The more you read the novella, the more you should wonder, I think, which judgments are to be taken as bedrock.

The variety within Mann's fiction is impressive and fascinating. But Joyce is even more various and many-sided. He begins his career with a wonderful sequence of bleak studies about the ways in which human lives can go awry - in my view, Dubliners is underrated.

For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it has three score and ten "toptypsical" meanings - an exaggeration, of course, but an important reminder to readers who like their fiction definite.

I suspect that any worthwhile exploration of these deep questions about living requires going beyond abstract discussions to the vivid presentation of possibilities. If readers are to be prompted to serious examination of their lives, anatomy isn't enough. We have to be stimulated to imagine, in some detail, what it would be like to live in particular ways.

Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn.

I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of Mann's and Aschenbach's sexuality), I use philosophical sources (but not in the way many Mann critics do, where the philosophical theses and concepts seem to be counters to be pushed around rather than ideas to be probed), and I use juxtapositions with other literary works (including Mann's other fiction) and with works of music.

Mann is widely recognized as a master of irony and ambiguity, yet it's remarkable how quickly people foreclose options he carefully leaves open. Lots of readers - including eminent critics - jump to conclusions: that Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is a central background text, that Aschenbach is an inferior writer, that he's never been attracted by pubescent male beauty before, that he dies of cholera.