’t need
a heavy policing role on the part of society to keep people of his sort in line. They do it for
themselves.

In my book, I quote some remarks Mann made in a letter to a friend, at the time he was writing
Death in Venice. He explained that he was at work on something “rather odd”, a case of “boy love”
(Knabenliebe), and commented: “You will say ‘Hm. Hm’ But it is very respectable.” Mann had it
exactly right, I think. And it’s respectable partly because of the restrained character of
Aschenbach’s sexuality, and partly because of his impressive discipline.

Could you please tell us what you mean by the term “synthetic complex?”

A synthetic complex is a cluster of psychological attitudes and tendencies produced in a person

through reading a literary work or listening to a piece of music. When we read or listen, we come to
the work with various beliefs, emotional sensitivities, as well as general dispositions to think and
feel. The reading or listening stimulates our imagination, producing new emotions and judgments
— that’s the synthetic complex. As we reflect on these, they may quickly dissolve. Or they may
become a stable part of our psychology, something around which various ideas and feelings from
our past experience coalesce. The result of that may be the displacement of some of our older
attitudes: we come to see new things as possible or to amend our ways of approving or
disapproving.
On my account, literature and music do their philosophical work through the formation,
stabilization, and growth of these synthetic complexes. Great works are enduringly rewarding
because, as we go back to them, the synthetic complex is extended in new ways.

Which of Mann’s works would you suggest readers new to him start with?

Death in Venice is a good first choice, as is Buddenbrooks. The novella is much shorter, but
Buddenbrooks is an eminently accessible novel — it’s a page-turner that helped make the fortunes
of the Fischer publishing house.

The novels of Mann’s maturity — Magic Mountain, Joseph, Faustus — are very great works
indeed. They are, however, long and extremely complex.

Whom do you see as the audience for your book?

The proverbial lover of literature and music. It’s not just for philosophers, or even just for
academics. I hope it will appeal to those who already know Mann or Britten or Visconti or Mahler
— and that it will inspire those who have never read the novella to do so.

Thank you for your time.