Commentary: Updating the SublimeAuthor(s): David SimpsonReviewed work(s):Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 245-258Published by: Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25600650 .Accessed: 24/09/2012 06:27

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies inRomanticism.

http://www.jstor.org

DAVID SIMPSON

Commentary: Updating the

Sublime

Unlike

the proverbial poor, the sublime has not always been with

us. Indeed, its place at the forefront of critical attention marks only a few periods in literary history. Even Longinus, the founder of the discourse about the sublime, spends much of his treatise describing what it is not, and cautioning his reader about the tendency of the sublime to

collapse all too readily into its opposite. His model of the sublime is, moreover, largely a rhetorical one, concerned to specify the marks of

genius and good style, and is not much preoccupied with the psycho logical, or with the mind-nature syndrome that characterizes romantic

and post-romantic interest in the subject. Nor was it simply the undis covered nature of his treatise that determined the relative indifference to the sublime that we find before the late eighteenth century. Those

generations for whom some model of decorum was a presiding ethic tended to consign whatever seemed excessive or irregular to the realm

of the grotesque or bizarre, rather than to a positively validated sublime. For Thomas Warton, the sprawling format and catalogue of fantastic

happenings titled The Faerie Queene belonged to the Gothic rather than to the sublime, and as such was associated with at best the primitive vigor and at worst the barbarism of the northern European imagination.1

The sublime was however of great interest to the romantics. It was a

consciously addressed topic, inspiring theories and treatises; and it has

proven conceptually useful as a way of describing some of the central features of romantic writing. Its place in the modernist and post-mod ernist consciousness is also assured, though largely by metamorphosis, and that process of transformation is a common preoccupation of the

essays in this issue. Most melodramatically, critics have sought to make sense of the nuclear bomb by way of an aesthetics of the sublime;2 and

i. Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser. 2nd ed. 2 vols. (London, 1762). 2. See Diacritics (Summer 1984).

SiR, 26 (Summer 1987)

245

246 DAVID SIMPSON

the traditional signatures of excess, overdetermination, and threatened

loss of self-identity appear in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, in

post-structuralist literary criticism, and in much (though not all) twen

tieth-century social and political theory. If the term itself and its cognates have been cheapened beyond recall by the mass media, so that the achievements of outstanding athletes can be described as "awesome,"

then the concepts which "the sublime" has traditionally and loosely designated still seem to be central to our definitions of the modern

predicament. Despite the arguably dominant influence of the micro

scopic or infinitesimal in modern scientific innovations?DNA, elemen

tary particle physics, molecular biology in general?it yet remains the case that we continue to prefer to identify ourselves by imagining, facing up to, comparing ourselves to or doing battle with things bigger or more powerful than ourselves: the state, the corporation, the Soviet

Union, or "Refrigerator" Perry. We seldom consider the ant, or the

lilies of the field; our cultural psychology remains an expansive one, to the extent that scientifically dubious projects, if they are only grand enough, are often better funded than those which set out to explore the

world's smaller phenomena. And, since 1800, the objects of our sublime

imagination have changed, along with the political uses to which it is

put. The egotistical sublime remains popular, but the sublime of nature is relatively unimportant to all but the membership of the Sierra Club and other such bodies. The "international" and political sublime has become obsessive as the rhetorical marker of a geographically isolated and isolationist culture, so that the single thoughts that now fill im

mensity partake all too often of the nature of prejudice. It is important to stress that the aesthetics of the sublime has not been

and is not normative for all people in all places at all times. Why, for

example, is it rather rare in the journals of Lewis and Clark, and so

rhapsodically evident in Walt Whitman's account of his visit to the American West? The coincidence of this and other related transitions with the expansion of empire and capital might cause us to suspect that there is something ethically uncomfortable at the heart of our craving for bigness and our urge to set ourselves against enormity in a process of cognizance or conquest, whether of depth, space or territory. Ahab now roams not only the oceans, but the upper air and the vacuum

beyond. The connection between an aesthetics of infinitude and an

historical experience founded in expansion (coded positively as "prog ress") is so obvious as to seem trite, but we have hardly begun to follow

through its implications. The denigration of "fetishism" that peaked in the nineteenth century was in one of its aspects a contempt for whatever

seemed fixed or immobile, as against the romantic affirmation of things

COMMENTARY 247

dynamic and in flux. "Expect poison from the standing water."3 Turning this around, we should at least ponder the possibility that we worship restlessness and idolize skepticism, and ask whether the obligation to

"develop" and make "progress" might not impose extreme burdens on

the individual self, as it also harbors a host of unanalyzed implications for political life, both domestic and international. We badly need an

analysis of the sublime, instead of the r?gurgitation or reaffirmation of its terms that much criticism has performed. Recent work by Ronald

Paulson, Gary Shapiro, and W. J. T. Mitchell provides an important prototype for such analysis, as do the essays in this issue.4

That there is a deep ambivalence about our commitment to change and flux?the one thing that non-industrial cultures (such as the Native

American) cannot understand about the "white man"?is illustrated

(though certainly not proven) by two platitudes in the common lan

guage. On the one hand we agree that it is a good idea, when under

stress, to "get out of ourselves"; on the other hand, too much of this

obliges us to make some attempt to "get back in touch with ourselves."

Analogously, the reified personality is held up to criticism ("he's very set in his ways"), but so too is the open-minded sensorium, alive to all

things and forgetting all ("he hasn't discovered who he is"). True ro mantics in this respect, we look for something between fixity and flux as the home territory of the happy consciousness, and the paradoxical intelligence of proverbial wisdom here seems an apt expression of the

dynamic of the sublime as a movement between selfhood and selfless ness?a dynamic that Christian ethics has consistently sought to im

mobilize into stable identity, but which nonetheless remains a threat in

itself, and a prominent feature of how we feel and talk about experience. Before giving more detailed attention to the substance of the essays

here collected, I would like to lay out some of the basic vocabulary that seems to me necessary for a full discussion of the attraction-repulsion

syndrome that informs so much of our thinking about the sublime. Its structure is, in an important and I think constitutive aspect, theological. There was no sublime in Eden, at least of the geophysical sort. There was a species of philosophical sublime, whereby Adam and Eve were to think of themselves as at once the crown of creation and massively

3. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman, revised ed.

(Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982) 37.

4. Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven & London:

Yale UP, 1983) 57-110; Gary Shapiro, "From the Sublime to the Political: Some Historical

Notes," New Literary History 16 (1985-86): 213-35; W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1986) 116-49.

248 DAVID SIMPSON

inferior to God. Their failure to understand this?"for inferior who is

free?"5?brings about their fall, which of course leaves them even smaller

than they were. And it is after the fall that the other forms of the sublime

appear: the geographical, climatological, and physiological.6 Everything in Eden was in balance: eating, sex, weather, work, and the proportion of day to night. After the fall, earth's axis shifted (Paradise Lost 10: 650 ffi), so that extremes of heat and cold, light and darkness, appeared for the first time. The "obscurity" that Burke, for example, instances as a

powerful ingredient of the sublime,7 is a result of man's first and greatest sin. It is a climatological analogue of or rejection of spiritual light, and a repetition, in the minor mode, of the "utter darkness" that images the demise of the fallen angels (1: 72 ffi).

This positioning of the sublime within (Miltonic) Christian doctrine does much to make sense of the attraction-repulsion syndrome that

constitutes its psychological identity. As the moderate exercise of the sexual and culinary appetites is replaced by gluttony and rapturous erotic

indulgence (followed by profound melancholy), so peace of mind and contentment with a fixed place give way to restless ambition and to wanderlust (this last dialectic is a prominent feature of, for example, Wordsworth's discourse about himself). The aggressive interaction of the very great with the very small was not a feature of the Edenic

experience. Milton's paradise was governed by the aesthetics of the beautiful. We must understand the romantic (and subsequent) interest in the sublime as part of a dramatic and even melodramatic imaging of the self as sinful and transgressive.

There is a second consequence of the fall, in Milton's account, that is

relevant to our understanding of the appeal of the sublime: political tyranny, and the resulting inevitable cycle of rebellions and repressions, revolutions and counter-revolutions. Michael explains that since man

has allowed rebellion within himself, God brings about the external

symbolization of this sin in the forms of worldly politics, and

5. Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge (New York & London: Norton, 1975) 9: 825. 6. The classic account of the debate about the effects of the fall on landscape is Marjorie

Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959; rpt. New York: Norton, 1963) 72?112. For Milton, the mountains were

part of the original creation (7: 282 ff), while the adverse climate enhancing their sublimity is a result of the fall (9: 782 ff). Blake, conversely, has Urizen dig up (i.e., create) the

mountains after his fall (in The First Book of Urizen). 7. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 2nd ed.

(London, 1759) 99 f.

COMMENTARY 249

Subjects him from without to violent lords; Who oft as undeservedly enthrall His outward freedom: tyranny must be,

Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse.

(12: 93-96)

The political sublime is then also a result of our fall; it too is marked

by a disturbance of the harmony of the beautiful, a discordant clash of the great and the small, tyrant and slave, each recognizing itself through the other in a process that can never be marked by any Hegelian reci

procity except at the purely epistemological level. The extremes of

postlapsarian climate and geography are matched by the contentious extremes of the social order.

There is thus in Paradise Lost a clear if dispersed connection between the fall, the climate and landscape of northern Europe (for Milton the normative environment of sinful man, but not accidentally the environ

ment of the developing commodity culture), and the experience of constant political turmoil. For Milton, the terms of the ethical, political and geophysical sublime are integrated one with another. During the

eighteenth century, the connections were somewhat submerged, or per

haps repressed, but they remained recoverable and at times (as with Burke on the French Revolution) even apparent. Much recent good work has been done on the relation between aesthetics and politics in the eighteenth-century sublime. Ronald Paulson has been insisting upon and demonstrating the importance of the conjunction; Frances Ferguson, in showing how the Burkean sublime positions its subject beyond con siderations of consensus and community, has nudged us toward an

understanding that the best candidate for the role of the dispenser of the sublime is the tyrant or patriarch; and W. J. T. Mitchell has analyzed the gender codes of Burke's writing, pointing out that the sublime is

masculine (patriarchs should be sublime), beauty feminine.8 Not for

nothing does Burke play up the role of the women workers of Paris in the initiation of the Revolution, which becomes for him a terrifying case of the world turned upside down, with the resources of the sublime in the hands of women (just as in the Miltonic scene the mundane sublime

was brought about by Adam's participation in "effeminate" values). The revolutionaries themselves laid claim to the other side of this

allegorical duality: they sought to restore an Edenic order and balance, and to reinscribe the beautiful into the earthly experience. They aimed

8. Frances Ferguson, "The Sublime of Edmund Burke, or the Bathos of Experience, "

Glyph 8 (1981): 62-78; for Paulson and Mitchell, see note 4.

250 DAVID SIMPSON

at paradise while the reactionaries saw only the chaos and confusion of Milton's hell. Thus an antithetical spirit like Blake would make some

thing positive out of apparent anarchy and confusion. Plate 7 of America offers a visual image of pastoral innocence, where the wrathful voice of Albion's angel prescribes only a "Blasphemous Demon" and a "Lover of wild rebellion. "9 Blake implicitly upbraids Milton for universalizing the sublime geography as a normative environment for all mankind;

Thomas Weiskel has astutely remarked that in Blake's books "the ob scure image is terrible only to him who is conscious of guilt."10 The beautiful and the sublime were thus contested by the rival iconographers of the French Revolution, less because they had all read Burke than because the terms of his treatise were already imbued with and emanated from a political-theological paradigm already familiar.

I come, at last, to a more direct engagement with the essays in this issue. They are all in various ways concerned with the legacies of the romantic sublime, and with the forms of its updating or modernization.

Paul Fry takes on the whole question of the post-romantic career of the

sublime, and proposes romanticism as principally responsible for its

attempted domestication or repression, its refiguring as an internal or

psychological energy rather than an external principle of power (God, Satan). For Fry, "it is in the guise of human nature that superstition returns to constitute the Enlightenment from which it has been ban ished" (190); "the otherness of the demonic is repressed and fear dissolves into anxiety.

" Notwithstanding the powerful case that can and has been

made for the eighteenth-century sublime as an urbane sublime, subject to presentation by artifice and convention and disciplined by wit,11 Fry is surely right to stress the primary levels of uncertainty that lurk beneath the literary sublime, ensuring that it had an audience interested in its

polite decontamination. I shall return at the end of this essay to the terms of Fry's analysis, and try to develop them further.

The essays by Michael Hays and Raimonda Modiano both address a

specific form of the romantic legacy, the comic; and Hays and Jonathan Arac explicitly take up the relation of the sublime to the romantic and

latterday public, a body politic if not polite. One might cast the comic as the archetypal bourgeois fiction.12 It shows us a large slice of the

9. The Illuminated Blake, ed. David Erdman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974) 145. 10. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of

Transcendence (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 79. 11. See Marshall Brown, "The Urbane Sublime," ELH 45 (1978): 236-54. 12. As has Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago & London: U of

Chicago P, 1983) 66.

COMMENTARY 251

social pie, and reproduces the facsimile of an organic community in which there is a place, however humble, for us all, and wherein even the fools and the knaves may eat. There is a less ebullient comic para digm whose pathos consists in the restless subject's recognition that,

finally, he must stay where he is (the subject of such restlessness is

usually masculine); but at least there is a place to stay. Tracing the

analogy between Kant's "humanistic" sublime and the plot of comedy, Raimonda Modiano asks whether the "comic sublime" may be "the last harbor for the aesthetics of the sublime in the modern period" (243). I think that Kant's humanism is a stoical one, involving the subject's necessary predication of consensus in the face of its likely empirical absence (such is also the tone of the categorical imperative); but it remains humanistic even as it fails to produce in actual life the intersub

jective harmony that we tend to identify with the mainstream tradition of comedy. As such, it perhaps most exactly prefigures the reconciliation within the self to our mistress the world that successful psychoanalysis now performs. The world is not changed, but the self finds a way of

dealing with it and preserving its own integrity. Fry and Arac both initiate the investigation of this process, and make us wonder whether it is such a good thing after all.

But Michael Hays argues that the romantics belittled the comic at the

expense of the tragic. Some of the features of this rejection, and some

understanding of its acutal symmetry with the continuity of the comic mode as suggested by Modiano, may best be described and attempted by way of Arac's account of Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb.

For Johnson, King Lear stood as an instance of the ethical or narra

tological sublime, but one which did not permit a reconstituted selfhood.

There are too many deaths, and of the wrong people, too much cruelty, too much confusion and irresolution. The play amounts to an anti

humanistic sublime: the integrity of the beholder is not so much con firmed as overwhelmed by forces that are imperfectly specified?both within and outside the self?and uncontainable within any morally pro prietor conclusion. Shakespeare, as he often did for Johnson, speaks too honestly of what we are and not enough about what we should be.

In contrast, as Arac points out, Charles Lamb found the full horror of the play perfectly acceptable, but only as a reading experience, re moved from the public space of the theater. It is a romantic truism that no performance could hope to do justice to the complexity of Shake

speare's art, which thus had to be read to be fully appreciated; but it

might be suggested that in putting things this way the romantics were

implying that such plays had better not be put before a public that could not be trusted to restrain itself from re-enacting or reacting to the

252 DAVID SIMPSON

discordant messages that the plays project. The force of tragedy's moral incoherences can be tolerated only when tamed, when internalized by an educated, capacious mind able, if not to maintain complete critical

distance, at least to guarantee that disruptive effects are not propelled into a public space. The walls of the educated reader's mind do not come asunder, as those of the theater might all too easily come asunder.

Lamb himself is not threatened by King Lear:

while we read . . . we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles

the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his [Lear's] reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning.13

Here, he reveals himself as able to perform a transcendentalizing gesture

which successfully abstracts the essence or prototype of reason ("a

mighty irregular power") from the "aberration" of an individual, con

tingent reason. The occasion perishes, but the type survives. Lamb has

not had to play out within himself the discordant careers of the play's characters, since he has a trancendental way-out; but in this successful

application of what Fry calls "the romantic illusion of the autonomous

self" (200), we can see the shadow of a serious psychological strain and trauma for those who might not have a similar safety valve to relieve the otherwise unbearable pressures that accrue when the entire public

sphere is thus incorporated within an individual mind. Let us assume, though, that the best and the brightest, like Charles

Lamb, are not severely discomposed by this high-pressure private read

ing experience. Do we not have here the aesthetic analogue of the role

that Burke ascribes to the patrician, the disinterested overlooker able to

adjudicate social conflict in a fair and just manner because he is himself above it, beyond the sphere of special interest? Here is Burke on the ideal statesman:

We compensate, we reconcile, we balance. We are enabled to unite

in a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending prin

ciples that are found in the minds and affairs of men.14

This credo is in turn so close to Coleridge's famous account of the

activity of the imagination?"the balance or reconciliation of opposite

13- The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (New York: Modern Library, 1935)

298-99.

14. Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1976) 281.

COMMENTARY 253

or discordant qualities"15?as to seem almost causal. Charles Lamb's

private chambers and Coleridge's faculty psychology are suffused with references to the very political life that they pretend or seek to displace. Returning to W. J. T. Mitchell's observation that Burke's sublime is

properly patriarchal, we may now fit in another rung in the social ladder.

Kings and princes may (and should) project their power, but it is up to the patricians (in Coleridge's case the "clerisy") to domesticate these

energies into credible facsimiles of consensus and harmony: into comic

fictions, one might say. The aristocracies, both of wealth and of intellect, exist to mediate and obscure the power of which they are the visible beneficiaries.

Arac is then absolutely right to suggest that the sublime, internalized

by Charles Lamb and his kind, can become "an agency of consolidation"

(219), as Paul Fry is right to wonder whether the sublime might not be a "happily deluded gesture of resistance to the doom of take-over that

proclaims subjection to be autonomy" (187). The shift that Arac plots, from Johnson to Lamb, is exactly symmetrical with that from public to

private space. And it is from Michael Hays' essay that we learn some

thing about the kinds of public space that the shift was designed to

displace. His account of the rioting and mayhem of the 1809 audiences

suggests that the high romantic disdain for the comic and the popular was not a matter of mere aesthetic preference. It suggests that there was,

in the behavior of the theater-going public, something much too remi niscent of the populist decision-making that had, for concerned British

observers, accompanied the outbreak of the French Revolution. We must fill in some details here. Given the conservative outcry, in

the 1790s and early 1800s, against the "Jacobinical" innuendoes of the

plays of Kotzebue and Schiller and their kind, one might expect that the establishment press would have discovered some saving alternative in

the national poet. It would be hard to argue otherwise than that, taken

as a whole, Shakespeare's plays defend rather than discredit the roast beef of old England. But more careful readers, growing up with Samuel

Johnson in mind, might have realized that the conservatism of the

tragedies, if such it be, was all too imperfectly worked out, and was thus all too likely to be transformed into its opposite. The social conflict that King Lear images might have seemed too complete for any resolu tion short of Nahum Tate's; and only highly academic readers could be

expected to make Charles Lamb's transcendentalizing move?a move

15- Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engeil & W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Prince ton UP, 1983) 2: 16.

254 DAVID SIMPSON

similar to that transcribed by Coleridge in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," where he manages to share "with lively joy" the joys he "cannot share."16 The romantic preference for tragedy over comedy that Hays

points out may then be the aesthetic virtue made out of an arguable

necessity: the trained mind must deal with tragedy because no one else can be trusted to do so.

It would be worthwhile to expand the Arac-Hays argument into the nineteenth century and beyond. Lamb was not a university professor; but after Arnold, the process of domesticating social energies and public crises of which the literary sublime may have been the exemplary in stance passed over into the academies, from whence it has not since

emerged. There are other institutionalized forms, such as psychoanalysis (as suggested by Fry), where the same or similar things happen, so that there is a good deal of evidence available to make us wonder whether the modern sublime can only ever be an "agency of consolidation," a

sheep in wolf's clothing. As the sublime was inserted into the individual mind or the private sphere, so it was displaced from other spheres. Hayden White has made some significant remarks about its displacement from theories of human history, a shift he too associates with romanti

cism.17 He suggests that romantic historians and those who came after

them were unable to face the possibility that history might be meaning less or cataclysmic: they were unable to imagine or represent history as

sublime. Instead, they produced models of progress or evolution, lead

ing White to speculate that this "domestication of history effected by the suppression of the historical sublime may well be the sole basis for the proud claim to social responsibility in modern capitalist as well as in communist societies" (130). He suggests, that is to say, that the discourse

or mythology of benevolent evolution is so powerful as to obscure or

refigure the "facts" of social relations. Military support of right-wing r?gimes thus masquerades

as "foreign aid," and functions rhetorically as

an unarguable moral duty. This shift in the writing of history, as White describes it, is analogous

to the other changes that the authors of the essays in this issue plot or

suggest. In each case, it seems that the power of external agents is

rendered less threatening: God and the devil (for Paul Fry); the theater

going public (for Michael Hays); and the forces of external nature (of

16. Coleridge: Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London, Oxford, New York:

Oxford UP, 1974) 181. See my account of this poem in Wordsworth and the Figurings of the

Real (London: Macmillan, 1982) 1-12.

17. Hayden White, "The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Subli

mation," Critical Inquiry 9 (1982-83): 113-37.

COMMENTARY 255

which more in a moment). This movement is commensurate with a

series of familiar propositions that we associate with romanticism and

its legacy: that nature is nothing without the mind's imaginings, that

King Lear is better read (by a few) than seen (by the many); that gods and devils are figments of the human unconscious. And if we are here

dealing with an individualization of the sublime and all that it stands

for, then the crisis in subjectivity with which we are so much concerned

"today" becomes not just understandable but inevitable. Public life con tinues to generate discord and asymmetry, conflict and trauma, but we

have no publicly-oriented language to describe it as such. Instead, every thing is expressed in terms of the autonomous self. Public experience can only be formulated in the discourse of private experience, and as such is refigured in terms that are alien to its original nature: terms of

choice, freedom, character. Not surprisingly, the strain of reprocessing the exterior into the interior is considerable, and it is then not remarkable that subjectivity has for a number of years now been considered to be in a state of crisis. We have hardly begun to explore the implications of this shift, if such it be, though Richard Sennett has begun the task.18 Some of its besetting consequences are the familiar subsumption of all

curiosity about what did or did not happen to "how I feel about it," and the notion that everyone has a right to feel whatever they like. Certain trends in critical theory are merely professionalized versions of this position. The loss of interest in the nature and degrees of objectivity reappears in the form of a "philosophical" proof that there can be no such thing.

I began by saying that the sublime has not always been with us; but it has certainly been more with us, white, male, western, members of

so-called "developed" countries (the term itself affirms Hayden White's case, as it veers from the descriptive toward the evaluative). Our

mythology of individuality is, for example, quite foreign to the Native American cultures that try to survive within and between us. Kant, in

his little-known pre-critical treatise on the sublime, remarked loftily that "the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the

trifling," and thus cannot experience what we know as the sublime.19

What to Kant appeared "trifling" might well to an African have been

quite sufficient; what to Kant appeared sublime might to him have

18. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (1974; rpt. New York: Random, 1978). 19. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait

(Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 1965) no. I owe this reference to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Writing 'Race' and the Difference it Makes," Critical Inquiry 12 (1985 86): 10.

256 DAVID SIMPSON

seemed absurd or grotesque, perhaps even a terrible misunderstanding of man's place in the world. The racism of this question is further

compounded when we recall that in the Critique of Judgment Kant was to make a strong connection between our ability to experience the

sublime and our susceptibility to generate or understand moral judg ments.

I would like to make two final points. They must be made briefly, and they will therefore seem tendentious, which they are. But they are

important. First: if the sublime did indeed, as Paul Fry suggests (and I believe

him) go "underground" and within at the moment of the Enlighten ment, appearing thereafter in the form of discordant aspects of individ

uality (drives, traumas, hallucinations); and if the sublime was, as I have

suggested, critically implicated in a postlapsarian theology; then the burden and definition of sin and transgression has also been reconfirmed as a private entity, which for the Christian tradition in general it already was. The romantic shift in the idea of the sublime thus brought it into line with what was already a dominant motif in the discourse of western

culture, and in this way strengthened that culture's mythologies of self determination. Notwithstanding the popularity in some specialized ac ademic circles of various models of social determination, it yet remains the case that among the population at large such models elicit a generally skeptical response. The history of the sublime renders this unsurprising.

Second: the more the external world and its energies can only be

expressed as functions of the single self, the more immune we become

to the claims (epistemological and then ethical) of otherness: other peo ple, other cultures, other forms of life (animal and vegetable), other

places. I have remarked already that while the power of external nature was a prominent feature of the romantic sublime, it is almost absent in

these essays, and indeed in the post-romantic archive which they var

iously explore. If history has been beaten down into a rhetoric of evo

lution, then nature too has been deadened, in our consciousness, to the

point where hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes are regarded as star

tling departures from the norm, rather than part of the way of things. God no longer speaks through nature, as he did to many observers of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, and we have no other voices to take his

place. Nature has no otherness. Let me suggest, in Walt Whitman's

writings, an exemplary moment in this diminishing of the natural sub lime. In his Specimen Days (1882), Whitman records his impressions of his visit to the West. Having at first thought that a poem about these

great spaces and clear skies would be "almost an impertinence," he

moves from the plains to the mountains and finds there the "law of my

COMMENTARY 257

own poems."20 The tumultuous landscape of "primitive Nature" is at

one with Whitman's poems. The tongue is half in the cheek, as it so

often is, but there is no alternative argument to render the irony anything but dishonest. We seem here to be witnessing almost the very moment

of the loss of nature's otherness, as Whitman looks back at the Rockies and sees there "the most spiritual show of objective Nature I ever

beheld." Nature is still objective, but only just. The prairies afford him a taste of the mathematical sublime?"their simplest statistics are sub

lime"?but the attraction-repulsion dialectic that was typical of the ro

mantic sublime is being rapidly simplified into a moment of pure, joyous recognition, and recognition of self or spirit. It makes him feel good.

Significantly, his account deals hardly at all with any perception of

anyone, or any thing, that lives on the plains or in the mountains.

Whitman was, I think, poised on the edge of the disappearance of the

"classical" sublime of nature, and he helped it toward its present state

of near-extinction. To return to the terms of Modiano's argument: do

we not as a culture (in despite of prophetic individuals) tend to look at nature by way of the tropes of comedy? The idiot faith that there is no

exploitation of nature now that cannot be put right by subsequent human

ingenuity and invention makes it impossible for us to elevate such

happenings as the destruction of the rain forests or the poisoning of water supplies to the status of genuine crises. We know about these

things, but we are not pressed to act. The comic view of nature seems

to me highly unusual when one looks across the spectrum of history and at the examples of other cultures. We should therefore conclude that its effects cannot be predicted, and at least suspect that it might prove an absolute disaster.

If we do have here, and I think we do, a serious and precise indicator of where "we" are headed, then it seems more than academically im

portant (though it is certainly that too) to look back at the romantic sublime from a position of difference, for the assumption of identity flatters us beyond our deserving. The romantics' interest in the grand and threatening objects of nature went along with their general obsession with categories of otherness. Even when their poems and writings image the subsumption or displacement of this otherness, as they sometimes

do, the terms of the dialectic are at least still there to be recovered and

thought through. Wordsworth's misunderstanding someone always re

20. This and the following quotations are from The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Mark

Van Doren, revised Malcolm Cowley (1945; rpt. Harmondsworth & New York: Penguin,

1981) 563, 565, 571- 575

258 DAVID SIMPSON

minds us that there is someone there. Reading Whitman, one realizes

that much has been forgotten since Wordsworth, who tried (even when

he failed) to fear himself and love all human kind, and who tried to find in the infinitesimal, in the meanest flower, thoughts that lie too deep for tears. Whitman thought that he loved everything, and that he could do no harm. There is no more dangerous belief, and no more telling signal of the complete disappearance of the sublime from the world above us, beneath us, and around us. Why is ecosystem an awkward word, assigned to biologists and to the radical-environmentalist movement, while su

perpower is comfortable and familiar as a definition of our collective selves?

University of Colorado, Boulder