1This paper was presented on 28 June 2019 at the Daphne du Maurier: A Critical Reassessment conference in Le Mans, France. On the same day, my parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. This essay is dedicated to them.
In this enchanted city all things seem possible. Time stops. Hearts beat. The laws of the real world are suspended. God sits in the rafters and makes fun of the Devil and the Devil pokes Our Lord with his tail. It has always been so. They say the boatmen have webbed feet and a beggar says he saw a young man walk on water. (Jeanette Winterson, The Passion 76)
2In “The Stranger’s Hand,” an unfinished film treatment written by Graham Greene at the beginning of the 1950s, a child, Roger, arrives in Venice accompanied by his aunt, who leaves him at a hotel in the company of strangers. Roger is supposed to wait for his father, due to arrive in Venice on the following evening. Roger’s father does not make it to the hotel, however, as he gets abducted. The child thus waits for him, alone in his hotel room, listening to the sound of each approaching vaporetto, and “soon he began to cry with the sense of mystery, rather than with the sense of fear or loneliness or bewilderment . . .” (Greene 632). During the difficult days that follow, in which a man search begins, Roger makes the acquaintance of several adults, including a doctor who reminds the child that “Venice is difficult for strangers” (643-44), and an Italian waiter who comforts him and helps him to investigate into his father’s disappearance with the aid of a friend affected by dwarfism, “the smallest man the child had ever seen—he was an inch shorter than himself and he had little beady belligerent eyes” (650).
3The present article discusses two novellas that, just like Greene’s treatment, include mystery, loss, a dwarf, strange hotel rooms, and a criminal investigation. Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now” (1971) and Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) feature disappearances, abductions, disoriented tourists, disquieting presences, and presages of death. Both novellas decline such elements differently, but my focus will be on the tropes that affiliate them, characterising a way of construing and representing the lagoon city as a space for existential questioning, renewal, and death.
- 1 In “The Passion from Winterson to Coryate,” a study of Venice as literary construct, Manfred Pfiste (...)
4Andreas Mahler observes that narratives in and of Venice tend to be “informed by a principle of paradoxical signification that is used to connote, self-reflexively, the city’s own irreducible ambiguity” (42). In one way or another, narratives on Venice assert the city’s perceived doubleness, leading to the “construction of semantic universes in which, on the pragmatic level, the characters are given one field of action where they are allowed to perform, for a given moment, both the real as well as the imaginary at the same time” (Mahler 42). This statement fully applies to the two narratives that this article sets itself the goal to analyse. To the notion of Venice as a space in which the symbolic order of the self gets challenged, a further layer will be added: the affinity that Manfred Pfister detects, but does not elaborate upon, between literary representations of Venice and colonialist/orientalist discourses.1 Indeed, both aspects are crucial in order to understand (British) literary constructions of the lagoon city and should therefore be considered in conjunction. This contribution will thus argue that the affinity detected by Pfister between discourses on Venice and colonialist/orientalist discourses is based on the narrative device according to which the rational British subject is posited in a liminal but always more “advanced” position (in Hegelian terms, from the perspective of the development of consciousness) between his/her (post)modern condition and an “other” reality he/she will have to comprehend, both in the sense of understanding and appropriating.
5Pfister’s essay features in a collective volume that focuses on literary representations of Venice over several centuries. Along with Mahler’s essay, the volume includes a study, written by Virginia Richter that centres on the same two texts I set out to investigate. In a way, my analysis could be read as a continuation of, as well as a response to, Richter’s findings, as she reads both narratives in light of the displacement and contradictions of the tourist condition. Another point I would like to make is that such a state does not constitute a final category, the ultimate motive for what happens to the characters. Their condition as tourists is more legible when contextualised within post-colonialist dynamics, in light of the notion according to which “Europe” has been constructed in deep dialectical relation not only to an external other, but also to an internal one. Indeed, in his genealogy of Europe, Europe (in Theory) (2007), a seminal work that analyses the theorisations of Europe that have produced the Eurocentric archive (the theories, beliefs, and assumptions that pertain to Europe’s self-perception and to its relations to the rest of the world), Roberto M. Dainotto argues that a modern European identity “begins when the non-Europe is internalized—when the south, indeed, becomes the sufficient and indispensable internal Other: Europe, but also the negative part of it” (4). Following Dainotto, the argument of this essay rests on the theoretical postulation of an isomorphic correspondence between Europe’s constitution as centre against an Asian, African, or American other on the one hand, and Northern Europe’s self-positioning as centre of modernity through its discursive otherisation of Southern Europe.
6England, a nation with a recent past of political and cultural hegemony within and outside Europe, has elaborated a taxonomic grid that accommodates other nations, cultures, and social formations, according to their perceived proximity to a modern, rational, and secular ethos. Italy traditionally occupies a liminal space within such a grid, a space in partial discontinuity with the rational and the (post)modern which literary representations of Venice make particularly visible. Venice, the city of ambiguity and doubleness par excellence, epitomises Italy’s own state as a space still partially anchored to a different episteme where manifestations of the magical, the supernatural, the unorthodox, and the regressive are still present, challenging British visitors with traces of a previous order of existence that has been superseded, but evidently not been forgotten nor thoroughly processed.
- 2 The theme of the relation of Venice to Italy would deserve further development, but cannot be prese (...)
7From this perspective, both narratives appropriate the notion of Venice as door to the Orient—outside European borders and within—and as the ideal stage for tales of a rational postmodern self challenged by past and lost possibilities.2 In order to clarify this precise point, both narratives will be read in light of Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, arguing that the mirror, a heterotopic space, plays an important role in both novellas.
8“Don’t Look Now,” a novella entirely built on doubles and dichotomies, opposes a man to a woman in their opposite attitudes towards the unknown. It immediately introduces us to twin old ladies and to the second sight one of them possesses, which will generate a parallel (double) reality in which ordinary perceptions of space and time get disrupted. In the narrative, youth is opposed to old age, innocence to corruptness (the child turns out to be the assassin; the alleged murderer turns out to be a police officer), ordinary Venice in daylight to “magical,” menacing Venice at night. John and Laura frequently get lost and need to choose between two options: “there were two canals ahead, one bearing right, the other left, with narrow streets beside them. John hesitated. Which one was it they had walked beside the day before?” (Don’t Look Now 18).
9This predicament is characteristic of the whole story as the protagonists are often called upon to choose between options. As it happens, whereas Laura, although keeping her rationality throughout, is capable of contemplating and even accepting a dose of soothing, otherworldly reality to help her contain her grief for the loss of her daughter, John always chooses wrongly, continuously hiding behind a deep veil of scepticism which eventually leads him to ruin.
10Du Maurier creates an enclosed and increasingly oppressive narrative in which John finally gets to “see” himself as reflected in, and by, a mirror, recognising himself as the designated victim of the whole story:
The child struggled to her feet and stood before him, the pixie-hood falling from her head on to the floor. He stared at her, incredulity turning to horror, to fear. It was not a child at all but a little thick-set woman dwarf, about three feet high, with a great square adult head too big for her body, grey locks hanging shoulder-length, and she wasn’t sobbing any more, she was grinning at him nodding her head up and down. . . . The creature fumbled in her sleeve, drawing a knife, and as she threw it at him with hideous strength, piercing his throat, he stumbled and fell, the sticky mess covering his protecting hands.
And he saw the vaporetto with Laura and the two sisters steaming down the Grand Canal, not today, not tomorrow, but the day after that, and he knew why they were together and for what sad purpose they had come. The creature was gibbering in its corner. The hammering and the voices and the barking dog grew fainter, and, “Oh God,” he thought, “what a bloody silly way to die…” (55)
11The moment of understanding, for John, is the moment of doom; when he is murdered, he is made to understand his visions and their ineluctability. At that very moment, he sees that his autonomy and his full agency as a rational subject have always been an illusion.
12Du Maurier’s novella, just like McEwan’s, is to be read with Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice serving as archetypal narrative, as the master-work which makes of Venice the context and accomplice of a northern European visitor’s ruinous descent to the South and to the Dionysian dimension within himself. Richter argues that du Maurier and McEwan avoid a flat repetition of the trope through self-reflexivity, awareness, and elaboration of the themes expounded by Mann. I would like to add that both narratives are located at a crossroads between two intersecting but distinct traditions.
13On the one hand, both narratives are legible, as previously observed in “Don’t Look Now,” in terms of a “descent to a maze,” geographical as well as existential, in which visitors to Venice get constantly lost trying to negotiate their present condition with something “other” that they find alluring and dangerous. On the other hand, this peculiarly “Venetian” literary tradition, established by Mann’s novella, has to be contextualised within that age-old dilemma, quintessentially British this time, that Italy has posed to fictional characters for a long segment of the British literary tradition: transcending (or not) the boundaries of their hyper-rationalism in order to admit an “other” existential order.
14Just as in E. M. Forster’s “Italian” narratives, roughly contemporaneous with Mann’s novella, in du Maurier’s and McEwan’s narratives a conventional discourse is still detectable according to which the characters most mentally and emotionally open to “other” possibilities stand a chance to be saved, or perhaps be changed in a positive way by the “Italian experience.” In the specific case of “Don’t Look Now,” Laura, who is open to a change of perspective, gets somehow consoled of her loss, and partially restored to a peaceful state of mind; the sceptical, unnerved, and restless John is, on the contrary, condemned, even if he actually stands in a privileged position to comprehend this “second” reality.
15In “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1984), Michel Foucault defines utopias as “sites with no real place.” They are sites, he argues, “that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces” (3).
16On the contrary, heterotopias are real places:
Places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (3-4)
- 3 “Don’t Look Now” actually includes a brief passage that closely recalls Foucault’s considerations a (...)
17In “Don’t Look Now,” Venice is indeed a counter-site and a heterotopia, a place that depicts the ordinary by portraying its counter-image, a microcosm apparently in continuity with it, but where ordinary rules can be temporarily suspended in order to make space for a circular tale of ineluctability, in which “fate” accounts for more than individual autonomy and self-determination.3 This kind of narratives seems literarily more plausible if set in Italy, simply because it relies on an enduring tradition of literary antecedents that, in the course of modern centuries, have canonised Italy as the space of the irrational and the pre- (and anti-) modern.
18This discourse stems from a perspective which assigns to different parts of the world a specific function conceived in relation and opposition to the space occupied by the normative self. It is an attitude that posits the self at the end of history and contemplates (and narrates) different geographical and cultural worlds as previous historical phases and stages of human development. From this standpoint, Italy, to the northern European visitor, still retains residues of a past episteme which make it the ideal location for tales of existential tourism and/or of self-discovery. In other words, Italy occupies a liminal space, “slightly other,” which is quintessentially embodied by Venice, its most “oriental” city.
19Foucault observes that between the two spaces of utopia and heterotopia there is the experience of the mirror: “I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror” (4). The image reflected in the mirror is easy to locate physically, but it is there and not really there at the same time. In other words, the space of the mirror, the space reflected by it, is in close and significant relationship to the normative space it reflects, yet simultaneously “other.” “From the standpoint of the mirror,” reasons Foucault, “I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there” (4). This is exactly what happens to John: he discovers, while dying, that he was never exclusively “there,” in the space of reality; his decisions were never entirely his, and he sees himself, for the first time, not as the sole master of his actions, but as a pawn within a larger design.
20Venice therefore represents a world which can still be “magical,” a dimension entirely lost to the postmodern (British) condition. Moreover, it provides the illusion of a space that Foucault calls “fantasmatic” (2), a place populated by ghosts and unreal presences that are “projected,” just as in a mirror, by the presence of the people who visit it for a limited period of time. Mahler calls this other realm a “second ‘reality’ of illusions” (40). Similarly, Sergio Perosa argues that “Venice acts as a disquieting mirror of conditions of displacement, dismay, uncertainty, between here and there, the natural and the unnatural, the organic and the inorganic, vegetation and history, past and present, one piled uncannily on top of the other” (126).
21The difference between “fantasmatic Venice” and “ordinary Venice” is highlighted throughout the narrative, as if the heterotopic essence of the city could only be revealed by visitors coming from a “future” place of rationality that has lost any magical connotation and significance. When this happens, Venice truly acts as a time-travel device as well as a mirror, allowing the visitors to go back in time, and offering to them, albeit for a short time, the illusion of a restored happiness. After all, as Foucault explains, “heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (6).
- 4 This very aspect is posited as central in Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 transposition of “Don’t Look Now,” a (...)
22It is not only that, in Venice, John and Laura’s traditional sense of time is continuously questioned by second sights, by the dead who come back to interact with the living. In the course of the narrative, Venice becomes an increasingly “animated” space, in the sense of a space gifted with an anima, an agency of its own that slowly envelops them, and finally entraps John. This magical dimension breaks with the protagonists’ normative notions of space and time—is Laura in London or in Venice? when does the vaporetto scene take place: in the past, in the present, or in the future?—reiterating Venice as a heterotopia as well as a heterochrony, a space where rational subjects lose their certainties and control over the most basic coordinates of their existence.4
23Colin and Mary are the protagonists of Ian McEwan’s novella. Their relationship is strong, complex, and cerebral, characterised, at the beginning of the story, by boredom and constant minor complications: “their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches” (4).
24“Like too many suitcases.” Colin and Mary’s sense of estrangement from one another is immediately associated with their shared difficulty to attune to two new places: their hotel room and the city. However, it is obvious from the start that their relationship, however intricate, is characterised by complications that are profoundly private and intimate, that fully belong to the couple and are constitutive of their way of being together.
25This condition is perfectly described in a scene in which the couple is reflected by the mirror of the hotel room they occupy; they might be momentarily estranged from one another, but they are also lost together, as it were, on the same side of the mirror and on the same side of such a separation:
[Colin] lingered behind her, staring into the mirror with her, trying to catch her eye. But she looked straight ahead at herself and continued to brush her hair. He traced the line of her shoulder with his finger. Sooner or later, the silence would have to break. Colin turned to leave, and changed his mind. He cleared his throat, and rested his hand firmly on her shoulder. Outside there was the beginning of a sunset to watch, and indoors there were negotiations which needed to be opened. . . . Miserably, he ran his finger along the line of Mary’s spine. She now held the handle of the brush in one hand and rested the bristles in the open palm of the other, and continued to stare ahead. Colin leaned forward and kissed her nape, and when she still did not acknowledge him, he crossed the room with a noisy sigh and returned to the balcony. (5)
26Colin and Mary’s sense of displacement and distancing from the city is conveyed from the beginning of the novella through references to their continuous getting lost: “Despite the maps, they frequently became lost, and could spend an hour or so doubling back and round, consulting (Colin’s trick) the position of the sun, to find themselves approaching a familiar landmark from an unexpected direction, and still lost” (4). Their sense of time, as well as their sense of space, is challenged: “Colin wheeled round on her, incredulous, exasperated. ‘That wasn’t our first day,’ he said loudly. ‘Now you are completely confused. It was seeing the queue that made us decide to go to the beach, and we didn’t go there till the third day’” (14). “‘We should have brought our street maps’” (37) is Colin’s mantra throughout the narrative.
27Of course, they never remember to do so, and from being lost in the city, Colin and Mary end up slowly caught by it, forgetting, throughout the holiday, to send postcards to Mary’s children. As the story unfolds, Colin and Mary become less estranged from one another as well. Their hotel room, which they rarely leave for several days, becomes the space of their renewed intimacy. There is, therefore, just as in “Don’t Look Now,” a suspended moment of happiness caused by the protagonists’ encounter with otherness. Just as the twin sisters, with their revelations of otherworldly presences, are capable of reassuring Laura for some time, Colin and Mary’s encounter with Robert and Caroline, brilliant examples of “fantasmatic presences,” is, for a short while, the catalyst of positive change in their relationship.
28In such a “double” city, Colin and Mary meet the unexpected couple on the opposite side of the mirror; they are introduced to an altogether different kind of connection, carnal, explicitly unbalanced, based on a sexuality openly expressed in terms of archetypal and gendered tenets of power and submission that Robert articulates thus:
Whatever they might say they believe, women love aggression and strength and power in men. It’s deep in their minds. Look at all the women a successful man attracts. If what I am saying wasn’t true, women would protest at every war. Instead, they love to send their men to fight. The pacifists, the objectors, are mostly men. And even though they hate themselves for it, women long to be ruled by men. It’s deep in their minds. They lie to themselves. They talk of freedom, and dream of captivity. (54-55)
29The renewed sexual freedom Colin and Mary enjoy with one another allows for the verbalisation of their erotic fantasies, which nevertheless remain manageably disturbing, and immediately lose their meaning outside of their sexual context. Their sexuality is “containable” in and by the words they exchange with one another while their relationship is passionate but restrained and dignified, clearly occupying a space and time that has once and for all left behind crude and regressive characterisations and seeks to rationally verbalise and exert control over its content and meaning.
30Therefore, Colin and Mary are simultaneously profoundly enticed by, and distrustful of, their new acquaintances. Their fascination with them and the desire to understand them more ultimately prevails, leading them to death and ruin, but before this happens, the protagonists experience a fleeting moment in which Venice and its second order of illusions exert a healing effect. As George von der Lippe observes:
The northern travellers do . . . find something of what they are seeking, in a reawakening of the senses. . . . John and Laura’s return to lovemaking and a closeness they had feared was gone forever, Colin and Mary’s subliminal perception of danger, prompting a rededication to each other emotionally and physically. (45)
31Keeping that perfect balance at the liminal point Colin and Mary occupy—as tourists suspended between home and abroad, between the past and the present, between rationality and fate—is virtually impossible; the power Robert and Caroline exercise on them is ineluctable and surreal, so that Colin and Mary are called upon to make a choice. When they visit their new friends for the last time, they arrive at their house almost against their will, as if carried by a shared irrational desire that proves ultimately fatal to them. As in numerous other narratives of British characters on Italian soil, the protagonists must be careful to incorporate just the right amount of the unfamiliar, the magical, the primal/regressive, and the fantasmatic, because when one’s free will is compromised, governed by irrational forces, then it is too late to go back.
- 5 Throughout both narratives, Italians appear as sometimes mysterious, sometimes colourful and playfu (...)
32During the prolonged scene in which Colin and Mary are inexorably separated from one another, Mary’s will is extinguished and Colin gets killed, Caroline describes the experience of realising a fantasy as “stepping into a mirror” (91). This act can be read as a trespassing, as the appropriation of a space that should not belong to the person who appropriates it. In other words, to a certain extent, forgetting one’s role and duties is depicted as good and even recommendable, especially in the course of a holiday in Venice, but excessive closeness, and adherence, to existential and relational dimensions that have been discarded by (post)modern cultures and civilisations can only be damaging.5
33In both narratives, the victim is a man. Whereas John is doomed for neglecting his psychic powers, Colin’s extraordinary beauty (a citation of, and homage to, Tadzio’s effeminate looks in Death in Venice) makes him the designated victim. If John seems to be punished for his complete rejection of the possibility to access a different reality, Colin pays for his momentary temptation to give up his rationality for the senses, for wanting to get lost deeper into the Venetian maze and its enticing shadows:
To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so easy. (Comfort 83)
34John and Colin are both ultimately condemned for not being able to successfully negotiate between reality and its second order of illusions. John gets punished for his excessive clinging to the rational world; Colin, for the opposite reason, for wanting to know more about something alluring but ultimately damaging, something that, having been transcended in time and space, can only survive in the heterotopia/heterochrony Venice incarnates.
- 6 McEwan’s choice of not naming Venice in the course of his novella is ascribable to this precise str (...)
35My reply to Richter will now be articulated in light of the previous observations. Richter acknowledges Venice as “an infinitely reproduced object of the literary text, the camera and the traveller’s gaze” (181). Mass tourism has made commonplace the experience of Venice; therefore, Richter maintains, “the tale of an individual’s existential encounter with an erotic, faintly oriental Other, epitomised in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, can only be retold with an ironic edge” (181). Du Maurier’s and McEwan’s novellas are located within this postmodern trend and share the strategy of counteracting the problem of “Venice made ordinary” with what Richter calls a “heightened reflexivity about the intertextuality of any Venetian text” (182).6
- 7 Du Maurier’s and McEwan’s texts elaborate upon the tradition of the Gothic, reworking it along mode (...)
36Moreover, in both narratives, the trope of tourism is put to productive use, as Richter points out, in its commonplaces, contradictions and conditions of estrangement. Therefore, both novellas succeed in combining the broad features isolated by Pfister (Venice as a space of otherness that challenges the self) with a more specific Gothic vein, another established “kernel of Venetian associations,” constituted by suggestions of “decay, desire, death” (Richter 181).7 At the centre of both novellas, there is the encounter with otherness, alluring and dangerous. Venice is not a mere frame for such encounters: in both narratives, it acts as the space of transgression described above, a “liminal realm where desire can be enacted” (Richter 183). This desire ultimately leads to death. As Perosa argues, death, when taking place in Venice, is a specific conceptual event:
I speak of concetto because death is feared, pursued, cherished and enacted in the decay of splendour, in the excess and corruption of beauty, in the surplus and added value of crumbling art and compromised history—in the ambivalence, that is, of sensual, mental joy, and a lugubrious atmosphere of doom. (116)
- 8 The topos is so well-established that Perosa proposes for it its own syndrome, one analogous to the (...)
37Both deaths, in du Maurier’s and McEwan’s narratives, belong to what Perosa calls “the locus classicus of exquisite deaths” (118).8 According to Richter, John and Colin die because they “fail to complete their task in some crucial way. Their failure to project themselves as proper tourists is an important factor in their trajectory towards death” (184). The point at which the present reading of the two narratives diverges from Richter’s is precisely this: Richter ascribes John’s and Colin’s deaths to their state as tourists without making sufficiently clear, to my mind, the historical and conceptual ties between the world of tourism and postcolonial practices. I see modern tourism as a social practice too embedded in a (post)colonial and (post)imperial worldview to agree with an investigation of the power relations staged by du Maurier and McEwan that makes tourism its ultimate framework, without acknowledging it as a social and cultural practice derived, in its modern form, from the recent past of colonial history and the contemporary archive of postcolonialism.
38Tourism is a derived cultural practice more than a primary epistemic category. From this perspective, British tourist practices on Italian soil cannot really be appreciated without reference to the past colonial episteme. In other words, in the two narratives at hand, the aspect I perceive as problematic in Richter’s reading of the British/Italian encounter is the attempt to inscribe empire in the context of tourist practices rather than the other way around. There is much more at stake than tourist practices when one makes of Italy the realm of all that England has lost, when Italy (Venice in this case) is given the power to profoundly transfigure (bring to ruin or kill) a story’s protagonists.
39Of course, tourism is one of the fundamental expressions of our globalised culture. At the same time, the globalised world in which we live is too rooted in the (post)colonial episteme for us to consider tourist practices as independent from it. Connections must be acknowledged. Stephanie Malia Hom, for instance, describes in some historical detail the similarities between British tourist and colonial practices when she argues that Thomas Cook’s organised travels to Italy for a British audience conveyed the spirit of the “civilizing mission” of the time, “a mission not unlike the civilizing missions that served to justify the projects of European colonialism taking hold across Africa and Asia at the same time” (91). These cultural “expeditions” translated the colonising spirit into the everyday and mundane dimension of leisure and had the twofold aim of educating the British travellers (to history and art) as well as the locals, bringing growth and economic development: “Cook figuratively brought civilization to tourists by institutionalizing it within daily life, much like colonizers sought to bestow the same upon colonized subjects elsewhere” (Hom 92).
40Therefore, returning to our novellas, I argue that John’s and Colin’s deaths are more fruitfully legible in terms of their state as tourists in and of Italy, a state which, in Anglophone narratives, often implies a component of “time-travelling,” of going back to some pre-modern or pre-postmodern condition. Venice constitutes a privileged way of access to this “other” order; it is the door to the Orient as well as the door to the Orient within. This manufacturing of a temporal difference, or denial of coevalness, has been amply investigated by anthropological and orientalist theories, but has rarely been examined in relation to fictional narratives. This is odd, considering the number of narratives that pivot on this cultural, artistic, and discursive fabrication which, far from being a mere narrative device, has become a proper technology of power. It is so embedded in, and conventional to, certain fictional forms that it has become invisible. Anglophone narratives set in Venice are placed in a privileged position to bring it back to the surface, structured, as they often are, around the narrative core of a rational northern visitor being challenged by a second order of reality, regressive, decadent, magical, and sensual.
41Nicolas Roeg’s filmic transposition of du Maurier’s novella isolates and enhances precisely this aspect, placing John in the impossible position to detect the familiar from the unfamiliar, the present from the past. As Gloria Lauri Lucente eloquently explains in a discussion of that filmic version, Venice is a:
[f]oreboding sepulchral city whose ominous presence drives its male protagonist towards preordained doom and self-destruction, Venice is a deadly space which emanates cryptic signs that threaten the cohesiveness of the visible world and demand to be deciphered. . . . A city of ghosts, revenants, echoes, doubles and untrustworthy perspectives, Roeg’s Venice hovers between the world of the living and the world of the dead and functions as a powerful metaphor for the repressed, the uncanny, the unheimlich. . . . The dividing line between what is familiar and what is unfamiliar is so tenuous in this city of specular doubles and reflections that at one point, John is deceived into thinking that the unfamiliar labyrinthine canals, the bridges, and the deserted alleys with their closed shutters are strangely familiar, even though he soon realizes that he has lost his bearings. It is this deceptive assurance of uncanny familiarity which brings with it a loss of boundaries between what is known and what is unknown that will ultimately lead to John’s demise. (108-09)
42In the film, John is not a tourist, but a restorer of architectural antiquities. This is significant, as in spite of not being just an occasional visitor to the city, his liminal position between two existential dimensions stays perfectly intact as an Englishman suspended, literally, between life and death, in the scene in which he falls from a scaffolding, but also figuratively, between the past and the present. An emissary of the new, John is someone who is capable, with his current knowledge, of intervening upon the past. Nevertheless, Venice challenges him to confront a different kind of knowledge, repressed and “other,” and its uncanny manifestations.
43In the short story entitled “Ganymede” (1959), du Maurier retraces even more closely the narrative contour of Death in Venice, telling the story of a British professor of Classics who falls for a young boy while sojourning in Venice. “Ganymede” is not discussed in the present essay, but the short narrative contains a passage which perfectly encapsulates Venice’s perceived discontinuity with the rest of the world and its supposed timelessness. As the professor arrives, for the first time, in the city, he reflects:
Lighting a cigarette, I was aware, surely for the first time in my life, of a sense of abandon, of belonging—certainly not to the present, nor to the future, nor even to the past, but to a period in time that was changeless and was Venetian time, that was outside the rest of Europe and even the world, and existed, magically, for myself alone. (Breaking Point 92)
44This essay has proposed an investigation of this notion of timelessness and discontinuity, and the perceived “magic” that goes with it. The Venetian second order of illusions, which functions according to its own rules, challenges the order of the self. The rational subject is called upon to take up wisely the prospect provided by a Venetian holiday because complete blindness, or failure, or refusal to recognise the potential danger of such an opportunity can lead to death.
45The two narratives discussed here place at their centre northern European protagonists constantly challenged by the city’s reiterated foreign character, its maze of alleys and the largely incomprehensible behaviour of its natives. In order to navigate the city and to make sense of their journey, the British protagonists need to meet someone situated half-way between their world and Venice’s second order of illusions: the psychic twin sister is a medium between two worlds; Robert is an Englishman born and raised in Venice.
46In du Maurier’s and McEwan’s novellas I see at work a fundamental contradiction that generates complex and fascinating narratives centred on an ideological mystification. By making use of Italy as the cultural polar opposite of England, as a trope for healing, salvation, and ultimately damnation, these stories consign Italy to a particular role, relegating it de facto to a heterotopic/magical space outside “real” space and real time, a mirror’s reflection and a place outside history that serves the double function of challenging the symbolic order of the self and reiterating its normative value.
