DAVID BRONSEN

T H E ARTIST A G A I N S T H I M S E L F : H E N R I K IBSEN'S
M A S T E R BUILDER A N D T H O M A S M A N N ' S
D E A T H 1N VENICE

When Henrik Ibsen's drama The Master Builder was publish-

ed in 1892, almost simultaneously with its English, French and
German translations, it was welcomed by the critics with close
to universal acclaim as a work of great literary merit. Despite its
positive reception, however, it was greeted with widespread
bafflement regarding its meaning. In the words of a contem-
porary, "'While one person sees Solness as Ibsen himself,
another sees him as Bjornson, a third as a symbol of the right-
wing party, a fourth as a symbol of the left and its leader, a fifth
sees Solness as a symbol of Man rising in rebellion against God;
a sixth sees the play as a conflict between youth and the older
generation.' Some sought to identify Solness with Bismarck,
while the Saturday Review in London decided that he was meant
as a portrait of Mr. Gladstone, and that the play was full of
references to the Irish question. ''1
It is significant, in view of this general lack of comprehension,
that Thomas Mann, who first read the play a year after its publi-
cation at eighteen years of age, immediately grasped its meaning
and wrote a critique of it in which he described Solness' fate as
a statement of the failure of aestheticism as an exclusive orienta-
tion to life. ~ Two decades later, in 1912, Thomas Mann publish-
ed his novella, Death in Venice, a major work dealing with a
similar theme.
1 Michael Meyer, ed., When We Dead Awaken and Three Other Plays
(Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960), p. 128.
Klaus SchriSter, Thomas Mann (Reinbek bei Hamburg; Rowohlt
Tasehenbuchverlag, 1964), p. 31.

21"
324 D A V I D BRONSEN

A number of signs point to Mann's having felt a special affini-

ty for Ibsen: he taught himself Norwegian in order to be able to
read Ibsen in the original; he wrote an essay on him, comparing
him to Wagner; and in the collection of novellas that he publish-
ed in 1904 under the title Tristan, he chose four lines of verse by
Ibsen as an epigraph:
Living means fighting within you
The ghosts of dark powers.
Writing is putting on trial
Your inmost self.
On the basis of its content, this poem could very well have been
written by Mann himself, and it is a further indication of the
close interplay of life and art for both Ibsen and Mann that the
position of the words "living" and "writing" can be reversed
and still have the poem apply in an illuminating manner to both
writers.
Seven years later Mann felt impelled to express in prose what
the poem had said more succinctly: "Writing has always seemed
to me a product and an expression of internal problems, of being
both here and there, of the affirmative and the negative, of being
of two minds, of the disturbing richness of inner conflicts, of
antitheses and contradictions. Why bother to write at all, if one
is not bent on coping intellectually and morally with a problem-
atic self? ''3 It is apparent that Ibsen and Mann were literally
kinsmen who were engaged for at least a good part of their lives
in defining themselves through literary oeuvres that found their
central orientation in dealing with their inner being.
The leads that both authors offer explicitly, namely the strug-
gle with the problematic self in literature and life, lend them-
selves to a comparative analysis of the drama, The Master
Builder, and the novella, Death in Venice. The theme these two
works have in common, that of the artist who is pulled back and

From the introduction to Betrachtunyen eines Unpolitischen (Frank-

furt am Main; S. Fischer Verlag, 1956), (originally published in 1919)
p. 12. The translation is mine.
THE ARTIST AGAINST HIMSELF 325

forth between his artistic vocation and the call of life, has, since
Romanticism, become a topos in world literature. What is
involved is that which a scholar writing in a different context,
has called the "original fracture in the way man is constituted,
a split that opposes him to himself . . . and exposes him to the
attacks of his unconscious. ''4
Freud, who saw the positive achievements of civilization de-
riving indirectly from the repression of primitive instinctual desir-
es, analyzed this so-called fracture of modern man in terms of the
forces of instinctual gratification in conflict with what he called
the "reality principle," which seeks to find satisfaction in ways
that are socially acceptable. Freud, something of an artist him-
self, illustrated this split in modern man with the image of the
rider who is striving to control the life of instinct in the form of
a powerful, only partially tamed horse. In the topos of the artist
against himself, the artist laments his lot because he sees himself
destroying affective gratification or depriving himself of imme-
diate contact with life by reducing it to the material of his art
rather than living it. Humans and human relationships have
value for him only as they serve his artistic ambitions in pro-
ducing his cultural artifact, with the result that the artist is' 'con-
demned" - and the concept of condemnation is prevalent in
the treatment of this theme - to be a spectator of life rather
than a participant.
The idea of the artist as observer rather than participant is
raised to an archetypal statement of depersonalization and isola-
tion by the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his
image of the writer living under the staircase of his own house,
where everyone passes before his eyes without noticing him.
This image, which Hofmannsthal has taken from the story of a
pilgrim in an ancient legend, has the writer - who has been
charged not to make himself known - hearing and seeing his
wife, children and friends speak of him as someone who has

O. Manoni as quoted by Stuart Hampshire in Freud, The New York

Times Book Review, 31 Jan. 1969, p. 8.
326 DAVID BRONSEN

disappeared, who has died and is being mourned. In the house

of life he lacks any function, rights or duties other than to be
present and be aware of all that goes on around him. In addition
to the psychic distress he feels, he also suffers physically. Every-
thing that impinges on his senses brings with it the excruciating
pain of an open wound. The artist himself is, figuratively speak-
ing, no more than an eye and an ear, yet there is nothing he can
shut out, because he does not have an eyelid. He suffers from all
things, yet by suffering from them he also experiences pleasure:
the experience of pleasure through vicarious suffering is the
entire substance of his life.5
Strindberg offered a variation on this theme when he observed
that he was born without an epidermis, so that all things pene-
trated into him without his being able to fend them off. Keats,
in an often-quoted passage, also maintained that the poet has
no self, or rather, the self of the poet is "everything and noth-
i n g . . , because he has no identity, he is continually informing
and filling some other body. ''n And Thomas Mann himself
wrote of the receptivity of the artist rising to an intensity that
makes creativity identical with pain. 7
Hofmannsthal, Strindberg, Keats and Mann, while describing
the lot of the artist as one characterized by suffering, neverthe-
less speak of the mission of the artist with reverence. Nietzsche,
on the other hand, wrote of what he looked upon as the excessive
claims the artist makes for himself with a distrust bordering on
contempt, which can probably be seen as a sign of bad con-
science regarding his own life. The asceticism which these
writers saw as an affirmation of their calling is, according to
Nietzsche - who represents one of the great influences in

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Der D ichter in dieser Zeit," in Hofmanns-

thai. Selected Essays. (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1955), p. 131.
6 Rent Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1956), p. 90.
7 Thomas Mann, "Bilse und Ich", in Altes undNeues, Kleine Prosa aus
fiinfJahrzehnten (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1953), pp. 27--
28.
THE ARTISTAGAINSTHIMSELF 327

the life of Thomas M a n n - in reality an impoverishment

o f life. Nietzsehe points out that the ascetic ideal by its very
nature results in a single aspect of life becoming the master
of one's existence instead of permitting the free play of all of
one's faculties and emotion. The strong and healthy person, as
he saw it, always holds himself open to the totality of possibili-
ties and does not let himself be governed by a single attracting
force.
Solness, w h o is Ibsen's main character, and Aschenbach, who
is Mann's, have spent their lives dedicated to the ascetic ideal
of the artist. Both of them are now in their waning years, the
time in a person's life when, according to Erik Erikson, one
achieves a final "wise integration" or else suffers from the
"disgust" and "despair" that can mar old age. s Solness and
Aschenbach have lived their lives in a state of sublimation, chan-
neling their desires for life and human contact into their work.
Their self-sacrifice has made them preeminent in their fields, but
now at the end of life they experience themselves as victims of
their habitus, chafing over the fetters and confinement their
work has imposed on them. There are many instances in which
this malaise expresses itself in literature and in the lives of writers
as an all-consuming obsession. Rainer Maria Rilke was making
reference to this obsession when he remarked that all writers
basically experience one major conflict in life which takes on
different guises at different times? And Graham Greene was
talking about himself as well as making an impressive generali-
zation with his remark, "Every creative writer worth our con-
sideration . . . is a victim: a man given over to an obsession. ''1~
Both of these statements give the impression that this dilemma
of the dedicated writer is inborn and therefore inescapable.

8 Quoted by Richard Locke, "The Last Word: Two Old Men," The
New York Times Book Review, 3 Oct. 1971, p. 47.
9 "Weisen von Liebe und Tod," Der Spiegel, 28 March, 1956, p. 43.
10Walter Clemons, A Sort of Life by Graham Greene, The New York
Times Book Review, 12 Sept. 1971, p. 3.
328 DAVID BRONSEN

The examination of the topos in the two works under discus-

sion is the more interesting and enjoys a broader relevance be-
cause the concepts of the artist contained in them really belong
to two different epochs. Mann's depiction of Asehenbach is Jn
the older tradition of poeta rates, the seer and superior being
whose entire life is seen as a moral act and who speaks as an
ethical model and an intellectual guide for an entire generation
of his fellow countrymen. There is a suggestion in the novella
itself that this is an anachronistic concept of the artist, and in
any case this view is carried ad absurdum, becoming its own re-
futation with the breakdown and degradation of Aschenbach's
self-imposed ideals. Ibsen's work, although preceding Mann's
by twenty years, conveys a more modern view of the artist.
The architect Solness was in his earlier years, while building
churches, a dedicated man, if not a moral one. However, the
Solness we see in the drama has long since discontinued building
churches for God and has taken to building houses for whoever
contracts for his services. He has given up the ideal that he once
had, and is left with selfish ambition as the sole motivation be-
hind his work, but he is also feeling guilty as a result.
That Ibsen should have cast his hero, who is a projection of
himself, as an architect while really having an artist in mind is
understandable in the light of how the dramatist saw himself.
Solness refers to himself directly in one place in the drama as an
artist, thereby establishing an identity between the two terms.
This identification is to be seen in the fact that Ibsen regarded
himself as a builder and his plays as works of architecture. In a
poem of his youth, "Building Plans," which goes back to 1858,
thirty-four years before he wrote The Master Builder, he com-
pared the artist to a master builder, which is the title the author
gave Solness in the play. It is further revealing that when an
acquaintance inquired if Ibsen was interested in architecture he
replied, "Yes, it is, as you know, my own trade. ''~1

11Michael Meyer, Ibsen. A Biography (Garden City, New York:

Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), p. 697.
THE ARTIST AGAINST HIMSELF 329

Both Ibsen's work and Mann's are characterized by surface

realism and a sub-surface symbolism, which justify the present
analysis and what hopefully will derive from it; but it should be
made clear that in a number of respects the two works seem, at
least at first glance, to be antithetical. Obviously, one is dealing
here with two different genres, each of which brings with it its
own distinctive characteristics. In Mann's novella, which is
largely lacking in dialogue, the reader is made privy to the
private, internal world of Aschenbach by a perspective which
limits itself to the consciousness of the central figure and permits
of no access to the thoughts and feelings of those who cross his
path and from whom, in fact, he is cut off. An eventlessness char-
acterizes the work, so that there is no evidence of the extraordi-
nary event that Goethe pointed to as a defining factor of the
novella, unless one chooses to see Aschenbach's u p h e a v a l - of
which no one else is aware - in such terms. In keeping with the
single focus of the novella, its temporal scheme is progressive,
with a few reminiscences affording a minimum exposition of the
past.
Ibsen's work is a drama, the mode of expression of which is,
naturally, dialogue. This means one is dealing with a more
"public" and extroverted genre. As befits the drama, the conflict
is external and results in collisions between characters and a
battle of the wills. With the exception of Hilde, who remains
enigmatic, everyone seems to be revealed through his or her
actions and verbal exchanges. Solness himself enters into rela-
tionship with all the characters and is seen as using or manipulat-
ing everyone he comes into contact with except for his wife,
whom he avoids and with whom he has no emotional contact,
and Hilde, who seems, on the contrary, to be manipulating him.
In contrast to the temporal scheme of the novella, Ibsen is using
the analytical technique, which means that a good part of the
play is occupied with uncovering the past and showing how it
conditions and even tyrannizes the present.
These remarks serve to contrast the two works, but it is in-
dicative of their nature that some of my generalizations need in
330 DAVID BRONSEN

part to be taken back. It is the narrative and not the dramatic

form that is normally seen as the more appropriate vehicle for
the treatment of the unconscious, yet both works presume to
deal with it. Mann's novella makes this fact explicitly dear, and
in one of his articles the author pointed out that Death in Venice
had with good reason become the subject of psychoanalytical
study, although he felt unedified by the results of such analysis) ~
Aschenbach at one point is feeling troubled over "his ignorance
of his own real desires,"as a statement regarding the unconscious
which also holds true of Solness. Both characters are out of
touch with their emotions and never openly confess to them-
selves the nature of their cravings. While both protagonists are
subjected to onslaughts of the unconscious, the author Mann
clearly understands more than does his creation, Aschenbach,
and can peer into the darkest recesses of his psyche. Despite all
the rich possibilities for interpretation in Death in Venice, the
writing of the novella is characterized by consciousness. Clues
are made available to the discerning reader and everything is
ultimately intended to be capable of interpretation. Mann was
fully aware of the implications of what he was writing; the work
is largely cerebral, and offers its own ongoing commentary,
something that is largely lacking with respect to the more her-
metic The Master Builder. In contrast to Mann's novella, Ibsen's
work is not wholly resolvable because it contains a degree of
complexity that verges on the unexplainable and therefore neces-
sarily leads the critic into the realm of conjecture.
Earlier in life Ibsen once remarked on the necessity he felt of
knowing a character fully before introducing him into a drama:
"Before I write one word, I must know the character through
and through, I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul."l~

12Thomas Mann, Mein Verhiiltnis zur Psychoanalyse (Vienna: Psycho-

analytischer Verlag, 1926), p. 32.
23Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, transl, from
the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Random House, 1936),
p. 40.
1~Meyer, A Bioaraphy, p. 560.
THE ARTIST AGAINST HIMSELF 331

The author had a lifetime to acquaint himself with the wrinkles

of his character Solness, because he was essentially writing about
himself. Nevertheless, in the case of The Master Builder he was
acting out a fantasy, the full implications of which he was not
aware of. Ibsen himself was living with the same bafflement as
his character, and what is unresolved and even inexplicable for
Solness is to some extent also true of the dramatist that con-
ceived him. One feels that Ibsen's work, more than Mann's, is an
instrument for self-discovery and catharsis, a way of dealing
with the insoluble problem with which he was faced. For that
reason and because of the exposure of an imperfectly understood
unconscious, The Master Builder retains an air of the enigmatic,
which is not true of Death in Venice.
It should be pointed out that although Mann once maintained
that as soon as a literary work is completed, the author is no
more of an authority than his critics in interpreting it, with
respect to the two works under examination, this statement ap-
plies more to Ibsen's work than it does to Mann, where intention
and execution seem to be identical. Ibsen's unconscious was at
work in The Master Builder, and through the act of creativity
he was revealing some things about himself of which he had not
become fully and consciously aware. These projections of self
express themselves in a recurrent symbolism which go beyond
the writer's cognition and uncover the wellsprings of motivation
and a concept of self inherent in the author. In contrast, Mann
articulated Aschenbach's motivation as well as his concept of
self and in the process was not really saying what he had not
already known. In Ibsen's drama I see the dramatist as having
plunged deeper - the image comes from The Wild Duck - in
his search for the self than in any of his other plays except for
Brand, which came much earlier, although the latter play is
saying more about the ego ideal Ibsen identified with than
the workings of his inner mind. The fact that Ibsen was
able to deal so masterfully with the unconscious in a drama,
namely a non-narrative form, is a tribute to his brilliant crafts-
manship. In analyzing the play, the attempt will be made to
332 D A V I D BRONSEN"

show that the author has managed this by a device that

comes across on the stage as partaking of the theater but which
in the last analysis is a theatrical objectification of narrative.
Part of the difference in the existential significance these two
works represent for their respective writers is to be found in the
position each work occupies in the author's development. The
Master Builder follows upon Ibsen's social, realistic, outward-
looking plays and initiates the final series of symbolist dramas,
all of which deal with the persistent outcry that life has been
wrongly spent. Death in Venice, on the other hand, marks the
close of Thomas Mann's work prior to World War I, which had
seen the author in search of himself through a long list of literary
works dealing with the isolation of the aesthetically oriented
individual. There is artistic stylization and a distancing between
the author and his subject in Death in Venice which sets this
work apart from its predecessors. When, shortly before the end
of the novella, we are informed: "There he sat, the master: this
was he who had found a way to reconcile art and honours; who
had written The Abject, and in a style of classic purity renounced
bohemianism and all sympathy with the abyss and the troubled
depths of the outcast human soul, ''1~ a tone of non-involvement
is sounded. We are treated to a detachment that distances itself
from the death that is to follow and which is nowhere to be
found in such a work as Tonio Kr6ger, where the artist was more
clearly identifying with his character.
In 1912, the year of the publication of Death in Venice, Mann
started work on The Magic Mountain, a novel which he was not
to complete and publish until 1924, but which sets forth a syn-
thesis and acceptance of life which Ibsen was never to achieve.
In the central chapter, entitled "Snow," the hero, Hans Castorp,
in a confrontation with what seems like imminent death, stops
seeing life and death as incompatible opposites and apprehends
them both as partaking in the greater unity which is life. The
same novel has the author coming to terms with his intellectual

15Death in Venice, p. 71.

THE ARTIST AGAINST HIMSELF 333

and political views, and integrating sickness - another of his

artistic affinities - into a more encompassing synthesis of self.
The fascination with sickness, death and personal disorientation
continued to express itself as a major source of inspiration in
Mann's works, but was no longer a codified personal statement
of the threat to an insecure self.
Paul Tillich observed that, " T h e person who has found his
identity and thereby the definition of that which lies within, no
longer feels the need to close himself off or to break out of him-
self. He is then bent on realizing that which is expressed in his
inmost being. ''~6 The novella and the drama stand as way-
stataions in the development of the art and psyches of the two
tuthors, but Mann's work attests to its author having arrived at
the position that Tillich describes, while Ibsen is voicing a
plaintive cry of impasse that he sounded again an d again in sub-
sequent works.
Another difference in the two works is the contrast in which
the two main characters stand to one another. Solness and
Aschenbach would not have felt comfortable in each other's
presence and neither would have willingly chosen the company
of the other. Solness is a harsh, splenetic, devious and ruthlessly
ambitious man in a provincial backwater, while Aschenbach is
a man of the world with exquisite manners and the breeding of
a patrician. A further dissimilarity is to be found in the fact that
each author is at variance with the other in the extent to which
he is willing to reveal the fact that he is writing about himself.
Ibsen has disguised Solness by giving him a different profession
and inventing assistants and office help for him, thus making it
appear that it was an imagined rather than an inner world he was
depicting. It was only with the publication after his death in 1906
of the correspondence Ibsen carried on with Emilie Bardach, an
eighteen-year-old Viennese girl that he had fallen in love with

16 Friedenstriiger Paul Tillich. Stimmung zur Verleihung des Friedens-

preises des deutsehen Buehhandels mit der Laudatio yon Bisehof Dibelius
und der Friedenspreis yon Paul Tillieh (Stuttgart: Der deutsche B u c h h a n -
del, 1963), p. 7.
334 DAVID BRONSEN

at sixty-one years of age, that the autobiographical nature o f

The Master Builder became known. Mann, on the other hand,
was overt in his depiction of himself, leaving profuse and trans-
parent clues not only in the work itself but in letters and later
publications destined to be solved by the host of literary critics
and scholars that were engaged in decoding his every allusion.
But the differences in the two works are basically of an ex-
ternal order. A list of similarities dealing not with the details
of plot but the underlying structures and the minds of the pro-
tagonists as well as the implications of their life styles reveals
a remarkable degree of correspondence. The similarity of the
two works begins with the names of the main characters. Mann
was given to what has been called "speaking names" - names
which make a statement about the character. Ibsen was less
inclined to this device, but did make use of it on occasion, as in
the name of iais early character Brand, which in Norwegian
means both "fire" and "sword," and with respect to a number
of characters in his last play, When We Dead Awaken. The names
of both Aschenbach and Solness consist of two elements.
"Aschen," the first part of the name of Mann's character, means
ashes, the remains of what was previously the source of fire and
heat - that which is burnt out and lacking in passion. The no-
vella at one point informs us that the works of the mature Aschen-
bach are lacking in evidence of fiery temperament. " B a c h "
means stream, so that the name conveys the idea of the ashen
remains of a once intense existence being dispersed and washed
away. "Sol", the first syllable in the name of Ibsen's protagonist,
means sun, the source of fire and heat, which in figurative terms
are understood as passion, while "ness" means promontory.
Since the sun is the most prominent of the celestial bodies, to
couple it with such a sufftx is to accentuate to the point of pleo-
nasm. When one relates the name to its bearer, the meaning
would seem to suggest a passion that is not fed and therefore led
to consume itself. The two names, therefore, have in common
the idea of a fire that is self-consuming. In keeping with what is
implied by these names, the artist portrayed in each instance
THE ARTIST A G A I N S T HIMSELF 335

totally dominates the literary work and is constantly the center

of attention. Since the perspective of the novella is reduced to
that of Aschenbach, it follows that he has to be present at all
times. As Solness is the character of a drama, it is not surprising
that he is absent in two scenes of the last act, although here too
he continues to be the subject of every exchange of dialogue.
Both Solness and Aschenbach are solitary, loveless men for
whom affective ties do not exist and who have become accus-
tomed to leading lives that permit of no deeper relatedness to
anything outside their work. The satisfaction and recognition
they have received from their work takes the place of love in
their lives, yet it would be misleadingly simplistic to say that
their creative accomplishments have come at the cost of personal
happiness. The impulse to creativity in each of them would seem
to stem as much from the need to compensate a lifelong emo-
tional dislocation as from artistic talent. It would follow, there-
fore, that without their work-lives these two men would be in-
finitely more impoverished than they already are. Although
work cuts them off from others and makes it necessary for them
to go into themselves, at the same time it represents the greatest
extroversion of which they are capable. Their triumphs and the
defeats of their lives take place within the circumscribed world
of their work, affording them a public image in a large com-
munity of respectful admirers with whom they do not have to
relate. Since work is the justification of their lives and art and
life are for them identical, it is only natural that for each, work
became the focus of utmost dedication. Thus both artists are
engaged in a perpetual act of self-preservation which they carry
out in the name of art.
Central to this act of self-preservation is the maintenance of
control. Aschenbach conveys this in his admiration for the image
of Saint Sebastian, who, pierced by arrows, goes on exerting his
moral self, an attitude also reflected in Aschenbach's favorite
motto, "Hold fast. ''17 For Solness self-preservation means as-

17 Death in Venice, p. 9.
336 DAVID BRONSEN

serting his will at all costs, bending his underlings to his wishes,
even though it means they have to sacrifice their own happiness,
and forcing his wife to surrender her claims to life, so that his
own remain unchecked. Control for both artists means not only
the execution of their intentions but also shutting things out or
not permitting them to happen. Part of what they are shutting
out is consciousness of forces within them that run counter to
the dictates of the will. Karl Jaspers has pointed out that every
intense psychic development in one direction tends towards a
sudden reversal in another. Asceticism, as he observes, invites
voluptuousness, so that the ascetic inevitably is subjected to the
temptation of St. Anthony. 18
Solness and Aschenbach, who have the greater part of their
artistic careers behind them and who are having to face up to
approaching death, suddenly discover within themselves a rebel-
lion against the imperative of discipline, duty and all the sacri-
fices these entail. Both men become engaged in a seemingly
ludicrous attempt to turn back the clock. Long repressed desires
rise to the surface to become prime movers, driving Solness and
Aschenbach into the self-contradictory path of seeking libera-
tion by fleeing from their own lives. In each instance the desire
for freedom and fulfillment expresses itself in sexual attraction.
Aschenbach falls in love with Tadzio, a beautiful Polish youth
of fourteen, and Solness' entire life is changed by his fascination
with the twenty-two year old Hilde. It is a forbidden love that
attracts these two aging men, as well as an unrealizable one.
Aschenbach finds himself unable even to bring himself to talk
to Tadzio, and Hilde, having boldly lured Solness and brought
him completely under her spell, maintains she cannot really run
offwith him because she would not want to hurt his wife. Despite
the hopelessness of their aborted affairs, in each instance the for-
bidden love seems to bring with it a strong suggestion of tran-
scendence. Solness, who is terrified of heights, manages, in the

as Psychologic der Weltanschauungen (G/Sttingen,Heidelberg: Springer,

1960), p. 239.
T H E ARTIST A G A I N S T H I M S E L F 337

face of contemptuous scoffing by his assistant Ragnar, who has

good reason to hate his tyrannical master, to climb to the top of
the tower of the building he has just completed. The tale of the
novella is transported into the context of Greek antiquity with
its celebration of homoerotic love, as suggested by the use of
Homeric hexameters describing a southern landscape and
Aschenbach's musing on the writings of Plato as he focuses on
his love for Tadzio.
Ultimately, however, what is beautiful in these relationships
reposes entirely in the imagination of the men themselves, as
befits artists who all their lives lived by the symbols and images
of their own creation. Not only are these forbidden loves lacking
in any hope of fulfillment, they are also sordid and degrading.
Aschenbach's love is associated with an outbreak of cholera.
In the midst of the plague that surrounds and then claims him,
the venerable artist surrenders his human dignity by letting
himself be grotesquely made up with cosmetics in order to ap-
pear younger in the eyes of Tadzio. Solness also undergoes sur-
render, in the name of his feelings for Hilde, he renounces his
profession, plans to desert his wife, and ends by crashing head
first into a stone quarry after his brief triumph of having climbed
the tower.
In keeping with their different personalities and temperaments,
Aschenbach gazes entranced at his phantom lover as death in the
form of slumber overtakes him, while Solness' death is accom-
panied by the terror and screams of the assembled crowd. Both
artists have fallen victim to their fate, but it is a fate they have
decreed for themselves. The paradoxical situation arises in which
eros, having been severely constrained for so long in the name of
creativity, suddenly breaks through lifelong prohibitions - pro-
hibitions which in this context would have to be identified with
the life instinct, because eros transforms itself into thanatos, the
destroyer. Each character, who previously had been fully in
charge of his life, becomes the author of his own death by cre-
ating a situation for himselfwhich inevitably leads to self-destruc-
tion. In fact, Karl A. Menninger, in his book Man Against Him-

22
338 D A V I D BRONSEN

self, to which I am indebted for the title of my paper, cites Death

in Venice as a literary example o f a man who began his self-
destruction long before the ultimate suicide. 19This is a statement
which can be proved within the context of the literary work and
has been dealt with by a number of critics. The same statement
applies equally to The Master Builder, although, to my knowl-
edge, no one has as yet pointed this out.
The first page of Death in Venice is a description of Aschen-
bach as writer, living the life of the Leistungsethiker, a term
which Mann uses elsewhere and can perhaps best be defined as a
person who finds his greatest meaning in life through unexcelled
achievement. Mann elaborated on this concept in his remark
that " w o r k is life's symbol of ethics" which took on personal
reality for him with "the subjective awareness" that he could
"under no circumstances do better than he had.'2~ The novella
informs the reader that it was "his work, for which Aschenbach
lived," and in the name of which he observed a "pattern of self-
discipline he had followed from his youth up. ''21 For the Lei-
stungsethiker the strenuousness of creation and the magnitude
of the obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of the human
optimum give legitimacy to the finished product. Thus, the
image of St. Sebastian being pierced by arrows in indispensable
to Aschenbach's credentials as artist.
To restore himself from the fatigues of the day's labor,
Aschenbach, who is referred to as "the lonely man," "the soli-
tary, ''22 goes out for a stroll which takes him to a nearby ceme-
tery. There, in the abode of the dead, after reading tomb markers
that bear inscriptions referring to a world beyond, Aschenbach
has a brief encounter with a man who stands before a backdrop
suggestive of a portal leading to another world: " a man," the
passage reads, "standing in the portico, above the two apocalyp-

19 New York: Harcourt Brace, (1938), p. 16.

20 Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, op. cit., p. 97.
21 D e a t h in Venice, p. 6.
22 Ibid., p. 63.
THE ARTIST AGAINST HIMSELF 339

tic beasts that guarded the s t a i r c a s e . . . ,,a3 Inexplicably, the

chance encounter with the unidentified man puts the artist in
mind of a trip he would like to take, and at once the idea be-
comes a source of "longing," " a passion," " a seizure," "almost
a hallucination.'24 He conjures up visions of terror and yearning,
his desire is described as a "contagion. ''25 Moreover, the de-
scription of the "craving for freedom, release, f o r g e t f u l n e s s . . .
flight from . . . a rigid, cold and passionate service ''26 is men-
tioned almost in juxtaposition with the description of Aschen-
bach at work.
Aschenbach's voyage takes him to Venice, where he is picked
up in a gondola which is described as being black as a coffin, the
owner of which insists on taking him to the Lido instead of to
the steamboat landing. Just as was the case with the man in the
cemetery, the gondolier has taken possession of him, seemingly
against his will. Aschenbach surrenders to both of these stran-
gers, who are described as surly, have similar facial features and
appear to be out of place in their surroundings. The imagery of
death which originated in the cemetery is reinforced with the
mention not only of the coffin but also the association of the ride
in the gondola to a trip with Charon, the ferryman who con-
veyed the souls of the dead across the river Acheron.
Aschenbach, who has been c.arried along by strangely irresist-
ible forces, encounters in Tadzio the most irresistible force of all.
He too is foreign and is moreover described in terms that would
suggest that he is not really of this world: his is "such [a] unique
personal charm, that [Aschenbach] thought he had never seen
[the like], either in nature or a r t . . . ,27 Tadzio's "perfect beau-
ty," of a " G r e e k sculpture," his "head of Eros" and his expres-
sion of pure and godlike serenity ''~8 have the air of an ultra-

23Ibid., p. 4.
24 Ibid., p. 5.
25 Ibid., p. 6.
2e Ibid., p. 7.
27Ibid., pp. 25--26.
28 Ibid., p. 25.

22*
340 D A V I D BRONSEN

mundane universe. And indeed this seems to be borne out by the

epithet given Tadzio - in the G e r m a n original "Psychagog" -
literally a guide of the soul, which is also the sobriquet of Her-
mes, the messenger of the gods whose function was to guide the
dead into the underworld.
With the introduction of Tadzio into the novella the reader
is ready for the insight of anagnorisis, which Northrop Frye has
described in the following manner:

At a certain point in the narrative, the point which Aristotle called

anagnorisis, or recognition, the sense of linear continuity of partici-
pation in the action changes perspective, and what we now see is
a total design or unifying structure in the narrative . . . Participa-
tion in the continuity of the narrative leads to the discovery or
recognition of the theme, which is the narrative seen as total de-
sign.z9

It is part of the total design and unifying structure of Mann's

novella that the L e i s t u n y s e t h i k e r Aschenbach, who has been
described as working to the point of exhaustion and who has
always driven himself to the "imperative summons ''3~ of his
work, is now answering to another summoner, which in a dream
expresses itself as "uttermost surrender. ''31 The Aschenbach
who was depicted as living by exertion appears supine and limply
inactive in the last part of the novella. The strength and resolu-
tion of Saint Sebastian has deserted him in the face of his un-
consciously conceived design for his own extinction, for Aschen-
bach is in fact an instigator of, as well as an accessory to, all the
forces that seem to be deciding his fate. The seeming concatena-
tion of fortuitous circumstance, including the ostensible impos-
sibility of leaving Tadzio and fleeing the cholera that is sweeping
Venice, has been dictated by Aschenbach's innermost being.

z9 Northrop Frye, "The Road of Excess," Myth and Symbol : Critical

Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska, 1963), pp. 7--8.
~oDeath in Venice, p. 41.
~l Ibid., p. 68.
T H E ARTIST A G A I N S T HIMSELF 341

At one point Tadzio is pictured as a half-god, with dripping

locks emerging from the ocean, and the ocean is identified not
only with him but also with Venice and with the hypnotic spell
cast over Aschenbach. It is perhaps illuminating to note that for
Freud water and the ocean represent a regressive concept as-
sociated with the amniotic fluid and the return to the womb,
while for Jung water is seen as the common symbol for the un-
conscious in which a face is revealed that one does not show to
the world. In any case, Mann himself remarked on his own con-
cept of the symbolic function of water some years after publica-
tion of the novella: " T h e ocean is not a landscape, it is the ex-
perience of eternity, of nothingness and death, a metaphysical
dream . . . . ,,3~
Like Thomas Mann, Ibsen was engaged in penetrating the
unconscious and revealing the face one hides from the world.
In The Master Builder as in Mann's novella, the catalyst appears
in the form of forbidden love for a young person who captures
the imagination and thoughts of the main character to the point
of domination and destruction. Hilde enters Solness' life, as he
points out, precisely at a time when he had been feeling very
1finch alone and hopeless. In fact, the master builder seems to be
afraid that he is losing his powers, that his inferiors are rising up
to challenge him and he is no longer in command. The sugges-
tion that he is verging on a breakdown is reflected in his misplaced
guilt and the feeling of others that he is not in his right mind.
To Hilde's question as to whether he can use her, he responds
with excited affirmation that she can give him back his youth.
If such a thing can be given, it would seem that Hilde would be
the right person for the task. She has arrived unburdened by
either baggage or money and is utterly indifferent to practical
considerations, which earns her the master builder's admiration.
For Solness, who is weighed down with feelings of obligation,
guilt and oppressive memories, Hilde's buoyancy, freedom and
high spirits might well provide some of the qualities he finds

821 am indebted to Professor Michael Mann for this quotation.

342 D A V I D BRONSEN

lacking in himself. In commenting on Solness' feelings of guilt,

Hilde offers herself as an example o f having a "robust con-
science, ''zz which in her terms means daring to be what one
wishes, But she will not serve him as a subordinate, as she scorn-
fully makes clear when Solness suggests she enter his employ.
On the contrary, she has come to make claims on him. Indeed
Solness, who is so accustomed to being the ruling force in the
lives of those he encounters, surrenders to all her wishes and sug-
gestions. The relationship quickly takes on uncanny qualities.
Hilde reads Solness' inmost thoughts, or else she conceives of
ideas to which he had never permitted himself to give expression.
In addition, Hilde informs Solness that she dreams almost every
night, suggesting her close contact with the unconscious from
which he apparently is so estranged.
The suggestive power she exerts over Solness partakes of the
extraordinary. Within a few minutes after her arrival Hilde
wanders around the room with her hands behind her back and
Solness, in watching her, falls into the same stance. Their tastes
and their dislikes prove a number of times to be identical and
moreover they find themselves attributing to one another the
power to wish things into reality. In answer to Hilde's question,
if he is sure that he has never called to her silently, Solness agrees
that he must have done so. When he asks, " H o w have you come
to be what you are, Hilde ?", she replies, " H o w did you make
me what I am ?,,~4 I t is apparent that these two people, whose
lives have become inextricably bound up with one another, are
not really two people at all, but rather that Hilde is a symbolic
representation of something in Solness.
Hilde represents freedom - she can leave home with hardly a
backward glance. She is unfettered by the restraints of civiliza-
tion, as symbolized by money and material objects. She is un-
troubled by guilt. It is true that Hilde brings Solness a new
awareness of life, but ultimately it is not vitality and life-giving

33 The M a s t e r Builder (reference to footnote no. 1), pp. 183--84.

~4 Ibid., p. 209.
T H E ARTIST A G A I N S T H I M S E L F 343

force she stands for, but death. As Solness remarks, she is a bird
c f prey. At one point Solness informs her, " I begin to think
there is no part of me that is safe from you. ''3~ And elsewhere
Hilde describes herself as "Dressed to Kill !,30 _ a phrase that
carries the same meaning in the original Norwegian, We see
Hilde's destructive side when she and Solness are discussing the
last time he climbed to the top of a tower. Hilde says, " i t was
so wonderfully thrilling to stand below and look up to you.
What if he were to fall over - he, the master builder himself! ''aT
Already back then when he had hardly taken notice of her; the
spirit of Hilde had nearly been the death of the master builder.
The same quality of fascination with death is expressed when
Hilde speaks of her dreams of falling. Solness, who has precisely
the same dream of falling from a great height, says that the
dreams make him "go cold as ice," while Hilde says she finds
the dream "exciting. ''as One understands that Solness' horror
and Hilde's excitement are two varying aspects of fascination.
It is clear from Hilde's repeated use of the word "exciting" that
the term connotes sexual excitement for her and that given its
context, eros takes on the meaning of thanatos.
The culmination of Hilde's fixation on the death wish comes
in the final act. She knows that Solness becomes dizzy when
climbing, yet she wills him to do so. There are even hints that
she both wishes and anticipates his destruction, as when she says
she is not going to break her neck, but rather stay on the ground
and watch Solness climb the tower. The fact that Solness climbs
to his death at Hilde's bidding is a metaphorical statement that
she has gained ultimate control over him, which is reinforced by
her statement that she is climbing with him.
The single resource that had preserved Solness up to then was
his artistic integrity - his belief in the importance of his work.
When he confesses to Hilde, "This building of homes for human

3n Ibid., p . 190.
as Ibid., p. 196.
aTIbid., p. 154.
aa Ibid., p. 168.
344 D A V I D BRONSEN

beings isn't worth a rap. It all amounts to nothing -,,~9 he has

died as an artist and as a man. His renunciation of the artist's
vocation brings with it a surrender to the desire for self-indul-
gence and death, accompanied by Hilde's ecstatic cries.
The rebirth that Solness experienced with the dionysian figure
that is Hilde was also his death, and the fact that the master
builder plunged to gory destruction makes it clear that his death
was not transcendent. The artistic vision revealed in Death in
Venice and The M a s t e r Builder is a statement of paradox.
In order to live, the dedicated artist must kill off the instinctual
forces which are the well-spring of life itself. If, on the other
hand, he abandons himself to the life force, he dies spiritually
and mortally.

+9Ibid., p. 208.