1In a short 1874 travel sketch on Florentine architecture, Henry James, recalling a visit to the Palazzo Corsini writes the following:
In places that have been lived in so long and so much and in such a fine old way, […] the past seems to have left a sensible deposit, an aroma, an atmosphere. This ghostly presence tells you no secrets, but it prompts you to try and guess a few. (James 1993a, 559)
2The “ghostly presence” in the Palazzo seems to be present in the room, quite independent of the visitor who feels its presence. And yet, there seems also to be an intimate connection between this “ghostly presence” and the inner life of the visitor to the Palazzo, who must “guess” whatever “secrets” they can with no help from the presence in the room. This intimate relationship between the ghostly presence in the room and the inner life of the arriving visitor conforms with the way that Virginia Woolf differentiates “Henry James’s ghosts” from “the violent old ghosts – the blood-stained sea-captains, the white horses, the headless Ladies of dark lanes and windy commons” (Woolf qtd. in Teahan 2020, 5). James’s ghosts instead “have their origins within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange” (5). Sheila Teahan, who quotes this passage from Woolf in an essay on the ghostly dimension of James’s travel writings, notes the proximity of Woolf’s language to the way that Sigmund Freud speaks of the uncanny. Teahan reminds us that although James’s ghosts may seem to arise “from within rather than impinging from without […] one of the effects of the uncanny is, of course, to undo this and other binary oppositions” (5).
3The difficulty of maintaining such binary oppositions as the ones between a subjective inner space and an objective outer space when speaking of a ghostly “atmosphere” is also demonstrated in the work of Gernot Böhme, who claims that phenomena like the “atmosphere” that James describes put into question this habitual mode of ontological division. He writes of atmospheres that:
We are not sure whether we should attribute them to the objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them. We are also unsure where they are. They seem to fill the space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze. (Böhme 2017, 11-12)
4The phenomenon of atmosphere is one that poses a problem to the ontological division between a subjective interior and an external objective world. When we sense the “ghostly presence” of an atmosphere, we encounter an allusion to the possibility of another mode of being that does not conform to an anthropocentric privileging of the human perspective. For Graham Harman, to maintain the ontological distinction of a world divided between the experiencing subject and an objective world outside leads to the unacceptable conclusion that “we cannot speak of the world without humans or humans without the world, but only of a primordial correlation or rapport between the two” (Harman 2017, 56). Harman proposes instead an ontological configuration consisting of nonrelational “real objects,” which can only allude to one another indirectly: “a world packed full of ghostly real objects signaling to each other from inscrutable depths, unable to touch one another fully” (Harman 2007, 187). The only means of “indirect contact” that can be made among “real objects” is through the kind of inward absorption that is permitted through what we understand as aesthetic experience (183-185). In Harman’s thought, there is never any direct transmission of information from one source to the next, but always an indirect, vicarious or ghostly transmission. Taking into account Harman’s thinking around the importance of aesthetic experience in making indirect contact with nonhuman modes of being gives us a new way of thinking about how James privileges the ghostly atmosphere of the places he visits in his travel writings. This bolsters and gives new meaning to Eric Morel’s claim that “James’s advocacy for aesthetic experience” is an important source for developing practices of “ecotourist reading” (Morel 2020, 2).
- 1 The idea of the “strange, irregular” temporality of “life” is present in James’s earlier essay “The (...)
5In this article, I will show, through a series of close readings of James’s 1892 travel essay “The Grand Canal,” that James’s attention to the atmosphere of place does more than merely transcribe the experience of a traveller to Venice; it allows the reader to brush up against something more real than phenomenal experience. This “something more real” has to do with the nonhuman rhythms that populate places to which we can become attuned through aesthetic experience. The ambiguities and indirections of James’s writing draw the reader closer to an elusive presence which is neither within oneself nor outside oneself in the space of the text, but somewhere else that can only be gestured toward indirectly. I will begin by inquiring into the mode of time or tempo that sets the rhythm for James’s travel writings. The strange, irregular tempos of Venetian life appear to bear some connection with what James calls the “double character” of Venice, its ability to generate an endless stream of dissolving reflections.1 Interrogating further into the nature of this “double character” will inevitably lead to an interrogation of our own presence, which has never quite arrived as we read. The text of “The Grand Canal” is one that requires of its readers a mode of attention that does not impose meaning but that makes room for endless, unimaginable possibilities at every turn. By reading from this generous and accommodating stance, we may be able to dimly imagine the possibility of other, perhaps nonhuman, rhythms which may populate the space of the text and of Venice itself. James’s writing invites this mode of reading, which Daniel Hannah calls “a queerly ecological connectedness between text and reader as arrivant,” referring to “Jacques Derrida’s queer conceptualization of an ecological hospitality, an absolute accommodation of the nonhuman other as arrivant” (Hannah 2013, 265). Timothy Morton’s adaptation of the Derridean figure of the arrivant as the “strange stranger” resituates Derrida’s thinking within the context of Graham Harman’s ontological project of thinking the allusive nonrelations among the “ghostly real objects” which always withdraw from direct contact with one another (Morton 2010, 38-50). My reading of James’s travel essay “The Grand Canal” invites the possibility of a visitation to a Venice that has been “lived in so long, so much and in such a fine old way” not only by its human inhabitants but by the strange strangers which we may encounter through the subtle modifications of our sense of time, space and the self that careful attention to James’s essay will bring about.
6Writing about James’s travel writings, Cornelius Crowley mentions the “seasonal and occasional” aspect of this practice, noting that often in these writings “[w]hat is seen and taken in is conditional on the seasons and on the time of day, on whether it is the first or the reiterated encounter between the observer and the particular place” (Crowley 2020, 1, 6). The time of the “seasonal and occasional” differs from the time of a narrative ordering of events by which the plot of a novel, or the events of a life, might be chronologically structured. Though the English word “time” has lost touch with this layer of meaning, both the French “temps” and the Italian “tempo” carry connotations of rhythm and climate in addition to the more restricted chronologically ordered time to which we have become accustomed.
7By entering the work of James through his travel writing, we might begin to notice how his later, more modernist work from the late 1890s onward is infiltrated by this non-narrative, seasonal or atmospheric dimension. Anna Jones Abramson, in her 2016 thesis The Age of Atmosphere: Air, Affect, and Technology in Modernist Literature, claims that “atmosphere is inextricable from the representational practices employed in the course of modernist experimentation” (Abramson 2016, 7). Modernist writers’ practice of rendering atmosphere, according to Abramson, often proceeds through distortions in narrative:
It is precisely in the gap between narrative as we expect it and narrative as modernists reinvent it that atmosphere can be found: when plot breaks down, when one narrator usurps another, when frames do not work as they used to, in a moment of unsettling defamiliarization or abstraction. (8)
8Becoming attuned to atmosphere operates according to a logic other than that of a narrative ordering of events. James cultivated this practice intensely in his travel writings, whose influence seeps into the narrative structure of his novels and tales. Venice in particular, to which James returned again and again, seems to disrupt the logic of narrative more than any other place. All of the travel sketches that make up James’s 1909 collection Italian Hours are grouped geographically and ordered chronologically, with the exception of the opening pieces on Venice which appear out of chronological order. For James, there seems to be something about Venice that resists being appropriated into a linear temporal scheme. In Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, Jennifer Scappettone writes of the city’s “topographical ambiguity or ‘amphibiousness’ that retains natural features associated with the primordial, and an architectonic obliquity that thwarts any Cartesian viewpoint or rationale” (Scappettone 2014, 13). Scappettone is referring here to the fact that Venice was not built entirely by human hands, but was built in concert with its wet sand and mud foundations, which were continually shifting according to the changing of the tides. There is another agency at work that operates according to a different temporal regime than the human chronological forward march of time. Despite the omnipresent inscriptions of the past that overwhelm one’s experience of Venice, James’s essay “The Grand Canal” allows the reader to become attuned to this other temporal dimension, the rhythmic tempo involved in the city’s “continual negotiation with the tides” (27).
9James’s 1892 essay “The Grand Canal” begins by noting a striking sense of temporal discontinuity that one feels in Venice:
Nowhere else has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so discontinuous, so like a crowd in a cemetery without garlands for the graves. (James 1993b, 314)
10The present is felt to be alien in Venice for it is everywhere measured by its difference from a distant, fondly remembered past. It is in the Piazza San Marco, “the splendid square” (314), where James claims that “[t]he present fortune of Venice, the lamentable difference, is most easily measured” (315). Despite his claim that the Piazza San Marco is “the centre of Venetian life” (314), James does not linger long in the “splendid square.” Although the Piazza San Marco is where we find the highest density of “shopkeepers and gondoliers, the beggars and the models” and “the polyglot pilgrims,” this is only because the Piazza is “the lobby of the opera in the intervals of the performance” (315). The main performance is not to be found in the “splendid square,” but elsewhere. To escape this “present fortune of Venice,” James insists that “we must turn away both from the purchasers and from the vendors of ricordi” (315). And here, the word “ricordi,” a duplicitous foreign homonym, serves as an initial means of distancing us from the deadening present of the “splendid square.” From the initial sense of ricordi as souvenir objects, in the next sentence we read that: “The ricordi we prefer are gathered best where the gondola glides” (315). These are no longer ricordi as solid, present souvenir objects, but ricordi as fluid, never quite present memories in motion. In this moment, the duplicitous doubling of literary reflection pivots us away from the human scene with its alienated sense of a present irremediably separated from a revered “past” to another scene, another place, which turns and glides to a different rhythm. The alliterated /g/ and /l/ in “gathered where the gondola glides” intimates a bubbling to the surface of a rhetorical excess within language itself.
- 2 The “queerness” of the Jamesian style is a term that Kevin Ohi uses to highlight the “antimimetic, (...)
11Where is this place “where the gondola glides”? It is of course “The Grand Canal,” which flows through the city of Venice, but also “The Grand Canal” which serves as the title of James’s essay and thus refers to the place of the text itself. This parallel between canal and text, geographical and literary place, is further brought out by their both being described in terms of sinuous undulations which obstruct frontal vision. The distance along the Canal from the Santa Maria della Salute to the iron bridge in front of the Accademia “is too much of a curve to be seen at any one point as a whole” and so “it represents the better the arched neck, as it were, of the undulating serpent of which the Canalazzo has the likeness” (320). Clear, straight vision is obstructed by the undulating curve of the Canal. James remarks further that he is unable to go into all of the palaces along the Canal that “this devious discourse has left behind” (327). The text itself, a “devious discourse,” also undulates through its queer Jamesian syntax,2 riddled with disjointed, lingering adverbial phrases, parenthetical remarks, objects separated from their verbs, producing the impression of a tangled, floating, “devious discourse” indeed.
12Neither the Canal nor the text allow for a clear vision of the city, but both constantly undulate and deviate in an unstable veering motion. The constant deviations of our attention as we read “The Grand Canal,” which alternate between scraps of memories, imagined scenes, physical sensations, and authorial asides, are so many ways of “turning away” from the deadening “essential present character of the city” which James had begun the essay by proclaiming as “its being the most beautiful of tombs” (314).
13How can we account for these slippages of attention, moments of “turning away,” that continually interrupt the text? For in reading “The Grand Canal” we find ourselves jumping from one point of view to another, from one side of the Canal to another, with little warning. After turning away from the crowded Piazza San Marco, we find ourselves looking across from the other side of the Canal, from the steps of the Santa Maria della Salute. The strange twinkling and glittering effect produced by the double reflection between the windows of the Venetian palaces and the water of the Canal suggests a “double character” of Venice, a charming duplicity that sends astray our attempts to establish a controlled representation of our Venetian experience:
On the other side of the Canal twinkles and glitters the long row of the happy palaces which are mainly expensive hotels. […] They are almost as charming from other places as they are from their own balconies, and share fully in that universal privilege of Venetian objects which consists of being both the picture and the point of view.
This double character, which is particularly strong in the Grand Canal, adds a difficulty to any control of one’s notes. (James 1993b, 316-317)
14Although “there is a little of everything everywhere in the bright Venetian air” (316), James seems to be able to discern something in particular about these palatial hotels across the Canal. His dramatizing imagination provides them with a distinct character. They sit shrewdly waiting for their next victim, all the while maintaining a bright gaiety, a duplicitous smiling welcome which conceals an ominous, deadly plot:
[T]o these houses belongs especially the appearance of sitting, across the water, at the receipt of custom, of watching in their hypocritical loveliness for the stranger and the victim. I call them happy, because even their sordid uses and their vulgar signs melt somehow, with their vague sea-stained pinks and drabs, into that strange gaiety of light and colour which is made up of the reflection of superannuated things. (316)
15The palaces are hypocrites, actors who can take on any role, whichever may appeal to the passing stranger, or victim, who drifts down the text or down the waterway of “The Grand Canal.” It is in this seductive “hypocritical loveliness” that the danger lies, the danger that the passing strangers may succumb to their own inner illusions, seen in the infinite reflective spaces of the Canal. It is here that the Venetian atmosphere may come to our aid, for we are not bound to be complicit with the scheming palaces, but can allow their “uses” and their “signs” to dissolve into the surrounding Venetian air, “that strange gaiety of light and colour, which is made up of the reflection of superannuated things.” As the Venetian palaces, empty vessels awaiting our arrival, are given life by the ambient air of our attention, we can, alerted to the “double character” of Venetian things, smile back knowingly and continue to drift along.
16When, a few pages on, we are confronted with another incarnation of the palaces cunningly awaiting our arrival in the form of “[t]he antiquity mongers,” we are perhaps now better equipped to respond to their “unanswerable question”:
The antiquity-mongers in Venice have all the courage of their opinion, and it is easy to see how well they know they can confound you with an unanswerable question. What is the whole place but a curiosity-shop, and what are you here for yourself but to pick up odds and ends? (James 1993b, 321)
17This is a curious state to find ourselves in: we know that the antiquity-mongers can confound us. We are fully aware of their duplicity, but does this knowledge allow us to escape the implications of their “unanswerable question”? What indeed is “the whole place,” the text in which we find ourselves, but a curiosity-shop, soliciting our attention with various “odds and ends”? Is it not the case that we read, just as we drift down “the Canal,” in order to gather these memorable “odds and ends,” the ricordi, which James had suggested we must not purchase from vendors, but gather “where the gondola glides”? Just as when earlier, we had been distracted to the point of turning away by the rhetorical excess of the alliterated sounds in the devious Jamesian discourse, we are once again distracted from the scene of the antiquity-mongers by a sound in the distance:
You have bad moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and, in the intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft plash of the sea on the old water-steps […]. (321)
18The sound of water lapping against the stone steps, whispered through a series of hushed sibilants, takes us out of the immediate present into imagined speculation about what might have been: “[F]or you think with anger of the noble homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of the delicate lives that must have been, that might still be, led there” (321). As the text goes on to evoke these possible, speculative, “noble homes,” the perspective remains directed out toward the future, ghostly reader who may happen upon the text, “you”:
You reconstruct the admirable house according to your own needs; leaning on a back balcony, you drop your eyes into one of the little green gardens with which, for the most part, such establishments are exasperatingly blessed, and end by feeling it a shame that you yourself are not in possession. (321)
19Very little detail is provided about this imagined “admirable house,” aside from the generic detail that there may be a “back balcony” with a view onto a garden. It is up to future readers to construct the house according to their needs, though the house we construct will never be our own. When we read James’s “The Grand Canal,” we can never be “in possession” of any interpretation that the text cannot shuffle off with a knowing smile. The “double character” of Venice, the treacherous multiplicity of meaning that undermines any attempt at mastery, is not a feature merely of the city itself; it also involves the future presence of the reader, who always arrives with a new perspective. This endless possibility of the always arriving reader, or arriving traveller, which the text makes room for at every moment, is part of what accounts for the “double character” of the Venetian life that James’s text allows to emerge. This “double character” undermines the text’s ability to represent James’s own phenomenal experience of Venice. It is related to what Kevin Ohi refers to as the “belatedness” of James’s later writings, in which the direct transmission of the content of experience is secondary to the indirect workings of style (Ohi 2011, 6). Our reading is never fully present to us, but always coming and going in dissolving streams of rhetorical figuration. James’s “The Grand Canal” is not a representation of experience, but an ongoing rhetorical engagement with the untimely, haunted experience of those who read it.
20In a striking parenthetical comment, we hear the voice of the author musing on this already presupposed future reader or future traveller to Venice, who is always in an unstable state of coming and going: “(I take for granted, of course, that as you go and come you are, in imagination, perpetually lodging yourself and setting up your gods)” (James 1993b, 321). As we read, we are “perpetually lodging [ourselves]” in one temporary place of residence after another, as we pass out of one dissolving reflection into another. It is not only the infinite glittering reflections of the Canal itself that provoke the vertiginous thought that everything is “picture and point of view;” the parenthetical remark addressed directly to the reader subtly “take[s] for granted” that it is also our own presence, our ongoing participation in the text, which contributes to the vertiginous “double character” of this Canal of glittering mirrors which we float down.
21In what follows this parenthetical musing on the coming and going of the future reader, we are provided with an example of the kind of temporary lodging that the text makes possible for its always arriving imaginative future readers. Although, as James writes, having “the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality of an old Venetian home” through “real participation” is perhaps the “shortest step into the inner spirit of the place” (321-322), it is not the only path that the reader may take to experience the “inner spirit” of Venice. James himself enjoyed the privilege of living in several of these old Venetian homes on several occasions, but he refrains from any attempt at direct representation of his own experience, for this would “savour of treachery to private kindness” (322). When James writes that he “should like to speak frankly of one of these delightful, even though alienated structures, to refer to it as a splendid example of the old palatial type” (322), we hear echoes of the way that James had earlier written of the “essential present character” of Venice from which we were obliged to “turn away.” The present in Venice, James had written, is “so alien, so discontinuous” (314), like the “alienated” palatial structures that James recalls living in. Perhaps in refraining to speak of his own “real participation” in these palaces, James is not only deferring to the good taste of not exposing private lives to the public eye, but is also relinquishing mastery over the reader’s experience, allowing for a different kind of “participation.” This withdrawal of access to James’s own private life allows the voice of the text to return to the posture of directly addressing the reader. The imagined, indirectly presented palace that James goes on to evoke, is not one that emerges as a reconstructed image of a concrete lived experience, but provides merely some loose scaffolding, some “odds and ends” for the reader to construct a temporary palace that suits their own needs. As James leaves behind the narrated events of his own life, we are able to enter into a different sort of time, one that inheres in places, and which is transmitted not through narrative time, but through a strange, irregular, haunted time: the ghostly presence of an atmosphere which slowly seeps into our experience of reading without our having noticed: “As you live in it day after day its beauty and its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions” (322). The next sentence, written in the mood of the subjunctive, announced by the speculative conjunction “if,” places us in the contingent situation of living for a brief span of time in this imagined palace “in the absence of its masters”:
If in the absence of its masters you have happened to have it to yourself for twenty-four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted stillness, late on the summer afternoon for instance, when the call of playing children comes in behind from the campo, nor the way the old ghosts seemed to pass on tip-toe on the marble floors. (322)
22When the masters are absent, the palace gains a strange intensity which manifests itself through a heightened sense of emptiness: a “haunted stillness.” As a result of this intensified emptiness, we can hear distant sounds: the sound of children playing, which signals a promise for the future, along with echoing footsteps from the past, those of “the old ghosts” who haunt our textual palace’s disjointed temporality. The “absence of the masters” invites a fleeting contingency, allowing for the coexistence of these figures for different regimes of temporality. Neither the children nor the ghosts are immediately present to us through vision, but are only heard in the distance. The children’s voices and the echoing footsteps of the ghosts float in and out of our awareness, unconstrained by the present immediacy of the visual image, obeying instead the porous logic of the sonorous, which can travel more easily across boundaries, both spatial and temporal. This ambient noise in the background is always there, though it may require the relinquishing of mastery, a concomitant weakening of our own and the text’s desire for control, in order for this background ambience to rise to faint perceptibility.
23This always ongoing background ambience is also perceptible through the figure of the many hidden gardens that lie between the walls of the Venetian canals. Their leafy vines at times creep through the cracks of the text, climbing over the walls lining the Canal to find themselves reflected in its shimmering waters. One of these instances occurs just after yet another moment of “turning away” from the solid, sepulchral inscriptions of Venice. We find James admiring from the outside one of the many Venetian palaces, this time “the high square Gothic Foscari” (325). At first, he attempts some blustering authoritative judgements about the palace, in an apparent effort to exert mastery. He labels it “one of the noblest creations of the fifteenth century, a masterpiece of symmetry and majesty” (325). However, this authoritative judgement quickly gives way to doubt and hesitation as we read on:
It is visibly “kept up”; perhaps it is kept up too much; perhaps I am wrong in thinking so well of it. These doubts and fears course rapidly through my mind – I am easily their victim when it is a question of architecture – […]. We feel at such moments as if the eye of Mr. Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and lose our confidence. This makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice, seek a pusillanimous safety in the trivial and the obvious. (325)
24John Ruskin famously decried the restoration of aging buildings as “the most total destruction which a building can suffer” (Ruskin 1849, 194). The material signs of age in buildings that modern restoration projects sought to clean away were for Ruskin to be lauded as the “golden stain of time” which would allow us to commune with the past (187). The rhetorical distancing from Ruskin in this passage suggests that James has a different view of time. For James, time is not a steady accumulation that we might read correctly or incorrectly in the stones of old monuments and buildings.
25As Sarah Salter has claimed, James does not understand history as a “totalized, narrativizable plot,” but he instead offers a “theory of the glimpse or impression” in which stray moments of experience can serve not to represent Italian history in any large sense, but to create what Salter calls “stylistic surface[s]” on which other, “extra-temporal spectacle[s]” might be inscribed (Salter 2014, 242, 241). This is precisely what occurs in the passage of text which follows James’s comments on Ruskin, as from the “symmetry and majesty” of the “high square Gothic Foscari,” carefully watched by the all-knowing eye of Mr. Ruskin, to “the trivial and obvious” which here takes the form of a “little garden directly opposite our windows” (James 1993b, 325).
I am on firm ground in rejoicing in the little garden directly opposite our windows – it is another proof that they really show us everything – and in feeling that the gardens of Venice would deserve a page to themselves. They are infinitely more numerous than the arriving stranger can suppose; they nestle with a charm all their own in the complications of most back-views. Some of them are exquisite, many are large, and even the scrappiest have an artful understanding, in the interest of colour, with the waterways that edge their foundations. (325-326)
26Such gardens, James claims, “show us everything” and are “infinitely more numerous than the arriving stranger can suppose” (325). The “arriving stranger” is a curious figure who never fully arrives, but is suspended in a progressive present as he drifts down the Canal, just as we drift through the meandering “devious discourse” of the text. We are in the position of the “stranger” as we gaze on these Venetian gardens which “nestle with a charm all their own in the complications of most back-views” (325). There is something unknowable about these gardens, which have “a charm all their own,” inaccessible to the kind of mastery that John Ruskin so commands in James’s mind over Venetian architecture, and yet they “show us everything.” Providing for the possibility that these gardens have “a charm all their own” distances them from any mediating human relation which might suggest that the gardens’ charm comes from the fact that they appear charming to us. Instead, in James’s writing, the gardens turn away from us, unconcerned with the intruding “stranger” who drifts through. The text instead highlights the gardens’ relations with other nonhuman actors. They “have an artful understanding […] with the waterways that edge their foundations.” The gardens and the water artfully conspire with one another, neither attempting to master the other.
27A few sentences on, no longer on the same “firm ground” provided by our position gazing directly on a garden from our windows, we have now diverged off into the imagination and into “the small canals,” the minor waterways which follow a different path than that of the main stream of the Grand Canal. Here we find that the “prettiest surprise” is not the architecture, the human-built environment, but the way the plant life overflows and intermingles with the walls of the city and the reflections this produces in the water of the canals:
The tangle of plants and flowers crowds over the battered walls, the greenness makes an arrangement with the rosy sordid brick. Of all the reflected and liquefied things in Venice, and the number of these is countless, I think the lapping waters loves them most. (326)
- 3 This reading, which takes into account the possibility of nonhuman agencies, takes inspiration from (...)
28The image of a “tangle of plants and flowers” which “crowds over the battered walls” suggests an uncontrolled eruption of nonhuman vitality.3 The noun “tangle” and the verb “crowds” evoke a teeming multiplicity, the intricate extent of which we are not able to see. As we listen to the alliterated /l/ in this second sentence, we experience a rhetorical exuberance that springs forth through the cracks of semantic meaning in a way analogous to the way the uncontrolled plant life grows around the walls of the city. The repeated liquid sound mirrors the fluidity of the “lapping waters” in a striking instance of language itself mirroring a further image of reflection. The ongoing flow of time evoked by the image of water and by the repeated liquid /l/ sound is caught momentarily in a static flash of reflection. In this momentary interval, this minor back eddy whirling away from the main stream, we find that there are hidden vitalities pulsating away to their own heterogeneous rhythms.
- 4 This thought of a time that does not always flow is indebted to Michel Serres’s image of time as pe (...)
29Time does not always flow through the Grand Canal or through its many minor back canals.4 When our attention begins to drift away from the rigid Cartesian lines of the “splendid square” of the Piazza San Marco or from the “symmetry and majesty” of the “high square” Venetian palaces that line the Grand Canal, we may discover any number of surprises as our attention is infiltrated by what is in the background: the unnoticed multiplicities of nonhuman rhythms which churn away amongst themselves, unconcerned by the human temporal and spatial patterns that we unthinkingly project onto the places we believe to inhabit.
30As we approach the end of “The Grand Canal,” the text appears to resist this very structure of its coming to an end. In the closing moment of the text, we have made it all the way up the Grand Canal to the railway-station on the opposing side of the Canal from the Piazza San Marco where we first began to turn away. Here, we catch sight of “the traveller emerging for the first time upon the terrace of the railway-station” (335):
He looks up and down at the gathered gondolas; he has his surprise after all, his little first Venetian thrill; and as the terrace of the station ushers in these things we shall say no harm of it, though it is not lovely. It is the beginning of his experience, but it is the end of the Grand Canal. (335)
31At “the end of the Grand Canal,” we are confronted with this figure of a new beginning, a beginning which puts into question the supposed “end” of the text which we supposedly reach upon completing this sentence. Although the text proclaims a rigid distinction between “experience” and the text/place of “the Grand Canal,” just as it proclaims a rigid distinction between “the beginning” and “the end,” neither of these oppositions can be easily sustained. As we turn the page of James’s Italian Hours to the next travel essay, we return twenty years back in time from the 1892 “The Grand Canal” to the 1873 “Venice: An Early Impression.” This next essay, the third to appear in Italian Hours, is the earliest written of the series of five essays on Venice which open the collection. Although it is the earliest of the five essays, it does not recount James’s earliest memories of Venice, but instead begins with a memory that is not the first, but already a return to an already known Venice:
I came into Venice, just as I had done before, toward the end of a summer’s day, when the shadows begin to lengthen and the light to glow, and found that the attendant sensations bore repetition remarkably well. (James 1993c, 336)
- 5 James’s remark about the uncanny “afternoon hour” that we find in the writings of Hawthorne comes i (...)
32The reader may recognise this feeling of returning to Venice from the two previous essays, which both begin by invoking the difficulty of saying anything new about a place that has been represented already so many times before. We are doubly struck then with that sense of eerie familiarity, as we read the line “I came into Venice, just as I had done before.” As the narrative “I” expresses their own sense of uncanny return to Venice, the readers who have read from the beginning of Italian Hours experience the third in a series of such eerie returns to the already known city of Venice. The Hawthornian atmosphere of the late “afternoon hour” in which we arrive contributes to creating a heightened sense of unreality (James 1984b, 126).5 This is a propitious environment for uncanny repetition.
33At the beginning of the second paragraph, the narrating “I” appears to split in two, becoming estranged from his own memories of arrival in Venice, which the essay’s speaker declines to recount: “I do not mean, however, to follow the traveller through every phase of his initiation” (James 1993c, 336). What was at first the narrating “I” of the initial account, “I came into Venice, just as I had done before,” now becomes “the traveller,” a figure distinct from the “I,” an “I” who is now free to engage in rhetorical purposes other than the mere narration of remembered events. The reassuring narrative sequentiality of beginnings and ends is troubled by the emergence of this figure of “the traveller” just one page down, but twenty years prior to the appearance of the same figure whose emergence from the railway-station had signaled the end of “The Grand Canal.” With this eerie doubling, looping effect, the travel essay as a faithful narrative recording of experiential observation turns into something more strange, more unsettling. Perhaps the faithful recording of one’s experience of a place just does require this kind of estrangement from oneself. When the speaking “I” splits off from and observes the figure of its own experiencing self, “the traveller,” this produces a moment of uncanny recognition. The strange affective atmosphere of the uncanny surges through and allows the reader to experience briefly the glimmering of a strange forgotten awareness. Who (or what) is “the traveller”? It does not seem to be entirely a figure for the narrative voice’s experience of Venice. Could it figure the reader’s own experience of Venice, even those readers who have no experience of their own of the geographical space that this signifier names? I would suggest that with this question, we begin to approach what might be behind this curious figure of the “traveller,” whose other pseudonym we encountered in the previous, later-written essay: “the arriving stranger.”
- 6 Morton here is writing of his concept of the “hyperobject,” which is a variation on the theme of Ha (...)
- 7 The “strange stranger” is a concept that Morton derives from Jacques Derrida’s arrivant, discussed (...)
34The arriving stranger never fully arrives, just as the arriving reader who may happen upon the text of “The Grand Canal,” but who will never be able to master any meaning behind the various figures that the text brings forth. Might we recognise in this always arriving stranger something in ourselves, something intimately close to our own experience here reading James’s Venetian travel essays? Still, even if we do experience a fleeting sense of familiarity, there is at the same time something irremediably foreign to us about “the traveller.” We are very different from “the traveller”; we have perhaps never been to Venice, and yet, as we turn the pages from one Venetian essay to the next, we begin to feel that perhaps we have been here before. The Venice that we begin to experience in these flickering moments of déjà-vu is the real place that James’s writing allows to emerge. When I speak here of a “real place,” I am alluding to Graham Harman’s idea of the inaccessible “real object” with which we may nonetheless make some sort of indirect “contact” through aesthetic experience (Harman 2017, 149-150). Rather than literal description of an object, which can only ever yield for us knowledge of its “sensual qualities,” aesthetic representations belong to a category of cognitive operation that, according to Harman, allow us indirect access to the mysterious world of “real objects.” Aesthetic experience has a “greater forcefulness and sincerity” than “even the greatest precision of discursive prose scientific statements,” because instead of engaging in the impossible task of “digging downward to the things themselves” (“things” which will always withdraw from our grasp by their very essence), aesthetic experience requires of the beholders that we substitute for the inaccessible real object another “real object” which is the only one that is always present to us: our own self (Harman 2017, 83). We have access to our own unique inwardness in a way that we do not have access to any other thing, even if this access remains indirect and fleeting. When James writes about Venice, especially in his later Venetian travel writings, he is not attempting to transcribe his experience literally, but instead to create the aesthetic conditions that will be conducive for future readers to experience not the phenomenal Venice of empirical experience, but the real Venice: the “ghostly presence” that we vaguely sense in the atmosphere of long lived-in places. The closer we look for the “inner spirit of the place” (James 1993b, 322), the more we begin to feel that strangely familiar “alien presence that is our innermost essence” (Morton 2013, 139).6 The “place” that James writes about, Venice or any other number of places that we visit in reading his travel writings, is made up of what Timothy Morton calls “strange strangers” (Morton 2010, 38-50),7 among whose ranks we must include ourselves, or at least that inaccessible part of our self that we nonetheless seem at times to brush up against indirectly.
35Today, as we continue to encounter the ghostly presence of the Jamesian text, we must evade the temptation to extract its secrets, but instead allow the guessing game to go on. Thinking in terms of the ghostly transmissions that a text might enact, rather than the straightforward transfer from one point to the next, might allow us to resituate our reading with a greater awareness of the unseen nonhuman agencies that are always churning away, constituting the same planetary atmosphere that we all breathe. When James wrote in 1874 that “[i]n places that have been lived in so long and so much and in such a fine old way, […] the past seems to have left a sensible deposit, an aroma, an atmosphere,” he did not specify by who (or what) these places had been “lived in” (James 1993a, 559). If we begin to consider that the places we encounter are perhaps “lived in” not only by their familiar human inhabitants, but by other, always as yet unimaginable “strange strangers,” our sense of place may begin to mutate so as to accommodate our unsuspected guests. In The Role of Place in Literature, Leonard Lutwack claimed that “Place loss, place devaluation, has been without question one of the principal motifs of literature over the last one hundred years” (Lutwack 1984, 184). We do not have to read this focus on “place loss” in literature as merely a lament for a lost harmonious and ordered relation between humans and their habitat, but we can instead consider this “place loss” as a loss of what we considered a place to be: the loss of our sense of place. In our current age of ecological mutation, perhaps a new sense of place may have begun to dawn on us. The nonhuman with which we have always coexisted, more intimately than we suppose, now begins to attract our attention following the discovery of our entanglement within the geological process of climate and the dire consequences that this bodes.
36“Place is no longer simply human,” writes Timothy Morton (2016, 27). The atmosphere that lingers in long inhabited places is no longer merely the residue of the human historical past, but of a non-narrative atmospheric past from the future or future from the past. The time of our ghostly present is out of joint, and this is precisely the opportunity it provides to the obstinate exiles who continue to derive vitality from the written word – that rarefied layer of atmosphere which allows for drifting in and out among varied pasts and futures.