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Book Reviews 101 parallels, like, for instance, the link between the gray in Chad Newsome's hair and the small skull on the cap of one of Holbein's ambassadors. Analogies of this sort detract from the contribution offered by this collection of essays. Tony Tanner. Venice Desired. Cambridge : Harvard U P, 1992. 384 pp. $29.95. By Pierre Walker, Western Michigan University The central point of Tony Tanner's Venice Desired is that when modern European authors write about Venice, they construct the city in particular ways. How they construct Venice, how those constructs are similar, and to a lesser extent (but central to Tanner's discussion of Henry James), how Ruskin's writing on Venice is central to subsequent literary constructs of Venice are Tanner's subject. The fundamental similarity of the various constructs of Venice that Tanner explores relies on the recurring view of Venice as a city of opposites; it is, as Tanner puts it, "a Western city saturated with the East; a city of land and stone everywhere penetrated by water; a city of great piety and ruthless mercantilism; a city where enlightenment and licentiousness, reason and desire, indeed art and nature flow and flower together—Venice is indeed the surpassing-all-other embodiment of that absolute ambiguity which is radiant life containing certain death" (368). Tanner focuses on a dozen writers of the age following the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797 and on how they represented their literary construction of Venice and characterized and modulated between Venice's opposites. Byron, Ruskin, James, Hofmannsthal, Proust, and Pound each receive separate chapters. Howells, Melville, Browning, Rilke, Sartre, and, naturally, Mann's "Death in Venice" also receive attention. In each of the central chapters, the method and the point are similar; Tanner discusses everything the author wrote about Venice and shows how each author handled the inherent and paradoxical contradictory nature of Venice. Because of the book's exhaustive consideration of all the Venice writings of Byron, Ruskin, James, Hofmannsthal, Proust, and Pound, Venice Desired strikes its reader as more devoted to the superficial exposition, complete with long plot synopses and lengthy quoted passages followed by a minimum of analysis, of each and every piece these writers produced on Venice at the cost of a concise foregrounding of the argument, of what the positive and the negative sides of Venice were in these texts, and of how the author's sense of Venice evolved during the course of his (and always his) career. There is nothing wrong in itself with the desire to be all inclusive, but Venice Desired would not have suffered from being a hundred pages shorter. 102 The Henry James Review None of the chapters appears to be written for specialists. In the James chapter Tanner treats us with detailed plot summaries of The Princess Casamassima and The Aspern Papers (though he spares us the detailed plot synopsis in the section on The Wings of the Dove; apparently he assumes his readers know this novel). Given the wide scope of the entire book, Tanner is probably wise to have written it for readers who are not experts on each of the authors he examines. The reader of the Henry James Review, however, is not likely to be overwhelmed by Tanner's revelations that in the letter Hyacinth writes to the Princess describing Venice, "Hyacinth's habitual tone is that of a yearning outsider whose desire is not to dismantle and destroy, but to gain admittance to, and enjoy, a socialaesthetic world from which he is...excluded" (174-75), that Hyacinth elides and overlooks "both the 'visible misery' and the 'barbarian' tourists" of Venice and sees the city as "simply a site for felicitous aesthetic epiphanies" (175), or that the letter looks like an early piece of James travel writing (175-76). One is certainly underwhelmed by Tanner's conclusion that "what is revealing in The Princess Casamassima is the use of Venice-as-spectacle as a site of total and terminal depoliticization. It could be James's last letter to himself and, effectively, it subverts the whole novel" (176). We realize from these two sentences, and from a remark in the one...

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