The Politics of Subreption: Resisting the Sublime in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”

Abstract

MATTHEW C. BORUSHKO The Politics ofSubreption: Resisting the Sublime in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” B eneath the obvious attachment to the sublime in Percy bysshe Shelley’s 1816 “Mont Blanc,” there is a profound unease with—and, in the end, a critical resistance to—the political implications of the sublime experience described in the poem. The source of this unease and resistance is the violence inherent in sublimity: violence that, in both its dynamic of power and domination and its necessary concealment of its own means, provides a model for the institutionalization of repressive political author­ ity. While “Mont Blanc” is traditionally read as engaging the alpine sublime in order to pose fundamental ontological and epistemological questions— thus construing the sublime moment as the origin of questions about “the nature of mind, the nature of knowledge, the nature of reality, and the re­ lation of the human mind to the universe”1—a closer examination of the poem’s politics, both implicit and explicit, reveals the sublime to be double-edged: creative of a precarious subjective “vacancy” that can incite philosophical and critical reflection but that can also, through its constitu­ tive violence, foreclose upon those reflective capacities. Shelley is certainly not alone in worrying the close and troubling rela­ tionship between the sublime and sociopolitical power. He would have i. I. J. Kapstein, “The Meaning of Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc,’ ” PMLA 62, no. 4 (Dec. 1947): 1046. Kapstein’s reading of “Mont Blanc” as a record of Shelley’s “ontological speculations” and the response from Charles H. Vivian are seminal; see Vivian, “The One ‘Mont Blanc,’” Keats-ShelleyJournal 4 (Winter 1955): 55-65. Earl R. Wasserman’s discussion of the poem in Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971) is perhaps the touchstone of ontological interpretations of “Mont Blanc.” More recent discus­ sions of the poem in this tradition have suggestively filtered the questions of mind and knowledge through the problematics oflanguage; see especially Frances Ferguson, “Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’: What the Mountain Said,” in Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 202—14; and Stuart Peterfreund, Shelley among Oth­ ers: The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). SiR, 52 (Summer 2013) 225 226 MATTHEW C. BORUSHKO found an exposition of the sublimity of tyrannical power in his father-inlaw William Godwin’s 1794 novel Caleb Williams, wherein Godwin dis­ cerns and dramatizes, through the relationship of Falkland and Williams, the politics ofEdmund Burke’s influential ideas on the sublime: in a word, Williams repeatedly loses self-possession when he must confront his unmis­ takably sublime master Falkland, and their relationship is a virtual set-piece, as we shall see, from Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sub­ lime and Beautiful.2 More broadly speaking, the potentially deleterious polit­ ical implications of the sublime are analyzed in the work of critics ranging from Anne K. Mellor, who critiques the “engendering of the sublime as a masculinized experience of power” and violence in Burke, Kant, Words­ worth, and Coleridge (as well as critics Samuel Holt Monk and Thomas Weiskel), to Terry Eagleton, who finds the sublime historically to be con­ servative and coercive at its core, “a suitably defused, aestheticized version of the values of the ancien regime" that “as a kind of terror, crushes us into submission.”3 Nonetheless, this sense of the sublime as, at the very least, politically problematic has yet to inform the extensive and formidable body of criticism on “Mont Blanc” in a substantive way. The following essay aims to address this gap in the criticism first by re­ turning to the place of the poem’s original publication, Percy and Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, in order to reveal, amid a searching but enthusiastic embrace of the famed alpine sublime, both Shelley’s keen sense of the violence involved in the experience as well as his inchoate concerns with the close relationship between sublimity and the imagining of authority. Next I turn to the theory of the sublime in Longinus, Burke, and Kant in order...