 much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of the elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolise. (Wilde 153)
However, later on, Dorian renounces his attraction to Christian faith believing that any formal acceptance of creed or system would arrest his intellectual development: "But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night" (Wilde 153). Subsequently, he passed through mysticism to the materialism of the Darwinists where he "found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, normal or healthy, normal or diseased" (Wilde 154). In the end, Dorian also rejects philosophical Darwinism convinced that all intellectual speculation is barren. As a result, he focused only on action and experiment, aware of the fact that "the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal" (Wilde 154). theory, although the author never left any evidence of the fact that he ever accepted and practised any of its philosophies. Pearce also argues that Dorian's idolatry of the senses was Wilde's own fetish at the time he was working on his novel.
The name and the position in the novel of the protagonist Dorian Gray is very much bound to Oscar Wilde's life. Oscar Wilde's biography mentions the existence of a certain young man of whom the author was very fond. This figure who fascinated Oscar Wilde was John Gray and it is said that he was the model for the physical beauty of Dorian Gray in Wilde's novel. And maybe there is a strong connection between Basil Hallward's first impressions of Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde's own impressions of John Gray:
Well, after I had been in the room about ten minutes,. (Wilde 13)
In the novel, Basil Hallward first sees Dorian at a party. The writer Frank Liebich points out that Oscar Wilde and John Gray first met at a dinner party in 1889 and that John Gray became Wilde's disciple. There is a reflection of the relationship between Oscar Wilde and John Gray in the description of Basil and Dorian's friendship:
I know he [Dorian] likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said. As a rule, he is charming to me, and we sit in the studio and talk. (Wilde 19)
Thomas Mann identifies with his protagonist of Death in Venice. The changes in Aschenbach's personality after he meets Tadzio, manifested by rejecting the psychological analysis and understanding he practised in his early work, simplifying morality and abandoning himself to the dark emotions he no longer even wants to control, parallel the Nazist political regime adopted by Germany in a period very close to that in which Thomas Mann was writing his novella. This political regime was characterised through violent attacks on reason and intellect, the whipping up of atavistic mass feeling, and the collective unreason of enthusiasm for Hitler. As Thomas Mann confessed that Gustav Aschenbach's problems and temptations have been his own: "I had these things in me as much as anyone," we are allowed to believe that the author had embodied the coming politics of his age through his writing of Death in Venice.
Within two years, the war that looms in that opening sentence "It was a spring afternoon in that year of grace 19-, when Europe sat upon the anxious seat beneath a menace that hung over its head for months" (Mann 417) had broken out and Mann was carried away, like most intellectuals in the combatant nations. Thomas Mann employs a technique that half-hides myth under a realistic surface in Death in Venice. The author gives the diabolical elements an always plausible mask: the devil is presented in the novel as part of the hero's mind, while the traditional twenty-four years of the pact coincide with the term of the disease. In writing The Death in Venice, Thomas Mann was uncovering, tackling the issues that had always preoccupied him and been the substance of his work, the threatening tendencies of his age. He was in fact consciously writing what he called the "novel of my epoch," epoch in which Germany had sold her soul to an evil power, to Nazism, associated with the disease that took hold of Venice.
The novella is a meditation upon the historical and social pressures bearing upon the modern individual.
Thomas Mann autobiography acknowledges the fact that, like Gustav Aschenbach, the author visited Venice. While staying in Venice with his wife and brother, Thomas Mann, like his fictional Aschenbach, was fascinated by a handsome Polish boy whom he watched playing on the beach. In fact, this 'personal and lyrical experience', as Mann later described it in a much quoted confessional letter, prompted the story Death in Venice.1 And just as Mann's protagonist Aschenbach is inspired by the sight of Tadzio to write 'a page and a half of exquisite prose' on an unspecified problem of taste and culture (viii, 493), so Mann wrote a short essay on his changing attitude to Wagner. Having idolised Wagner for many years, he confessed, he was now turning away from the composer's steamy Romanticism and towards a new classicism.
When the story begins, Aschenbach is already a classic writer, in two of the senses which Goethe gave the term. First, he represents the type of 'classic national author' His paternal ancestors were soldiers or administrators in the service of the Prussian state which formed the core of a united Germany. And in one of his major works, dealing with Frederick the Great, Aschenbach has evoked a national subject from Prussian history. Second, he is an exemplary writer. Extracts from his works are reproduced in school readers so that schoolboys may model their style on his. It represents the 'pure style appropriate to its subject' (G xii, 243) which Goethe considered classical. In addition, Aschenbach is a classical writer in the obvious sense of emulating the classics. He admires, and tries to imitate, the order, balance, harmony, and restraint deemed characteristic of classical literature. Mann himself followed this precept to the extent of emulating the classic prose of Goethe.
In the essay 'Sweet Sleep' (1909), Mann defines the morality of the artist:
The artist's morality is composure ['Sammlung'], it is the power of self-centred concentration, the commitment to form, shape, limitation, corporeality, the rejection of freedom, infinity, dozing and drifting in the limitless realm of feeling - in a word, it is the will to produce a work. But how ignoble and immoral, how bloodless and repulsive is the work that is born of cold, calculating, virtuous, self-contained artistry! The artist's morality is self-abandonment, straying and self-loss, it is struggle and hardship, experience, insight and passion ['Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Leidenschaft']. (xi, 338)
In this declaration, and in his critical portrayal of Aschenbach, Mann is affirming the artist's duty to inquire, to probe, to reach what will often be uncomfortable insights into human character. One inadequate, answer is that Mann actually encountered such people in Venice:
Nothing in Death in Venice is invented:.
The wanderers who cross Aschenbach's path likewise derive their disturbing aura from his emotional projections. Not only are these figures wanderers, like Aschenbach, but they also share some of his traits: the slight build, the loose mouth and the short nose. They represent the unacknowledged and unwelcome shadow-side of Aschenbach himself, the rootless, bohemian aspect which he has done his best to repress.8 Jung has shown that the heightened sensibility accompanying a mid-life crisis can generate precisely such visionary embodiments of psychic forces. The story gradually reveals what Aschenbach is repressing - his power to love, his capacity for homosexual love, and the areas of experience it opens up. His repressed emotions appear just where he thought he was safest: amid his devotion to classicism.The Eastern Algarve is calling. Octant · Praia Verde is your long-awaited retreat in the Algarve, a combination of forest and ocean, between green patches and columns of white sand. The natural spectrum, the contemporary details and the comfort of the place beckon you to enjoy shared experiences and nights that will bring many other summers to mind - because, really, this is how good memories are made.
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Here, in what was the first Octant boutique hotel, knowing how to welcome our guests is everything. Our guests are our family, around the table and elsewhere. Because we want to share the best of the region, and the best of ourselves