Versions of a Human Sublime

Abstract

STUDIES of the sublime, from Burke to Monk and Hipple, used to focus on the enumeration of qualities in the sublime object or, more precisely, as they are reflected in the mind of the spectator (pain, obscurity, power, privation, vastness, difficulty). In the last decade, mediated by Nietzsche and Freud, by Harold Bloom and Thomas Weiskel, the focus has shifted to the agon between subject and object. The former both/either a participant within a sublime confrontation and/or a spectator without. Burke had claimed that only the spectator has the aesthetic distance to qualify for the sublime experience; but then obscurity was Burke's chief criterion, whereas writers like those in this issue of New Literary History are more interested in pain, especially as it relates to power. (Pain, Burke wrote, is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit to pain willingly.) Two consequences of the structuralist emphasis on relationship seem to me implicit in these essays: the humanization of the sublime relationship, of the object as well as of the participant-subject, and the demystification (which takes the form of the beautification) of the sublime relationship by the spectator-subject outside the action. The first plays down Burke's belief in the need for aesthetic distance from the immediate pain; the second introduces the political dimension of censorship. Freud hovers over both, lending to the first his concept of internalization and to the second repression. By the humanization of the sublime object I mean naturalizing, or arguably travestying, the sublime encounter formulated by John Dennis between man and the most sublime of all objects, God. The supernatural force revealed (in the manner of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic tales) to be a participant in a domestic power struggle. Kant's formulation of the spectator's response as an oscillating pattern of challenge and withdrawal leads into a plot in time beginning with the confrontation of what can most generally speaking be called the incomprehensible (whether nature, God, or paternal authority) followed by accommodation or, in Freud's term, internalization. Weiskel's incisive reading of Burke's Philosophical Enquiry in his Romantic Sublime revealed traces of a father-son confrontation in the example