SOURCE: Olster, Stacy. “Remakes, Outtakes, and Updates in Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover.” Modern Fiction Studies 41, no. 1 (spring 1995): 117-39.

[In the following essay, Olster analyzes the imagery and the romantic form of The Volcano Lover, examining the novel within the context of postmodern theories and focusing on Sontag's use of language to depict the continuity of human experiences and actions through the ages.]

Our friend Sir William is well. He has lately got a piece of modernity from England which I am afraid will fatigue and exhaust him more than all the Volcanos and antiquities in the Kingdom of Naples.

—James Byres to the Bishop of Killala, 14 June 1786¹

The “piece of modernity” in question was Emma Hart, formerly Emily Hart, formerly Emy Lyon, recently arrived in Naples after having been dispatched from London by her erstwhile protector Charles Greville in an attempt to exchange the financial burdens of supporting her for the financial rewards that might accrue from a lucrative marriage. The marriage Greville anticipated for himself did not take place; the one he never contemplated did, though, as Emma became the wife of his uncle William Hamilton on September 6, 1791. In so doing, she, whom nephew had dangled before uncle as “a modern piece of virtu,”² one more beautiful item to add to Hamilton's antiquarian collections, became more than just a companion whose status had been sanctioned legally and whose name could be prefaced with the title “Lady.” She became the heroine of a romance, peculiarly modern perhaps in that her virtue did not hinge on her virginity (which was long lost), but certainly romantic in that the wedding between low-born servant girl and plenipotentiary of British royalty both confirmed the prospects presented in Pamela's fiction and anticipated those socially unequal liaisons, such as that between William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, that later would occur in fact. (And that was before Nelson ever entered the picture.)

That Byres, an art dealer, should refer to Emma as a “piece of modernity” in particular is most appropriate when considering Susan Sontag's re-telling of her story in The Volcano Lover, for Sontag—from whose vocabulary the word “postmodernism” is noticeably absent—professes that “most everything we think of as natural is historical and has roots—specifically in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the so called Romantic revolutionary period” (Cott 49), the very period during which the marriage between Emma and Hamilton and her subsequent affair with Horatio Nelson took place. But that Byres's fears should focus on the possible exhaustion that Hamilton's piece of modernity might exact upon a significantly older benefactor unintentionally raises questions about literary exhaustion—a distinctly postmodern concern—with respect to any contemporary re-telling of the story of the Hamiltons and Lord Nelson as a romance, to cite the subtitle that Sontag appends to her historical novel.

Such distinctly postmodern concerns about literary exhaustion, moreover, are not the only ones that link Sontag to a cultural phenomenon she never identifies by name. Admittedly, different postmodernisms exist for different postmodernist commentators (the, by now, de rigueur caveat by which the work of each is prefaced); that being the case, many of Sontag's remarks nevertheless conform to almost every defining element upon which commentators agree as basic assumptions. Her evolutionary conception of aesthetic forms, in which “exhausted” forms are periodically “replaced by new forms which are at the same time anti-forms” (Against Interpretation 180), actually predates John Barth's 1967 and 1980 pronouncements on exhaustion and replenishment respectively. Her rejection of grand narratives, whether exemplified in the myth imposed by Lévi-Strauss upon all cultures over all times or the single scenario by which the North Vietnamese understand their entire history (Against Interpretation 79; Radical Will [Styles of Radical Will] 219), is no different from Lyotard's repudiation of totalizing systems. Her view of images that displace the reality of their referents, as illustrated by photography's “hyping up the real” (On Photography 169), virtually duplicates Baudrillard's simulacra (not to mention his wording). And if her tracing the production of those images within advanced industrial societies does not duplicate Fredric Jameson's wording in quite the same manner (he would prefer multinational), her proposing that “freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself” (On Photography 178-179) as the ideological upshot of a proliferation of images corresponds completely with his diagnosis.³

Why then the confusion among literary critics, who designate Sontag as, alternately, late modernist and early postmodernist?⁴ Part, no doubt, is attributable to Sontag's refusal to strait-jacket her conception of the modern—the word she typically employs when delineating the qualities listed above—to a single chronological period. In contrast to a theorist like Jameson, who derives postmodernism's historical situation from its multinationalism being the cultural dominant of “our own period” (36), Sontag conceives different cultures experiencing the historical conditions that promote particular kinds of art at different chronological times. Yet far more categoric confusion, I would argue, results from that admiration of the artist/auteur's will and insistence on the work of art's autonomy that signal, particularly in Sontag's early writings, the lingering perspective of the aesthete who adamantly rejects all notions of “putting art to use” and whose anti-interpretive refusal to “dig ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text” presumes that texts are best experienced as ends in themselves rather than as ideologically constructed (Against Interpretation 21, 6).

The importance of a later work like The Volcano Lover thus derives, in large part, from the way it directly addresses Sontag's straddling of the modernist/postmodernist divide. Framed with respect to cinematic techniques, yet always aware of the moral element inherent in choosing different forms of representational media, Sontag's recycling the story of the Hamilton-Nelson triangle as a historical novel yields a perfect example of the kind of self-reflexive postmodern novel that Linda Hutcheon has dubbed historiographic metafiction (14). At the same time, Sontag's dubbing that same historical novel a romance recycles a narrative form whose representation of an idealized world in which “all the arts and adornments of language are used to embellish the narrative,” to quote Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg (14), “signifies a fiction composed by an individual author for esthetic ends” (248)—a narrative, in other words, perfectly suited to the modernist in Sontag who began her career advancing the priority of form over content.

As Gillian Beer has pointed out, however, the romance is not quite as “esthetic” a production as Scholes and Kellogg presume. While the idealized world presented in romance “is never fully equivalent to our own,” it nevertheless “must remind us of it if we are to understand it at all” (3)—and for the very didactic purposes of instruction. (After all, once Nelson enters the picture, Emma Hamilton's story shifts from a chronicle of upward mobility to a testament to the folly of flouting social conventions.) As a result, in choosing a form with such an implicit utilitarian component, Sontag provides not just a postmodern parody of an earlier admonitory tale, she provides a postmodern parody of her own early aesthetic pronouncements.

PREVIEWS

“The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things.—The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written,” wrote Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1785). Continuing with this line of thought, she went on to distinguish between the two literary forms on the basis of the approximation of verisimilitude each provided:

The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen.—The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own.

(111)

As Reeve also admitted, such neat distinctions did not apply quite so well in an age of “modern Romances” that “were written with more regularity, and brought nearer to probability,” having “tak[en] for their foundation some obscure parts of true history, and building fictitious stories upon them,” to the extent that “truth and fiction were so blended together, that a common reader could not distinguish them” (64-65). Reeve was not alone in her concern. Distinguishing between those recent works of fiction he termed “comed[ies] of romance” and those earlier works of Knight-Errantry he called “heroic romance[s],” Samuel Johnson warned of the imprudent messages that the modern incarnations could send to their readers:

In the romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any applications to himself; the virtues and crimes were equally beyond his sphere of activity. … But when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man; young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention, and hope by observing his behaviour and success to regulate their own practices, when they shall be engaged in the like part.

(67, 69)

The solution was not to dispense with romance, however, but to employ romance for purposes of moral education, for “under proper restrictions and regulations they will afford much useful instruction, as well as rational and elegant amusement” (Reeve xvi). Thus, Johnson advised careful selection of material, based on his belief that an awareness of the excellence of art imitating nature should be tempered by an awareness of which parts of nature were most worthy of being imitated (70). Yet far from such strictures being an imposition upon romance, they in many ways just made more explicit the duties that were always implicit in a genre that, for all the temporal or social distance separating its stories from their audiences, was allusive from the very beginning. As Gillian Beer notes, “[t]he romance tends to use and re-use well-known stories whose familiarity reassures” in such a way that “remote sources are domesticated and brought close to present experience primarily because they are peopled with figures whose emotions and relationships are directly registered and described with profuse sensuous detail” (2), with results of which Doctor Johnson would most certainly have approved: “Because romance shows us the ideal it is implicitly instructive as well as escapist” (9).

Particularly illustrative of this instructive component of romance is the most familiar precursor of Sontag's own re-telling of the Hamilton-Nelson triangle, Alexander Korda's That Hamilton Woman (1941, released in England as Lady Hamilton), which, for all its director's emphasizing amorous passion as defining his principal characters' desires while filming (“Vincikém,” he reputedly admonished his set designer brother upon viewing the lavish library constructed for Lord Hamilton's home in Naples, “it's a love story. I can't shoot it in a bloody library. Make me a bedroom!” [Korda 150; Walker 152]), was intended from its inception as a piece of propaganda to mobilize support for Britain during World War II. (As Korda informed his screenwriters, “Propaganda needs sugar coating” [Edwards 127].) Suggested as a subject in 1940 by Winston Churchill, who was interested in a vehicle that would promote Britain's historic role as a scourge of tyrants (Hitler here equated with Bonaparte); funded by Korda himself, who had been secretly serving as a courier for transatlantic messages and whose New York City offices were already supplying cover to MI-5 agents gathering intelligence on both German activities in the United States and isolationist sentiments among makers of American foreign policy; and starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, who were interested in quick cash to stabilize their finances in order to evacuate their respective children from Britain for the remainder of the war, the movie repeatedly sacrifices the passion of romantic love in order to send the message that “England expects that every man will do his duty,” as the sails raised prior to the Battle of Trafalgar signal.

And not only men, as it turns out. “Well, we both have our duty, haven't we?” says Alan Mowbray's doddering William Hamilton to his wife, when asking her to convince Nelson of her imminent move to Cairo so that he will return to London as ordered by the Admiralty. “I feel it my duty to tell you of these things,” says Nelson to the Admiralty officers, when imploring them to convince the prime minister not to ratify any peace plan with Napoleon. So clearly, in fact, did the film send its message about the need for continued vigilance against the threat of “men who for the sake of their insane ambition want to destroy what other people build,” so loudly did it proclaim the centuries-old role of Britain (a “tiny little bit,” as Emma says, when first shown its position on the globe) in maintaining a Commonwealth “in which every little spot has its purpose and value to the balanced line of life” against “madmen” who “want to get hold of the whole world” and “dictate their will to others,” that it became Exhibit A in a case brought against Korda by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Committee had accused him of operating an espionage and propaganda center for Britain in the United States—a charge Korda only escaped by virtue of the fact that his scheduled appearance before the committee on December 12, 1941 was preempted by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor five days earlier (Holden 166).⁵

This is not the movie scenario viewers remember, of course, no more than they remember the film's peculiar abstemiousness that qualifies, if not condemns, the very lushness its romantic surroundings are meant to herald: a Nelson who renounces the Neapolitan fete held in his honor as a “tragic carnival” of “paper caps and toy balloons,” an Emma who replaces banana curls and oversized white hats with sensible dark clothes and embroidery hoops. That viewers remember a love story is due to the fact that the real romance involved in the film's production occurred off-screen, between two actors (who had just completed a run of Romeo and Juliet—another real romance—just prior to the start of filming), each married to another person, who in having “loved before their time,” to quote Life magazine (20 May 1940), had entered the pantheon of “great American lovers—the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, John Barrymore and Elaine Barrie, and John Smith and Pocahontas” (Vickers 128). It did not matter that the two actors in question had obtained their respective divorces and married in secret before production began, for it was the image of two adulterous actors playing two adulterous historical figures that lent the movie the aura of romance that is now remembered.

According to Sontag, such a sentimental residue is, in part, a function of film's being the artistic medium “most heavily burdened with memory,” so much so that “practically all films older than four or five years are saturated with pathos” (Radical Will 113, 114). In even greater part, it testifies to the substitution of image for actuality that Sontag, citing the 1843 preface to the second edition of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, sees as forming “a widely agreed-on diagnosis” of a society's modernity (On Photography 153). Just how relativistic that diagnosis is to different societies and different times, however, is suggested by the particularly heavy burden of cinematic imagery with which Sontag has to contend in The Volcano Lover, for Korda's version was not the only movie made of the Hamilton-Nelson affair. Preceding and succeeding it were so many celluloid versions of Lady Hamilton's story produced in so many countries as to make Emma an international commodity: Malvina Longfellow in Nelson and The Romance of Lady Hamilton (Great Britain, 1918 and 1919), Liane Haid in The Affairs of Lady Hamilton (Germany, 1921), Gertrude McCoy in Nelson (Great Britain, 1926), Corinne Griffith in The Divine Lady (USA, 1929), Michele Mercier in Lady Hamilton (West Germany, Italy, France, USA, 1969), and Glenda Jackson in Bequest to the Nation (Great Britain, 1973) (Pickard 91-92). Representing the romance of Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson in a contemporary novel thus means representing an image of an image of an image ad infinitum, the cumulative burdens of which Sontag portrays in the deliberately hyperbolic rhetoric she chooses to delineate the most clichéd (and hence parodied) feature of her narrative, the volcano itself: “a monstrous living body, both male and female,” “an abyss,” “[a] constant menace,” “[t]he slumbering giant that wakes,” “[t]he lumbering giant who turns his attentions to you” (5-6).

This is not to suggest that Sontag reduces her historical personages to celluloid phantasms and their ménage to mirage. “The question is never whether the events of the past actually took place,” Linda Hutcheon remarks in an important qualification:

The past did exist—independently of our capacity to know it. Historiographic metafiction accepts this philosophically realist view of the past and then proceeds to confront it with an anti-realist one that suggests that, however true that independence may be, nevertheless the past exists for us—now—only as traces on and in the present. The absent past can only be inferred from circumstantial evidence.

(73)

And the evidence in question, as Sontag's inclusion of letters and other written documents attests, is specifically textual. Therefore, while Sontag's deconstructed rendering of a bloated and boozy Emma may result in a more accurate Emma, in that it corresponds more closely to the Emma described by those of her time as “a dull creature” (Goethe 316) and “terribly fat” (Vigée Lebrun 68), it does not (and cannot) arrive at a truthful Emma because the evidence upon which she bases her own portrait is itself compromised.

In the case of Emma in particular, more than human bias contributes to that compromised quality of her representations. “Few ever see what is not already inside their heads,” Sontag writes in her novel (56), and Emma was very much in the heads of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. (“She is becoming a local marvel with an international reputation, like the volcano” [137].) Having been painted or drawn by George Romney, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, John Raphael Smith, Gavin Hamilton, Frederick Rehberg, Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Dominique Vivant De Non, Constantina Coltellini, Henry Fuseli, Thomas Lawrence, Jean Baptiste Monnoyer, Wilhelm Tischbein, Angelica Kauffmann, and James Masquerier; and having in those pictures incarnated such varied figures from history, myth, and literature as Joan of Arc, Magdalen, St. Cecilia, Nature, Circe, Medea, Agrippina, Thetis, Calypso, Hebe, Sibyl, Ariadne, innumerable Bacchanates, Shakespeare's Miranda and Constance, Goethe's Iphigenia, and William Hayley's The Triumph of Temper heroine Serena, Emma as visual image was very much in the heads of Europeans at that time, and often prior to her arrival on the Continent. “Hers was the beauty he had adored on canvas, as a statue, on the side of a vase,” muses Hamilton, referred to throughout the novel as the Cavaliere, who has himself contributed to the advance of Emma's image by commissioning a portrait of her from Reynolds: “Nothing had ever seemed to him as beautiful as certain objects and images—the reflection, no, the memorial, of a beauty that never really existed, or existed no longer. Now he realized the images were not only the record of beauty but its harbinger, its forerunner” (130). Thus, Sontag amends Feuerbach's conception of a modern age's preference for “the image to the thing, the copy to the original” and presents her own version of Baudrillard's précéssion of simulacra that precedes even Baudrillard's conceptualization:⁶ because notions of reality change as certainly as notions of image, the “true modern primitivism,” in her view, “is not to regard the image as a real thing,” but to define what is real to the degree that it conforms to the visual image that precedes it” (On Photography 153, 161). To put it another way, when the time comes for Emma to sit as portrait subject instead of portrait model, as occurs with Romney's painting her as The Ambassadress in 1791, there is no Emma left to paint, for, as Romney's Sitters's Diaries show, even the image of Emma married to the Ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies precedes her actual marriage to him, the nuptials in question taking place on the third day after her sittings begin (177; Great Britain Arts Council 45).

When Sontag then writes that Emma “does not know who she is anymore, but she knows herself to be ascending” (134), she describes not just the indeterminate subject of postmodern writing, as the apparent ease of the actual Emma's changes of name might indicate (heightened in Sontag's book by the character's remaining without any name until the last page), but the overdetermined subject. Even her transformation is depicted with respect to an old familiar story—“Pygmalion in reverse” (144). Any “ascension” Emma undergoes is simply a function of having replaced less reputable artistic transposers, like London sex therapist Doctor Graham, in whose tableaux vivants she models at fifteen, with more reputable ones, like society portrait painter George Romney, for whom she begins posing two years later (146). Perhaps more to the point, any “ascension” Emma undergoes proves to be short-lived in the extreme, as renderings of the actual historical figure confirm, for at the same time that her body begins to expand, her images start to shrink—from early canvases of her in classical dress (95″ × 80-1/2″ for Romney's Thetis, 53″ × 62″ for Vigée-Lebrun's Bacchante, 51″ × 38″ for Hamilton's Sibyl), to later likenesses of Emma as herself both anatomized (Joseph Nellekens's 22-15/16″-high marble bust, Thomas Laurence's 7-7/8″ × 6″ penciled head) and miniaturized (Henry Bone's 3-1/2″ × 3″ ivory). Indeed, so many representations of her begin to appear (a 1-3/8″ enamel brooch in Naples's De Ciccio Collection), or are alleged to appear (the figure of Hope on the Duke of Clarence's porcelain dinner service), and in so many different mediums (a 3-1/4″ × 2-1/2″ tortoise-shell snuff box with miniature ivory inset) that all sense of her uniqueness vanishes.⁷ No longer an artifact of high culture, but available to all through mass merchandising, she becomes easily disposable, as in fact happens when she dies in Calais, penniless and indolent.

FREEZE-FRAMES

The paradigm in Sontag's book for the transformation that Emma undergoes is the transformation of Hamilton's Portland Vase into Etruria Ware at the hands of Josiah Wedgwood, an emblematizing that Sontag highlights through an anthropomorphic rendering of the vase with respect to features of human anatomy. The process delineated is the one sketched by Walter Benjamin concerning the fate of a work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction, and the lesson taught applies as much to the romantic form in which Sontag works as it does to the image of the romantic figure at its center:⁸

Some twenty replicas of the midnight-blue glass vase were made in smooth black stoneware—the industrial potter and professed lover of simplified forms was to consider it his masterpiece. Wedgwood did not even attempt to match the color or patina of the original and, by simplifying, vitiated its aristocratic contours. The vase's handles lean inward instead of following the curve of the body, the shoulders are more rounded, the neck is shortened. Perhaps the Cavaliere found the slightly dumpy rendering acceptable, having long ago overcome any patrician resistance to this new, mercantile way of spreading the influence of his collections. But he would surely have been startled by the progeny of the vase that the Wedgwood firm began turning out by the tens of thousands in the next century. Olive-green, yellow, pale pink, lilac, lavender-blue, grey, black, and brown Portland vases; Portland vases in many sizes, including small, medium, and large. Everyone could have, should have a Portland vase—and however desired: that was the company's plan. It grew, it shrank, it could be any color. The vase became a notion, a tribute to itself.

Who can really love the Portland Vase now?

(137-138)

According to Donald Barthelme, who portrayed the per-capita production of trash as increasing over the years, the question was moot; with production approaching the one hundred percent mark, disposal of trash was impossible and appreciation inevitable (97). Sontag concurs, if for slightly different reasons. Inheriting an aesthetic artifact that so epitomizes all those overstylized “derelict, inane, démodé objects of modern civilization” enables Sontag to treat it as an artifact of Camp, to be dismembered as part of her long-standing Surrealist program of “cultural disburdenment” and then reassembled with the aim of “destroying conventional meanings, and creating new meanings or counter-meanings through radical juxtaposition” (Against Interpretation 271, 269; Radical Will 167). Far from hampering Sontag in her task, the vulgarization that the history of the vase typifies is an absolute prerequisite for such recycling as depends on objects that cannot be considered “high art or [in] good taste”—indeed, “the more despised the material or the more banal the sentiments expressed, the better” (Against Interpretation 271).

Complementing the description of the Portland Vase's descent into Wedgwood's crass commodification, therefore, is a second description that traces its later re-valuation in the British Museum after it is “decreated” at the hands of a young man in 1845 and subsequently repaired (345). “Can something shattered, then expertly repaired, be the same, the same as it was?” Sontag asks of the restoration that yields a “new vase, neither replica nor original” (347). Again, the answer that she provides applies as much to the romance narrative that she herself is recycling as it does to the piece of first-century B.C. Roman cameo glass that she describes in it:

A perfect job of reconstruction, for the time. Until time wears it out. Transparent glue yellows and bulges, making seamless joints visible. The jeopardous decision to attempt a better reconstruction of the vase was made in 1989. First, it had to be restored to its shattered condition. A team of experts immersed the vase in a desiccating solvent to soften the old adhesive, peeled off the one hundred and eighty-nine fragments one by one, washed each in a solution of warm water and non-ionic soap, and reassembled them with a new adhesive, which hardens naturally, and resin, which can be cured with ultraviolet light in thirty seconds. … The result is optimal. The vase will last forever, now.

(347)

Not quite. Sontag ends the passage by qualifying the longevity of the reconstructed artifact—“Well, at least another hundred years”—thereby signaling the limited shelf life that any single rendering can hope to have within an ongoing process of aesthetic fluctuation.

Towards the end of reassembling her own version of the Hamilton-Nelson affair, Sontag sets the story of romantic passion commemorated by antecedents against a story of revolutionary passion that in most earlier accounts serves as mere backdrop.⁹ Prefigured by the fall of the Bastille, portrayed with respect to those same volcanic eruptions that previously signified amorous desire (Vesuvius's worst eruption since 1631 coinciding here with the Terror in France reaching its climax in 1794 [185]), and embodied in those Jacobin intellectuals and aristocrats who turn Naples into a Parthenopean Republic on January 29, 1799 (celebrated by Vesuvius on the evening of its proclamation [277]), the depiction of political passion in Sontag's book rescues from oblivion those omitted from earlier artistic renderings. In contrast to Emma Hamilton's superfluity of images, these are the people of whom no popular images remain.

Such an absence does not result from lack of desire, however, for Sontag's historically marginalized revolutionaries are as interested in their imagerial renderings as those monarchists at the other end of the political spectrum. And by the time that Sontag introduces the Revolution of 1799 into her book, it is not just the confidante-to-the-Queen-of-Naples Emma who is concerned with the way she will appear to posterity. Nelson, who, as performing self, has envisioned his image “in history paintings, as a portrait bust, as a statue on a pedestal, or even atop a high column in a public square” from the beginning (193), resorts to cosmetic enhancement when the likenesses he has imagined start being crafted upon his return to England (330). True, the martyred revolutionaries contemplate transformation into images at a particular time (prior to their executions) and under particular circumstances (struck by the need to embolden themselves before they die) that the monarchists never have to consider. But in seeking images of themselves that will not just remember them to future generations (much like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in Robert Coover's The Public Burning¹⁰) but specifically set an example for future generations, they embark upon a program of instruction that is no different from that pursued by those who seek imagerial transposition for different ideological and social purposes.

Nowhere is this common proclivity of romantic passions better illustrated than in Sontag's juxtaposition of Emma Hamilton, privileged for being at center stage of the book's romantic drama, against Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, privileged for providing the voice that concludes her historical novel. It is not just a question of Emma's desire for amorous passion to make her “pure sensation” (263) mirroring Fonseca Pimentel's yearning for political passion to turn her into “pure flame” (417). Even more, it is a question of the vehicles through which both women express their differing forms of passion having instruction as their primary ends. “The instruction of the people and their conversion to republican ideas—propaganda—was the only one of the revolution's tasks on which everyone could agree” (280), Sontag writes, and in the newspaper articles that Fonseca Pimentel herself writes, she proposes forms of art that can contribute to that purpose: “puppet shows with more edifying escapades for their Punchinellos,” “operas with allegorical subjects such as those being staged in France” (280). Yet when Emma, draped in tunics and shawls, performs her Attitudes before invited company, the poses she assumes in succession are intended to provide edifying illustrations to her guests, precisely the kind of edifying illustrations, in fact, that the romance writer seeks to evoke through recourse to ancient prototypes. Specifically, Emma is to “[i]llustrate the passion” of figures from antiquity (both male and female) because “[w]hat people made of antiquity then was a model for the present, a set of ideal examples,” with the past providing “familiar names (the gods, the great sufferers, the heroes and heroines) representing familiar virtues (constancy, nobility, courage, grace)” (146, 148). So successful an instructress does Emma become, eventually, that when she poses as successive figures from an earlier age,

[s]he was not just impersonating Cleopatra now, she was Cleopatra, ensnaring Antony; a Dido whose charms detain Aeneas; an Armida who has bewitched Rinaldo—the familiar stories from ancient history and epic everyone knew, in which a man destined for glory makes a brief stop in the course of his great mission, succumbs to the charms of an irresistible woman, and stays. And stays. And stays.

(235-236)

That Emma misses the whole point of the poses she incarnates results from the fact that the images with which she seeks to instruct are static, each governed by the selection of a single moment, “the right moment, the moment that presents meaning, that sums up the essence of a character, a story, an emotion,” the combination of which leaves Emma not with a continuous narrative, but with a set of snapshots, “a living slide show of the iconic moments of ancient myth and literature” (146). And because the significant moment privileged by neoclassical aesthetics is one that “showed suffering with decorum, dignity in the midst of horror,” it “evoked the worst without showing us the worst” (295). Therefore, when those revolutionaries about to mount the scaffold seek to “show an example” through “the didactic art of the significant moment,” these “future citizens of the world of history painting” choose an image of themselves that represents stoicism in the face of death, based on the assumption that “[a]n image, even of the most lamentable events, should also give hope. Even the most horrifying stories can be told in a way that does not make us despair” (295).

Unfortunately, in choosing an image that omits the full extent of the horror they undergo, they leave the future citizens of the world who view their (imagined) portraits unable to reconstruct the story that would provide the greatest amount of edification. Moreover, in assuming that image-makers control image apprehension, they neglect the role of what Victor Burgin has called the seeing subject and that subject's “preconstituted field of discourse” with which images interact to produce a story (69, 65). When all those who live by the image in Sontag's novel (which is to say everybody) thus try to reconstruct a historical narrative, they invariably get the story wrong. Nelson, whose dreams even take the form of disconnected pictures, casts the story of Emma and Hamilton as a sentimental morality play: “the fallen woman, taken under the Cavaliere's protection, who had become an irreproachable wife” (196, 195). Queen Maria Carolina of Naples tells the story of a tragic diva (Sontag's recycling of Tosca), and “the whole story came out, backward” (325). Emma relates to dinner guests the tale of a band of murderers who occupy the Cavaliere's courtyard a few weeks after her arrival, not realizing that the events she describes have occurred a quarter of a century earlier and not even to her (170-172).

What Emma's complete bypassing of all sense of temporal relations reveals, finally, is the ahistorical component of the static image, typified for Sontag in the photographic image that atomizes experience into “a series of unrelated, freestanding particles” and turns “history, past and present, [into] a set of anecdotes and faits divers” (On Photography 23). Psychologically useful, such a separation of actions and consequences can “suppress, or at least reduce, moral and sensory queasiness” (On Photography 40): the Cavaliere, who wants “nothing to disturb the beautiful images he preserved of Naples,” is spared the hangings, shootings, and beheadings of revolutionaries that occur in his fair city, for Naples remains “like a picture,” always “seen from the same point of view” to those who view it from aboard Nelson's ship (284, 294). As a vehicle for transmitting any edifying knowledge of history, however, the static image proves extremely limited. As Sontag again illustrates with respect to the photograph, the static image may goad conscience but never result in any “ethical or political knowledge,” and, as a result, “[t]he knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. It will be a knowledge at bargain prices” (On Photography 24).

The question, then, concerns what vehicle will transmit the experience of the past most efficaciously—pictures or words, images or narratives. As mediating texts, neither, of course, can presume to transmit that experience accurately. Nonetheless, in Sontag's view, the two encourage very different responses, complicity or responsibility, from their audiences: “While images invite the spectator to identify with what is seen, the presence of words makes the spectator into a critic” (Radical Will 185). The two, moreover, encourage very different temporal and spatial responses in particular. “In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions,” she writes. “And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand” (On Photography 23). Writing of a period in English history when only ten thousand people read newspapers and during a period of history in which increased literacy is matched by increased media imagery, Sontag has no choice but to maintain “the right velocity of narration” (328, 349), as she describes it, in order for her work to facilitate greater understanding. For that she must move from the image of abbreviated temporality to the narrative of conscious temporal relations.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

Ironically, the narrative of temporal relations that Sontag composes as a romance novel takes its cue from the insufficiency of words to describe fully what needs to be communicated, particularly when the subject at hand evokes the most extreme form of sensory response. “How can the Cavaliere communicate to an auditor how disgusting the King is,” she questions, only to conclude that he cannot: “An odor. A taste. A touch. Impossible to describe” (44). How can the Cavaliere communicate how beautiful the cameos, vases, and paintings that decorate his treasure-congested study are? “Their forms, he wrote, were simple, beautiful, and varied beyond description” (73). So frequently do such moments of inadequacy occur, in fact, that “Impossible to Describe” turns into a heading for a list (129).

Faced with this representational insufficiency of language, the Cavaliere opts for narratives that sanitize history. “He only relates,” Sontag writes of his experiences with Naples's flatulent young king, “and in the relating, the sheer odiousness of it dwindles into a tale, nothing to get wrought up over” (44). Hamilton may ease the burden of his conscience by reminding himself that the king is “just one item” that beggars description, but Sontag's Naples, a “kingdom of the immoderate, of excess, of overflow” (44), is a place with more than one source of odious behavior that beggars description in words—this, after all, is a city where people rip apart live animals tied to the base of a mountain of food built for all court celebrations. “And where everyone is shocked is a place where everyone tells stories” (38). Safe stories, like those of the Cavaliere; stories designed to minimize, not dramatize, shock and spectacle.

Sontag, who has long advocated an art of “shock therapy” to awaken those in the West from the “massive sensory anesthesia” that she sees plaguing them since the time of the Industrial Revolution (Against Interpretation 302), takes the opposite approach. If the narrative of linear temporal relations cannot convey the extent of her subject's shock adequately, she fractures the seamless narrative of strict chronology to suggest the shock of her subject analogously, with Hamilton's Vesuvius juxtaposed against Las Vegas's fifty-four-foot-high fiberglass replica (327); Pompeii and Herculaneum against Hiroshima and Nagasaki (113); William Beckford's Fonthill Abbey against Ludwig II's “Disneyesque” Neuschwanstein (344); and gallows against gas chambers (217). With language from one period yoked to phenomena of another, winds of southern Europe promote “a collective PMS that comes on seasonally” (86), and a naval commander who disobeys orders becomes a hero “who has in effect gone AWOL” (319).

The method informing the whole is cinematic, reflecting Sontag's belief that “the distinctive cinematic unit is not the image but the principle of connection between the images” (Radical Will 108), and the specific governing principle of connection is montage. Emma's emotionally charged character raises questions about women's power in patriarchal societies, and with a “flash-forward” Sontag relates the tale of Tosca (309), the story she later has Queen Maria Carolina relate in summary form backwards (325). The Cavaliere normally observes Naples from behind windows and terraces, and with a “reverse shot” Sontag shows how he later views it while at sea aboard the Foudroyant during the 1799 Revolution (298).

“You'll lose track of the time,” the novel's narrator warns in Sontag's opening mise-en-scène in a Manhattan flea market, spring of 1992, prior to the jump-cut that leaves her in a London picture auction, autumn of 1772 (3). In a very real way one does, of course, for what these fragmentations of linear time and space do—techniques comparable to the “rhetoric of disorientation” that Sontag admires in the films of Jean-Luc Godard (Radical Will 165)—is make past, present, and future equally present, as suggested in the oxymoronic phrase that introduces the story of Tosca as an illustration of woman's powerlessness that “a flash-forward may serve to recall” (309). As a result, the narrative perspective of the novel grants its readers the same kind of “dual citizenship in the past and in the future” that the Neapolitan fortune teller Hamilton consults is granted by her oracular vision (58). “The future exists in the present, she said. The future, as she described it, seemed to be the present gone awry” (58). The coming attractions, in short, are already here.

As Efrosina also warns the Cavaliere, “[t]he future is a hole. … When you fall in it, you cannot be sure how far you will go” (55). And what one falls into within Sontag's comparativist history are Derridean “[m]oments of slippage, when anything seems possible and not everything makes sense” (120), the most compelling of which concern that concept of cultural hybridity defined by Homi Bhabha and Edward Said. Naples, the wealthiest, most populous city on the Italian peninsula, and, “after Paris, the second largest city on the European continent” (20), becomes “Ireland (or Greece, or Turkey, or Poland),” another “refractory colony, or a country on Europe's margin,” to be disciplined and dealt with accordingly (298). Palermo is shown to be to Naples what Saigon is to Hanoi, and what Rio is to São Paulo, and what Calcutta is to Delhi—a southern culture in which people who are “never on time” (but who do possess “a wonderful sense of rhythm”) just “charm, charm, charm”—only what Palermo is to Naples is also what Naples is to Rome (225-226). Perhaps most unsettling, the 1799 Neapolitan “fairy-tale revolution” doomed to defeat from the very beginning is also presented as the republic that seeks, in Sontag's deliberately loaded phrasing, “to win the hearts and minds of the people” in the five short (renamed) months of its existence (278, 281).

More than anything else, these moments of slippage call into question all notions of historical progress. The King of Naples decrees that animals tied to the mountain of food are to be slaughtered first and then hung in quarters on a fence. “As you see,” he tells the Cavaliere, “there is progress even here, in this city” (44), a statement whose meaning its own ironic tone immediately cancels. In contrast, then, to a novel like Ragtime, which undermines complacent notions about America “then” being better than “now” in order to show historical continuities and patterns between the early and late periods of the twentieth century, The Volcano Lover offers contiguities and parallels between circumstances that prevail in those late capitalist countries that Sontag terms modern. Viewed in this context, turn-of-the-century (eighteenth to nineteenth) Naples in Sontag's Romantic self-fashioning (to parody Stephen Greenblatt) is no better or worse than turn-of-the-century (twentieth to twenty-first) America—a statement as unsatisfying to liberals who harbor hopes for the future as it is to conservatives who venerate the inheritance of the past.

Writing about the seventeen-million-dollar villa built by J. Paul Getty to house his antiquities and paintings, an architectural structure whose garish appearance seemed at odds with the Renaissance and Baroque art contained within it, Joan Didion saw a similar lesson being taught: that “the past was perhaps different from the way we like to perceive it,” that “[t]he old world was once discomfitingly new, or even nouveau,” finally, that “not much changes,” indeed, “that we were never any better than we are and will never be any better than we were”—a lesson she considered “a profoundly unpopular political statement” (76). As Didion also noted, the Getty was modeled upon a villa buried in 79 A.D. by mud from Vesuvius, unearthed in part by digging around Herculaneum that took place during the eighteenth century (75). Writing about the eighteenth century directly, Sontag offers the massiveness of Vesuvius itself, “instructive as well as thrilling” (6), both “[e]ntertainment and apocalypse” (129), whose unpredictable yet imminent eruptions signal the sense of historical irresolution to which the lesson of her book is ultimately devoted: the “permanent modern scenario” she sketched earlier in which “apocalypse looms … and it doesn't occur. And it still looms” (AIDS [AIDS and Its Metaphors] 175). At the time she first depicted that scenario, she, fittingly, framed it as cinematic narrative, “a long-running serial.” Equally fitting was the name she gave to the soap opera that comprised her view of the process of history: not “Apocalypse Now,” but “Apocalypse From Now On” (AIDS 176)—a variation on another old scenario admittedly, but, then again, what artifact in Sontag's aesthetic flea market isn't?

Notes

1. James Byres, Historical Manuscripts Collection, London, 24: Rutland MSS, vol. 3, 311; qtd. in Fraser, Emma, Lady Hamilton 80. I am indebted to Catherine Belling for bringing this biography, as well as the pamphlet accompanying the 1972 Lady Hamilton in Relation to the Art of Her Time exhibition, to my attention.

2. Charles Greville, letter to William Hamilton, 10 Mar. 1785, qtd. in Fraser 55.

3. See Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion” 29-34, and “The Literature of Replenishment” 65-71; Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge 37-41; Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation 1-42; and Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 1-54.

4. For an extended discussion of Sontag's sensibilities as reflecting the paradoxes of late modernist aesthetics, see Sayres 10-12. For representative citations of Sontag as an early postmodernist, see Brooker 10-11, 17; Maltby 17; and Hutcheon 10. For consideration of Sontag's theorizing as compared with that of more recent French post-structuralists, see Kennedy 30-31.

5. Even Nelson's return to Naples to evacuate the Hamiltons and the royal family—problematic in that it was in direct defiance of Lord Keith's order to take his fleet to the Mediterranean—is presented in Korda's film as an act of duty, justified by Nelson with the phrase, “I will not see those I love and those I owe loyalty to left alone.” So big a fan of the finished film was Winston Churchill that he had a copy shown to those accompanying him on the Prince of Wales for the Atlantic Charter meeting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in August of 1941. He also had a private print of his own kept at Chartwell that he used for private screenings (Vickers 132).

6. Baudrillard's “La précéssion de simulacres” appeared in Traverses 11 (1978): 3-37. Sontag's emendation of Feuerbach first appeared in the New York Review of Books, 23 June 1977: 25-27, as part of her essay on “Photography Unlimited” prior to its inclusion in On Photography.

7. For a listing of the dimensions of these renderings of Emma Hamilton, see Lady Hamilton in Relation to the Art of Her Time, a pamphlet accompanying the 18 July—16 October 1972 exhibition of the same name, organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Greater London Council at the Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood.

8. For Sontag's reading of Walter Benjamin as exhibiting a paradigmatically Surrealist temperament, see the title essay in Under the Sign of Saturn 109-134.

9. For an earlier example of Sontag's portrayal of political revolution as an expression of passion, see her 1969 piece, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for us) to Love the Cuban Revolution” 6, 10, 14, 16, 18-19.

10. Coover's sympathetic portrayal of this desire in The Public Burning is, in large part, a response to those much more critical charges lodged against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg while incarcerated. See Fiedler 25-45, and Warshow 69-81.

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