This descriptive use of words-“eros in the word” in Mann’s phrase-this courting of things in language, seems to me to be Mann’s primary excellence. Let me make a large claim for him: just as, perplexed by some event in one’s life, say the advent of friendship, one might go to a classical writer for help in mastering the matter, so, when overwhelmed by certain subtle and complex experiences of civilized modernity, one might read Mann in order to gain an apt and precise language, a language with which to delineate and fix such experiences. The first and general reason lies in Mann’s command of words. Having begun in so deprecating a manner, I ought first to give reasons why this work is worth close study. The work I shall deal with is a short novel, a novella, by Thomas Mann, called Death in Venice, or, more accurately, “The Death in Venice,” that is to say, “The Death Appropriate to Venice.” Mann considered this novella in certain respects his most successful work, a crystallization of all the elements of his artistry. My lecture will therefore be an inquiry into the nature of the essential charlatan-an enterprise in the spirit and tradition of Plato’s Ion. This is not my own but the author’s opinion of himself. We live in a state of decadence, of falling away, the more so for no longer naming it as such, and Thomas Mann’s way of laying the past to rest seems to me vastly better than the hatred of it accompanied by ignorance which characterizes the brutal branch of the phenomenon of decadence.įor the next hour I am going to lecture on a work largely autobiographical, whose hero is a charlatan and whose author is therefore the same.

Death in venice by thomas mann