ABJECTION, SUBLIMITY, AND THE QUESTION OF THE

UNPRESENTABLE IN POE, BAUDELAIRE, AND LOVECRAFT

by

Vivian Ralickas

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Vivian Ralickas, 2006

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Abjection, Sublimity, and the Question of the Unpresentable in Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft

Doctor of Philosophy, June 2006

Vivian Ralickas, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft: what do these three

authors have in common, aside from superficial similarities prevalent to the “damned artist”

type, such as a turbulent life marked by social alienation and an early death? Their respective

statuses at the margins of the literary establishment during their lifetimes and their espousals of

reactionary social and political perspectives (Poe championed slavery, Baudelaire was a

misanthrope and an anti-Semite, and Lovecraft was, during the first part of his adult life, a

proponent of Nazi eugenics) point to affinities than run deeper than merely biographical

coincidences: all three were beholden to, yet distanced themselves from, the widespread

currents of thought of their respective epochs. This tension that characterizes their worldviews

informs their art: in defying the status quo, Poe and Baudelaire were committed to uncovering

a new way of seeing that would radically change our relation to the world; Lovecraft, on the

other hand, adopted a reactionary aesthetics in an attempt to ward off the horrors of modern

life. In examining the critical and literary works of each author, this thesis argues that Poe’s,

Baudelaire’s, and Lovecraft’s common ground is aesthetic: each bases his critical theory on the

sublime and engages aspects of sublimity in his literature. However, the subjective position

conveyed in the poetry of Baudelaire and the fiction of Poe and Lovecraft is conditioned by the

abject. In other words, a tension arises between the sublime that defines their poetics and the

abjection that founds their fictional personae. Ultimately, by outlining the limits of the sublime

experience by means of the abject, their literature explores the question of the unpresentable

and enlists them as contributors to the modernist avant-garde project.

iii

Unless otherwise indicated, emphasis in citations is present in the original source. All citations

are unadulterated except for typographic symbols, which have been modified for consistency.

In parenthetical references Poe’s complete works are cited as CW; Baudelaire’s are identified

as OC. When quoting or paraphrasing critical works, parenthetical references provide the title

of the scholarly text the first time it is cited; all other entries contain only the name of the

author and the page number, except for cases in which I cite more than one work for a given

writer. In such instances, in addition to the author’s name and the page number, the abbreviated

title of the work appears in parentheses in all subsequent entries.

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................................6

THE SUBLIME: LONGINUS, BURKE, AND KANT............................................................................................6 POE, BAUDELAIRE, AND LOVECRAFT: THE ABJECT AS A COMMON GROUND..............................................9 ABJECTION AND THE SUBLIME IN POE, BAUDELAIRE, AND LOVECRAFT: THE STATE OF CRITICAL

ENQUIRY ...................................................................................................................................................11

CHAPTER 1: THE SUBLIME AND THE ABJECT....................................................................................13

TRANSCENDING RHETORIC: THE LONGINIAN SUBLIME.............................................................................13 THE BURKEAN SUBLIME: SUBLIME TERROR OR ABJECT HORROR?...........................................................20 THE KANTIAN SUBLIME: AT THE LIMITS OF THE EXPERIENCING SUBJECT................................................29 THE ABJECT ..............................................................................................................................................40

CHAPTER 2: EDGAR ALLAN POE...........................................................................................................52

PART 1 — JUSTIFYING A SUBLIME READING OF POE: THE CRITICAL CONTEXT ........................................52 PART 2 — THE ABYSS OF UNITY: THE SUBLIME AND POE’S PRAGMATIC CRITICAL THEORY ...................68

The Genealogy of the Sublime in Poe .................................................................................................70 Poe’s Pragmatic Theory of Poetry and the Sublime ............................................................................72

Unity of Effect ................................................................................................................................72 Beauty .............................................................................................................................................76 Genius .............................................................................................................................................77 Imagination and the Grotesque .......................................................................................................80

PART 3 — FIGURING THE ABYSS: AN ANALYSIS OF SELECTED SHORT STORIES .......................................84 Mesmerism and the Limits of Experience: “Mesmeric Revelation” and “The Facts in the Case of

Mr. Valdemar”.....................................................................................................................................84 “Ligeia” and “Usher”: The Horror of Abjection..................................................................................89 Sacred Art and “The Domain of Arnheim” .........................................................................................98

PART 4 — POE IN PERSPECTIVE...............................................................................................................108

CHAPTER 3: CHARLES BAUDELAIRE .................................................................................................110

PART 1 — SITUATING THE SUBLIME IN BAUDELAIRE..............................................................................110 PART 2 — THE SUBLIME AND BAUDELAIRE’S EXPRESSIVE THEORY OF CRITICISM ................................117

Modern Art ........................................................................................................................................117 Art and the Marketplace................................................................................................................117 “Romantisme”...............................................................................................................................118 Heroism and Modernity ................................................................................................................123 The Sublime and “le Malheur” of Baudelaire’s Modern Beauty ..................................................125

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The Sublime Nature within the Artist ................................................................................................129 The Imagination ............................................................................................................................132 The Poetics of the Abject: “Une Charogne” .................................................................................136

PART 3 — THE FIGURE OF THE ARTIST ...................................................................................................142 The Dandy .........................................................................................................................................145 Laughter: The Cry of the Abject........................................................................................................156 The Abject Hero ................................................................................................................................162

PART 4 —BAUDELAIRE IN PERSPECTIVE .................................................................................................168

CHAPTER 4: HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT .................................................................................171

PART 1 — LOVECRAFT AND THE QUESTION OF THE SUBLIME .................................................................171 PART 2 — ROMANTIC ART AND “COSMIC INDIFFERENTISM”: LOVECRAFT’S AESTHETICS .....................175

Situating Lovecraft: Poe and Baudelaire ...........................................................................................175 Romantic Art and the Mechanist Materialist .....................................................................................180 Mechanist Materialism and “Cosmic Indifferentism”: The Grounds of Lovecraft’s Nihilism..........184 “Authentic Art” and Lovecraft’s “Cosmic Horror” ...........................................................................190

PART 3 — THE QUESTION OF “COSMIC HORROR” AND ITS RELATION TO THE SUBLIME .........................201 A Language that Fails to Describe.....................................................................................................203 A Refutation of the Sublime ..............................................................................................................205 “Cosmic Horror” as Abjection of Self: “The Outsider”.....................................................................211 Laughter: Symptom and Displacement of Abjection.........................................................................214

PART 4 — AT THE LIMITS OF THE LOVECRAFTIAN SUBJECT ...................................................................216

CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................................................219

WORKS CITED..........................................................................................................................................225

PRIMARY SOURCES..................................................................................................................................225 SECONDARY SOURCES.............................................................................................................................226

Introduction .......................................................................................................................................226 Chapter 1............................................................................................................................................226 Chapter 2............................................................................................................................................228 Chapter 3............................................................................................................................................234 Chapter 4............................................................................................................................................237 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................................240

6

Introduction

Sublime de l’océan calme ou déchaîné, du désert qui anéantit toute idée de vie, des montagnes invincibles, du ciel étoilé au-dessus de nous… Sublime des grandes métropoles vues à distance, des rites dont la solennité remonte à la nuit des temps, d’une musique qui pénètre l’âme, de ruines insolites… Sublime des poèmes où les mots s’animent, de systèmes philosophiques qui osent penser les principes et les fins, de conceptions religieuses et morales dénuées de complaisance… Sublime d’un acte ou d’un comportement qui font croire à l’existence d’une liberté radicale qui outrepasse et subvertit la distinction commune du bien et du mal, et dont le souvenir se réveille parfois comme un défi… Baldine Saint Girons, Fiat lux: Une philosophie du sublime 10 Elevated above all other beings, he is also degraded below all; man is sublime and abject, great and wretched, strong and powerless, all in one. His consciousness always places before him a goal he can never reach, and his existence is torn between his incessant striving beyond himself and his constant relapses beneath himself. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment 143 (Explaining Pascal’s defence of religion in Pensées)

The apparent dichotomy that the sublime and the abject represent is not restricted to the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to anthropological studies, they are trans-

historical facets of the sacred;1 the duality they represent is as ancient as the human condition.

One may ask why, given the all-encompassing possibilities that a study of abjection and

sublimity offers, I have chosen to focus on literature and, in particular, on two authors of the

nineteenth century and one of the first half of the twentieth century: Edgar Allan Poe, Charles

Baudelaire, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. There are three predominant reasons for my

choice: the first concerns the sublime’s history, the second has to do with the aesthetic

orientation of the three authors in question, and the third pertains to the state of current

scholarship on these three authors’ engagement with the sublime and the abject.

The Sublime: Longinus, Burke, and Kant

Literature has been integral to any discussion of sublimity since antiquity. The sublime, most

commonly referred to in classical scholarship as the grand style in treatises of rhetoric that

primarily discuss elocution, is indebted to Longinus for its extension beyond the realm of

1 For an insightful dialogue on the sacred, see Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva’s published

correspondence in Le Féminin et le sacré, Paris: Éditions Stock, 1998.

7

rhetoric. In On Sublimity, a work that engages the notion of sublimity through a comparative

analysis of classical Greek, Roman, and Hebrew literatures, Longinus sets the groundwork for

the development of the sublime as an aesthetic category in the eighteenth century by means of

his notion of consensus, his understanding of genius (or the innate qualities a sublime writer

must possess), and the necessary relationship he establishes between the listener or reader and

the speaker or writer by means of the sublime utterance.

Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft inherit their respective understandings of the sublime

from the eighteenth century, the period when, as a result of Boileau’s translation of Longinus’

treatise, published in 1674, the concept re-emerges in intellectual thought after a long period of

relative silence. Among the eighteenth-century philosophers who engage the notion of the

sublime, Burke and Kant are the most relevant to my analysis of the authors in question,

primarily because of Burke’s influence on literature and the visual arts, and Kant’s pivotal

position in the defence of metaphysics as a philosophy of limits. In Burke’s A Philosophical

Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Kant’s Critique

of the Power of Judgment (1790), the sublime is defined as an aesthetic category opposed to

the beautiful. Their respective positions signal a significant shift in perspective from Longinus,

for whom sublimity served as a means for the audience to commune with the great mind of an

orator capable of producing sublime utterances; for Burke and Kant, the emotional experience

to which the sublime gives rise is an end in itself. Although there exists a basic similarity in

their understanding of aesthetics, that is, the feeling of pleasure or pain foregrounds

experiences of the beautiful or sublime, in Burke’s case “aesthetic” refers to the relation

between the subject’s sensations and a quality inherent in a particular object or phenomenon in

nature, whereas for Kant, it is the interplay between a priori subjective dispositions and the

self’s representation of an object that defines an aesthetic experience. (According to Kant, the

self has no unmediated access to the world through sensibility.) The perspective Burke adopts,

prevalent in the eighteenth century well before his Enquiry, is a product of empiricism’s claim

that knowledge is gained through the senses’ unmediated contact with an object. Although

Burke trivializes the beautiful as an aesthetic category by treating it as though it were equatable

with the merely pretty, from the standpoint of my analysis the most intriguing facet of his

Enquiry lies in its inadvertent conflation of the sublime and the abject, both sources of negative

pleasure he calls delight, through the primacy he attributes to unmediated sensations in his

definition of the sublime. In other words, Burke outlines the limits of the sublime by providing

categories of sensible experience that exceed its constraints; according to Jean-François

Lyotard, “the [Burkean] sublime was not a matter of elevation […] but a matter of

8

intensification” (Lyotard, The Sublime and the Avant-Garde 40). As Baldine Saint Girons

astutely remarks in her introduction to Fiat lux: une philosophie du sublime, Burke attempts a

genesis and an archaeology of the sublime that approximates psychoanalytic methods of

research (Saint Girons 33). From that perspective, Burke’s Enquiry anticipates the modern

subject, one who is conditioned by an ontological void and in whose being the sublime and the

abject have their origin.

Kant’s transcendental metaphysics, in contrast, attempts to strike a balance between

rationalist and empiricist perspectives: he grounds the subjective disposition upon a priori pure

elements of cognition; moreover, he holds that the mind possesses a certain structure that

determines the limits of what we can both know and experience. Although it may seem

contradictory, aesthetic judgments of the beautiful and the sublime are, according to Kant,

reflective, a priori, and necessarily universal. They are reflective in that they are not based

upon a quality inherent in the object but upon a subjective disposition, as mentioned above;

they are universal in that the feeling of pleasure one derives from an experience of the

beautiful, for instance, must be universally communicable to all (all people are presumably

capable of experiencing the beautiful or the sublime because, as human beings, our minds are

structured in the same manner). This postulation classifies the notion of consensus as a priori: it

cannot be demonstrated empirically, yet it is a necessary hypothesis to ensure the

communicability of the feelings inspired by specific aesthetic judgments.

It is significant, however, that in the case of both Burke’s Enquiry and Kant’s “Critique

of Aesthetic Judgment,” the articulation of the sublime as an aesthetic category allows for the

possibility for art to assume a privileged position in aesthetics, as demonstrated by the German

Romantics, who subvert nature’s pre-eminence in aesthetic judgments (a position defended by

Kant in the Third Critique) and posit art as a means to obtain access to the divine. The root of

such a trajectory is already present in the works of both Burke and Kant: Burke devotes the last

section of his Enquiry to the virtues of poetry and its capacity to inspire a sense of the sublime

as a consequence of poetic language’s opacity; Kant’s notion of genius, on the other hand,

attributes a privileged status to the avant-garde artist and his creations. A contemporary

example of the repercussions of the sublime’s designation as an aesthetic category is evident in

Lyotard’s understanding of modern art, on which I will have more to say in the conclusion of

this thesis.

9

Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft: The Abject as a Common Ground

The Oxford English Dictionary defines abjection as “the action of casting down; abasement,

humiliation, degradation”; it is derived from the past participle of the Latin verb “abicere,” “to

throw away.” In Pouvoirs de l’horreur, Julia Kristeva elaborates on the significance of the

abject to psychoanalysis by underscoring its centrality to a human being’s development and

constant negotiation of both corporeal and psychic identities. As her examples suggest,

literature, particularly that of the modernist avant-garde, occupies a privileged place in the

history of humanity’s confrontation with the abject. Avant-garde writers defy the literary and

social conventions of their epochs; their works assume new, unprecedented forms and often

delve into the dark recesses of the human psyche. This breaking of taboos, however, is not an

end in itself; while it is true that anyone can write fiction that shocks its audience by subverting

the constraints of the common taste, this does not guarantee that the book will contain any

insight into the human condition or be of any literary merit. In rejoicing in the materiality of

the sign, the avant-garde probes the most intimate depths of emotional identity—the

unrepresentable ground of subjectivity—through style. Avant-garde literature, according to

Kristeva, presents us “le point sublime où l’abject s’effondre dans l’éclatement du beau qui

nous déborde” (Kristeva, Pouvoirs 248). Her argument underscores the idea that a

confrontation with the void of their innermost selves compels the avant-garde to produce

objects of beauty—they are driven to affirm an identity through the creation of cultural

products, even if that identity is provisional and mutable. Hence, following the initial horror

abjection arouses in them, the experience calls them to action—to assert their humanity; in this

affirmation which takes place after the “abject turn,” the abject is similar to the sublime. From

the chaos of the abject new forms and an emerging consciousness are brought to light. While

the abject was not a factor in the considerations of Longinus, Burke, and Kant, nor was it a

characteristic of their contemporaries’ responses to an experience of the sublime, the proximity

of the two experiences is implicit in the parallel structure of their respective dynamics. As I

endeavour to explain in the first chapter, at one stroke an experience of the sublime, Longinian,

Burkean, or Kantian, can collapse into the abject.

In my view, no one understood the propinquity of the sublime and the abject better than

Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. All three were “rogue”

writers in their day, situated at the margins of the literary establishment. Each, moreover, was

beholden to and yet resisted the dominant aesthetic and ideological currents that shaped their

epochs. Poe was strongly influenced by German Romanticism early in his career; however,

10

over time, the nature of his indebtedness assumes a more complex character since in his fiction

and critical writings he often parodied its doctrines as well as its American and continental

adherents. Neo-Platonism and Idealism were two of the currents of thought prevalent in

Baudelaire’s cultural milieu; nevertheless, his poetics and literary practices betray his unease

and eventual dissociation from them. Lovecraft’s worldview conveys his avid engagement

with the scientific developments occurring in the early twentieth century and the strong

influence exerted on him by nineteenth-century nihilist philosophy (Nietzsche and

Schopenhauer), yet, in spite of his openness to new ideas in science and philosophy, he decried

his modernist contemporaries’ experimentation with form in the literary and plastic arts.

Their relationship to one another, moreover, constitutes an important aspect that unites

these three authors. Baudelaire and Lovecraft’s debt to Poe is no small matter, and it is from

this vantage point that any affinity between the two can be discerned: Baudelaire was so

enthralled by the few stories and poems by Poe that were accessible to him that he avidly

sought out more texts and devoted many years to translating his work (Baudelaire’s

translations were originally published over a span of nine years, from 1856 to 1865); in

addition, he identified so readily with the version of Poe he created for himself—he saw Poe as

a damned artist-genius at odds with the American culture of his day—that he adopted Poe as a

spiritual brother to whom he prayed for support. For his part, Lovecraft counted Poe among his

earliest and most eminent influences, and much of his early fiction bears the mark of his

predecessor. There exist, of course, cultural, historical, and idiosyncratic differences that

distinguish these writers, which I address in their respective chapters. However, the common

aspect all three share is primarily aesthetic: the present study contends that Poe and Baudelaire

both ground their respective poetics on the sublime, whereas Lovecraft’s notion of “cosmic

horror” implicitly denies the possibility of an experience of the sublime. Furthermore, I

elucidate how all three posit an experiencing subject who explores the limits of his culture as a

means to come to terms with his ontological status. Received ideas on morality, philosophy,

literary genres, and artistic forms are subverted in an effort to understand the crisis of modern

subjectivity: a self-reflexive, knowing subject who has no access to the origin of his self-

knowledge. Their texts disturb the relation between the self and its objects—the nature of

representation is thrown into question in their attempts to represent what cannot be presented:

the grounds of selfhood.

11

Abjection and the Sublime in Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft: The

State of Critical Enquiry

Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft engage the sublime in their poetics, yet their literary texts

subvert this aesthetic category and present readers with instances in which a body, textual or

otherwise, fails to signify. An analysis of the interrelation that exists between the abject and the

sublime in Baudelaire’s poetry, the fiction of Poe and Lovecraft, and each writer’s critical

writings is essential if we are to gain a better understanding of the paradox at the crux of their

aesthetics. A precedent exists insofar as it concerns a study of the sublime in Poe, Baudelaire,

and Lovecraft, respectively. In general, scholars have sought to trace the impact primarily of

Burkean and Kantian notions of sublimity in the works of these authors (with scant exceptions,

if Longinus is mentioned it is in passing). This type of enquiry can assume a thematic approach

that seeks to identify, on the one hand, tropes common to literary representations of the

sublime (a character’s confrontation with an object that is foreboding and not clearly

discernable, formless, or infinitely powerful) or, on the other hand, textual examples of the

artist-genius capable of creating sublime art. Readings of this kind explore the implications of

either—in the context of the author’s other texts possessing a similar aesthetic orientation; in

the entire corpus of each writer in the more ambitious studies; in the writer’s positioning vis-à-

vis his contemporaries; or in a combination of these. Another method considers the

repercussions of the sublime in Poe’s or Baudelaire’s poetics and critical writings. (I exclude

Lovecraft from this category for one reason: of the two published studies to date that deal with

the sublime in Lovecraft, both focus on his fiction.) Studies of this sort situate Baudelaire’s or

Poe’s poetics within the broader scope of the history of ideas or the intellectual currents that

held sway during the nineteenth century. Some scholars working in this vein maintain a

distinction between the beautiful and the sublime in their analyses, in spite of the conflation

that occurs between the two in the critical writings of Poe and Baudelaire. The originality of

my contribution to research on the sublime in these three authors is based on a demonstration

of the following key points: the beautiful according to Baudelaire and Poe’s supernal beauty

are predicated on the Kantian and Longinian notions of sublimity, respectively, whereas

Lovecraft’s notion of “cosmic horror” engages aspects of the Burkean and Kantian sublimes;

contrary to Poe’s and Baudelaire’s fictional characters or poetic personae, for whom an

experience of the sublime remains possible as a consequence of the type of subjectivity

concomitant with each writer’s aesthetics, Lovecraft’s fiction implicitly denies the possibility

12

of the Burkean or Kantian sublimes by negating the human-centered viewpoint requisite to an

experience of sublimity.

As a category worthy of analysis in literature, abjection has received little attention until

very recently. Nevertheless, several critical enquiries have addressed symptoms of the abject in

the literature of the three authors in question—but without reference to abjection proper—by

probing their breaches of the moral, ideological, formal, and thematic conventions that define

canonical literature. Some critics indicate the limits of the sublime experience as it is manifest

in the fiction of Poe, and their analyses constitute a starting point for my own interpretation of

his work. Critical readings that deals directly with the abject and any one of the three authors

are few in number, and, in spite of their merits, not one seeks to explicate the dynamic that

exists between the sublime and the abject in Poe, Baudelaire, or Lovecraft, respectively, much

less to provide a comparative exegesis of these three authors with respect to the irreconcilable

tension that grounds their literature and critical writings.

The present study aspires in some measure to fill this lacuna by first tracing the

genealogy of the Longinian, Burkean, and Kantian sublimes in the critical works of each author

and outlining Poe’s, Baudelaire’s, and Lovecraft’s respective poetics to pinpoint the origin of

the dialectic of the sublime and the abject. This is followed by an examination of selected

fictional or poetic texts to identify the kind of subjectivity each writer posits, and to show how

the dynamics of abjection and sublimity are manifest in their respective literary practices. A

divisive and irreconcilable tension arises between Poe’s, Lovecraft’s, and Baudelaire’s sublime

poetics and the type of subjectivity each asserts: one for which abjection constitutes the

founding experience.

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Conclusion

The sublime may well be the single artistic sensibility to characterize the Modern. Lyotard, The Sublime and the Avant-Garde 38

Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft each engage aspects of the Longinian, Burkean, and Kantian

sublimes in their works. In the case of Poe, unity of effect is the axis of his pragmatic critical

theory, a poetics in which we see the conflation of the art critic and the poet as well as the

notions of fancy, imagination, and intuition. He defines this effect, moreover, in terms of

supernal beauty, a category whose parallels with the Longinian sublime are unmistakeable: it

occasions an elevation of the soul, self-displacement, and the reader’s communion with the

author, based on an almost complete identification with his words. In contrast to Poe,

Baudelaire posits an expressive critical theory: modern art symbolically depicts the artist’s

inner self or what he calls his “tempérament.” Baudelaire’s concern is not with the minute and

accurate depiction of an object, since the representation itself is secondary to the artist’s self-

expression. His aesthetics is based primarily on the Kantian sublime since modern art

astonishes and compels the viewer’s attention in a manner similar to a spectacle in nature that

evokes a sense of the sublime in us; it can be created only by one who possesses genius, an

innate quality; and, most significant of all, in representing a scene or object, modern art offers a

negative presentation of the artist’s “tempérament” or his noumenal self. As for Lovecraft, the

notion of “cosmic horror” upon which his poetics is predicated appears to make reference to

something that combines aspects of the Burkean and Kantian sublimes: he aims to express to

the reader a sense of that fear (Burke) and awe (Kant) we feel when confronted by phenomena

beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs.

All three authors, however, underscore the limits of an experience of the sublime in their

literary works, something which is also manifest in their respective poetics. Poe’s emphasis on

the grotesque in his elucidation of the imagination as a combinant faculty attributes equal

prominence to elements that exhibit neoclassical features of beauty, such as harmony and

symmetry, and to those of a more subversive, hybrid nature. His fiction reflects the dialectical

tension that arises from such an uneasy combination: in contrast to his critical theory, wherein

the notion of effect is predicated primarily on the Longinian sublime, his tales dramatize the

horror of abjection. Poe’s stories that make implicit reference to either the Burkean or Kantian

aesthetics of the sublime subvert its dynamics by drawing the reader’s attention to a body in

220

decay: figuratively, the body of language—the signifier; literally, a putrefying corpse. In my

view, in subverting the sublime upon which his notion of effect is predicated Poe aimed to

convey a horror whose emotive structure is analogous yet antithetical to the sublime

experience.

Baudelaire’s poetry underscores the indeterminacy of the Kantian sublime by offering us

a poetic persona who confronts objects that inspire both a sense of the sublime and of the

abject, depending on his state of mind. This indeterminacy is manifest in his critical theory:

Baudelaire’s uses of sexual metaphors in describing the effects of modern art belie the sense of

control he purports to convey through descriptions of art as a machine and claims to Kantian

disinterestedness. Moreover, in direct opposition to the Dandy persona he adopts, he advocates

that the art critic must be engaged and partisan, staking all in defence of his viewpoint. As I

hope to have shown, abjection is central to the Baudelairean figure of the artist: it qualifies the

beauty particular to modern art and it is the principle governing his existence. In establishing

the boundaries and the rules that must be subverted for the artist to create, the ideal exists as a

function of the abject: the prescriptions of Catholic morality and doctrines, the Kantian

aesthetics of the sublime, and Dandyism constitute the rules the poetic persona is compelled to

transgress. His subversion of these codes, moreover, is an externalization of his inner conflict,

and the many masks he adopts act as means to displace his inner crisis: the Baudelairean poetic

persona is one who is continually faced with his own alterity.

Contrary to Poe and Baudelaire, Lovecraft’s fiction dramatizes a character’s coming to

terms with the unpresentable that implicitly denies the possibility of any form of sublime

experience. “Cosmic horror,” the all-pervasive fear he aspires to convey through the

ontological fragmentation and the collapse of signification his texts enact, is founded on the

subversion of a humanistic mode of subjectivity, dramatized through a character’s progressive

coming into knowledge of his insignificance in the universe—outside the limited scope of

human affairs. Nevertheless, Lovecraft appears to espouse a view of art that echoes Romantic

aesthetics and celebrates human achievement: what he calls “authentic art,” works that assert

his Anglo-Saxon culture and traditions, affirm the artist’s humanity and his community of like-

minded people by extending their knowledge of the world. “Authentic art” not only subscribes

in part to the Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful by giving us a sense of the furtherance of life,

it also supplants science’s epistemological function. Lovecraft’s stance, however, cannot be

perceived as anything but reactionary: in light of his position as a self-proclaimed mechanist

materialist, “authentic art” operates as a shield whose function is to deflect the horrors of

modern life. In its subversion of his category of “authentic art,” Lovecraft’s fiction

221

consequently narrates the shock produced by the collision of two antagonistic modes of

thought: the humanistic worldview embodied in his reactionary aesthetics and the nihilism of

his mechanist materialism. Put another way, his fiction dramatizes a crisis in subjectivity that

challenges the aesthetics of the Burkean and Kantian sublimes to which his fiction makes

implicit reference: the horror of abjection.

The dialectic of the sublime and the abject evident in the works of Poe, Baudelaire, and

Lovecraft underscore both the limits of the sublime experience, be it Longinian, Burkean, or

Kantian, as well as its indeterminacy. The latter is an aspect of sublimity that has been

commented upon by Jean-François Lyotard in his elaboration of the relation between the avant-

garde and the aesthetics of the Kantian sublime. In briefly outlining Lyotard’s argument, I

intend to use his observations most pertinent to my work as vehicles or spring-boards, so to

speak, to my own concluding remarks on the aesthetics of Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft

within the broader scope of modern art.

In Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime, Lyotard discusses modernist painting as a

necessary and inevitable development brought about by the technological revolution that gave

birth to photography. His point is not so much to differentiate painting from photography but to

elucidate, by means of this comparison, the dialectic at stake in avant-garde art, which forms

the basis of its distinction from “low art” or the kind that appeals to the taste of the masses.

According to Lyotard, photography displaced painting on several levels. First, the knowledge

and skill requisite to painting since the Renaissance are readily available to the masses by

means of the photographic machine: anyone can take a decent photo without knowing the

techniques of drawing, the laws of perspective or composition, colour theory, or the chemical

processes involved in mixing paints or varnishes (with digital cameras, even the darkroom

becomes obsolete). In other words, photography has contributed to the democratization of art,

and it figures as the culmination of the Renaissance’s program of political and social ordering,

wherein only privileged classes determined the politics of representation. (It is worthwhile to

note that up to this point Lyotard’s argument borrows substantially from Baudelaire’s essay

titled “Le Public moderne et la photographie” from Le Salon de 1859.)

Second, the nature of the consensus requisite to a judgment of taste undergoes a radical

change with the advent of photography. Lyotard explains that the aesthetics of beauty was

bequeathed to photography and not to modern painting, since the former calls upon a shared

standard of taste. However, the beautiful that photography makes possible is pre-determined

and regulated by capitalist industry: cameras are mass-produced, which means that in spite of

the infinite possibility of subject matter for representation, there is a uniformity to the

222

appearance of the images they generate. Photographic images have no “aura,” in Walter

Benjamin’s sense of the word; they possess no singularity and no authenticity because they can

be mass-produced (Ross, “Aura” 509). Lyotard emphasizes that photographs themselves

“immediately bear the stamp of the laws of knowledge. The indeterminate, since it does not

allow for precision, will have to be eliminated, and with it goes feeling” (Lyotard,

Unpresentable 65).

For painting to avoid being relegated to the status of the photograph’s poor cousin and

succeed as a viable medium of artistic expression, it had to become “a philosophical activity”:

“Those painters who persisted,” expounds Lyotard, “had to confront photography’s challenge,

and so they engaged in the dialectic of the avant-garde which had at stake the question ‘What is

Painting?’” (Lyotard, Unpresentable 65). All previous assumptions concerning the practice of

painting had to be re-evaluated. The medium had to be purified, so to speak. To answer such an

essential question painting and, more generally, the modern art work, “would no longer bend

itself to models, but would try to present the unpresentable” (Lyotard, The Sublime and the

Avant-Garde 41). In Lyotard’s view, modern art is bound to the aesthetics of the sublime.

What is the “unpresentable,” and how does one go about “re”-presenting it or making it

visible? The answer to the first question is Kantian Ideas of reason, “for which one cannot cite

(represent) any example, case point, or even symbol” “because to represent is to make relative,

to place in context within conditions of representation” (Lyotard, Unpresentable 68). Since we

cannot conceive of an image that adequately conveys an Idea nor can we compare it to

anything in order to see it in relative perspective, the answer to the second question is that the

unpresentable can be demonstrated only by means of what Kant termed the “abstract”: a

negative representation (Lyotard, Unpresentable 68). Contrary to the beautiful, no consensus of

taste exists to guide artists whose work is predicated on the aesthetics of the sublime; inherited

conventions—established symbols and forms—are discarded. The very question “What is

Painting?” or, more generally, “What is Art?” compels a break with tradition. Radical

experimentation is implicit in avant-garde art: “To the public its products seem ‘monstrous,’

‘formless,’ purely ‘negative’ nonentities”1 (Lyotard, Unpresentable 67). Once the shock wears

off and the public becomes accustomed to the new forms and symbols conjured up by the

avant-garde, however, the latter must strive to find new means, break other taboos, to convey a

1 Lyotard draws the reader’s attention to the fact that he employs “terms by which Kant

characterized those objects that give rise to a sense of the sublime” to describe the qualities inherent in modern art (Lyotard, Unpresentable 67).

223

sense of the unpresentable.2 Ontological indetermination characterizes modern art, and the

necessarily heuristic process of creation assumes a role more prominent than that of the art

work itself.

Although Lyotard addresses this issue only in passing since it is not central to his thesis,

we may extend his idea by stating that in transgressing the limits of what is acceptable to the

common taste modern art is often perceived as abject. The work of art presents itself as a

representation; it affirms the unpresentable by underscoring the materiality of its medium. It

disturbs our relationship with the world, each other, and ourselves by forcing us to confront a

material presence that does not signify—at least not yet. As I hope to have shown, Poe and

Baudelaire found their respective poetics on the aesthetics of the Longinian and Kantian

sublimes, respectively: both ask, in their own way, “What is Art?” Poe’s elaboration, in the

Marginalia, on his quest for new and unprecedented combinations to arrive at what he deems to

be a truly original work, and both Baudelaire’s position as a Dandy as well as his undertaking,

in Mon cœur mis à nu, to realize Poe’s dictum of originality attest to their commitment to

innovation, their artistic and intellectual pioneering spirit. In so doing, each explores the

boundaries of the genres, themes, and forms common to short fiction and poetry during their

lifetime. Lovecraft, on the other hand, asked and found an answer to the question “What is

Art?”: to a nihilist like him, for whom free will is reduced to mere chance3 in a deterministic

universe, art is a balm, a lie we use to give value to our lives and to guard against the

meaninglessness of existence.

The work of all three strives to present the unpresentable: the ontological ground of

subjectivity that makes possible a sense of the sublime or of the abject. It is of paramount

significance, however, that the subjective position held by Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft is

one in which the crisis of abjection constitutes a founding experience. In the literature of all

three any confrontation with the limits of the self, ontological or epistemological, will

inevitably throw into relief the tension between the sublime which grounds their poetics and

the abjection manifest in their art. Perhaps the capital distinction among the three can be

summed up as follows: for Baudelaire and Poe the sublime remains possible since their notions

of subjectivity are inscribed within the humanistic tradition; conversely, since Lovecraft

disavows a human-centered worldview and denies the human being any existential significance

2 See Lyotard’s The Sublime and the Avant-Garde for an analysis of modern art’s relation to

temporality. 3 Chance and determinism are two notions necessarily at odds with each other; however, according

to Lovecraft, “chance” is the name those who cannot see all ends (human beings) give to events that they did not predict or foresee.

224

in the cosmos, an experience of the sublime becomes impossible for his characters. In light of

Lyotard’s observations about modernism and the sublime, and, perhaps more significantly, the

centrality of abjection to the avant-garde project that can be gleaned from his argument, it

becomes manifest that the dialectic of the sublime and the abject common to the aesthetic

orientation of Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft is symptomatic of the rise of modernism and the

relativism concomitant with a newly-emerging modern sensibility.

225

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