The Volcano Lover

Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover: A Romance (1992) is a historical, biographical novel that narrates the lives of Sir William Hamilton and his domestic circle between 1772 and 1803, a period marked by the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802). It offers a vivid portrait of Naples, a major cultural center in the 18th century, and delves into the dramatic events of the Neapolitan Revolution (1799). Hosted at the court of the Bourbon monarch Ferdinand IV of Naples as the British ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Hamilton lived in Neaples from 1764 to 1799. Besides his office as a diplomat, he was also a collector of antiquities, and a self-taught geologist and naturalist. Hamilton’s work on the Italian volcanoes, targeted to the travellers of the Grand Tour, was published in Naples in 1776 with the title Campi Phlegræi. Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies as They Have Been Communicated to the Royal Society by Sir William Hamilton. 

The creative trigger for Sontag’s novel was a copy of Hamilton’s Observations that she found in a print shop near the British Museum in the early 1980s (Blume 2000). The Volcano Lover deals with the lives of Hamilton, his first wife Catherine, his second wife Emma, and her renowned lover, Admiral Lord Nelson. Regarding the genre, Stacey Olster sees the novel as an example of Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (119) because it intertwines the narration of historical facts with fictional elements, and with Sontag’s reflections on art, collecting and writing. 

Noam Andrews maintains that in travelogues from the Grand Tour onwards, “Vesuvius persistently functions as a metaphor for desire, for romantic and sexual adventures liberated from the entanglements of social restrictions” (14) occupying a space where it intertwined with “antiquity, sexuality, and the southern climate” (14). In The Volcano Lover, this topos manifests itself in the love triangle between Hamilton, Emma, and Lord Nelson. Furthermore, Mount Vesuvius is the central, ever-visible metaphor for uncontrollable forces of love, violence, and revolution, always threatening to erupt and wreak ruin. Alessa Johns points out how in her historical novel Sontag used Vesuvius “to weave together images of eighteenth-century political, scientific, affective, aesthetic, and military eruptions” (89), echoing Madame de Stäel’s metaphorical use of the volcano in Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807).

In the Prologue, the author-narrator summarises the symbolical value of volcanoes in the cultural imagination. First, she describes the volcano as a living being, with a mouth and a “lava tongue” (5). Every volcano is 

a monstrous living body, both male and female […] Something alive, that can die […] Existing only intermittently, a constant menace […] Capricious, untameable, malodorous […] The slumbering giant that wakes […] The lumbering giant who turns his attentions to you. King Kong. Vomiting destruction, and then sinking back into somnolence. (5–6). 

In this excerpt, marked by several personifications, the volcano’s feminine nature may refer to its capacity to produce fertile land, while its masculine character can be read in terms of destructiveness. Sontag also draws on Greek mythology, in which volcanoes and volcanic activity were often associated with Titans and Giants, particularly Typhon and Enceladus. A volcano can also be perceived "as a grand pyrotechnical show" (6); this comparison refers to the great interest in public pyrotechnic displays of ‘firework’ volcanoes in late eighteenth century London. Finally, referring to the volcano as an emblem of passion (7), the narrator compares it to a violent feeling that can rekindle after being extinguished. 

The ‘Cavaliere’ William Hamilton is the volcano lover of the book’s title, who climbed Vesuvius on more than 60 excursions during his 35-year stay in Italy. Sontag underlines how Hamilton, in contrast to the 18th century wave of theological conjectures on the age of the Earth and on the nature of volcanoes, confined his research to direct observation. He hired various artists and assistants to collect volcanic samples, document the lava flows, record the changing shapes of Mount Vesuvius, and draw the atmospheric changes caused by its eruptions. However, she also characterises Hamilton as a Romantic wanderer, wanting for sublime experiences and willing to be memorialised as a direct witness of the eruptions. “At a safe distance it is the ultimate spectacle, instructive as well as thrilling” (6) says the narrator in the Prologue, expressing her biofictional subject’s point of view, which in turn draws on Burke and Kant’s aesthetics of sublime. In Part 1, chapter 2, we read that Hamilton had a passion for “what always surprised, alarmed” (28); however, in chapter 5, Hamilton contemplates an eruption of Mount Vesuvius “from the safety of the observatory room” (83).

As a collector, Hamilton sees Vesuvius as a repository for hidden treasures from the geological past. He makes culture of nature by gathering up “specimens of cooling lava […] of the salts and sulphurs (deep yellow, red, orange)” (27). His passion for the volcano is ignited by both scientific and aesthetic interests, but it also unveils a reifying attitude, because “Of the volcano he could only make a gift, to his glory and the glory of the volcano” (27). Furthermore, he thinks he can possess the volcano, make it his object of desire, even though he is conscious of the eccentricity of this passion, as suggested by the rhetorical questions: “A mountain for a beloved? A monster?” (28). 

For Hamilton, Vesuvius' eruptions are first and foremost a sublime spectacle:

If the mountain spat fire, hurled itself into the air, turned to flame and a moving wall of ash, that was an invitation to look. The mountain was exhibiting itself […] Even in the most pacified souls the volcano inspires a lust to see destructiveness. (32)

When the volcano is not erupting, when it just emits dirty white vapours, it makes “a very melancholy impression” (32) on the observers. It is just “[p]ure massiveness–grey, inert” (32). By contrast, eruptions turn inorganic mass into something thrilling, vibrating with life and art. What fascinates the spectator is the volcano’s “defiance of the law of gravity” (32): an eruption is “like ballet” (32). The volcano is a “stimulus for contemplation” (82), offering alternatively noise and “islands of silence” (82). Hamilton climbs the mountain and, once on the top, he has “Fantasies of omnipotence” (58): like the rear of an orchestra, he imagines himself amplifying and muffling the nature’s sounds. In these examples, natural phenomena are perceived as the greatest show for everyone to see and hear: by producing "girandoles of red-hot stone, far surpassing the most astonishing fireworks, [Vesuvius offers] Entertainment and apocalypse" (129). Finally, the mountain is personified: compared to an actor, it has its own “poses and performances” (158).

The narrator’s description of the eruption of August 1779 is like an ekphrasis of Fabris’s illustrations for Hamilton’s Observations:

a column of liquid fire began to rise and quickly reached an amazing height, twice that of the mountain, a fiery pillar ten thousand feet high, mottled with puffs of black smoke, scored by flashing zigzag lines of lightning. The sun went out. Black clouds descended over Naples. (83–84)

The narrator uses the following designations to characterise Mount Vesuvius: “the graveyard of its own violence" (7), “the exterminator” (28), “the legendary menace, double-humped” (28), “a great ruin […] which could come alive and cause further ruin” (57), “an emblem of all the forms of wholesale death” (112). Such expressions draw on the topoi of cruel nature, death, war, apocalypse and ruin; regarding this latter aspect, not only does the volcano cause ruin, but it is a blackened ruin itself. Using this metaphor, Sontag highlights an analogy between nature and culture: both can be reshaped by unpredictable events that cause destruction and renewal. Furthermore, she suggests how the Romantic aesthetics implied a conceptual ‘domestication’ of nature, which was seen less as ‘pure matter’ than a recognisable “matter shaped by its observer” (Giordanetti and Mazzocut-Mis 164), in this case, an instance of ‘ruin’.  In Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni (1816), Percy B. Shelley considered Mont Blanc not as a mere geological conformation but as an agential force with “a plan for humanity” (Giordanetti and Mazzocut-Mis 164). Sontag’s protagonist seems to share this view, pushing it to the extreme when he sees eruptions and other natural catastrophes as makers of culture: "nature run amok also makes culture, makes artifacts, by murdering, petrifying history. In such disasters there is much to appreciate" (112). In this excerpt, the narrator unveils how natural disasters, despite their inherent link with material and sociocultural annihilation, may encourage historical research and lead to scientific progress. In Hamilton’s view, petrified history can be used not only as an archaeological archive for the study of past civilisations, but also as a tool for scientific investigation, involving the reconstruction of eruptive dynamics through the analysis of volcanic stratigraphy. Recent studies underline how “the geological and geomorphological records are important resources for understanding past and future hazards and disaster events” (Tilley et al. 3), because “the stratigraphy [is] fundamental [also] for the set up, along with surveillance, of statistical models for probabilistic volcanic hazard assessment” (Doronzo et al. 3). In Hamilton’s Observations – which feature various plates describing and analysing volcanic deposit – and in Sontag’s novel, Hamilton is a pioneer of volcanic stratigraphy, collecting stones and minerals while keeping in mind that the mountain might suddenly come alive and cause further ruin.

In the final passages of the novel, the narrator draws connections between geological and social history to reflect on the extraordinariness of human resilience in the face of destructive powers: 

Like Vesuvius, the French Revolution was also a phenomenon. But a volcanic eruption is something perennial. While the French Revolution was perceived as unprecedented, Vesuvius has been erupting for a long time, is erupting now, and will erupt again: the continuity and repetitiveness of nature. To treat the force of history as a force of nature was reassuring as well as distracting. It suggests that though this may be only the beginning, the beginning of an age of revolutions, this too will pass. (161)

Later, she adds that

To love volcanoes was to put the revolution in its place. To live in proximity to the memory of a disaster, to live among ruins—Naples, or Berlin today—is to be reassured that one can survive any disaster, even the greatest. (162)

Theses passages shift the focus from the danger and destruction associated with natural and social catastrophes to the human capacity to overcome trauma and rebuild a whole world from its ruins.