Giorgione Storm 
DOCUMENT FOR THE COURSE: "Controversy Sollers-Debray of Venice "
conference with C. Bertho Lavenir, Shanghai, April 2008;
See also: Jean-Didier Urbain, The Idiot's journey: stories of tourists , Payot / Small Library, 2002
"Sollers-Debray Controversy over Venice"
Introduction
While the nineteenth century discovered the concept of heritage and sowed the territory of the various European countries 'historic', the end of the twentieth century marks a disillusionment. In a century and a half, the protection of ancient buildings, their maintenance and access are the norm. The number of tourists has grown exponentially. Some places like Versailles or the Louvre, welcomes visitors by the millions every year, across the population of Europe is considerable. For the latter one landscape routes, it streamlines visits, modernized equipment ... Cafeterias, bookstores, parking lots surrounding castles, churches and museums. Waves rush of tourists can imagine "how" France in Europe and two days a week.
This very success leads to a paradoxical process of devaluation of assets. The symbolic buildings, even the most prestigious, tends to vanish. Subjected to heavy use, they lose their importance in the collective imagination. Eroded by too many literary celebrations, told in too many letters, diaries, memoirs, novels, they no longer mean anything from having served too.
Venice is one of those places, too celebrated, too visited, photographed too. At the turn of the twenty-first century, two French writers confront about it. Regis Debray published in 1995 Against Venice, a small pamphlet in which he expressed his abhorrence of the worship of Venice and his irritation at the carefully crafted literary poses of those who go for the literary prize. Philippe Sollers, founder of his time in the magazine Tel Quel , enfant terrible of the New Novel in the 1960s, a writer now chastened, replied in a violent section of his love of Venice Dictionary (Plon, 2004): Debray, Sollers writes, is an "embittered philosopher" a "disappointed love" a "frustrated with politics and history ". In short it professes to love Venice is not that he does not know or deserve. Sollers, he knows how to enjoy Venice. Besides, no one lives there not a part of the year for decades? He directed himself in a previous novel, The Feast in Venice, in the guise of a writer recluse living in one of the palaces of Venice. One thing, however, brings Sollers and Debray: a disdain for the common crowd of tourists. And one thing separates them: Sollers think we can develop a distinguished use of the city. Debray argues no, and that poses dandies lovers selective lagoon are a variant of the vulgarity of the ruling classes.
Conflict, after all, might be only a minor episode in the French literary scene if it gave us an opportunity to reflect on the place in the cultural life of one of the great capitals of Heritage world. So what has happened between 1850 and 2008 for the same city, considered a jewel of European culture, comes to be regarded as a capital of vulgarity? Two phenomena have been combined. First industrialization of tourism in the second half of the twentieth century has brought some areas of heritage in a market economy that has stripped them of their aura. To stand out a tourism is now commonplace, the ruling classes and the crop circles have to invent another use of heritage and a different approach to the city. It is this desire of distinction that stigmatizes Debray ... and to substitute another.
The early years of the twenty-first century seem to require a reinvention of the uses of heritage. The conflict around Venice can define its contours. To do this, we proceed in the following pages, in three stages. At first we recall the process by which Venice became a world capital of culture which will note the diversity of cultural registers through which individual visitors can be approached. In a second step we will return to the condemnation of mainstream tourism by placing it in a sociology of cultural practices. In a third we will consider the proposals of our writers hungry for distinction.
Distinction? The work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu ( Distinction, A Social Critique of Judgement , Minuit, 1979) indeed provide the conceptual tools relevant for dismantling process by which representatives of various social groups emit value judgments about cultural practices and engage in a logic of competition to validate certain practices and invalidate others in the cultural field.
I. See Venice, writing about Venice: a European heritage
The city of Venice holds a special place in the European heritage partly because its history has bequeathed an urban design and a unique heritage of art almost without rival. The visit of the city, built on the canals is not devoid of playfulness. Moreover, for several centuries, European men of letters and artists have used to get there. Their letters and books were scattered throughout Europe on account of their experience in the city. A kind of "knowing visit" Venice has been constituted, which has spread among the educated classes of Europe.
A prestigious past
The city of Venice is first and foremost an extraordinary story and an amazing urban heritage. The city is located just north of the Adriatic, where it was founded in the fifth century by people fleeing the land invasions. It is built on islands in a lagoon and home, palaces and religious buildings are built, mostly on stilts. Little or no streets in this strange city, but the channels. It travels by boat. In the twentieth century, motorboats, the motoscaffi, replaced the gondolas. This is one of the few cities where buses are boats. The airport is on land and when The aircraft landed at sunrise or sunset soil is discovered during the journey by boat to the city a beautiful cityscape.
The city also is full of artistic treasures. It became about the year one thousand, one point of contact between East and West, both for trade and for military operations. Its merchants became very wealthy and powerful nobility. Each other and have built along the canals and palaces sober on the outside but beautiful on the inside, as well as churches beautifully decorated. The largest of them, Saint-Marc, is defended by two stone lions, antique sculptures brought from the ancient capital of the Roman Empire, Byzantium. Aristocratic republic, the city is headed by a doge and council all-powerful. The intrigue, secrecy, poisoning, arbitrary imprisonment of political life rhythm. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the social life of Venice is an exception in Europe. Concerts and festivals punctuate public life. Merchants and nobles do work of painters and musicians of the highest quality. Wealthy merchants and aristocrats to maintain courtesans. The luxury industry is booming. It is in Venice that we know make the big mirrors that adorn the Europe's most prestigious chateaux. The luxury clothes, the beauty of music, the beautiful pictures impress visitors. Correspondence tell masked balls, secret meetings on the gondolas, jealous husbands, murder, spies. It is in Venice that were born artist's works Tintoretto (1518-1594), musician Vivaldi (1678-1741), playwright Goldoni and Casanova's scandalous. The reputation of the Venetians spread throughout Europe. The King of Saxony brought with gold painter Canaletto in Dresden to decorate his palaces. A spectacular city
grown men of Europe full love to spend. The German engraver Albrecht Dürer is in 1506. He sent a dozen letters to a friend Nuremberg to be published in Italian in 1781. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne stayed there in 1580, with a visitation program that already seems established by custom. Although the city has impressed
"other than he had imagined and rather less admirable, he recognized in all its features with extreme caution, writes his secretary. The police, the situation, the arsenal, the Piazza San Marco and the press of foreign peoples, it seemed the most remarkable things. "
A young French aristocrat who became Speaker of the Parliament of Burgundy, spent in 1739 and never tires of the strangeness of this city built on water:
"... when there is a time, he writes, seen exiting the water on all sides of palaces, churches, streets, entire towns, because there is not one, and finally not being able to step into the city without the foot in the sea is one thing to my liking so I'm less surprising today that the first day .... " (President Brush, Italian Journey, )
Festivals gondolas and masked balls
The trip to Venice is essential to a man of taste in the late eighteenth century. The German writer Goethe resides there in 1784. A letter published in the compendium of his "Italian Journey" describes a popular Venice alive, all steeped in art and sense of fun:
"The people are the foundation on which everything rests. The audience played their role, and the crowd identified with the show. During the day, the squares and on the waterfront in the gondolas and palaces, the seller and the buyer, the beggar, the sailor, the neighbor, the lawyer and his opponent, live, struggle, wiggle, talk, protest, shouting, calling, sing, play, swear and make noise.
And at night they go to the show and see and hear the day their lives artistically combined, embellished, interwoven tales, far from reality by the mask while it is close by the mores.
They giggle like kids, they cry, they clap and make noise. From morning to night, or rather from 0:00 to 0:00, it's always the same. "
Venice melancholy
But the vitality of the city seems to run out. In the nineteenth century, the city has lost vitality commercial and Bonaparte took away her independence. He conquered the city, gives it a dull administrative status before selling it to Austria. The city sleeps. The palaces of complete degradation. Tourists, however, returned, and the aristocrats who spends a season or more. They will develop a new theme: Venice is no longer the city of unbridled celebration and luxury, but a place filled with the melancholy memory of his past greatness. The English poet Lord Byron and dandy dedicated poems to the city all the fingerprints of the sense of deprivation of the city. And "The Silent Gondolier Rowing in Silence" from the Fourth Childe Harold
song:
"Echoes of Venice not repeat more verses of Tasso,
and silent gondolier rowing in silence.
Its palaces crumble on the shore, and
music now strikes no more ear incessantly.
His glory days are past, however
but Venice is still beautiful.
empires fall, arts degenerate
but nature never dies;
but she has not forgotten how Venice once was dear to him, this
pleasant of all pleasures,
paradise of the earth, the mask of Italy! "
... A new theme is needed in the writings of European scholars: the death of Venice associated with death in Venice. The economic decline of the city, which seems to sink slowly into the lagoon, echoes the theme of literary Sehnsucht nostalgia as shown in German Romanticism. The sense of time passing, the despair, grief, love, suicide even become inextricably tied to literary themes the literary image of Venice in the nineteenth century.
paradoxical celebration of the disqualification of the city accompanied by a transformation of the look on the monuments. In the first part of the twentieth century Venice is still a place to stay aristocratic writers, artists and people of the world will make long stays. The Englishman has developed in Ruskin The Stones of Venice, a new aesthetics of the monument. The beauty of Venice said he holds in his dereliction same: it must operate at no cost on ancient monuments restorations brutal in destroying the charm.
"Time and dereliction as the waves and storms have been overcome to decorate it instead of destroying it, and they can still save in the ages to come this beauty ..."
Death in Venice
the twentieth century, the theme of Death in Venice is combined with that of the death in Venice. Suicidal melancholy in the city the perfect setting to pass the act. that prevail in European culture through film. In 1971 a film crystallized on a single work the Romantic tradition and prestige film of the city's Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti. From the great Italian aristocracy, last was inspired by a story by German writer Thomas Mann published in 1913, the "Belle Epoque" of the European aristocracy. The hero, loosely based the character of the musician Gustav Mahler, also reflects part of the personality of the author. The central character is a writer already old, who wanders with no real end in Italy. He stays in the bad season in a grand hotel more or less deserted Lido, Venice strip of sand separating the sea, when it is disturbed by a young boy of great beauty, he follows in the city but no dare tackle. The writer to die of cholera in Venice.
The critical success of this film that takes place among the masterpieces of European cinema, gives a new relevance to the vision disillusioned romantic Venice and associates it with a popular vision of the artist, regarded as a solitary genius, misunderstood, crushed under its own contradictions. The soundtrack, taken part in the Fifth Concerto Gustav Mahler experience a popularity far exceeding the usual audience of the novels of Thomas Mann. Some aristocratic cultural tradition joined at this time of mass culture.
Venice, mass culture, mass tourism
Venice, also entered the mass culture through tourism. In the twentieth century journey of cultural discovery has become a practice weight in Europe while retaining, in part, the forms that had been given by the middle classes in the middle of the nineteenth century. Transport prices downward effect in Europe significantly. From the 1950s, automobile travel is increasing, in Europe the distances are not excessive. Air travel was popularized in 1980. In Venice a station is built in the 1930s to facilitate entry into the city. The hotels are proliferating. The museums were reorganized to accommodate the crowds. Tour guides are intended to provide the user guide of the city. There are a considerable number, published in all major European languages. Venice also became popular in European culture, the stereotype of the city conducive to love. One example the travel destination for honeymooners. All this gives rise to a genuine tourist industry.
cf.Carte Baedeker guide, Venice, 1913
This is manifested by a proliferation of images. Photographs, postcards and souvenirs illustrated multiply the first half of the twentieth century, the stereotypical images of the city. Piazza San Marco, the Church of the Salute, the Accademia (Museum of Painting), Rialto Bridge, Grand Canal are reproduced in millions of copies of objects that visitors to prevail in their country, filling the interiors of European houses with tiny reproductions of the Rialto bridge and gondolas on the Grand Canal. This freezes the image directory view of the city ..
also printed travel guides offer travelers ordinary marked trails that lead to the most important monuments. In museums, these works attracted the attention of tourists on certain tables only, always the same. The palaces and buildings, they offer a historical interpretation and unique aesthetic, often old and summary.
Venice in danger?
The highlight of this identification of Venice as a high-rise in global tourism is its listing of World Heritage of Humanity. Unesco, in fact, has developed a Convention on the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, opened in 1972 and in 1978 a particularly prestigious list of sites and a list of endangered sites. The issue of Danger is thus required at the end of the twentieth century. The audience of the great international tourism is not particularly sensitive to the poetry of ruins. It looks rather that the whole town turns into a historic monument to his own satisfaction. But the city suffers. The pollution came from the nearby town of Mestre great abyss buildings. Flood water from the lagoon ("acqua alta") tend to be more frequent and the 1966 is spectacular. The traditional economy of the town from disappearing in the number of permanent residents has declined steadily, resulting in poor maintenance of the built heritage. The large tourist tends to counteract this development requires that the city remains ready to welcome visitors and show them what the guide and travel agencies have promised : Old buildings, churches, museums, hotels, restaurants, gondolas ... The capacity of the city, beyond which the city is corrupt and compromised urban functions, was evaluated at 25 000 visitors a day, yet the average is 30 000 visitors from Venice with peaks of 200 000 visitors per day.
II. Debray, Sollers and Venice
is in this context that the conflict takes place between Philippe Sollers and Regis Debray. Summarize. Philippe Sollers writer, dandy, a Venice resident of the year, like the aristocrats European turn of the century, fiercely critical mass tourism and offers another way to enjoy the heritage of Venice, refined out of step with the codes of public and fully mediated by attending intimate texts of writers. Yet it is precisely this practice that refined Regis Debray, a philosopher and essayist, attacks. There's nothing more trite in a certain environment, "he said to want to distinguish themselves from the banal. And nothing more vulgar than to profess to despise the vulgar ...
despise the ordinary tourist
From the first pages of the dictionary in love Venice, tourists experience a critical mass in order. Tourists, writes Philippe Sollers, understanding neither what they are doing or where they are. To profess to despise the ordinary tourist is not original, it's the rule for members of the educated classes in Europe. The phenomenon is ancient. Gustave Flaubert and Maxime du Camp in 1843 traveling along the first tourists were making fun of them already and for the same reasons. The criticism is the first tourist to travel in groups. It is therefore not characterized by individuality and originality that are fundamental values in the construction of the figure of the artist in the West. Moreover, the tourist is not sufficiently cultivated to develop itself a thought or emotions to the masterpieces he contemplates. It merely reproduces the emotions that he prescribed the printed guide or cicerone.
As shown by Jean-Didier Urbain The Idiot's Travel the history of travel in contemporary Europe is based on an opposition between the tourist and traveler. The tourist is despicable for the reasons that we say: the traveler is honorable because it is akin to the aristocratic figure of the creator. The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, particularly in the work The distinction devoted to the sociology of taste, interprets this desire in the broader context of the defense of a cultural and social capital. No wonder then that the representatives of mass tourism suffer the scornful gaze of our two scholars.
Sollers against tourists
Criticism tourist dictionary lovers of Venice, however, is more subtle than the usual denunciations, in that it addresses the posture of the ordinary visitor. Philippe Sollers said tourists can neither stand, nor look.
First entry. Sollers, magically happened "in a dream" in Venice - which allows him not to stand in line - between the museum called the Accademia and went straight to his favorite painting painter Giorgione's The Tempest. There he contrasts the poor uneducated tourists who did not have the user manual of the place and the amateur aesthetic, who knows how to interpret the table. Why do tourists understand anything? First, because taken in a logical case for his time he runs and agitated when they should stop. Time is a luxury he has not. Moreover, the tourist is not able to understand for himself the meaning of works that look and trusted the teachings of the printed guide. But this guide does not teach him anything, "said Sellers.
"A guide will tell you" The nature and exalted poetic and harmonious relationship that man has with her are the real subjects of the painting. " You are now well advanced. You are no doubt useful to know that Giorgone (which we know very little) was born around 1478 ... that humanism finally inspires his themes: you're still in the fog. "Abandon
Guide:
"Pass the tourists, just remain there in front, shut up, forget everything. The table takes place now, for you, for you alone. You talk about the weather over time, like any city, Serene constantly. It is his vocation, his greatness, his quiet "
This suggests that Sollers, the visitor is therefore to break with the usual practice of mass tourism - the crowds, noise, agitation," Goodwill cultural "embodied by the guide - and reinvest the installation of visitor aesthetic, exceptional character, armed with a personal sensitivity sufficient for it assures a direct, intimate, at work.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has characterized this position of distinction in the practice of visiting the museum. She replies, "he said, two positions: those of the heirs, children of the upper layers of society - and that of members of classes or medium full of what he calls the" cultural goodwill ". The latter, he says conscience not master the knowledge that can enjoy a cultural object ("include a roll") but they express the desire to appropriate them. Unlike the "heirs," said Pierre Bourdieu also were fed in their childhood have enough knowledge cultural, for having never need to use them explicitly. They tend to erase the memory of learning work it took to make and assert their ability to enter into the mystery works only because of their sensitivity, highly personal and innate quality. The members of the middle classes, however, accessing the latest on the visit of the great collections prove unable to separate these crutches that are teaching guides, who report their cultural inferiority.
Haro on the printed guide
Sollers still camped outside the Giorgione continuous demonstration. "I listen," he said, [the table] I'm starting to see. " Then begins a detailed description of the table What do we see? A half-naked woman suckling a child, a young man walking, broken columns. And Sollers to engage in an interpretation of the table. Broken columns: it is a grave. Heron? A symbol of lust. Sollers but cheating on the edges. This is not sensitivity but scholarship to track its demonstration. Who knows that broken columns can mean a grave if not specialists? And who knows this verse of the fourteenth century, he cites and which intervenes suddenly in the proof to convince the reader amazed that this is the symbol of sexual frenzy ... For successive shifts Sollers replaces the guide. He is the guide ... evidence that he did not need the guide ...
Sus-camera
Sollers also tackles the status of the image. First targeted the Japanese tourist, who acknowledges, is known for its use of the frenetic camera. Here at the Accademia Japanese - always in groups is not it - accumulating the errors of taste. They photograph the paintings to Instead of looking. Worse, overwhelmed by the images which they are not codes, they are amassing at the exit to watch the film on television exposure, more subdued version, domesticated, the flow of colors and shapes they n have not been able to love.
"I remember, during a splendid retrospective of Titian in the Doges Palace, Japanese tourists photographing furiously tables not to see them, destabilized by their size, complexity, beauty and gathering at the exit look to television sets the film on the exhibition ... "
Writers as mediators
The real way to understand the city, Sollers, is through the mediation of the ancient writers who preceded him in Venice. On the one hand, it gives the reader a posture similar to that of the authors he frequents. Writer among writers, artist among artists, he escapes the danger of being drowned in the anonymous mass. Then Sollers, erudite, cultured and clever, is happy to use unfamiliar texts rare and amazing. That's for sure: this look on his proposed city will own, unique, rare and unique.
Sollers has directed this entry in the city by the literature in two books. The first Day in Venice, apparently as a novel. His frame is: a writer involved in trafficking of stolen art. It is not the instigator but a mere sidekick. The great masters of traffic, it does not, use him through a woman he was in love. More very young, she is part of the Parisian world of publishing. He himself stays in Venice, in a palace which he rarely goes out in the company of a young woman. It an Australian student who is graduating in mathematics and foreign operations, which remains suspicious that she meets. At least it seems. The same writer in Paris, worried unless it is just jealous, says fears that the young woman is sent by the police. At the end of the story a powerful boat anchored in front of the Palace. The narrator comes on board, a picture is revealed. There is an array of unknown or lost Watteau. The writer stands guard at the table. It handles a large pistol. The boat leaves. Nothing seems to have happened. This story
which may belong to the genre of detective fiction, however, appears only very gradually to the reader. Its elements remain scattered and disjointed, as covered by another narrative: the writer's stay in the Venetian palace. The narrator tells the frame of days, the moments of sleep, changes of light in the windows, his naps, moments where he makes love with his young companion, advances lazy text he writes. The narrator sounds like what we know about Philippe Sollers himself by his occupation, age, position in society, taste poses and dandy provocation.
The exact reverse of a mass tourism
The use of the city that is proposed in this novel is the exact reverse of mass tourism. Venice is both present and absent in the text. Absent. The narrator wanders ever. Venice is one of the most visited places in Europe and probably the one where there is less gardens. He pushes up the paradox never leave his garden which he details the trees plants and flowers. Moreover, it does not visit. He stayed in the heart of a famous place among all the monuments and not talk about it. If the writer operates sometimes a few outings in the city is to do precisely what the tourists do not do: go to the theater, concert, a reception with friends ... This raises living in old Venice, with these resources Rare missing tourists: time, knowledge network, friends ... Laying aesthetics, which wants to distinguish from common. What others do, I do not do it.
The city is yet present, but through a filter, the culture of the narrator. It does not describe himself monuments, he recounts what the ancients have said travelers. It does not tell the adventures of its out on the town, he cites those he found in books. It is not in Venice to visit Venice but to read, hidden in his garden, what else have lived and told the city. Even his posture improbable conspirator resulted in a dangerous traffic takes a turn for literature: Is it true? Is that wrong? Or is it only the narrator's desire to be the equal of a Casanova who combined literature and conspiracy? Or is it that the return of a theme characteristic of Sollers novels - three of his novels successive narrator is a spy - outside the world incognito to watch and in find the hidden meaning?
Sollers's Venice is indeed saturated with the memory of his predecessors: Goethe and the Cardinal de Bernis, Dürer and the German Romantic writers, Thomas Mann. Nobody can accuse him of being pedantic ... the entire text is simply text entered by other like a palimpsest, made of several layers that appear in places. It is more generally a characteristic of writing Philippe Sollers than being saturated by other texts. His novels are full of long quotations, literary device he systematized. Is this a method to construct a distanced view and fed either a laziness too gifted a writer - as some suspect -? The person we suspect, did not cure.
It will also systematize the process dictionary lovers of Venice, published in 2006, cited above. A dizzying round of writers. But neither Lagarde, nor Sollers Michard. In each of the writers he cites, it fetches the little-known text, the odd anecdote that illuminates his personality. It brings the reader into the intimate lives of these writers never reduced entangled in their writings but so incredibly romantic in love, bankruptcies, secrets, conspiracies. It was Louis Aragon young man maintained by Nancy Cunard, who tries to commit suicide in Venice in 1928. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, struggling with the prostitutes in the city, Michel de Montaigne, sick and grumpy. Sollers fun and dictionary form allows it to Peggy Guggenheim neighborly wealthy American of the twentieth century, Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, Vivant Denon, libertine lover of art and love, traveling Following Bonaparte and Marcel Proust accompanying his mother. In this dictionary we find also a set of buildings, places (the ghetto), tables, never discussed in terms expected, always magnified by a scholarship weird, unexpected perspective. It's a way to enjoy the heritage that we offer. Distinguished, contemptuous of the mass tourist, but within a tradition: traveling artist. The look of being exceptional sensitivity which is experiencing a unique experience, develops a particular focus on the unprecedented own city.
is precisely this look "artist" that R. Debray will in turn shot !
Debray cons Venice
what has bitten Regis Debray? Cons Venice is full of anger, rhetoric may be, but angry nonetheless. Venice annoys him. And more snobs who claim to experience Venice emotions like no other. No names of course. It does not denounce his best enemies but vitriolic portraits.
course begins with Debray decry the mainstream tourism. But this is not the essence of his remarks. What will it apply to demolish the "artist eyes" on the city, the posture of the man - or the woman-grown, the desire for distinction that pushes a fraction of the visitors to do anything to distinguish themselves from the vulgar, extricate themselves from the crowd.
"The mere sight of Fortune on his globe of gold or stone lions of the Arsenal is instantly push between the thumb and forefinger the quill pen of Chateaubriand. ('Venice is there sitting on the shores of the sea, like a beautiful woman who is going out with the day: the evening breeze lifts her hair embalmed; dies welcomed by all the graces and all the smiles of nature ... '. Why is it that Joseph Prudhomme is more exposed than others to this Registry miraculous? Annually deposited in the Parisian storefronts two or three chapters of the Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, paperback under assumed name, that to have only the arch and not the holding of Viscount raise thousand cries of delight "
Joseph Prud Man is the hero of the novel of the same name published in 1857 by Henri Monnier, contemptuous of bourgeois stupidity. Its name suggests, it is "prudent." It's ridiculous the representative of a middle class and poor satisfied, conveying ideas and clichés. Of course not it thoughtful of Régis Debray to dress up for this surname writers and writers who, exactly, are going to Venice looking for a fragrance of distinction. Those whose books assure us that they understand precisely Venice other than ordinary mortals, they know there safe havens that do not frequent travelers vulgar they feel emotions rare in Venice, they are only to know ...
This allocation of distinction infuriates Debray. It seemed typical of a Parisian bourgeoisie who succeeded - he said the ape-life artist because she despises the people. And it scans of the same movement all the cliches of this literature
"If there was a code of ethics in our corporation [the writers], to temper the critical grandstanding, literary and film critics should agree in principle to a penalty imposed uniformly international products taking Venice backdrop ( as well as the use of tear-sorts in children under twelve years on the screen). This handicap is intended to offset the advantage conferred by these mechanically feasible as a backdrop. "
Debray goes even further. There really in Venice, he writes, buildings, works of art, places that do not deserve the reputation they have been made and which do not justify the reverent worship that is carried by their false scholars. At the Accademia, for example, The Meal Levi by Veronese is not a masterpiece of European painting. It is a clever trompe l'oeil lacks momentum, "a great machine," a "disproportionate coloring without an atom of pain without an accent of truth. And the celebrated philosopher, a taste for contradiction, Naples, most popular, most unkempt, dirty more perhaps, but more authentic. But the philosopher cheat a little, too. At first he hates Venice far less than he says. Who careful reading, his little pamphlet anti-Venice, offers superb pages to the glory of the city. Debray famous example of how splendidly the lagoon, working as a ramp positioned between the city and theater groups, isolates a magical space, a city unique, neither completely real nor completely artificial. And he does not leave behind in the round Sollers breezy references that require to be included, a strong classical culture.
cons Debray
Sollers Sollers, who would have thought, was felt targeted. Enough anyway to devote a section of his dictionary in love with Venice insolent Debray, calling
philosopher embittered, disappointed in love, frustrated by politics and history, a severely wounded the pleasure of literature and art. "
He summarized his remarks. For Debray Venice would
"narcissistic, no religion, cynical, no heat popular. The venue is a tragedy and nobody jumps out at you neck. Is the empty mud, temptation, the same impurity ... "
knives are drawn, feathers, sharp insult springs of the inkstand. All this for Venice. Or maybe for some representation of themselves and the world that the writer built around the city.
Venice resurrected
It is not about controversy confidential. Day in Venice Venice is like Counter been published and republished in paperback. Are readily dictionary lovers of Venice on the shelves of bookstores. This book has even spawned a collection of books sold in sizes small airports. Each volume is devoted to a major European city and compiles the main texts What devoted to the latter the ancient writers. All these cities, Venice, such as Prague, Paris, London or Rome are certainly overrun by too many visitors. Restorations abusive, tourism developments threaten their monuments and ancient quarters. Prague looks like a copy of which Prague was built for an American museum. Bruges was frozen in its beauty too much repainted. And yet. We wondered at the beginning of this conference if too many visits did not kill the emotion. If too many tourists did not use the heritage significance if the sense of beauty of the buildings had not disappeared under the weight of command admiration. It seems to Venice the answer is: no. We do not argue like cats and dogs are like Debray and Sollers around a city emptied of all its charms, meaningless, out of memory. Without doubt we must conclude as Regis Debray does the last line of Against Venice.
"Venice? I know .. but still "
This very success leads to a paradoxical process of devaluation of assets. The symbolic buildings, even the most prestigious, tends to vanish. Subjected to heavy use, they lose their importance in the collective imagination. Eroded by too many literary celebrations, told in too many letters, diaries, memoirs, novels, they no longer mean anything from having served too.
Venice is one of those places, too celebrated, too visited, photographed too. At the turn of the twenty-first century, two French writers confront about it. Regis Debray published in 1995 Against Venice, a small pamphlet in which he expressed his abhorrence of the worship of Venice and his irritation at the carefully crafted literary poses of those who go for the literary prize. Philippe Sollers, founder of his time in the magazine Tel Quel , enfant terrible of the New Novel in the 1960s, a writer now chastened, replied in a violent section of his love of Venice Dictionary (Plon, 2004): Debray, Sollers writes, is an "embittered philosopher" a "disappointed love" a "frustrated with politics and history ". In short it professes to love Venice is not that he does not know or deserve. Sollers, he knows how to enjoy Venice. Besides, no one lives there not a part of the year for decades? He directed himself in a previous novel, The Feast in Venice, in the guise of a writer recluse living in one of the palaces of Venice. One thing, however, brings Sollers and Debray: a disdain for the common crowd of tourists. And one thing separates them: Sollers think we can develop a distinguished use of the city. Debray argues no, and that poses dandies lovers selective lagoon are a variant of the vulgarity of the ruling classes.
Conflict, after all, might be only a minor episode in the French literary scene if it gave us an opportunity to reflect on the place in the cultural life of one of the great capitals of Heritage world. So what has happened between 1850 and 2008 for the same city, considered a jewel of European culture, comes to be regarded as a capital of vulgarity? Two phenomena have been combined. First industrialization of tourism in the second half of the twentieth century has brought some areas of heritage in a market economy that has stripped them of their aura. To stand out a tourism is now commonplace, the ruling classes and the crop circles have to invent another use of heritage and a different approach to the city. It is this desire of distinction that stigmatizes Debray ... and to substitute another.
The early years of the twenty-first century seem to require a reinvention of the uses of heritage. The conflict around Venice can define its contours. To do this, we proceed in the following pages, in three stages. At first we recall the process by which Venice became a world capital of culture which will note the diversity of cultural registers through which individual visitors can be approached. In a second step we will return to the condemnation of mainstream tourism by placing it in a sociology of cultural practices. In a third we will consider the proposals of our writers hungry for distinction.
Distinction? The work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu ( Distinction, A Social Critique of Judgement , Minuit, 1979) indeed provide the conceptual tools relevant for dismantling process by which representatives of various social groups emit value judgments about cultural practices and engage in a logic of competition to validate certain practices and invalidate others in the cultural field.
I. See Venice, writing about Venice: a European heritage
The city of Venice holds a special place in the European heritage partly because its history has bequeathed an urban design and a unique heritage of art almost without rival. The visit of the city, built on the canals is not devoid of playfulness. Moreover, for several centuries, European men of letters and artists have used to get there. Their letters and books were scattered throughout Europe on account of their experience in the city. A kind of "knowing visit" Venice has been constituted, which has spread among the educated classes of Europe.
A prestigious past
The city of Venice is first and foremost an extraordinary story and an amazing urban heritage. The city is located just north of the Adriatic, where it was founded in the fifth century by people fleeing the land invasions. It is built on islands in a lagoon and home, palaces and religious buildings are built, mostly on stilts. Little or no streets in this strange city, but the channels. It travels by boat. In the twentieth century, motorboats, the motoscaffi, replaced the gondolas. This is one of the few cities where buses are boats. The airport is on land and when The aircraft landed at sunrise or sunset soil is discovered during the journey by boat to the city a beautiful cityscape.
The city also is full of artistic treasures. It became about the year one thousand, one point of contact between East and West, both for trade and for military operations. Its merchants became very wealthy and powerful nobility. Each other and have built along the canals and palaces sober on the outside but beautiful on the inside, as well as churches beautifully decorated. The largest of them, Saint-Marc, is defended by two stone lions, antique sculptures brought from the ancient capital of the Roman Empire, Byzantium. Aristocratic republic, the city is headed by a doge and council all-powerful. The intrigue, secrecy, poisoning, arbitrary imprisonment of political life rhythm. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the social life of Venice is an exception in Europe. Concerts and festivals punctuate public life. Merchants and nobles do work of painters and musicians of the highest quality. Wealthy merchants and aristocrats to maintain courtesans. The luxury industry is booming. It is in Venice that we know make the big mirrors that adorn the Europe's most prestigious chateaux. The luxury clothes, the beauty of music, the beautiful pictures impress visitors. Correspondence tell masked balls, secret meetings on the gondolas, jealous husbands, murder, spies. It is in Venice that were born artist's works Tintoretto (1518-1594), musician Vivaldi (1678-1741), playwright Goldoni and Casanova's scandalous. The reputation of the Venetians spread throughout Europe. The King of Saxony brought with gold painter Canaletto in Dresden to decorate his palaces. A spectacular city
grown men of Europe full love to spend. The German engraver Albrecht Dürer is in 1506. He sent a dozen letters to a friend Nuremberg to be published in Italian in 1781. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne stayed there in 1580, with a visitation program that already seems established by custom. Although the city has impressed
"other than he had imagined and rather less admirable, he recognized in all its features with extreme caution, writes his secretary. The police, the situation, the arsenal, the Piazza San Marco and the press of foreign peoples, it seemed the most remarkable things. "
A young French aristocrat who became Speaker of the Parliament of Burgundy, spent in 1739 and never tires of the strangeness of this city built on water:
"... when there is a time, he writes, seen exiting the water on all sides of palaces, churches, streets, entire towns, because there is not one, and finally not being able to step into the city without the foot in the sea is one thing to my liking so I'm less surprising today that the first day .... " (President Brush, Italian Journey, )
Festivals gondolas and masked balls
The trip to Venice is essential to a man of taste in the late eighteenth century. The German writer Goethe resides there in 1784. A letter published in the compendium of his "Italian Journey" describes a popular Venice alive, all steeped in art and sense of fun:
"The people are the foundation on which everything rests. The audience played their role, and the crowd identified with the show. During the day, the squares and on the waterfront in the gondolas and palaces, the seller and the buyer, the beggar, the sailor, the neighbor, the lawyer and his opponent, live, struggle, wiggle, talk, protest, shouting, calling, sing, play, swear and make noise.
And at night they go to the show and see and hear the day their lives artistically combined, embellished, interwoven tales, far from reality by the mask while it is close by the mores.
They giggle like kids, they cry, they clap and make noise. From morning to night, or rather from 0:00 to 0:00, it's always the same. "
Venice melancholy
But the vitality of the city seems to run out. In the nineteenth century, the city has lost vitality commercial and Bonaparte took away her independence. He conquered the city, gives it a dull administrative status before selling it to Austria. The city sleeps. The palaces of complete degradation. Tourists, however, returned, and the aristocrats who spends a season or more. They will develop a new theme: Venice is no longer the city of unbridled celebration and luxury, but a place filled with the melancholy memory of his past greatness. The English poet Lord Byron and dandy dedicated poems to the city all the fingerprints of the sense of deprivation of the city. And "The Silent Gondolier Rowing in Silence" from the Fourth Childe Harold
song:
"Echoes of Venice not repeat more verses of Tasso,
and silent gondolier rowing in silence.
Its palaces crumble on the shore, and
music now strikes no more ear incessantly.
His glory days are past, however
but Venice is still beautiful.
empires fall, arts degenerate
but nature never dies;
but she has not forgotten how Venice once was dear to him, this
pleasant of all pleasures,
paradise of the earth, the mask of Italy! "
... A new theme is needed in the writings of European scholars: the death of Venice associated with death in Venice. The economic decline of the city, which seems to sink slowly into the lagoon, echoes the theme of literary Sehnsucht nostalgia as shown in German Romanticism. The sense of time passing, the despair, grief, love, suicide even become inextricably tied to literary themes the literary image of Venice in the nineteenth century.
paradoxical celebration of the disqualification of the city accompanied by a transformation of the look on the monuments. In the first part of the twentieth century Venice is still a place to stay aristocratic writers, artists and people of the world will make long stays. The Englishman has developed in Ruskin The Stones of Venice, a new aesthetics of the monument. The beauty of Venice said he holds in his dereliction same: it must operate at no cost on ancient monuments restorations brutal in destroying the charm.
"Time and dereliction as the waves and storms have been overcome to decorate it instead of destroying it, and they can still save in the ages to come this beauty ..."
Death in Venice
the twentieth century, the theme of Death in Venice is combined with that of the death in Venice. Suicidal melancholy in the city the perfect setting to pass the act. that prevail in European culture through film. In 1971 a film crystallized on a single work the Romantic tradition and prestige film of the city's Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti. From the great Italian aristocracy, last was inspired by a story by German writer Thomas Mann published in 1913, the "Belle Epoque" of the European aristocracy. The hero, loosely based the character of the musician Gustav Mahler, also reflects part of the personality of the author. The central character is a writer already old, who wanders with no real end in Italy. He stays in the bad season in a grand hotel more or less deserted Lido, Venice strip of sand separating the sea, when it is disturbed by a young boy of great beauty, he follows in the city but no dare tackle. The writer to die of cholera in Venice.
The critical success of this film that takes place among the masterpieces of European cinema, gives a new relevance to the vision disillusioned romantic Venice and associates it with a popular vision of the artist, regarded as a solitary genius, misunderstood, crushed under its own contradictions. The soundtrack, taken part in the Fifth Concerto Gustav Mahler experience a popularity far exceeding the usual audience of the novels of Thomas Mann. Some aristocratic cultural tradition joined at this time of mass culture.
Venice, mass culture, mass tourism
Venice, also entered the mass culture through tourism. In the twentieth century journey of cultural discovery has become a practice weight in Europe while retaining, in part, the forms that had been given by the middle classes in the middle of the nineteenth century. Transport prices downward effect in Europe significantly. From the 1950s, automobile travel is increasing, in Europe the distances are not excessive. Air travel was popularized in 1980. In Venice a station is built in the 1930s to facilitate entry into the city. The hotels are proliferating. The museums were reorganized to accommodate the crowds. Tour guides are intended to provide the user guide of the city. There are a considerable number, published in all major European languages. Venice also became popular in European culture, the stereotype of the city conducive to love. One example the travel destination for honeymooners. All this gives rise to a genuine tourist industry.
cf.Carte Baedeker guide, Venice, 1913
This is manifested by a proliferation of images. Photographs, postcards and souvenirs illustrated multiply the first half of the twentieth century, the stereotypical images of the city. Piazza San Marco, the Church of the Salute, the Accademia (Museum of Painting), Rialto Bridge, Grand Canal are reproduced in millions of copies of objects that visitors to prevail in their country, filling the interiors of European houses with tiny reproductions of the Rialto bridge and gondolas on the Grand Canal. This freezes the image directory view of the city ..
also printed travel guides offer travelers ordinary marked trails that lead to the most important monuments. In museums, these works attracted the attention of tourists on certain tables only, always the same. The palaces and buildings, they offer a historical interpretation and unique aesthetic, often old and summary.
Venice in danger?
The highlight of this identification of Venice as a high-rise in global tourism is its listing of World Heritage of Humanity. Unesco, in fact, has developed a Convention on the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, opened in 1972 and in 1978 a particularly prestigious list of sites and a list of endangered sites. The issue of Danger is thus required at the end of the twentieth century. The audience of the great international tourism is not particularly sensitive to the poetry of ruins. It looks rather that the whole town turns into a historic monument to his own satisfaction. But the city suffers. The pollution came from the nearby town of Mestre great abyss buildings. Flood water from the lagoon ("acqua alta") tend to be more frequent and the 1966 is spectacular. The traditional economy of the town from disappearing in the number of permanent residents has declined steadily, resulting in poor maintenance of the built heritage. The large tourist tends to counteract this development requires that the city remains ready to welcome visitors and show them what the guide and travel agencies have promised : Old buildings, churches, museums, hotels, restaurants, gondolas ... The capacity of the city, beyond which the city is corrupt and compromised urban functions, was evaluated at 25 000 visitors a day, yet the average is 30 000 visitors from Venice with peaks of 200 000 visitors per day.
II. Debray, Sollers and Venice
is in this context that the conflict takes place between Philippe Sollers and Regis Debray. Summarize. Philippe Sollers writer, dandy, a Venice resident of the year, like the aristocrats European turn of the century, fiercely critical mass tourism and offers another way to enjoy the heritage of Venice, refined out of step with the codes of public and fully mediated by attending intimate texts of writers. Yet it is precisely this practice that refined Regis Debray, a philosopher and essayist, attacks. There's nothing more trite in a certain environment, "he said to want to distinguish themselves from the banal. And nothing more vulgar than to profess to despise the vulgar ...
despise the ordinary tourist
From the first pages of the dictionary in love Venice, tourists experience a critical mass in order. Tourists, writes Philippe Sollers, understanding neither what they are doing or where they are. To profess to despise the ordinary tourist is not original, it's the rule for members of the educated classes in Europe. The phenomenon is ancient. Gustave Flaubert and Maxime du Camp in 1843 traveling along the first tourists were making fun of them already and for the same reasons. The criticism is the first tourist to travel in groups. It is therefore not characterized by individuality and originality that are fundamental values in the construction of the figure of the artist in the West. Moreover, the tourist is not sufficiently cultivated to develop itself a thought or emotions to the masterpieces he contemplates. It merely reproduces the emotions that he prescribed the printed guide or cicerone.
As shown by Jean-Didier Urbain The Idiot's Travel the history of travel in contemporary Europe is based on an opposition between the tourist and traveler. The tourist is despicable for the reasons that we say: the traveler is honorable because it is akin to the aristocratic figure of the creator. The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, particularly in the work The distinction devoted to the sociology of taste, interprets this desire in the broader context of the defense of a cultural and social capital. No wonder then that the representatives of mass tourism suffer the scornful gaze of our two scholars.
Sollers against tourists
Criticism tourist dictionary lovers of Venice, however, is more subtle than the usual denunciations, in that it addresses the posture of the ordinary visitor. Philippe Sollers said tourists can neither stand, nor look.
First entry. Sollers, magically happened "in a dream" in Venice - which allows him not to stand in line - between the museum called the Accademia and went straight to his favorite painting painter Giorgione's The Tempest. There he contrasts the poor uneducated tourists who did not have the user manual of the place and the amateur aesthetic, who knows how to interpret the table. Why do tourists understand anything? First, because taken in a logical case for his time he runs and agitated when they should stop. Time is a luxury he has not. Moreover, the tourist is not able to understand for himself the meaning of works that look and trusted the teachings of the printed guide. But this guide does not teach him anything, "said Sellers.
"A guide will tell you" The nature and exalted poetic and harmonious relationship that man has with her are the real subjects of the painting. " You are now well advanced. You are no doubt useful to know that Giorgone (which we know very little) was born around 1478 ... that humanism finally inspires his themes: you're still in the fog. "Abandon
Guide:
"Pass the tourists, just remain there in front, shut up, forget everything. The table takes place now, for you, for you alone. You talk about the weather over time, like any city, Serene constantly. It is his vocation, his greatness, his quiet "
This suggests that Sollers, the visitor is therefore to break with the usual practice of mass tourism - the crowds, noise, agitation," Goodwill cultural "embodied by the guide - and reinvest the installation of visitor aesthetic, exceptional character, armed with a personal sensitivity sufficient for it assures a direct, intimate, at work.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has characterized this position of distinction in the practice of visiting the museum. She replies, "he said, two positions: those of the heirs, children of the upper layers of society - and that of members of classes or medium full of what he calls the" cultural goodwill ". The latter, he says conscience not master the knowledge that can enjoy a cultural object ("include a roll") but they express the desire to appropriate them. Unlike the "heirs," said Pierre Bourdieu also were fed in their childhood have enough knowledge cultural, for having never need to use them explicitly. They tend to erase the memory of learning work it took to make and assert their ability to enter into the mystery works only because of their sensitivity, highly personal and innate quality. The members of the middle classes, however, accessing the latest on the visit of the great collections prove unable to separate these crutches that are teaching guides, who report their cultural inferiority.
Haro on the printed guide
Sollers still camped outside the Giorgione continuous demonstration. "I listen," he said, [the table] I'm starting to see. " Then begins a detailed description of the table What do we see? A half-naked woman suckling a child, a young man walking, broken columns. And Sollers to engage in an interpretation of the table. Broken columns: it is a grave. Heron? A symbol of lust. Sollers but cheating on the edges. This is not sensitivity but scholarship to track its demonstration. Who knows that broken columns can mean a grave if not specialists? And who knows this verse of the fourteenth century, he cites and which intervenes suddenly in the proof to convince the reader amazed that this is the symbol of sexual frenzy ... For successive shifts Sollers replaces the guide. He is the guide ... evidence that he did not need the guide ...
Sus-camera
Sollers also tackles the status of the image. First targeted the Japanese tourist, who acknowledges, is known for its use of the frenetic camera. Here at the Accademia Japanese - always in groups is not it - accumulating the errors of taste. They photograph the paintings to Instead of looking. Worse, overwhelmed by the images which they are not codes, they are amassing at the exit to watch the film on television exposure, more subdued version, domesticated, the flow of colors and shapes they n have not been able to love.
"I remember, during a splendid retrospective of Titian in the Doges Palace, Japanese tourists photographing furiously tables not to see them, destabilized by their size, complexity, beauty and gathering at the exit look to television sets the film on the exhibition ... "
Writers as mediators
The real way to understand the city, Sollers, is through the mediation of the ancient writers who preceded him in Venice. On the one hand, it gives the reader a posture similar to that of the authors he frequents. Writer among writers, artist among artists, he escapes the danger of being drowned in the anonymous mass. Then Sollers, erudite, cultured and clever, is happy to use unfamiliar texts rare and amazing. That's for sure: this look on his proposed city will own, unique, rare and unique.
Sollers has directed this entry in the city by the literature in two books. The first Day in Venice, apparently as a novel. His frame is: a writer involved in trafficking of stolen art. It is not the instigator but a mere sidekick. The great masters of traffic, it does not, use him through a woman he was in love. More very young, she is part of the Parisian world of publishing. He himself stays in Venice, in a palace which he rarely goes out in the company of a young woman. It an Australian student who is graduating in mathematics and foreign operations, which remains suspicious that she meets. At least it seems. The same writer in Paris, worried unless it is just jealous, says fears that the young woman is sent by the police. At the end of the story a powerful boat anchored in front of the Palace. The narrator comes on board, a picture is revealed. There is an array of unknown or lost Watteau. The writer stands guard at the table. It handles a large pistol. The boat leaves. Nothing seems to have happened. This story
which may belong to the genre of detective fiction, however, appears only very gradually to the reader. Its elements remain scattered and disjointed, as covered by another narrative: the writer's stay in the Venetian palace. The narrator tells the frame of days, the moments of sleep, changes of light in the windows, his naps, moments where he makes love with his young companion, advances lazy text he writes. The narrator sounds like what we know about Philippe Sollers himself by his occupation, age, position in society, taste poses and dandy provocation.
The exact reverse of a mass tourism
The use of the city that is proposed in this novel is the exact reverse of mass tourism. Venice is both present and absent in the text. Absent. The narrator wanders ever. Venice is one of the most visited places in Europe and probably the one where there is less gardens. He pushes up the paradox never leave his garden which he details the trees plants and flowers. Moreover, it does not visit. He stayed in the heart of a famous place among all the monuments and not talk about it. If the writer operates sometimes a few outings in the city is to do precisely what the tourists do not do: go to the theater, concert, a reception with friends ... This raises living in old Venice, with these resources Rare missing tourists: time, knowledge network, friends ... Laying aesthetics, which wants to distinguish from common. What others do, I do not do it.
The city is yet present, but through a filter, the culture of the narrator. It does not describe himself monuments, he recounts what the ancients have said travelers. It does not tell the adventures of its out on the town, he cites those he found in books. It is not in Venice to visit Venice but to read, hidden in his garden, what else have lived and told the city. Even his posture improbable conspirator resulted in a dangerous traffic takes a turn for literature: Is it true? Is that wrong? Or is it only the narrator's desire to be the equal of a Casanova who combined literature and conspiracy? Or is it that the return of a theme characteristic of Sollers novels - three of his novels successive narrator is a spy - outside the world incognito to watch and in find the hidden meaning?
Sollers's Venice is indeed saturated with the memory of his predecessors: Goethe and the Cardinal de Bernis, Dürer and the German Romantic writers, Thomas Mann. Nobody can accuse him of being pedantic ... the entire text is simply text entered by other like a palimpsest, made of several layers that appear in places. It is more generally a characteristic of writing Philippe Sollers than being saturated by other texts. His novels are full of long quotations, literary device he systematized. Is this a method to construct a distanced view and fed either a laziness too gifted a writer - as some suspect -? The person we suspect, did not cure.
It will also systematize the process dictionary lovers of Venice, published in 2006, cited above. A dizzying round of writers. But neither Lagarde, nor Sollers Michard. In each of the writers he cites, it fetches the little-known text, the odd anecdote that illuminates his personality. It brings the reader into the intimate lives of these writers never reduced entangled in their writings but so incredibly romantic in love, bankruptcies, secrets, conspiracies. It was Louis Aragon young man maintained by Nancy Cunard, who tries to commit suicide in Venice in 1928. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, struggling with the prostitutes in the city, Michel de Montaigne, sick and grumpy. Sollers fun and dictionary form allows it to Peggy Guggenheim neighborly wealthy American of the twentieth century, Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, Vivant Denon, libertine lover of art and love, traveling Following Bonaparte and Marcel Proust accompanying his mother. In this dictionary we find also a set of buildings, places (the ghetto), tables, never discussed in terms expected, always magnified by a scholarship weird, unexpected perspective. It's a way to enjoy the heritage that we offer. Distinguished, contemptuous of the mass tourist, but within a tradition: traveling artist. The look of being exceptional sensitivity which is experiencing a unique experience, develops a particular focus on the unprecedented own city.
is precisely this look "artist" that R. Debray will in turn shot !
Debray cons Venice
what has bitten Regis Debray? Cons Venice is full of anger, rhetoric may be, but angry nonetheless. Venice annoys him. And more snobs who claim to experience Venice emotions like no other. No names of course. It does not denounce his best enemies but vitriolic portraits.
course begins with Debray decry the mainstream tourism. But this is not the essence of his remarks. What will it apply to demolish the "artist eyes" on the city, the posture of the man - or the woman-grown, the desire for distinction that pushes a fraction of the visitors to do anything to distinguish themselves from the vulgar, extricate themselves from the crowd.
"The mere sight of Fortune on his globe of gold or stone lions of the Arsenal is instantly push between the thumb and forefinger the quill pen of Chateaubriand. ('Venice is there sitting on the shores of the sea, like a beautiful woman who is going out with the day: the evening breeze lifts her hair embalmed; dies welcomed by all the graces and all the smiles of nature ... '. Why is it that Joseph Prudhomme is more exposed than others to this Registry miraculous? Annually deposited in the Parisian storefronts two or three chapters of the Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, paperback under assumed name, that to have only the arch and not the holding of Viscount raise thousand cries of delight "
Joseph Prud Man is the hero of the novel of the same name published in 1857 by Henri Monnier, contemptuous of bourgeois stupidity. Its name suggests, it is "prudent." It's ridiculous the representative of a middle class and poor satisfied, conveying ideas and clichés. Of course not it thoughtful of Régis Debray to dress up for this surname writers and writers who, exactly, are going to Venice looking for a fragrance of distinction. Those whose books assure us that they understand precisely Venice other than ordinary mortals, they know there safe havens that do not frequent travelers vulgar they feel emotions rare in Venice, they are only to know ...
This allocation of distinction infuriates Debray. It seemed typical of a Parisian bourgeoisie who succeeded - he said the ape-life artist because she despises the people. And it scans of the same movement all the cliches of this literature
"If there was a code of ethics in our corporation [the writers], to temper the critical grandstanding, literary and film critics should agree in principle to a penalty imposed uniformly international products taking Venice backdrop ( as well as the use of tear-sorts in children under twelve years on the screen). This handicap is intended to offset the advantage conferred by these mechanically feasible as a backdrop. "
Debray goes even further. There really in Venice, he writes, buildings, works of art, places that do not deserve the reputation they have been made and which do not justify the reverent worship that is carried by their false scholars. At the Accademia, for example, The Meal Levi by Veronese is not a masterpiece of European painting. It is a clever trompe l'oeil lacks momentum, "a great machine," a "disproportionate coloring without an atom of pain without an accent of truth. And the celebrated philosopher, a taste for contradiction, Naples, most popular, most unkempt, dirty more perhaps, but more authentic. But the philosopher cheat a little, too. At first he hates Venice far less than he says. Who careful reading, his little pamphlet anti-Venice, offers superb pages to the glory of the city. Debray famous example of how splendidly the lagoon, working as a ramp positioned between the city and theater groups, isolates a magical space, a city unique, neither completely real nor completely artificial. And he does not leave behind in the round Sollers breezy references that require to be included, a strong classical culture.
cons Debray
Sollers Sollers, who would have thought, was felt targeted. Enough anyway to devote a section of his dictionary in love with Venice insolent Debray, calling
philosopher embittered, disappointed in love, frustrated by politics and history, a severely wounded the pleasure of literature and art. "
He summarized his remarks. For Debray Venice would
"narcissistic, no religion, cynical, no heat popular. The venue is a tragedy and nobody jumps out at you neck. Is the empty mud, temptation, the same impurity ... "
knives are drawn, feathers, sharp insult springs of the inkstand. All this for Venice. Or maybe for some representation of themselves and the world that the writer built around the city.
Venice resurrected
It is not about controversy confidential. Day in Venice Venice is like Counter been published and republished in paperback. Are readily dictionary lovers of Venice on the shelves of bookstores. This book has even spawned a collection of books sold in sizes small airports. Each volume is devoted to a major European city and compiles the main texts What devoted to the latter the ancient writers. All these cities, Venice, such as Prague, Paris, London or Rome are certainly overrun by too many visitors. Restorations abusive, tourism developments threaten their monuments and ancient quarters. Prague looks like a copy of which Prague was built for an American museum. Bruges was frozen in its beauty too much repainted. And yet. We wondered at the beginning of this conference if too many visits did not kill the emotion. If too many tourists did not use the heritage significance if the sense of beauty of the buildings had not disappeared under the weight of command admiration. It seems to Venice the answer is: no. We do not argue like cats and dogs are like Debray and Sollers around a city emptied of all its charms, meaningless, out of memory. Without doubt we must conclude as Regis Debray does the last line of Against Venice.
"Venice? I know .. but still "
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