Looking and Touching: Spectacle and Collection in Sontag's Volcano Lover

Not altogether surprisingly, Susan Sontag’s self-styled romance serves as a forum for the expression of ideas of the visual that have their origin in the 18th-century—ideas that have recently been theorized and reinvigorated by a postmodern interest in the gaze. ¹ Intrigued with the multitudinous forms of 18th-century interest in the image, Sontag’s novel—produced by a writer on film and photography who is also a filmmaker—is itself a collection of theories of the visual seen through the double lens of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. In its interest in the visual, Sontag’s novel does not focus on the activity of looking alone, but explores the lust of the collector, for whom the activity of the “caressing eye” (3) must be supplemented by the appropriating touch. By way of this topic, Sontag engages an 18th-century concern with the relation of optic to haptic such as we might find in Addison, Diderot, or Herder, and with a broader interest in the relation of image to the real that the conjunction of optic and haptic suggests. In The Volcano Lover, Barthes meets Benjamin—figuratively, it should be added—on the common ground of the collection.

1. Multiple Identifications

“The aesthete’s radicalism: to be multiple, to make multiple identifications; to assume fully the privilege of the personal.” Sontag’s ostensible subject is Roland Barthes, the quotation from a eulogy for her mentor, “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes.” ² In the context of this essay, to be an aesthete means to affirm, as Barthes has claimed of himself, the notion of spectacle as “the universal category through whose forms the world is seen.” ³ Mirroring her subject’s method here and elsewhere, Sontag’s identifications are likewise multiple and personal: in this portrait of the aesthete we recognize a self-portrait of Sontag as formalist. In its contours we also discern the sensibility of the cavaliere, Sontag’s fictional rendering of Sir William Hamilton—his double, as she calls him on the copyright page of The Volcano Lover: for this aesthete, too, the world reveals itself as spectacle. But for the cavaliere, the spectatorial attitude is additionally determined by the collector’s fixation on objects: of Sontag’s cavaliere it can truly be said that the “deep transaction” that takes place between him and the world “always take[s] place with things.” ⁴ So, too, Sontag has claimed concerning Walter Benjamin—another link in this relay—that great melancholic born “Under the Sign of Saturn,” as Sontag was herself. Sontag’s novel opens in Manhattan, spring of 1992, as the author in jeans, silk blouse and tennis shoes, led by the collector’s desire, enters the flea market that is also the text, in search of the perfect object. In this, too, she models herself on Benjamin who, having unpacked his library, disappears into the edifice of words that constitutes and houses his collection. Rephrasing Susan Stewart, we might say that the flea market that is the novel is in a parasitic relation to a very specific host culture. ⁵ Like Barthes’ writing, Sontag’s novel “assumes an endless discourse anterior to itself.” ⁶

2. Seriality

“A complete collection is a dead collection. . . . The great collections are vast, not complete. Incomplete: motivated by the desire for completeness” (72). What better way to insure the open-endedness of a collection than to collect a volcano? Like the historical William Hamilton, the cavaliere is famous for his collections of antique vases, of painting, and other objets d’art acquired serially, “piece by piece” (25). ⁷ And, like other 18th-century men of sensibility, the cavaliere’s vision is picturesque in the most fundamental sense: he sees the world in pictures. Entranced with the “pyrotechnical show” that is Vesuvius, that “ultimate spectacle” (6), the cavaliere is in the grips of a passion “rationalized as scientific interest and also as an aesthetic one” (25). Unlike the cavaliere’s vases, the image of the volcano in the panoramic distance is rarely static; whether obscured by clouds, emitting wisps of smoke, or spitting...