THOMAS MANN
31
Baok of Marriage.)
So the aging novelist is made to pursue through
the labyrinthine streets of Venice what is really only the sterile pro–
jection of his mind in its effort to create form out of its own substance,
to breed beauty and spirit out of the mere ideas of these things. Tadzio
is compacted half of material reality, half of a tired and wordy Pla–
tonism. For Aschenbach he is the materialization of that ideal per–
fection of form which he had cultivated all his life; so that he is the
image of Narcissus in the pool. And the tantalizing smile that Tadzio
returnS
him
several times throughout the story is also the Narcissus–
smile of recognition. As an object of desire, however, he can only be
frustrating, absurd, impossi.ble, the mere dream of him as such leading
his
worshipper straight into the depths of the abyss.
Through the suffering and humiliation of the pit, the initiate in
the rites not only learns the horrors involved in the full experience of
living but also acquires the grace and strength that will enable him
to endure them. He sloughs off the old arrogant childish self that
had made the world seem like a mirror of his own emotions and
emerges as a mature and responsible member of the tribe. A real
dialectic process occurs by which the old individual self is reborn on
the higher plane of the moral and social. And so Aschenbach, that
tardy initiate, already sickening from the poisoned berries that he has
eaten to allay his thirst, is made to go for a last time to the beach to
catch a glimpse of Tadzio. An abandoned camera on a tripod records
the scene: Tadzio, playing with some of his friends, is suddenly
downed, his face pressed into the sand, and when he is freed he walks
sullenly away. At that instant occurs a profound transformation in
Aschenbach's vision of him: he is no longer an object of desire, but
an object of contemplation. In the first place, his little exhibition of
outraged pride has made
him
a human being. Now that Aschenbach
himself has tasted this emotion to the full he is no longer able to
confuse reality with the reflections of his own overdeveloped aesthetic
sensibility. Tadzio is no less beautiful in his eyes, but now the beauty
"flashes off" the organism as a whole, as from the bird in Hopkins'
sonnet, and it is impossible to distinguish between the physical and
the spiritual in the perfect harmony of their functioning. The recogni–
tion that the boy's superior physical charms have been intimately
bound up with a superior moral nature enables Aschenbach to
dis–
cover in him a completed symbol of his own predicament. The tussle
between Tadzio and the boy of "coarser nature" on the beach is.the
allegorical correspondence of the terrible struggle that he has just
been through in his private abyss. Morally, Tadzio supplies a living
and breathing example of that working-alliance between matter and
spirit, feeling and reason, "knowledge of the abyss" and intoxication
with form which the artist must effect
if
he is to
prese~e
his own
