Absolute Irony and Despairing Vision in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to apply Alan Wilde’s concept of absolute irony to two quintessential modernist texts – Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In Horizons of Assent, Wilde discusses about crisis in modernist aesthetics. According to him, this is the crisis of unresolved irony that modernist texts use as a central trope or consciousness. He names such a modernist use of irony as absolute irony. When applied to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, it becomes clear that Mann ironizes the tendency to be sexually immoral and yet the irony does not condemn it so that ambivalence remains even in the ending of the novella. For Eliot, the modernist landscape without morality and faith – which he ironizes – remains a waste land till the end because the rain never falls. The paradox of death-in-life, which the use of absolute irony gives rise to, in The Waste Land remains unresolved. So, the dissertation concludes that Alan Wilde’s theory of absolute irony applies quite well to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and that it comes out as a defining characteristic of modernist aesthetics.