Intersecting Geographies/Intertextual Traces: Queered Desire and Imperilled Love in Michael Cunningham’s <i>By Nightfall</i> and Thomas Mann’s <i>Death in Venice</i>

Abstract

This article explores Michael Cunningham’s 2010 novel, <i>By Nightfall</i> along with its suggestive fragments of Thomas Mann’s novella <i>Death in Venice</i> (1912). In an examination of two beautiful young men, Tadzio in <i>Death in Venice</i> and Mizzy in <i>By Nightfall</i>, the article investigates the dialectic between (queered) desire and death/self-dissolution. Through a deployment of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the article will interrogate the permeable boundaries between homoerotic love, beauty and death. Derrida’s concept of the trace is used as indicative of the paradoxical relationship between absence and presence to investigate the imbrication of the constitutive and yet also destructive and unstable relationship between Eros and Thanatos, beauty and lack, ideality and actuality. In both texts, art and the quest for ideal beauty become fatally caught up with self- deception and sexual ambiguity, played out against the respective backdrops of early twentieth-century Venice and contemporary Manhattan. In the figures of Gustav Aschenbach and Peter Harris, the article demonstrates how they embody a threatened heterosexuality and a precarious selfhood involving, not only a courting of death, but, furthermore, an exposure of the fissures within seemingly hegemonic gendered subjectivity.