SOURCE: Hayes, Tom, and Lee Quinby. “The Aporia of Bourgeois Art: Desire in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.” Criticism 31, no. 2 (spring 1989): 159-77.

In the following essay, Hayes and Quinby explore “the dilemma of desire” in Death in Venice.

Death in Venice is undoubtedly a central text in Thomas Mann's oeuvre and in contemporary literary criticism. It is also, and this is not exactly the same thing, an exemplary text of “high” modernism, one that questions the moral and aesthetic “certainties” of bourgeois culture. On the one hand the novella has been read as a cautionary tale, an apologue showing that even the most Apollonian artist may give way to Dionysian excess and sink into a slough of despond. In this reading Death in Venice charts the irruption of the Freudian id and elicits sympathy for an artist suddenly engulfed by his “base” desires. On the other hand, from...