Penn State Deluge - Vol. 2 No. 1 - Spring 2004

Nick Bantock's The Venetian's Wife is a collage of a book, and the mixture of different narrative frames echoes the style of color illustrations that Bantock has chosen to fill the novel. Bantock weaves his own drawings and paintings into the story so well that any plain text reproduction of his work would not deliver the same effect to the reader. The 1996 book deals in the intrigue of the international art and antiquities market, but it also includes a fantastical element, which acts like a rhapsody on the possibilities for the power of the internet. The narrative consists mostly of e-mail messages interspersed with a "computer diary" written by Sara Wolfe. She is a 26-year-old introverted art conservator who feels stuck in a rut at the museum where she works, and leaps at an opportunity—explained via e-mail—to take up the quest to locate artworks coveted by a mysterious collector. Bantock includes reproductions of these imaginary artworks, catalogue pages and hand-scrawled manuscripts pertinent to the story as well as brief omniscient asides "sent" to the reader through the ether by this mysterious collector. This man turns out to be the ghost of Niccolo Dei Conti, a fifteenth-century Venetian merchant and traveler who was struck by lightning late in life, after the death of his wife, and becomes confined for centuries to travel among the earth's network of natural electrical pulses (Bantock 62). Conti is in the dark for many of these years, until the invention of the telephone allowed him to begin listening and learning the languages of the world. Meanwhile, he regains his lifetime's memory and sets out on a mission to unite all 42 of the priceless works of Asian art he had owned in his bodily life. When telephone lines are connected to computers, and the internet is born, he finally has the practical means to accomplish his task. In the novel, he is a body-less soul captured in cyberspace, and his main voice is electronic mail.

The Venetian's Wife is a novel of magical realism. In the same way that Gabriel Garcia Marquez surrounds a few fantastical—and often symbolic—elements with the trappings of South American verisimilitude, Bantock writes a believable tale using the vernacular of computers, but places at the center a character who embodies many of the hopes and fears about the burgeoning influence, reach, and power of the internet. Mr. N. Conti, as he is known in his e-mail address, has learned how to wield much of the power that web access, e-mail, and a host of other communication appliances have granted him—or any of his incarnate counterparts with a computer, a modem, and willingness to make online transactions. Conti remains singularly focused on his goals of reassembling the art collection and producing a pair of metamorphoses by the end, but the means by which he accomplishes these ends are ethically questionable and highlight ongoing worries about internet security and privacy. Conti's undertakings from the inception of the internet can be seen as one grand case of identity theft—a Renaissance ghost posing as a latter-day benefactor and art enthusiast, albeit under the same name. [10] Along the way, Sara—his postmodern handmaid—balks at such suspicious methods, especially when he admits to reading her computer diary, but Bantock's conclusion makes a plea for justifying such means in the service of time-spanning bliss for two couples. Just a year after McCarthy writes the first installment of her story about two adults bumbling their way through an online romance, Bantock fashions a novel about a benevolent if paternalistic life-force mastering the world of e-commerce to effect a metaphysical climax for him, his wife, and a pair of would-be contemporary lovers.

The e-mail correspondence between Sara and Conti begins with an act of what might be construed as voyeurism. Sara experiences a peculiar feeling when viewing the drawing of a Shiva sculpture in the museum where she works: "The second I laid eyes on it I started to sweat. My legs went rubbery and my heart started pumping frantically," she writes in her computer diary (Bantock 10). Later, we learn that Conti has instructed the museum to position a surveillance camera to look down on the drawing; "electronic cameras are my eyes," he tells her in an e-mail (Bantock 85). Conti confirms Sara's reaction by peeking into her diary to see the reaction noted above, a tactic we learn only later, once Conti has accrued a sufficient level of trust with Sara.

While Conti recruits Sara for the unique job he has in mind and begins giving her marching orders, he carefully reveals to her only what he thinks she needs to know at any given moment. He offers her a substantial salary, an expensive computer system, and assures her that he will cover all travel expenses. His excuse for being unreachable except via e-mail is explained away at first as an immobility issue: "Travel for me is no longer possible [. . .]" (Bantock 14). Conti calls himself "a mysterious old man, whom you may never see" (Bantock 18). The charade of his inability to travel represents a bit of wry irony, because Conti as cyber-ghost has more mobility than regular humans, albeit on a plane separate but parallel to the one Sara and her terrestrial companions negotiate. He stands for the information-superhighway dream—embraced by Bev of Chat Connect Crash and others—of "traveling" in an instant to all corners of the globe and communicating with people wherever a computer or related device allows him contact.

Using conventional research in printed sources, Sara corroborates some biographical information about Niccolo Dei Conti, the Renaissance explorer, and seems initially willing to believe that the online Mr. Conti is a descendant of the original art collector (Bantock 23). Her early qualms are focused on whether Conti is a sham artist actually inventing the history to which he alludes; she does not worry whether Conti is a corporeal being. When the fictive genealogy seems plausible, Sara begins the hunt for his artworks with some of her concerns assuaged. She thinks she knows enough about her employer and ignores what she does not, partly because Conti has enticed her with generous compensation and the mystery/sensuality of his artifacts. An underlying current that has shaped the way we view interaction done entirely via e-mail has been the set of assumptions we make about who sits typing at the other end of the line. [11] In Chat Connect Crash, Bev and Max found what they were hoping for when they inadvertently hooked up in person at the computer show. In The Venetian's Wife, Conti plays on the assumed bounds of reality, even in cyberspace, to hide his otherworldly nature from Sara, his employee and protégée.

When Conti finally admits to his status as a ghost, Sara replies with a terse e-mail: "You are kidding me, aren't you? This is a joke, right?" (Bantock 61). As he begins to explain himself, Conti reveals his underhanded means of raising capital:

That was easy: with the privilege of inside information, making a vast fortune on the stock markets was child's play. Transmitting messages, moving money, instructing couriers, all were easy and I soon had the power I required. (63)

The ease with which Conti finances his quest requires a great leap of faith, but Bantock brushes it aside quickly to move on with his love story. The temptation to gain wealth through unethical electronic methods has gradually become more of a concern in today's world, as identity theft and hacking make headlines. [12] We are to assume that somehow Conti has dodged any law enforcement efforts or found ways to escape discovery of any wrongdoing by the Conti Foundation. In some ways, this is a hacker's fantasy—to exist only in the ether and thus avoid spending any time behind physical bars. Sara admits to being troubled by the overall revelation of working for a ghost, but Conti's ethics do not bother her ultimately. Instead she worries about her own affairs momentarily: "I wonder how the I.R.S. feels about phantom employers?" (Bantock 64). Eventually, Conti convinces her of his ghostly quality by eavesdropping on a phone call she places and reporting back to her what she says (Bantock 66).

The final obstacle to her fully accepting Conti and the reward he's arranged for her comes when he admits to peeking into her supposedly secret computer-based diary (Bantock 85). He explains to her his rationale for this invasion of privacy:

I have no skin, no bone. Lust is a function I left behind with my body 500 years ago. [. . .] I can hardly be seen as a physical threat, can I? [. . .] I come from a period in which the twentieth-century notion of fair play did not exist. I was a merchant, an opportunist, I lived by my wits as did all of those around me. If a mortal did not wish a document to be read, it was up to him to keep it safe. Can I be blamed for the integrity of my curiosity? (Bantock 86)

Conti, in his near-omniscience and centuries-old mentality, makes an argument akin to some used during contemporary debates over privacy and copyright arguments. If I can do it without getting caught, he postulates, why should I be prevented from doing so? Many of those users who willingly trade copyrighted material over the internet make similar claims. Writing in the mid-1990s, Bantock saw the internet as a landscape not entirely charted and a world of possibilities untried. Conti sees and exploits the way the "electronic web," as he calls it, transcends national boundaries and finite jurisdictions.

By the end of the story, Conti admits to having a paternal interest in Sara. He wants to see her succeed in her tasks, become more confident, be more forward with her crush, Marco, and finally, consummate that love with him in a subterranean scene of metaphysical transformation, which also reunites Conti—on some unexplained plane—with his long-dead wife. Readers have no awareness of whom, if anyone, Conti has hurt during his online exploits; instead, we are made to believe that perhaps the cyber-ghost could foresee a happy, transcendent ending. Bantock, with a good deal of irreverence and fantasy, takes the debates about the extent of the internet's power to an extreme in the character of Niccolo Conti and suggests that all these online adventures can bring about some sensual and spiritual good in the end. Bantock's book is a grand thought experiment postulated as the internet swells to become a world unto itself.

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[ Contents | Abstract | Intro | I | II | III | IV | V | VI ]
[ Notes | Works Cited | Appendix ]

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