Dionysus and His Discontents: Variations on a Motif in Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Thomas Mann

The essay presents a comparative analysis of three modernist novellas—Heart of Darkness, Death in Venice, and The Turn of the Screw—focusing on their use of Dionysian motifs, whereby “Dionysian” is intended in its Nietzschean context. Alongside the thematic literary connections it draws, the essay also reflects on the motives and implications of Nietzsche’s Dionysism for modernist aesthetics: Nietzsche’s eventual subsumption of the Apollonian under the Dionysian ushers in modernity’s espousal of irrationality, disease, darkness, and concealment as its privileged moments of expression. However, this new Dionysism is also symptomatic of the anxiety experienced in the aftermath of the death of God (and the concomitant death of the soul), and the essay demonstrates that the figure of the irrational in all three novellas is conveyed in terms of the struggle of a soul.