Reinventing the Sublime: Post-Romantic Literature and Theory - Hardcover

Steven Vine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1845191773 ISBN 13: 9781845191771

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Looks at the return of the sublime in post-modernity, and at intimations of a 'post-Romantic' sublime in Romanticism itself. The sublime is explored as a discourse of 'invention' -- taking the Latin meaning of to 'come upon', 'find', 'discover' that involves an encounter with the new, the unregulated and the surprising. Lyotard and Zizek, among others, have reconfigured the sublime for post-modernity by exceeding the subject-centred discourse of Romantic aesthetics, and promoting not a sublime of the subject, but of the unpresentable, the 'Real', the unknown, the other. 'Reinventing the Sublime' looks at 18th-century, Romantic, modernist and post-modern 'inventions' of the sublime alongside contemporary critical accounts of the relationship of sublimity to subjectivity, aesthetics, politics and history, including '9/11'. It reads Burke and Kant alongside post-modern discourses on the sublime, and Wordsworth, De Quincey and Mary Shelley in relation to temporality and materiality in Romanticism, and considers 'modernist' inflections of the sublime in T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes in relation to the themes of disjunction and excess in modernity. The author examines the postmodern revisiting of the sublime in Thomas Pynchon, D.M Thomas and Toni Morrison, and draws on Lyotard's reading of the sublime as an aesthetic of the avant-garde and as a singular and disruptive 'event', to argue that the sublime in its post-modern and contemporary forms encodes an anxious but affirmative relationship to the ironies of temporality and history. 'Reinventing the Sublime' focuses on the endurance of the sublime in contemporary thinking, and on the way that the sublime can be read as a figure of the relationship of representation to temporality itself.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Vine is Senior Lecturer in English at Swansea University, and among many articles is the author of Blake's Poetry: Spectral Visions (1993), Emily Bronte (1998) and William Blake (2007). He is the editor of the Penguin edition of D.H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod (1995), and of Literature in Psychoanalysis: a Reader (2005).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Reinventing the Sublime

Post-Romantic Literature and Theory

By Steven Vine

Sussex Academic Press

Copyright © 2014 Steven Vine
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84519-177-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Reinventing the Sublime, 
Part I Romantic Totality, 
1 William Blake's Materialities, 
2 Mary Shelley's Bodies, 
3 Thomas De Quincey's Identifications, 
Part II Modernist Alterity, 
4 T. S. Eliot's Intensities: The Waste Land, 
5 Virginia Woolf's Disjunctions: Mrs Dalloway, 
6 Djuna Barnes's Night Life: Nightwood, 
Part III Postmodern Temporality, 
7 Thomas Pynchon's Entropy: The Crying of Lot 49, 
8 D. M. Thomas's Anamnesis: The White Hotel, 
9 Toni Morrison's Belatedness: Beloved, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

William Blake's Materialities

In an essay of 1833 entitled the 'Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art,' Charles Lamb lambasts what he calls the 'material sublime' of John Martin's paintings. In an argument privileging spirituality over materiality and imagination over visual presentation, Lamb criticizes Martin's panoramic canvas 'Belshazzar's Feast' (1820) for being too material. Though Lamb considers the 'towered structures' of Martin's art as belonging to the 'highest order' of the material sublime, the term itself – invented it seems by Coleridge – is not an honorific. In Table Talk (1835), Coleridge uses the term to describe the furious images of Schiller's dramas, the sensual tumult of Schillerian theatricality: its excess of material effect over spiritual meaning. 'Schiller has the material sublime,' he remarks; 'to produce an effect, he sets a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames ... Shakspear drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow.' For Coleridge the sublime of Schiller's drama is mired in materiality and sensation, but Shakespeare's rises into the region of mind. For Lamb, too, the 'material' sublime designates a privative attachment to materiality, a fixation on sense that in Martin's case discloses a 'defect of [the] imaginative faculty.' Wedded to matter over mind, material sublimity seeks to present in pictorial, corporeal form ideas that should, according to Lamb, have a 'poetic' or imaginative denotation. In the case of 'Belshazzar's Feast,' the fearful judgement of God upon the self-regarding King Belshazzar at his table is too 'material' because Martin presents the written judgement of God in a dazzle of light on the palace wall: a blaze seen both by the crowds at the feast and by the spectators of the canvas. But Lamb insists that this divine writing is seen only by the King in the Biblical account, not the spectators. For this reason the sublimity of the scene resides in the immateriality of the King's terrified, phantasmal reception of God's sentence, not the gaudy materiality of light blazing on an architecturally immense structure.

In the way Lamb sets it up, Martin's painting sustains a perilous hold on the sublime. This kind of art, he says, is the product of a '[d]eeply corporealized' mind, 'enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality.' Against this, the sublime for Lamb belongs to the 'intellectual' not the material eye. The material sublime is, in this sense, on the way to being engulfed in debased spectacle: crude theatricality and sensationalism. Effecting an erasure of mind and the imaginative faculty, material sublimity is a vitiating and privative simulacrum of the sublime. Lamb's formulation of the sublime belongs to that shift in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture that displaced sublimity away from the materiality of the external object, and relocated it in the self-conscious interiority of the subject. If the eighteenth-century sublime staged a crisis in the self's relation to an overwhelming externality – whether nature or God – the Romantic sublime installed that sublime in and as an agon of the subject's faculties. The empirical, physiological emphases of Burke's sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) were themselves part of this resiting of the sublime in the passions of the subject rather than the qualities of the object: part of what Thomas Weiskel calls the eighteenth century's 'nascent psychological aesthetics.' This shift was, in its turn, a refinement or extension of the eighteenth-century's reformulation of the classical or Longinian sublime, a recasting that shifted the sublime away from being a question of style to one of affect, away from rhetoric to psychology, away from the discourse of poetics to that of aesthetics.

It was Kant who described Burke's sublime in the Enquiry as a 'merely empirical exposition' of the affective states of the subject, a 'physiological' and 'psychological' discourse standing in contrast to his own 'transcendental' deduction of the formal conditions of aesthetic judgement. For Kant, Burke's account of the sublime and beautiful remains too entangled in the sensuous, the bodily, the corporeal, and fails to explain the formal ideality of the subject's faculties in a discipline of transcendental critique. Insisting that 'the sublime is ... not to be sought in the things of nature but only in our own ideas,' Kant discovered the sublime in what Gilles Deleuze calls the 'fundamental discord' of the subject's faculties: the discord between what Kant dubbed the 'faculty of presentation' and the 'faculty of concepts,' or to use his favoured terms, between 'imagination' and 'reason.' In Kant, when the imagination (always, for him, a sensuously synthesizing faculty) is unable to 'present' to the mind an image of something that exceeds its synthetic grasp – say, a mountain, a sea, a desert, the heavens – the faculty of 'reason' takes over in a thinking of the totality or infinity that the imagination fails to grasp empirically. A bifurcation opens up in the faculties of the subject between the sensuous and the rational, the imagination and reason, in an irreducibly equivocal experience of pain for the imagination and pleasure for the faculty of thought. The 'sublime' is a rational exceeding of the project of sensuous presentation in the subject's experience of simultaneous rational elevation and sensuous deprivation.

William Blake echoes on one level Kant's valorization of the mental over the material sublime. According to Vincent de Luca (the most attentive commentator on the Blakean sublime), Blake's and Kant's sublimes have an 'identical structure' because, even though the terms 'imagination' and 'reason' are valued antithetically between the two writers, Kant's reason corresponds to what Blake calls the 'Intellectual powers,' while the Kantian imagination is equivalent to Blake's concept of the 'Corporeal Understanding.' Thus in a letter to Thomas Butts of 1803 Blake offers his definition of the 'Most Sublime Poetry' as 'Sublime Allegory,' that is, 'Allegory addressd to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding.' Here, as de Luca notes, a superior faculty of the mind – the 'Intellectual powers' – is roused to act via the agency of a sublime poetry that causes the mind to eclipse the miseries of the 'Corporeal Understanding' in the transcendences of spirit. As in Kant, the sensuous or corporeal – materiality itself – is reduced in the name of the supersensuous.

For de Luca, the Blakean sublime is roundly Kantian in its elevation of mental over material determination, intellectual power over corporeal understanding. Yet, at the same time, the Blakean sublime does not involve for de Luca any Romantic-ideological celebration of the sublimity of artistic creation, but instead is a 'textual sublime' that occurs in the act of reading itself. According to de Luca, Blake's sublime is a readerly sublime in which the interpreter – encountering the massed materiality of the Blakean illuminated text, especially in the late epics – meets a 'barrier' or 'wall of words' that, equivocally, both arrests the reader's understanding and spurs him or her on in an agonistic effort of reading. Consequently, says de Luca, 'The crucial sublime event takes place in the actual difficulties of the reading experience.' The thick corporeality of the Blakean text – its hectic 'crowding of characters and of reference,' its material density – produces the 'tension necessary for the sublime experience' by both impeding and enabling the play of the intellectual powers.

While acknowledging the persuasiveness of de Luca's reading of Blake in terms of the textual sublime, Tilottama Rajan argues that de Luca's Kantian emphases tend to 'absorb' Blake's texts into a 'hermeneutics of the sublime as opposed to a deconstruction of sublimation'; that is, Blakean textuality is construed as promoting an idealizing sublime that instates the priority of 'mental "realities"' over material signification. Signifying matter is lifted – 'sublimated' – in a hermeneutic of mental transcendence, and the material 'barrier' or 'wall of words' is overcome as the reading subject 'grasps the transcendental.' This idealizing structure is consonant with de Luca's insistence that there is in Blake a 'habitual association of the sublime with a manifestation of intellect and a flight from the corporeal.' However, Rajan argues that there is also in Blake a 'specifically romantic genre [that is] defined by Friedrich Schlegel when he speaks of a metawork that contains not only the text but also the story of its genesis and a self-commentary,' a 'reflexive' and self-reflexive genre that seems to 'verge on postmodernism' but actually has 'more to do with a hermeneutics of becoming.' According to this Romantic idiom, the text does not so much instate an achieved transcendence as project the perilous possibility of one: a possibility that, however, is deferred to the reader, the future and the historical process, to what Rajan calls the 'supplement' of reading.

On this model, the Romantic text is articulated in a poetics of incompletion and non-realization – an 'ongoing process' that asks to be 'continued in the reader.' In this way, the reader of the 'sublime' text grasps the transcendental only in its deferral, in a process of hermeneutic construction and deconstruction whose idiom is more historical than transcendental. The Romantic text's 'imperfection and involution' means that mental sublimation is restlessly submitted to material and temporal deconstruction. Rajan's view that Romantic reflexiveness 'verge[s] on postmodernism' is instructive because, defined as Schlegelian 'becoming' rather than being, the Romantic text inaugurates a sublime that, intimating the postmodern, is temporal rather than transcendental. As Karl Kroeber argues, the 'main thrust of Romantic historicism is not toward apocalypse nor transcendence but ... is, by definition, transitional' – belonging to an 'aesthetics of ... sublimity, [but] the sublimity not of space but of time.' Thus the temporalization of the sublime in Romanticism anticipates Jean-François Lyotard's 'postmodern' revisiting of Kant in order to rethink the Kantian sublime as a temporal rather than metaphysical structure, as the question of an event rather than a transcendent meaning. It is in this sense that I want to develop a notion of Blake's 'material sublime.' For Blake's sublime, though tied anxiously to a threatening corporeality, resides in the determinate form of its material inscription, in its status as a material or textual event. The sublimity of the Blakean text, as Blake himself protested, founds itself on 'Minute Discrimination' rather than 'General Form,' on the play of particularity not the law of generality. For Blake, the sublime inheres in the particular, the material, the singular, the minute, rather than the transcendent mysteries of what Jerusalem calls 'Abstraction.' Inscribing the mind in matter, Blake's material sublime also – as we will see – installs itself in history.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Blake describes his own practice of relief etching and illuminated printing as a process of material transformation – the materialization, we might say, of the sublimities of 'soul.' He writes:

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

Instead of infinity transcending materiality – with the 'soul' in sublime exaltation over the body – the infinite is disclosed in the body of the material. The sublime is 'sensual' or material. If the infinite becomes a property of materiality, it does so not in any final revelation – in an apocalyptic revelation or 'display' of truth – but a process of revelation, a revealing. Blake's use of the present continuous form – 'printing,' 'melting,' 'displaying' – insists on the revelation of infinitude as an activity rather than an end. The infinite is never finally revealed, but always being revealed. The infinite is in the process of revelation, for Blake's corrosives designate a process rather than a product, a 'displaying' rather than a display. The infinite resides in the corrosion and 'melting away' of the material, but that process is internal to materiality itself. The material is not sublimated, but the sublime installed in the material.

Yet Blake's fulminations against materiality or the 'Corporeal' – particularly from the mid 1790s onwards – are well-known. '[A] Fig for all Corporeal,' he spits in a letter of 1801, and ends A Vision of the Last Judgement (1810) in full Neoplatonic flight:

Mental Things are alone Real what is Calld Corporeal Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place ... Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought ... I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action it is as the Dirt upon my feet No part of Me ... I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.

Looking 'thro' not 'with' the material eye, Blakean vision grounds itself, à la Kant, in an overcoming of empirical sense, a surpassing of the material in the name of the 'Mental.' Existence is constituted on the basis of 'Mind or Thought,' while the corporeal is abjected from the identity of the imagining self.

But if the material is abjected here, Blake seeks the formalization of materiality rather than its negation. As de Luca says of the imprint of Burke's sublime on Blake, 'There is ... no more of a body-mind split in Burke's theory than there is in Blake's work. If, for Burke, all is body, then Blake seeks less to reverse this position than to infuse it with an idealist basis. He seeks an image of intellect embodied, and this he finds in the sensory surface offered by the text.' Examples of Blake's sublime of the 'sensory surface' are, of course, the corroded and infinitized surfaces of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - where, as we saw, materiality tropes infinity – as well as the obdurate materiality of the Blakean illuminated book itself, where 'Mental Things' are restlessly corporealized. In this way the Blakean sublime is found in the material as well as the mental.

Cataloguing his picture 'The Ancient Britons' in A Descriptive Catalogue (1809), Blake describes the 'Beauty proper for sublime art' as being 'lineaments, or forms and features that are capable of being the receptacles of intellect,' adding that 'every thing tending toward what is truly Ugly [is] the incapability of intellect.' As 'receptacles' of intellect, lineament, form and feature become the vehicles for Blakean spirit, the incarnations of a sublime of mind. Lineament, form and feature are the foundations of sublime art because they embody intellect; in them, the material is grasped by the mental. Lineament, form and feature lift or 'sublime' corporeality into mind, and introduce linear and intellectual form into massy material chaos. As Blake insists in A Descriptive Catalogue:

The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling ... The want of this determinate and bounding form evidences the want of idea in the artist's mind ... Leave out this l[i]ne and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1845191773
• ISBN 13: 9781845191771
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272