"Poor Venice … The Supreme Bugbear of Literature"

Thus in 1872, Henry James, on overloading the Venetian city with commentary. Seventy years later, in 1942, the poet Diego Valeri signed off on his own attempt in Guida sentimental di Venezia to describe Venice, by lamenting many fine pages of effort but not a single one that offered "a key to the mystery" ("ma non una pagina che vi dia la chiave del mistero"). Valeri had, he noted, canvassed both history and legend, verse and prose, grandeur and decadence; he had invoked Baudelaire's Spleen et idéal as well as Goethe's Dictung und Wahrheit. Everything was at hand for translating Venice into words, yet the result of all this labor was, despite wonderful and memorable pages, that there was no key to open the mystery of this unsayable place (indicibile città). Valeri's frustration, though tinged with pride at his own perseverance, is echoed by many others. Not least Henry James, whose later essay of 1882 opined that "There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject" of Venice. Such admission (and perhaps defiance, as these writers go on to "say" much on the subject) seems de rigueur: Predrag Matvejevif asks rhetorically, "What can one add to the history of the city that history itself does not already know?"; while James warned that "he had no information whatever to offer" and therefore he could not "pretend [that he would] enlighten the reader." Despite such disavowals, Matvejevif's mini-essays offer some oblique and informative insights, while James, allowing as how there is "nothing new to be said about her certainly," nonetheless thinks "the old is better than any novelty." The danger there, as the ever vigilant Régis Debray warns us, is that we take commentaries on other commentaries for novel "sensations." Yet too many subsequent writers, unlike James, do not confess their lack of novelty. Morand remains, he says, unmoved by the ridicule directed at those who write about Venice; so, clearly, do others. But then ever since at least 1494 it has been clear, as it was to the Milanese Pietro Casola, that "so much has been said and written that it appears … there is nothing left to say."

It is precisely this modern persistence in the face of the unsayable and the overdetermined that intrigues me. If the problem was "notorious" already in 1882—James naturally cites the hovering presence of John Ruskin—then it has become both positively routine and frequently banal by the twenty-first century to propose any remarks on Venice. That risk of superficiality can, of course, be embraced deliberately: Joseph Brodsky thinks "surfaces … are often more telling than their contents." Nonetheless, there is now much more "information" than James considered was available; the modern scholarly industry on the Serenissima is enormous, and that traditional sobriquet suggests how much "she" has maintained her sang-froid in the face of probing academic research (and even perhaps, as Matthew Arnold said of Shakespeare, has managed to abide its questions with serenity). But in many ways there is a disconnect between the kind of insights that James and Valeri essayed and the weighty and imposing scholarship that has, indeed, like massive keys turning smoothly in recently oiled locks, opened up the society, culture, arts, and politics of the Venetian Republic to our fuller understanding.

I am not, then, concerned with the considerable and indeed daunting academic and specialist literature on Venice, but with a whole range of other writings that might be labelled bellettristic, essayist, or journalistic. The French have been particularly drawn to this mode, the form of which they would perhaps term the récit, what Régis Debray describes as platitudes from some "prestigious pen" (though in his case, it clearly takes one to identify such!). Their creativity and productivity are to be marvelled at: Contre Venise, Venises, Nudités de Venise, Les Dimanches de Venise, La vie vénitienne, there are new titles every time I go to Venetian bookstores, not to mention the publication in tiny bouquins of the obiter dicta of earlier prestigious pens, like Alfred...