Aschenbach’s Dream: The Dream and its Aftermath
In Aschenbach’s dream, Mann skillfully blends both fear and fulfillment, and by the end of the dream these two fundamental emotional responses are indistinguishable from each other; they are one and the same. The dream harkens back to some sort of primitive state of humankind – to barbarian days before the intellectual abstraction of Christianity and after the fall of classical thought.
In the dream, Aschenbach watches as a disorderly group of torch-bearing people together with a pack of animals descends down a grassy hillside. Women are dressed in coarse furs, which only partly cover their lower halves. Their breasts are exposed and they hold them in their hands. Snakes coil around their waists. The men have horns and animal skins for clothes. They parade down in unison, beating on drums. Young boys are there, too, with sticks or staffs to prod the heard of animals forward. It is clear to the dreaming Aschenbach that the group is coming in order to prepare a feast. He tries to hold himself back from the crowd, from the scene, but feels compelled to join it, drawn away from his core set of beliefs and into an embrace of this pagan ritual – a ritual seemingly based wholly on the sensual. The internal battle is fierce: “He trembled, he shrank, his will was steadfast to preserve and uphold his own god against this stranger who was sworn enemy to dignity and self-control.” Despite his resistance, Aschenbach is overcome by the intensity of the scene he both fears and longs to join. “But the mountain wall took up the noise and howling and gave it back manifold; it rose high, swelled to a madness that carried him away.” This is Aschenbach’s moment of complete loss of self. For the whole stay in Venice his moral, social, and rational self has checked his more basic, instinctual, irrational desires. He has obsessively watched and thought about Tadzio for days, but he has not acted. His rational, social self has not allowed him to cross the line. He has not, in waking life, surrendered to his desires. Here in the dream, however, is gives over to them fully. The result is overwhelming and shocking – perhaps even deadly. The final part of the dream is an attempt to capture the essence of Aschenbach’s desires, unbridled by social mores, or, more elementally, by the ability of his reason to control his bodily drives or desires:
In the dream, Aschenbach watches as a disorderly group of torch-bearing people together with a pack of animals descends down a grassy hillside. Women are dressed in coarse furs, which only partly cover their lower halves. Their breasts are exposed and they hold them in their hands. Snakes coil around their waists. The men have horns and animal skins for clothes. They parade down in unison, beating on drums. Young boys are there, too, with sticks or staffs to prod the heard of animals forward. It is clear to the dreaming Aschenbach that the group is coming in order to prepare a feast. He tries to hold himself back from the crowd, from the scene, but feels compelled to join it, drawn away from his core set of beliefs and into an embrace of this pagan ritual – a ritual seemingly based wholly on the sensual. The internal battle is fierce: “He trembled, he shrank, his will was steadfast to preserve and uphold his own god against this stranger who was sworn enemy to dignity and self-control.” Despite his resistance, Aschenbach is overcome by the intensity of the scene he both fears and longs to join. “But the mountain wall took up the noise and howling and gave it back manifold; it rose high, swelled to a madness that carried him away.” This is Aschenbach’s moment of complete loss of self. For the whole stay in Venice his moral, social, and rational self has checked his more basic, instinctual, irrational desires. He has obsessively watched and thought about Tadzio for days, but he has not acted. His rational, social self has not allowed him to cross the line. He has not, in waking life, surrendered to his desires. Here in the dream, however, is gives over to them fully. The result is overwhelming and shocking – perhaps even deadly. The final part of the dream is an attempt to capture the essence of Aschenbach’s desires, unbridled by social mores, or, more elementally, by the ability of his reason to control his bodily drives or desires:
His senses reeled in the steam of panting bodies, the acrid smell of goats, the odour as of stagnant waters – and another, too familiar smell – of wounds, uncleanness, and disease. His heart throbbed to the drums, his brain reeled, a blind rage seized him, a whirling lust, he craved with all his soul to join the ring that formed about the obscene symbol of the godhead, which they were unveiling and elevating, monstrous and wooden, while from full throats they yelled their rallying-cry. Foam dripped from their lips, they drove each other on with lewd gestures and beckoning hands. They laughed, they howled, they trust their pointed staves into each other’s flesh and licked the blood as it ran down. But now the dreamer was in them and of them, the stranger god was his own. Yes, it was he who was flinging himself upon the animals, who bit and tore and swallowed smoking gobbets of flesh – while on the trampled moss there now began the rites in honour of the god, an orgy of promiscuous embraces – and in his very soul he tasted the bestial degradation of his fall.
That the dream is the point of no return for Aschenbach is made clear in the line directly following it: “The unhappy man woke from this dream shattered, unhinged, powerless in the demon’s grip.” What is the demon here? It is certainly not Dürer’s demon from the "Temptation of the Idler." Aschenbach’s demon is a demon that he had heretofore caged, kept in check. Now unleashed, raw desire becomes the instrument of death. What Aschenbach fears most now is not dying but losing the object of his obsession, his love – the chance that Tadzio might leave the city with his family to avoid the pestilence in Venice.
Giving in to his base passions, Aschenbach attempts to enter into a lover’s game with the boy. He visits a barber and has his hair and mustache dyed, his skin treated with cosmetics in an attempt to look much younger than his years. The result is a study in the grotesque – the type already represented by the old man masquerading as a youth on the ferry to Venice and reinforced by the demon-jester-musician who performed on the hotel terrace. Again Visconti captures the scene masterfully:
The make-up is a death mask. The inner demons have fully consumed Aschenbach. He has given over to his desires – transformed his fears into his ultimate fulfillment and as such has committed a sort of suicide – killing his rational, bourgeois self.
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