If there is one city that might be said to embody both reason and
desire, it would surely be Venice: 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
Byron: 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.
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