Venise la nuit: Rêve / Venezia di notte: Sogno

Abstract

The writings of the brothers Goncourt are eclectic to say the least, associated with schools ranging from naturalism to japonisme and with genres ranging from novels and plays to art criticism and biography. As Edmond, the longer-lived half of the duo, explained a year before his death in 1896, what unified these diverse efforts was his and Jules’s zealous “religion de la réalité, de la vérité absolue, appliquée à l’humanité ou à la matière, dans la reproduction littéraire” (Goncourt and Goncourt, L’Italie iii).But at the outset of their career, the brothers nurtured a different, even antithetical, sensibility. With several decades’ distance Edmond also recalled how, after the failure of their first book, En 18. . . (1851)—a collection of highly precious, loosely connected fictional vignettes that, published on the same day as Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s December coup d’état,1 passed unnoticed by Parisian critics—he and Jules entered a period of “années inquiètes, hésitantes” (Goncourt and Goncourt, L’Italie ii ). Uncertain as to “la voie que le lettré doit prendre” (ii), they found themselves in a vague “disposition lyrique et symbolique,” with just one guiding conviction. This was “un certain mépris pour la transcription du vrai, du non imaginé” (iii)—that is to say, an antipathy to the very approach that would come to define their oeuvre from the 1860s onward.2In search of material for their burgeoning aesthetic program, the Goncourts embarked in November 1855 upon a six-month tour of Italy. Traveling around the country, they took copious notes, which they regarded not as “transcription[s] du vrai” but rather as inspirational source material for a radically imaginary account of the sights they had seen. This account, Edmond wrote, was to take the form of “un livre de prose poétique, fantastique, lunatique—un livre de rêve, donné comme le produit d’une suite de nuits hallucinatoires” (Goncourt and Goncourt, L’Italie iii).Upon their return to Paris in May 1856, the brothers set to work on this project, and the following spring, they submitted an excerpt from it, titled “Venise la nuit,” for publication in L’Artiste, a weekly art review edited by their friend Théophile Gautier. With its exuberant, stream-of-consciousness narration and wildly fantastical, proto-Surrealist tableaux, the piece seemed to fulfill the stylistic goal the Goncourts had set for their Italian monograph as a whole.“Venise la nuit” recounts an extended dream sequence, a jumble of oneiric set-pieces spanning multiple historical eras and featuring many of the city’s best-known figures and landmarks. It begins with the first-person narrator trying to steal Veronese’s Apotheosis of Venice from the sala del Maggior Consiglio and ends with his transformation into the Lion of Venice, a winged beast cast in bronze and perched atop a massive granite column near the palazzo Ducale. In between those two improbable events, the Goncourts’ “I” witnesses Watteau’s funeral (conducted by a rowdy gang of masked Carnival revelers), meets the wind god Aeolus blowing glass soap bubbles on the island of Murano, tours the Moorish quarter of Canareggio with a character from the Decameron (60), and succumbs to the charms of an enigmatic muse named Zitta (“toi, la femme au front parée de rêverie, toi, la femme au coeur douloureux et anémié, . . . toi, la novuelle Vénus, toi, la jeune physionomie moderne, . . . [toi,] la vierge-mère du génie de Carpaccio!”; 66). He even deciphers the songs of the pigeons that swarm on the piazza San Marco: Sais-tu bien qu’ici, le soir, sur les balcons, alors que le vent du Lido apporte au front les baisers de la mer, tous les coeurs sont occupés à se mettre des ailes, pour s’envoler de terre? . . . Sais-tu qui tient ici le bureau de la poste restante? C’est l’Amour, l’Amour qui, sans demander de passeport aux amoureux, délivre tant d’espoirs, et tant de belles joies, et de petits papiers à lire à deux genoux, et de tout petits mots qui sont de grands serments, et l’avenir promis et le présent donné, et le monde et le ciel tenant dans un chiffon? (32)The cumulative effect of these phantasmagoria is hypnotic, amplifying the already weird and singular beauties of the Serenissima and transforming it into an uncanny dreamscape. In the apt assessment of Vittorio Pica, an Italian art critic and collector who served as general secretary of the Venice Biennale in the 1920s and who was an early scholar of the Goncourts’ écrits de jeunesse, In esso Venezia è rappresentata come una città incantata, come una città vista attraverso I fantasmagorici veli di un sogno ed è descritta in una prosa poetica, che ha le fascinatrici esuberanze di colore dell’ultimo grande pittore veneziano, di Tiepolo (quoted in D’Ascenzo 206)3(In this [work] Venice is portrayed as an enchanted city—a city seen through the phantasmagorical veils of a dream, and described in a poetic prose that has the fascinating exuberance of color characteristic of the last great Venetian painter, Tiepolo.)The Goncourts’ contemporaries, however, did not share Pica’s enthusiasm for “Venise la nuit.” Its serialized printing in May 1857, in two sequential issues of L’Artiste, met with disgust and indignation from the journal’s readers, drawing charges of “pur charentonisme” and prompting a wave of subscription cancellations (Goncourt and Goncourt, L’Italie iv). So great was the scandal that Edmond and Jules did not even, according to the former, dare to ask for payment for their work (iv). They burned the bulk of their Italian manuscript, though they saved the offending Venice article from the flames, and put their dreamy prose-poetic effusions behind them. In their next book, Soeur Philomène (1861), they began to develop the gritty naturalist perspective—an unflinching clinical gaze fixed on the miseries of the Parisian poor—for which they would subsequently gain renown.Long after Jules’s premature death in 1870, Edmond returned to “Venise la nuit” and included it in two different books of essays: the anthology Pages retrouvées (1886) and a collection of otherwise rather conventional impressions de voyage called L’Italie d’hier (1894). As he wrote in a preface to the latter volume, Edmond had over the decades developed a growing retrospective fondness for his and Jules’s reviled Venetian experiment: “Un rien du sentiment de predilection que les mères ont pour leurs enfants mal venus” (Goncourt and Goncourt, L’Italie v). This nostalgia may have been rooted in his awareness that if the essay’s failure had not been so complete, he and his brother might never have found their way to their hallmark “religion de la réalité.” In any case, Edmond even expressed the desire to publish “Venise la nuit” as a standalone work, “un petit bijou typographique” (v).While he did not live to realize that hope, the Venetian imprint Damocle has now done so with the release of a bilingual French and Italian edition of the work, titled Venise la nuit: Rêve / Venezia di notte: Sogno (2021). The edition and translation are elegantly done by Carlo Alberto Petruzzi, who explains in a prefatory note that he has deliberately maintained some of the Goncourts’ “inexactitudes” of expression—in the bits of Italian and Venetian dialogue that pepper the French original—because they serve to highlight una felice distanza fra il lettore di oggi e l’universo della Serenissima; l’allontanamento nel tempo e nello spazio e la patina di un lessico ‘scoretto’ di entusiasti viaggiatori del Grand Tourconsentono un più facile ingress nella scrittura ‘bizarra’ e poeticamente ricercata dai due fratelli in quel period della loro produzione. (9–10)(a felicitous distance between today’s reader and the universe of the Serenissima; the sense of estrangement in time and in space, and the patina of “incorrect” linguistic usage by Grand Tour travelers, allow for an easier entry into the “bizarre” and poetically recherché writing of the two brothers during this period of their production.)This “felicitous distance” comes through beautifully in Petruzzi’s rendering, which preserves the oddities, for example, in the string of curses—uttered by an enraged street vendor of fried pumpkin—that open the book, as the narrator tries to flee with his stolen Veronese tucked under his arm. In the original and the translation, the pumpkin seller’s parting insult is “Don Squacquera!” (Sir Diarrhea!), a colorfully disgusting epithet otherwise found only in a satirical play by the sixteenth-century Florentine author Pietro Aretino. Poetically recherché indeed—and deliberately so. In fact, it seems that the brothers borrowed the term from the first-ever French translation of Aretino’s works, an 1845 edition where they also found, in a footnote to the “Don Scacquera” line, another antiquated obscenity for their pumpkin merchant’s harangue: “écosse-fèves,” faithfully rendered by Petruzzi as “scozzafave,” meaning bean-sheller.4 The Goncourts too were clearly interested in the type of estrangement effect that antiquated and obscure vocabulary words could produce.Petruzzi, for his part, contributes a few flourishes of his own to amplify the lexical quirkiness of the narrative, giving another line of dialogue from the Goncourts’ version—“tout cela est plat comme un fait” (38)—as “tutto questo è piatto come una cronaca” (as flat as a chronicle; 39). This embellishment is particularly clever because it underscores the bias against factual chronicling that informed the composition of “Venise la nuit” in the first place. The subtlety and care that such choices demonstrate make this book as pleasurable—and strange, and surprising—to read in translation as in the original, and will leave readers of both versions regretting that the Goncourts should have awakened so soon from their outrageously unreal dreams of Italy.