30
PARTISAN REVIEW
of the ancient initiation rite? Freud had already written of the ado–
lescent crisis in terms of the heroic struggle of the individual for self–
survival; and Jung, following Levy-Bruhl and Durkheim, had ex–
plained the manner in which this is institutionalized in the primitive
rites de passage.
The novelist in Mann's story is someone who has come
to
his
initiation too late, and the rite must be played out on the silent
plane of the consciousness. For many years, nature in Aschenbach
had been "kept quiet," like the cholera plague later on in Venice,
lest it disturb the even flow of his reputation, the steady accumulation
of honors, the adoption of his books as texts in the schools. Too early
in life had he publicly renounced "all sympathy with the abyss," and
devoted himself to the responsibilities of
his
position. Not until he has
reached the age of fifty does the sight of a coarse and vaguely foreign–
looking face during a walk by a cemetery stir up in him the desire
for travel and relaxation. But this is enough to start
him
on
his
"jour–
ney by water" (which young Joseph is to reenact in the monkeyland
of Egypt) to the forbidden land, to the city that is the meeting-place
between the East and the West, to the classic Venice of the North
German imagination. At once it becomes evident that he could never
have forsworn the abyss, because he has never known it, or he would
not be so shocked and disgusted by
his
observations on the way. And
no sooner in Venice than he feels himself completely at the mercy of
the rather sinister, animal-like gondolier who rows
him
to
his
hotel
without waiting to be paid. The man was without a license, it appears,
and this is the first distinct note of the illicit. It is the illicit, however,
that strikes
him
full in the face next day when he sees the boy Tadzio
for the first time in the hotel waiting-room. Then begins
his
long season
of anguish and humiliation in the underworld of
his
own unsuspected
impulses and desires, which become subtly identified with the sights
and the sounds and especially the smells of the corrupt city. For nature
takes revenge on Aschenbach by asserting herself through one of her
most anti-social manifestations; he becomes the victim, in Freudian
terms, of an infantile regression. But
homos~xuality,
which Freud ex–
plains as a type of psychological narcissism, is also emblematic of the
immaturity of an artist whose images have never been more than the
reflexes of
his
own unchecked idealism. As the earlier denizens of the
abyss had been subject to the hallucinations of the sensibility, so that
we never know whether the stranger in "Disillusionment" or the beau–
tiful lady in "The Wardrobe" were real persons or mere dreams, the
noble Aschenbach is the victim of the mind's own tendency to project
images of its unappeasable love of perfection. Both tendencies are
fatal to mature creation; both lead to a reprehensible sterility. (It is
to this aspect of the homosexual passion that Mann directs
his
atten–
tion in
his
curious discussion of the subject in Count Keyserling's
