Killing the Moonlight

Modernism in Venice

Jennifer Scappettone

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231537742
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: Literature

As a city that seems to float between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has long seduced the Western imagination. Since the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies about the sinking city have engendered an elaborate series of romantic clichés, provoking conflicting responses: some modern artists and intellectuals embrace the resistance to modernity manifest in Venice's labyrinthine premodern form and temporality, whereas others aspire to modernize by "killing the moonlight" of Venice, in the Futurists' notorious phrase.

Spanning the history of literature, art, and architecture—from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Ezra Pound to Manfredo Tafuri, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Coover—Killing the Moonlight tracks the pressures that modernity has placed on the legacy of romantic Venice, and the distinctive strains of aesthetic invention that resulted from the clash. In Venetian incarnations of modernism, the anachronistic urban fabric and vestigial sentiment that both the nation-state of Italy and the historical avant-garde would cast off become incompletely assimilated parts of the new. Killing the Moonlight brings Venice into the geography of modernity as a living city rather than a metaphor for death, and presents the archipelago as a crucible for those seeking to define and transgress the conceptual limits of modernism. In strategic detours from the capitals of modernity, the book redrafts the confines of modernist culture in both geographical and historical terms.

1. “THE ENTANGLEMENT OF MEMORY”

RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE OF PRESENT AND PAST IN RUSKIN’S VENETIAN HISTORIES

Repose, as it is expressed in material things, is either a simple appearance of permanence and quietness…or else it is repose proper, the rest of things in which there is vitality or capability of motion actual or imagined.

—John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume III

SHIFTING TOUCHSTONES

“You know I promised them no Romance, I promised them stones. Not even bread. I do not feel any romance in Venice. It is simply a heap of ruins.”¹ So writes John Ruskin to his father in 1852. In volume II of The Stones of Venice (1853), he redirects the force of this rebuke, condemning the ideal of Venice forged by his century’s “impotent feelings of romance” as itself a ruin, but lacking substance: “The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust” (Works 10:8). Ruskin’s brutal daylight takes aim at enchantments such as those underpinning Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, themselves derivative of tropes in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho—and reproduced to hollow effect in middlebrow novels and travelogues:

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;

A palace and a prison on each hand:

I saw from out the wave her structures rise

As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand:²

Rejecting any conception of Venetian “structures” erected through hocus pocus, and resisting the temptation “to submit ourselves to their undistinguished enchantment” (Works 9:59), Ruskin sets out instead to analyze their concrete “Foundations” (as announced by the title of Stones’ opening volume). Ruskin’s cautionary tale of Venetian rise and decline will be based on “frank inquiry,” opposing “the indolence of imagination” (10:9), in what is perhaps a direct reference to Byron’s description of Venice as “the greenest island of my imagination.”³ Stripped of Romantic embellishment, the “fragments” of Venice can be confronted in their immediacy—without recourse to parasitic indulgence in their decay or to fanciful restoration, whether literal or literary.⁴ Ruskin’s history will be based on the actual stones of Venice, however battered or unstable.

The seventeen years of research leading up to The Stones of Venice were only the beginning of Ruskin’s audacious departure from the literary tradition surrounding the city. In Praeterita (1886–89), he justified a half-century of ensuing work on Venice by asserting that “her history had been falsely written…, and not even by any of her own people understood,” and that before he began to study them, various Venetian masters were virtually unavailable to the senses: “Tintoret was virtually unseen, Veronese unfelt, Carpaccio not so much as named” (35:156). In restoring the sensuous immediacy of Venetian materials to the work of historiography, Ruskin underscores their failure to be still—and even goes so far as to invert the agency of the senses from time to time. St. Mark’s Rest: The History of Venice, Written for the Help of the Few Travellers Who Still Care for Her Monuments (1877–84) grants the city itself the power of sight, invoking “this amphibious city—this Phocaea, or sea-dog of towns,—looking with soft human eyes at you from the sand, Proteus himself latent in the salt-smelling skin of her” (24:263). This prose embraces the sea-town’s metamorphosis: It equates Venice with an ancient Ionian capital of navigators, then with the seal (phoke) immanent in its name, represented as a hybrid sea creature; next it personifies Venice, feminizing its “skin” only after infusing it with the scent of Proteus. The amphibious city exceeds the observer’s grasp despite his efforts to conjure it with the deictic “this.” The unfinished aggregation of essays he gathered under the heading St. Mark’s Rest was intended to cap Stones, Ruskin’s only prior history⁵; but its sentences stage their surrender to a flux made literal by the city of stone in water.

Henry James wrote of this series of pamphlets, “There is an inconceivable want of form in it, though the author has spent his life in laying down the principles of form and scolding people for departing from them; but it throbs and flashes with the love of its subject—a love disconcerted and abjured, but which has still much of the force of inspiration.”⁶ Ruskin confesses to his passion for Venice in Praeterita, transcribing an 1841 diary exclamation: “This, and Chamouni, are my two bournes of Earth.” (The diary may originally have read “homes,” but Ruskin’s 1887 transmutation of the quote for his memoir, characterizing Venice as both life’s destination and boundary, is a generative one.)⁷ Abjuring the decades of research that this passion inspired, consummated only in part, as “bye-work,” the elder Ruskin then ruefully ascribes to the city the role of “a vain temptation,” substantiating this claim with the diary’s gushing observation that in Venice, “[t]here is moon enough to make half the sanities of the earth lunatic.”⁸ James revels in this tendency of Ruskin’s writing to be led into temptation, straying from its author’s “narrow theological spirit”⁹; the younger author is equally an admirer of Walter Pater, who noted that the value of attempts “to define beauty in the abstract…has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way.”¹⁰ Both successors to Ruskin prize the empirical pursuit of an object as it dodges or exceeds abstract aesthetic principles “in the most concrete terms possible”¹¹—the pursuit of an object that thwarts undeviating inscription.

FIGURE 1.1. John Ruskin, “Moonlight on Venice, from the Lagoon,” The Stones of Venice, volume II, plate J, 1853.

In his first history, aspiring to chart a linear narrative of Venice’s rise and fall, Ruskin had at least endeavored “to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat like passing bells, against the STONES OF VENICE.”¹² Such opening rhetoric exhibits the early venture’s wish to capture the transient stones of Venice as a bounded image before the water’s advance masters them once and for all. Aiming to distill what he later identified as “the laws of national strength and virtue” to which Venetian art could testify,¹³ the nostalgic young aesthetic historiographer hopes to suspend the Gothic forms of the Venetian Republic in drawings and text. This struggle is twofold: he has to extract Venice from its tidal and sociopolitical tumult as a coherent “image” so as to isolate it in time as a historical case. Stones strives to assign exemplary monuments and dates to the phases of Venice’s cultural zenith and fall into decadence,¹⁴ and thus to contrast the comprehended site of the premodern past with contemporary states of affairs: “to succeed…in making the Stones of Venice touchstones, and detecting, by the mouldering of her marble, poison more subtle than ever was betrayed by the rending of her crystal” once several centuries of classical revivals eclipse a Gothic integrity.¹⁵ Yet the stone environment Ruskin recruits to concretize the historical record proves impossible to bracket from interference by countervailing tempos—most dramatically that of the current forming its foundations.

It would be a mistake to read the turbulence of Ruskin’s Venetian histories merely as the outcome of passion, “vain temptation,” or lunacy. The errant discourse of these volumes stems from the critic’s methodological aspiration to permit his unstable touchstone to speak for itself. “[Venice] shall also tell you…her own story, in her own handwriting,” he avows in St. Mark’s Rest; “Not a word shall I have to say in the matter, except to deepen the letters for you when they are indistinct, and sometimes to hold a blank space of her chart of life to the fire of your heart…, until words…are seen” (24:241). Constructing a history from the piecemeal testimony of Venetian objects in their labyrinthine environment, Ruskin overturns a burdensome legacy of inscription, dissipating the “egotism” of Enlightenment rhetoric and Romantic sentimentalism attaching to the place (10:221). As narrative, St. Mark’s Rest subordinates the role of individual actors to artifacts, and grounds this focus on things in Venetian tradition, schooling readers in the fact that the Venetian Republic erected monuments such as the columns in St. Mark’s Piazzetta “in memory of things,—not of the man who did the things” (24:208). Unlike the imperial column heroizing Napoleon (and invoking Trajan) at the Place Vendôme, or Nelson’s Column in London, the Venetian columns are there, supporting their saints, because they are beautiful in and of themselves, as pieces of stone (24:219–20). In the process of researching and submitting to things, the author drifts from his own rhetoric as a matter of course—provoking an ideological and epistemological conflict that will be tapped by the coming generation. All of the seer’s morality is aesthetic, all his ontology material; and the Gothic forms he sets out to archive in the service of a cautionary tale about Venice’s fall into early modern decadence finally prove inextricable from a temporality that is both rapacious and ongoing, as made legible in the motions of the sea to which the Republic was ritually wed.

What Kenneth Clark reads, in conjunction with many other critics, as “that lack of a sense of order and proportion which confused [Ruskin’s] encyclopaedic philosophy” should therefore be recognized as the outcome of a strategy born less of “love,” faith, or nervous exhaustion than of the meticulous observation of Venetian forms in their native context.¹⁶ Turning from the prevalent tendency to read Ruskin’s narrative errancy in psychological or deconstructive terms, I regard it as the outgrowth of an unruly empiricism whose insistence on reading history through a precarious material archive has repercussions for coming generations of artists. Repudiating the egocentric designs of Romantic imagination, and methodologically drawn to distraction from the contemplation of any single artifact in isolation, Ruskin as critic expands our historical perspective on premodern Venice. His historiography incorporates not only the traces of Venice’s alterations through successive centuries, but also the distressed conditions of the place’s observation in real time—amidst the stumbling blocks and cacophony of a city penetrated by tourism, industry, and the money economy. The organization of experience in the cityscape made present by his chronicles thus verges on (while never giving way to) a wholly ambulatory and even anarchic aesthetic. Ruskin’s principal object of study, architecture, which is absorbed (as Benjamin noted) “by a collectivity in a state of distraction,” in fact demands close attention to the incidental phenomena that surround and traverse it—even if such attention generates narrative interference.¹⁷ The critic’s concentration on the structural and experiential discontinuities within an imagined Gothic whole generates a polychronic “history” of proliferating paths, whose narrative detours represent the strain of experiencing the past within a postlapsarian present.

Ruskin’s designs on Venice anticipate their own disruptions from the start. He admits as early as the opening chapter of Stones that despite his best efforts “to trace the lines of this image,” his inquiries “will hardly render this outline clearer.” He is also ready to confess that his writing itself will alter its shape: “their results will, in some degree, alter its aspect” (9:18). In the preface to St. Mark’s Rest, he makes more dramatic claims for the incomplete and wayward nature of his chronicle. In the later work, the history of Venice, taken chiefly to be written in the “manuscript” of its art (as opposed to those of its deeds or words), “once lay open on the waves,…a golden legend on countless leaves,” but is now, “like Baruch’s roll,…being cut with the penknife, leaf by leaf, and consumed in the fire of the most brutish of fiends” (24:203)—subject to despoilment and sale, neglect, and contamination by modern industry. Presenting himself as a metaphorical reader of a precious text, Ruskin foregrounds the inexorably fragmentary quality of his attempt to salvage Venetian history: “What fragments of it may yet be saved in blackened scroll…this book will help you, partly, to read. Partly,—for I know only myself in part” (203–04). The gaps that interpose themselves into these chronicles turn “Venice” into a matter more volatile than it was before. In prose composed under the stress of the political upheavals of 1848, the stones of Venice and the “sentence” they convey (“God has numbered thy kingdom, and finished it” [9:59]) appear as unstable as the transitive waves bound to wear them away. Though he wishes to safeguard Venice’s lessons, if not its actual foundations, from tempo—a term connoting both time and climatic forces—Ruskin’s prose ends up registering the damaging and ongoing effects of both. Ruskin forces us to conceive of building itself dynamically, in time.

Ruskin will find Venice eroding from a “national” perspective as well. For in the introductory “warning” of Stones quoted earlier, he has ascribed to the natural—to the “fast-gaining waves”—energies that are also, and more immediately, sociopolitical. The city sits at the distressed center of a Europe at the brink of war—war spurred by a republicanism altogether different from the antique, noble Venetian form he defends in writing. In 1849–50—when he returned to Venice planning only to obtain “some clearer assurance respecting certain parts of chronology,” but was instead obliged to derive his own chronology “stone by stone” (9:3–4)—the Bourbon monarchy had collapsed, obliging Louis-Philippe and his queen to flee to England, where the Chartists had marched to Westminster demanding reform; republicans were agitating in Ireland; and Savoy was at war with Austria, along with Charles Albert’s other territories of Piedmont and Sardinia. Most immediately for Ruskin and his new bride, Hungary and the entire Lombardo–Veneto region had revolted against Austrian rule. The Repubblica Veneta di San Marco was declared in 1848 by Venetians under the leadership of Daniele Manin; though it was suppressed by aerial bombing within five months, the revolt was crucial in symbolic terms, awakening the revolutionary energies of an effort to unify Italy and of a broader European republican unrest. As Ruskin prepares the second and third volumes of Stones in 1851, the Republican–Royalist controversy is raging in Paris, and Venice is controlled severely by Austria in the wake of the uprising: “there is now no ‘lonely isle’ in all the lagoons of Venice” because “[w]herever you go…there is now a Sentinel and a powder magazine.…There is not a single shore—far or near, which has not in some part of it the look of fortification—or violent dismantling o...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Venetian Modernity: A Troubled Present
• 1. “The Entanglement of Memory”: Reciprocal Interference of Present and Past in Ruskin’s Venetian Histories
• 2. Nearer Distances and Clearer Mysteries: Between Patches and Presence in James’s “Visitable Past”
• 3. Adriatic Fantasies: Venetian Modernism Between Decadence, Futurism, and the World Wars
• 4. From Passéism to Anachronism: Material Histories in Pound’s Venice
• 5. Fabulous Planning: Unbuilt Venices
• Coda: Laguna/Lacuna
• Notes
• Index
• Color Plates