Not long ago, I acquired a curious figurine from a seller on eBay.
The figurine is made of bronze and is about three inches in height, and depicts a puer alatus—a winged male infant—cradling a dolphin over its shoulder. The seller speculated that it might’ve been a fisherman’s good luck charm. A reasonable guess, but it looked to me more like a replica of one of the artworks one would see on the European Grand Tour. A cursory web search revealed that that’s what it is. The original was part of a fountain excavated from Pompeii; my replica probably was cast in a Neapolitan foundry sometime in the late 19th or early 20th centuries.
The motif of the putto with a dolphin was common in ancient art and can be traced back to Greece at the end of the archaic period and, as with many subjects in Greek art, was later adopted by the Romans. As noted in Brunilde Ridgway’s classic paper “Dolphins and Dolphin Riders” a common scenario showed the putto, representing the infant god Eros, riding on the back of the dolphin. This doesn’t seem to illustrate an episode in any myth concerning Eros, but instead was likely an allegory for the speed with which love, represented by the swiftly moving dolphin, can change allegiances. What’s curious about my figurine is that it inverts the relationship between the two: the putto is carrying the dolphin rather than the other way around. Obviously this is an allegory for something, but what? It’s a question that raises a second question about the time-bound nature of interpretation.
An artwork, even an ancient and decorative one, stays alive through the (continuous or discontinuous, as the case may be) chain of interpretations that makes up its posterity. A work that had a specific meaning in its own time may in its various afterlives come to suggest meanings more or less distant from its meaning in its original milieu. This is particularly true of allegories, which are rich in implication and often say more than they mean. Because by nature they say one thing under the sign of another, they are especially able to generate new meanings, particularly when the keys to their original associations and conventions have been lost or when our own, time-bound interpretations of the concepts these works represent undergo change. A work that had a specific meaning in its own time may in its various afterlives come to suggest meanings more or less distant from its original meaning. This isn’t the product of an inherent indeterminacy of meaning but rather of a poetic suggestiveness the elucidation of which just is its interpretive legacy. More generally, as Umberto Eco has argued, the properties of an artwork – its materials, formal composition, subjects, and so forth – lend it something like a meaning intention of its own, semi-independent of the meaning intention of the artist who created it. And so it is, even with this small replica.
The first thing I noticed about the figure, the thing that initially attracted me to it, was the stance of the putto relative to the dolphin. It’s ambiguous, especially as reproduced at the replica’s small scale. Eros cradles the dolphin in the crook of his right arm, while his left hand appears to be securing the dolphin’s nose against his chest. The dolphin, its tail uplifted, forms a figure “S,” as if caught in an undulating motion. It isn’t passively draped over the putto’s shoulder but rather seems to be squirming, perhaps trying to escape. The figurine lacks the kind of detail that would show the putto’s facial expression so we can’t tell if he’s struggling with the dolphin. (The placard by the original in the Naples Archaeological Museum describes it as a Cupid playing with a dolphin – at least the English translation does. The Italian title is the more neutral Amorino con delfino.) What does seem clear though is that the putto has made the dolphin its own. This suggest to me an allegory read in light of Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
That the puer alatus represents Eros is easy enough. Being familiar with the meaning of the motif of Eros as dolphin rider, I read the dolphin as representing what, after Freud, we now would call the libido – the life instinct as embodied in the outward-directed force of desire. The ancients had chosen the dolphin to symbolize the vicissitudes of erotic desire because they recognized that the creature’s swift movement mimicked the lability of affection as it darts seemingly indiscriminately from object to object. At the same time, the dolphin’s being an entity other than Eros implicates it as representing a force powerful enough and capricious enough to seem like something with an independent existence – a universal and impersonal force bursting upon us in an eruption of desire and affective energy that resists the rationalizing counterweights of sense and system. Simply put, the dolphin is libido in its guise as the kind of inchoate force Nietzsche characterized as Dionysian: a quasi-madness that we seem not to possess but that possesses us instead. But then something happens. When Eros captures or plays with the dolphin he makes it, or simply recognizes it as, his own.
I see this frozen drama of possession as one of self-possession. It’s evocative of the claim made by Kojève that it is through desire that we become self-conscious – that desire, as the subjective or inward-facing dimension of the lack that we must fill in order to survive, reveals ourselves to ourselves. It is through the revelation of desire that the word “I” first appears – as Kojève puts it, “Desire is always revealed as my desire, and to reveal desire, one must use the word ‘I.’” (This story of the birth of self-reference in language as midwifed by desire may be a philosophical just-so story, but it has an intuitive truth to it that makes it effective as a kind of modern myth of origins.)
Libido, whether in the narrow sense of the specifically erotic drive, or in the broader sense of an attraction to an external object, is one such revelatory desire. Thus when the putto apprehends the dolphin he recognizes the impersonal force it represents as being his. He recognizes himself through his desire, which reveals him to himself as a desiring being (an emptiness or nothingness, as Kojève would have it) driven to the external world around him in order to satiate that desire. Desire further reveals the external world as something other than himself, something that is always-already given and which stands apart from him and against him as an object to a subject – a subject now aware of himself as a subject and as such, radically different from the objects surrounding him.
Although in this scenario both the putto and the dolphin are allegorical figures, they come to their allegorical meanings from different directions. As a now self-conscious, desiring being the putto becomes the figure of the libido personified and personalized in human form, the instinctive force as it realizes itself in the life of the concrete individual who now knows himself to be a concrete individual – to be an “I” in the midst of the “not-I” that is the world. His allegorical function as the individuated libido made aware of itself ultimately derives from his bodiliness, specifically, his having the form of a human infant who has not yet reached the age of reason. This signifies that the embodied libido is like a human infant in its impulsiveness and innocence of rationality. It may be the engine of self-consciousness, but the self-consciousness it gives rise to initially just takes this primitive form. The dolphin’s allegorical function derives from an analogical equation based on the proverbial quickness noted above — darting speed is to the dolphin just as lability is to the libido.
Would the owners of the original fountain statue of which my figurine is a miniature copy accept the allegorical reading I’m proposing? I believe they would. The conceptual vocabulary likely would be unfamiliar, but the underlying intuition wouldn’t. After all, it’s one they’d been able to express in the eloquent language of images.
Reference:
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit,, assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom, translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell U Press/Agora Books, 1980).