Proust, Ruskin, James and le Désir de Venise

Abstract

“It is a great pleasure to write the word:” thus Henry James starts his 1882 essay on Venice. To write the word is to inscribe the name; to inscribe the name is to evoke the place; to evoke the place is – well, “a pleasure.” Or simply – pleasure. But what kind of pleasure? And what is the complex relationship between place, name, and word? In that essay James goes on to assert that “of all the cities of the world [Venice] is the easiest to visit without going there.” He is referring of course to his – to our, to everyone's – inescapable saturation with images and associations of Venice from books and pictures. Venice, of all cities in the western world, is the already written, the already seen. The pleasure of Venice, the pleasure which is Venice, is pre-scribed, pre-viewed. The name permanently pre-empts the place, and, as I shall suggest in relation to Proust, the word finally pre-empts the name. In the discourses with which Proust and James were familiar the word/name “Venice” was a site of semantic excess, over-filled with desires, anticipations, dreams, expectations, experiential appropriations. At the same time it was a site of semantic evacuation, disillusion, loss, deprivation, decline and declinations, experiential expropriations.