The study on the concept of the 'uncanny' here is centred around Vidler's observation of Pompeii, with references to many figures who were also struck by the 'site of death', namely Chateaubriand, Gautier, Schelling and Sigmund Freud. He starts the essay with defining Pompeii's distinguishable character, in comparison to that of Rome and Herculaneum; that is its "homely nature".
"The circumstances of its burial has allowed the traces of everyday life to survive with startling immediacy. Its streets, shops, and houses seemed to the traveler from the north at once intimate and private." (p. 45)And yet, Pompeii seemed to represent "the conditions of unhomeliness to the most extreme degree". This is the effect of the juxtapositional co-presence of domestic homely ruins and skeletons next to each other.
"For behind the quotidian semblance there lurked a horror, equally present to view: skeletons abounded." (p. 46)He had made the various observations and studies thought the archaeological, historical, literal and aesthetic eyes. The lines about his sensitive examination of the close relationship between the story of Pygmalion and that of Pompeii, are remarkable.
(the lines following the mention of an impression of a young woman's breast found beneath a portico, that is now kept in the museum of Portici.)
"The sculptor whose creation was so lifelike that she seemed to blush at his embrace, who fell in love with and "married" his ivory statuette, was now replaced by nature, or even better, history, which had moulded its own work of art from the life, turning, in a reversal that caught the romantic imagination, living beauty into dead trace. And, following the hardly subdued erotic subtext of the buried city, this trace was not simply a mummified body or skeleton but the ghost of a breast, a fragment that, in an age preoccupied with the restoration and completion of broken statues, demanded to be reconstituted, in imagination at least." (p. 49)Important references:
Théophile Gautier 'Arria Marcella'
Sigmund Freud's essay 'Uncanny'
Wilhelm Jensen 'Gradiva'
(to be continued...)
