What Killed Aschenbach?  In response to:  Love in Venice from
the January 9, 2014 issue  To the Editors:  Leo Carey concludes
his thoughtful review of my Deaths in Venice: The Cases of
Gustav von Aschenbach [NYR, January 9] by voicing the reasonable
concern that, in giving prominence to Mann the serious thinker,
I force Mann the artist to recede into the background. But I
think my book captures important aspects of Mann’s artistry.
One point of my title was to signal the many ambiguities of
Death in Venice: “Deaths” not “Death,” “Cases” not “Case.”
Traditionally, certain claims are taken for granted—Aschenbach
is an artistic failure, he dies of cholera—and since these
claims tend to limit the philosophical exploration of the
novella, I hoped to show that they are not required. Carey reads
me as aiming to replace one set of interpretive assumptions with
another, and criticizes some of my readings by summarizing the
traditional grounds for the standard presuppositions; that style
of argument assumes that we ha