Panel: Adaptation & Influence | Q&A: Tues. April 12 @ 6pm

Any adaptation of art between two mediums is also a kind of translation. Each medium has its own toolbox for conveying meaning through combinations of its unique signs. In written works, we are allowed to see the thoughts and feelings of characters and we are told, from one word to the next, a particular procession of events. Things cannot proceed in exactly the same manner in film. The audience is not told about the thoughts and feelings of characters, except through narration, and the moving images comes to take the place of the written word. Suddenly, sound is available as a meaning making tactic. Elements in the semiotic toolbox are exchanged, replaced, or added. The challenge of adaptation is one of purpose. In adaptation one can choose to preserve, alter, remove or add meanings in the new work that may or may not be present in the original.

Luchino Visconti's 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice masterfully showcases the potential of adaptation. Through careful consideration of thematic meaning, Visconti makes small alterations to the novella's contents that preserve and build upon Mann's themes. For example, the main character's shift in occupation from a writer in the novella to a musical composer in the film serves multiple purposes. It intimately connects the character to Visconti through his association with opera and auditory arts, and it utilizes the medium of film to convey this connection. Visconti's use of additional scenes and characters all serve a translation purpose—to preserve and to add to Mann's themes. I will focus on two such themes: the death of aristocracy and the dangers of beauty.

Through the "blender of metaphor," this thematic message of death can be transposed to the Death of aristocracy. Because Achenbach is associated with aristocracy, he can be understood as a stand in for Aristocracy as a whole. The way he acts and thinks indicates similarities with aristocracy. Achenbach’s freedom of movement largely comes from his wealth, and he uses it to admire his object. The morality of modernity is not compatible with aristocracy. The Death of aristocracy is also self-inflicted. Just as it is Achenbach’s willful staying in Venice that is ultimately his demise, aristocracy must not deny the movement of history into a form that makes it obsolete. Therefore, if aristocracy spends too much time with classicism and old customs, then aristocracy will be destroyed. Aristocrats must look towards the future in order not to be destroyed.

This in turn signaled a certain barbarism in in places still afflicted by cholera, in part owed to the origins of cholera in Asia and the Indian Subcontinent. Therefore, Italy adopted a plan of silence. As Frank M. Snowden, Yale historian and author of Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present puts it, “To admit an outbreak of Asiatic cholera was too dishonorable a confession of backwardness.” These two responses work together to explain the public health response of the Venetian commune. The association of cholera with backwardness would lead them to want to keep it hidden, and the plan of the Italian government endorsed this motivation.

However, Death in Venice’s construction of cholera is inconsistent with the reality of cholera in several ways. Most immediately, the visceral disgust of cholera is absent. As Frank Snowden puts it, “Mann spared von Achenbach the final indignity of revealing his symptoms, allowing him instead to make medical history by becoming the first cholera patient ever to die peacefully asleep in a desk chair.” Cholera inspired terror in people through the quickness of death after the onset of symptoms, the corpse-like appearance of bodies hovering near death, and the “vigorous … contractions that cause limbs to shake and twitch for a prolonged period” after death. This terror is absent in Death in Venice.

There is also an inconsistency of cholera’s reality as a highly political ailment. Prevalence of cholera was much higher among poor people. For example, the death rate of cholera was 8 per thousand in the 1837 Naples epidemic, but 30.6 per thousand in the poverty-stricken Porto district. This uneven distribution of disease combined with the visceral disgust of death-by-cholera caused people to distrust governmental public health efforts. Finally, defeating cholera required significant advancements in public health understandings, specifically the abandonment of the miasma theory of disease in favor of germ theory.

Overall, this construction of cholera is important for the message of Death in Venice because it informs the historical context of each story’s release. Thomas Mann’s original novella deals explicitly with the Death of aristocracy as it was occurring. Snowden remarks that “Cholera moved in the wake of revolution rather than triggering it.” Revolution, in this case the risorgimento, weakens aristocracy while cholera delivers the final blow. Just as Achenbach can be said to be half-dead, suffering from a prior ailment that is the occasion for his vacation to Venice, aristocracy in 1911 can be said to be half dead, with cholera bringing about the complete Death of aristocracy. Thus, the message about Death is reformulated. A preoccupation with Beauty is dangerous for everyone. Even those who ought to be protected best, such as the aristocrats, may succumb to a disease with a lowly connotation such as cholera when they lose sight of their place in the progress of history.