Toward an Ecological Sublime

Abstract

Toward an Ecological Sublime Christopher Hitt (bio) I In his recent essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon offers a provocative critique of the contemporary inclination to idealize wild nature, an inclination that, as he rightly notes, is largely indebted to the aesthetic of the sublime popularized by European Romanticism. 1 Calling into question the “habits of thinking that flow from this complex cultural construction called wilderness” (TW 81), Cronon suggests that in the sublime tradition nature comes to represent an enticing “flight from history”: “the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living” (TW 80). For Cronon, the fundamental problem with the concept of sublime wilderness is that it depends on and reinscribes the notion of nature’s otherness, of the separation between the human and nonhuman realms. Although Cronon supposes his environmentally-conscious readership will find his view “heretical” (TW 69), his impulse to critique the sublime is hardly new. Indeed, it has been the overwhelming tendency of literary criticism over the past few decades to evaluate the aesthetic of the sublime primarily as an expression of asymmetrical power relationships: between human and nature, self and other, reader and text, male and female, conqueror and oppressed. Thus, historically-oriented critics such as Laura Doyle and Sara Suleri have posited a relationship between the ideology of the sublime and eighteenth-century British imperialism; the Marxist Terry Eagleton has exposed the sublime as an instrument of the bourgeois subject; and feminist critics such as Patricia Yaeger, Anne Mellor, and Barbara Claire Freeman have indicted the sublime for its endorsement of masculine power. 2 Even those writing from less overtly political perspectives acknowledge that the discourse of the sublime has operated to confirm the authority and autonomy of a subject over and against a threatening other. Paul de Man, though his eventual aim is to [End Page 603] show how such descriptions are a function of their linguistic structures, notes that in Kant’s formulation of the sublime, the imagination “takes on the form of a reconquered mastery, a reconquered superiority over a nature of which the direct threat is overcome.” 3 Responding to (but also writing in the tradition of) this deconstructionist reading, Frances Ferguson makes a similar observation: “the sublime,” she declares, “establishes nature as the instrument for the production of individuality.” 4 And Neil Hertz, in an essay informed by psychoanalysis, concludes that the experience of the sublime can be seen as a “strateg[y] designed to consolidate a reassuringly operative notion of the self.” 5 This brief sampling of scholarship, while far from exhaustive, is generally representative of the tenor of recent literary criticism on the sublime. Still, as a sustained critique of sublimity from a position of environmental advocacy, Cronon’s analysis has few precedents. Perhaps the only literary critic to consider explicitly and at some length the relationship between the ideology of the sublime and our conception of the natural environment is Donald Pease, writing in the mid-1980s, before ecocriticism had begun to crystallize into a coherent field. His essay “Sublime Politics” argues in part that the sublime as it was understood in the nineteenth-century United States served to authorize a policy of environmental devastation: “Through the subtle turns of the American sublime, the liberal in taking axe and hammer to the virgin land could, with childlike innocence, proclaim that only through destruction of Nature’s bounty could he feel by doing what nature commanded as if he were truly in touch with nature’s will.” 6 If we accept Cronon’s premise that the Romantic aesthetic of the sublime continues to inform our present-day conceptions of the natural world, then critiques like Pease’s would seem all the more essential to ecocriticism, a discourse that generally professes (along with, for example, feminist and Marxist studies) a self-conscious interest in its relevance to...