Venice as a metaphor

Three perspectives on what we're doing

1.

​​in solitaria malinconia
ti guardo e lagrimo,
Venezia mia!

The poet said, when Venice seemed shortly and immediately (rather than slowly and inexorably) doomed. In that verge of destruction, perhaps, the contours of its earthly beauty and splendour shone especially bright.

Some, such as the Hebrew bible, among a great many others, would disdain such cries over worldly things.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
    vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What does man gain by all the toil
    at which he toils under the sun?

And so forth.

Savonarola, the ascetic celebrity, poet, friar, is known for his great bonfire of vanities in Florence, where thousands of objects—art pieces, books, cosmetics, laces, mirrors—objects conducive to sin—were set to a great flame in the public square. Reduced to ashes and equated with the rest.

The beyond, deep goodness and true meaning, transcendence—they call for us to detach from our short-lived surroundings and seek their temporality. And so it goes that anything that reveals an exaggerate devotion to things of this world, an inordinate esteem for what will, sooner or later, be dust, is suspect and immoral. Rejection and self-negation are common traits across all religious orders, from medieval saints to Buddhist monks.

Vanitas is the opposite. Venice is the opposite. Its dazzling beauty, its stone curves and the silhouettes of its alleyways, the ringing of its ancient churches, the whiteness of some of its arches over the swirling darkness of its surrounding lagoon: this is our earthly world at its best. Dust in one of its most elevated forms. It cannot be torched.

(Vanitas is a short-lived art genre that was popular in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, especially among Dutch still life painters. The paintings are luscious and macabre. Skulls almost always appear, alongside more pleasant objects, sinful ones—explosively colourful flowers, lutes, mirrors. They are a kind of memento mori. They, all together, whisper in their sensual way: …but you will die.)

In their frames, transcendence and its object are one and the same. The smiling bones of death are the painful edge to the beauty; ‘next, I decay’, said the flower in full bloom. It is the very intensity and fullness of the beauty, of worldliness, of gilded things, that portends the end, and points to that which must overcome the futility of this cycle.

Transcendence can be captured in the fleeting vanities of our world. Perhaps it lives there best. So, our existence, like Venice (like our civilisation, perhaps) are gushing with life and will one day rot. But that gushing is divine, and we would like it to last as long as possible.

A te, Venezia,
l'ultimo canto,
l'ultimo bacio,
l'ultimo pianto!

Alyssa Erspamer

2.

If Disneyworld or the Shard or the to-be-built Saudi Mirror Line skyscraper sunk into the sea, that might be poetic justice. The oceanic threats to Fiji, Bangkok and the Maldives smack of injustice. The slow sinking of Venice is neither. It is awkward; it is a tragedy. The residents of historical Venice have dwindled down to about 50,000. It is a tragedy not of human loss but of beauty, history, culture. Marinetti might be happy—the Futurist ringleader distributed pamphlets in the centre of Venice in 1910 arguing for the downfall of a Venice passatista (an old-timey, past-obsessed Venice), the Venice of tourists and peddlers. To be replaced with ‘factories plumed by smoke’, the ‘imposing geometry of metallic points’ and the ‘reign of the divine Electric Light’.

Venice didn’t modernise in Marinetti’s sense. It’s still a snow-globe of the past full of stalls of peddlers and the old palazzi Marinetti called ‘leprous’. Yet in another sense Venice is as contemporary as it gets (or modern? post-modern? one might throw in the towel and simply call it Western, the state of which these adjectives have tried to capture). For the wealthy deindustrializing nations of the West, mired in nostalgia for the post-war era of high growth and relative equality (as Alex Hochuli convincingly argues), metal and smoke are a bit passé. Factories have been converted into lofts or art spaces. And Venice remains titillatingly passatista because as Heidegger would say, it is ordered to be so by the ‘vacation industry’. And by the odd financialized industry of contemporary art brooding over the whole place, having chosen an appropriate scenic backdrop for the things it tries to peddle, expensive trinkets and plotless videos mostly: investments.

I suppose we’re doing the same thing here? Wheeling it out again, the city of canals and palazzos and the car-less labyrinthine streets that in late autumn fill with an inviting mist, a sense of life without the cold automatisms of modernity, the sense Colin gets in The Comfort of Strangers as he gazes down a Venetian alley, that ‘to step down there now as if completely free, […] would be so very easy’.

Who can resist the allure? Who, those of us who fell jaws dropping in love with the place, can resist seeing the parallels with the rest of our awkward time, here in the ‘West’, a hallowed out capital-driven land haunted by history, threatened by the waters, declining not like the abandoned farm-towns of Italy and Spain being sold for 1 euro but like a Fitzgeraldian character who thinks refusing to believe in decline means avoiding it? It’s not just the physical thing, but Venice the symbol, filled with trinkets and ghosts. Venice has seduced us too.

Melanie Erspamer

3.

Venice serves not only as a metaphor, but as a metonym. As the Western world wakes up to the reality of an uncertain future and the potential for instability, the ecological disaster that faces Venice is a rhetorical contiguity of the fate of the liberal international order spearheaded by the United States and its allies in Europe and beyond. 

In the 20th century, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson wrote that all of human language tilts on an axis of two linguistic poles: that of metaphor, and that of metonymy. He argued that this dichotomy was so pervasive to human language that it ‘appears to be of primal significance and consequence for all verbal behaviour and for human behaviour in general’. In the 21st century, we see this dynamic spill over into the concept of the political, and our urban landscapes in their entirety. It is this way that Venice functions as a metonym for the Western world: the fate of Venice, through political mismanagement as well as environmental disaster, is contiguous to the entire fate of the neoliberal political order as established by the United States and its proxies on the European continent. Indeed, the destiny of St. Mark’s Square and its implications stretch politically, socially, and ecologically across the Atlantic and serve as a literal and metonymic harbinger of things to come. 

‘The beginning of the end’ for Venice, so to speak, emphasises the socio-political crises facing Western hegemony in the present day. Analogous to Jakobson’s concept of metonymy is the notion of ‘displacement’, which the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud defined as the way in which repressed ideas or notions resurface under a different guise; In many respects, both psychical and literal, Venice faces a series of displacements, as does the West more broadly. The multiple crises of neoliberalism, overtourism, and environmental catastrophe intersect both the psyche and the material world but nevertheless, at least presently, find themselves displaced. 

The Venice Review seeks to confront these issues in writing, with the city of Venice at the nexus of our project: metaphorically, metonymically, and literally. As Europe enters the unchartered waters of the 21st century, the canals of La Serenissima prefigure the future processes of our material conditions and appear to be an omen for our prospective socio-political realities.

Finlay Darlington-Bell