Aschenbach's Dream: Venice and Lido
The trip by boat from Pula to Venice is an ordinary one, though one particular sight greatly disturbs Aschenbach. He sees a group of “lively youths” in the first class cabin, but when he focuses his attention on them, one of them is not what he seems. In a passage that sets the stage for Aschenbach’s emotional turmoil later in the story, the narrator relates:
One of the party, in a dandified buff suit, a rakish panama with a coloured scarf, and a red cravat, was loudest of the loud: he outcrowded all the rest. Aschenbach’s eye dwelt on him, and he was shocked to see that the apparent youth was no youth at all. He was an old man, beyond a doubt, with wrinkles and crow’s-feet round the eyes and mouth; the full carmine of the cheeks was rouge, the brown hair a wig. His neck was shrunken and sinewy, his turned-up moustaches and small imperial were dyed, and the unbroken double row of yellow teeth he showed when he laughed were but too obviously a cheapish false set. He wore a seal ring on each forefinger, but the hands were those of an old man.
The image of this old man masquerading as a youth greatly disturbs the conservative Aschenbach, who wants to maintain strict divisions between youth and age, ugliness and beauty. It is perverse and unnatural, he thinks, for such a man to pretend to be something he is not. The old man is defying nature, corrupting the foundational element of beauty: the youthful human body, the youthful male body. In such a way Aschenbach reveals himself as a believer in the classical, Greek conception of beauty, a conception based on the rational analysis of form.
Aschenbach finally arrives in Venice and takes a gondola to Lido, the long, thin Island shielding the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic Sea.
He takes a room in the elegant Hotel Excelsior, which is now full of upper class Europeans on holiday. During his first evening there as he awaits the call to dinner with other guests in a lavish hotel sitting room, Aschenbach spies Tadzio, a Polish boy. Aschenbach is struck by the boy’s beauty (understood at this point in the classical sense) and is immediately overcome with inner tumult. We see the following depiction of his first sighting of Tadzio in the 1971 film, “Death in Venice,” directed by the Luchino Visconti.
Around a wicker table next to him is gathered a group of children in charge of a governess or companion – three young girls, perhaps fifteen to seventeen years old, and a long-haired boy of about fourteen. Aschenbach notices with astonishment the lad’s perfect beauty: "His face recalls the noblest moment of Greek sculpture – pale, with a sweet reserve, with clustering honey-coloured ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity."
The night after Aschenbach finally learns the truth about what is going on in Venice – in other words that the cholera epidemic is spreading quickly and taking many lives – he experiences an acute mental breakdown. The breakdown happens in a dream. Curiously enough, Visconti chooses to leave out the dream sequence in his film version of the novella (and to include questionable scenes like a memory flashback and a visit to a brothel). The dream, notably, comes the night after Aschenbach watches an outlandish musical performance, performed by a group of street musicians on the hotel’s terrace. The surreal nature of the performance sets the stage for the chaos of the following dream. Below is Visconti’s brilliant filmic representation of the show.
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