Conrad, Freud, and Derrida on Pompeii: A Paradigm of Disappearance

In the year 79 C.E., a fierce eruption of Mount Vesuvius resulted in the complete burial of one of the most opulent cultural centers of the Roman Empire. Effaced by mounds of ash and lava, Pompeii was transformed into a symbol of severance and destruction—a significance that it has retained in collective thought to this day. At present, the excavated city stands as a historical and cultural monument to a temporal arrest that occurred almost three thousand years ago. Prey to a chronological anomaly, Pompeii constitutes a paradoxical fusion: it is a virtual actuality, a present-day past.

Encapsulating the incommensurate forces of disappearance and recovery, the geographical space of Pompeii doubles as a psychological, philosophical, and literary locale, a metaphor that inspires and informs the works of several great Western writers. In this paper, I will trace the manner in which this interdisciplinary juncture hosts a meeting between Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida. Despite the disparity of their interpretative frameworks the three writers identify in the Pompeiian image a locus of desire that is engendered by the tantalizing absence of that which was buried or lost. By testing the writers' various approaches to this apparent lack—approaches that encompass the fluctuating temporalities of absence and presence, loss and recuperation, closure and deferral—this paper examines not only the motif of Pompeii but also the principles that underlie the works of those who interpret it.

The texts studied here, namely, Conrad's The Arrow of Gold, Freud's "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva," and Derrida's Archive Fever, differ in their treatment of the Pompeiian motif. Freud uses the motif in a strictly interpretative manner, commenting on its significance within a fourth text, Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva: A Pompeiian Phantasy (1903).¹ Like other works of literature, Jensen's novel was made famous by Freud's psychoanalytic interpretation, which appeared in 1907.² Indeed, it is Freud's analysis that provides the impetus for Derrida's discussion of the image of Pompeii in Archive Fever. Freud unmasks the psychodynamic undercurrents of Jensen's literary creation; Derrida, in turn, deconstructs the unconscious drives that inform Freud's interpretation. The three texts may thus be viewed as a series of embedded narratives, each framing or being framed by the other.

Conrad does not participate in this game of Chinese boxes. The Arrow of Gold introduces the Pompeiian motif not by way of interpretative commentary but as an apparently incidental literary analogy. Despite several striking similarities in plot and characterization, Conrad does not directly relate or allude to Jensen's story.³ Whether or not Conrad was familiar with the earlier tale, much like Jensen, he presents an infatuated and tortured protagonist seeking an impossible love. In Conrad's novel, Jensen's Pompeiian setting appears in a symbolic and reduced form, as the Pomeiian ruins are translated into the stylized décor of the heroine's living room.

The motif of Pompeii that haunts Conrad's novels and short stories prefigures doom, separation, and loss.⁴ Conrad employs the symbol of Pompeii in the service of its tragic association, an immanent and inevitable disappearance in death. This reading, however, signals an introduction not to themes of mourning but rather to a literary representation of the intensification of desire. As I have shown elsewhere,⁵ themes of loss and separation in Conrad inaugurate a psychological study of desire: whether departed, unattainable, or the rejecting party in a tale of unrequited love, the missing other is internalized by the infatuated lover. No longer flesh and blood, the other is now an object of desire, an elusive and tantalizing fabrication that is often more alluring than its actual counterpart. Pompeii thus signals the introduction of an "irrealizable desire"⁶ where the absent exerts its power over the present and the virtual propels and manipulates the actual.

In my discussion of the Pompeiian motif the shift from themes of mourning to themes of desire is significant, for it is pervasive not only in Conrad but, as I will show, also in Freud and...