Venice Desired

Convergences: Inventories of the Present

by Tony Tanner

If there is one city that might be said to embody both reason and desire, it would surely be a thousand-year triumph of rational legislation, aesthetic and sensual self-expression, and self-creation―powerful, lovely, serene. Unique in so many ways, Venice is also unique in its relation to writing. London has Dickens, Paris has Balzac, Saint Petersburg has Dostoevsky, Dublin has Joyce, but there is simply no comparable writer for, or out of, Venice.

Venice effectively disappeared from history altogether in 1797 after its defeat by Napoleon. From then on, it seemed to exist as a curiously marooned spectacle. Literally marooned―the city mysteriously growing out of the sea, the beautiful stone impossibly floating on water―but temporally marooned as well, stagnating outside history. Yet as spectacle, as the beautiful city par excellence, the city of art, the city as art and as spectacular example, as the greatest and richest republic in the history of the world, now declined and fallen, Venice became an important site for the European imagination.

Watery, dark, silent, a place of sensuality and secrecy; of masks and masquerading; of an always possibly treacherous beauty; of Desdemona and Iago, Shylock, Volpone; of conspiracy and courtesans in Otway; an obvious setting for many Gothic novels―Venice is not written from the inside but variously appropriated from without. Venice―the place, the name, the dream―seems to lend itself to a whole variety of appreciations, recuperations, and and hallucinations. In decay and decline, yet saturated with secret sexuality―suggesting a heady compound of death and desire―Venice becomes for many writers what is was for both “the greenest island of my imagination” and a “sea-sodom.” It also, as this book tries to show, plays a crucial role in the development of modern writing. Tony Tanner skillfully lays before us the many ways in which this dreamlike city has been summoned up, depicted, dramatized―then rediscovered or transfigured in selected writings through the years.

Genres: History

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Geoff]

"Watery, dark, silent, Venice has long been a site and topic for the European imagination. Venice - the place, the names, the dream - has been the scene and inspiration of many writers, particularly Byron, Ruskin, James, von Hoffmannsthal, Proust and Pound. They are the focus of Tony Tanner's exploration of Venice in literature and the starting point for further discussions of Browning and Melville, Rilke, Mann and Sartre. Defeated by Napoleon in 1797, Venice dropped out of history, languishing through two centuries as a curiously marooned spectacle. The beautiful city par excellence, the greatest and richest and most splendid republic, now declined and fallen, it lent itself to appreciation and recuperation in writing. And as mediated by Ruskin, it was to play a crucial role in the development of modern writing."

[scrapespaghetti · Rating 2 out of 5]

(particularly in decay and decline), falling or sinking to ruins and fragments, yet saturated with secretive sexuality—thus emanating or suggesting a heady compound of death and desire—Venice becomes for many writers what it was, in anticipation, for Byron: "the greenest island of my imagination." When Byron left Venice two years later, it had become a "sea Sodom." Venice had a way of turning on her writerly admirers as no other city does.[p5]

(Venice’s reality as a city combines two extremes almost without transition: a glorious, unexampled, and shining creativity, and a history of sordid, labyrinthine corruption and profound degradation. Venice as quasi-Platonic sovereign republic; Venice as city of prisons, sinister police forces, internal dissension, and tyranny.)
(a certain troubling consistency in Venice’s image keeps recurring. One is (Tanner speaks here of Ruskin) how in Venice "the transition from gorgeousness to garbage [the city’s two extremes] is swift indeed." This rapid oscillation between Paradise and Inferno)

(The second feature of Venice’s image is the way in which the city is always written about from the outside (by a visitor from the outside) and is therefore already "grounded in an image which in turn was nourished by a textually based text. Venice is always the already written as well as the already seen, the already read." Thus Proust in a sense inherits Venice from Ruskin by reading about it, and in turn writing it, so to speak, in his own idiosyncratic way. Tanner remarks:)
Farness is all. In terms of Proust’s novel, Venice (the word-name) both represents and is the indefinable and unconfinable pleasure of absence, a pleasure which is indistinguishable from pleasure deferred, or that deferral which is pleasure. Venice present is Venice lost…. But perhaps that losing is a prelude to another finding—a finding again—in another mode…. The pleasure of Venice is no unambiguous matter. [VD243]