Of volcano lovers and their weird motivations

Anthony Licari's article (April 26) must have piqued the interest of many readers with the unusual subject it treated. "Volcano obsession" is by no means the commonest of themes. As the columnist suggested, it normally attracts rather bizarre people - what shall we call them, volcano watchers? The great American writer Susan Sontag defined one such character "the volcano lover" in her 1992 historical novel of the same name. Sontag concentrates on a relatively well-known character (Sir William, il cavaliere) who because of his elite status is oblivious of the deep social and psychological changes going on in the world around him.

The only thing in the external world that captures his attention or excites him is the volcano itself increasingly becoming his sole source of solace. No great social change can really make much difference to him, but the volcano fascinates him because of its potential to wipe out everything once and for all. A death wish seems to be the prime motivator of the novel which takes a number of twists until we realise that the characters who initially fool us into thinking them deep and interesting are only vain, reactionary, at best irrelevant. Sontag seems eager to convince us that "volcano watchers" are simply useless people.

As your readers may know, The Volcano Lover is the odd man out, so to speak, in Sontag's outstanding literary output. Small wonder her theme is so strange. It is however, interesting to note that in her last published essay Sontag wrote about another pair of novels that take place around a volcano: Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Nobel Laureate Halldòr Laxness's Under the Glacier (vide the February 20, 2005 edition of the New York Times.) She tells us nothing new about the former novel that in the past served as one of the uniting factors between France and the US of A. Regarding the latter, she again takes the opportunity to slam the sheer inanity of this weird fascination with gazing into the earth's entrails. The late Ms Sontag had her good reasons to refrain from considering the standard Freudian interpretation of all that is associated with volcanoes.

To be sure Dr Licari was very kind and considerate about the motivations of obsessive volcano watchers, but many would be more inclined to judge them as classic examples of the eternally solitary who suffer from severe paranoia and a maladjusted personality due to which syndromes they are prone to retire from normal society perhaps trying to communicate with the mysterious creatures supposedly operating in the underworld. In Etna's case the Sicilians of antiquity swore these were the industrious blacksmiths of the god Vulcan, whereas their Christian successors feared them as demons which St Philip of Agira (our own San Filep) was presumably sent out to exorcise.

May I add that later (more enlightened) Sicilians and most other Christians learned to view these "mysterious forces" as a figment of the volcano watchers' sick imagination. As things turned out San Filep could be reasonably regarded as a pioneer psychiatrist adequately conversant with the infirmity under review. A visit to St Philip's church in Żebbuġ would suffice to prove that the higher Church authorities were always aware of the saint's real "profession" even while tolerating his popular reputation as a sort of "exorcist". His real designation lies in the official inscription accompanying his image: energumenorum salus.