PRELUDE TO THE GREAT SUBLIMITY SHIFT

“We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life.”

― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble 

I'll be writing more about the impending "shift" in some of my literary categories in the next post. This post provides a history of the concept of "the sublime," supplementing much of what I've already written here about the concept's appearance in the works of such 18th-century critics as Burke and Kant.

I confess that, though I've read more about the sublime than many people, for overall history I'm as dependent on online sources as anyone. But as a first-time experiment, I decided to consult not just the dominant source Wikipedia, but also Grokipedia, Elon Musk's AI-generated competition for the allegedly over-liberal online encyclopedia. What I found has nothing to do with the political sympathies of either encyclopedia's compilers, whether direct (Wikipedia) or indirect (the programmers behind the Grokipedia AI). The Grokipedia entry is much stronger than the competing entry on the elaboration of the sublimity concept, and cognate concepts, in ancient Greece. But it then cites, as did other sources I relied upon in past, Edmund Burke's 1757 writings as the first important post-Renaissance meditations on the sublimity concept. The Wikipedia entry says little about the Classic Greek developments but includes more data about the 17th and 18th centuries. Since I'm more interested in the post-Renaissance developments, from now on I'll build on Wiki's historical observations, like this one.

In Britain, the development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and John Dennis. These authors expressed an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.^[3]

I find it fascinating that the three authors cited in the passage cited the Longinian idea of "the sublime" in relation to their sightseeing tours of the Alps. The article discusses, as I will not, some of the differences in their interpretations of their separate experiences, and I will take Wiki at its word since I've read nothing of Addison, Dennis, or Ashley-Cooper (the last of whom-- fun fact-- got a shout-out in the teleseries LOST). I suspect that all three invoked the sublime in reaction to some anterior observation about the concept, possibly from one of those persons who translated Longinus into English in either the late 17th or early 18th century. Is it possible that all three authors journeyed to the Alps with the advance suspicion that the Alpine sights would give them the elevated experience Longinus wrote about? Impossible to know, but it has been said (by sources I forget) that pre-Renaissance Europeans of sufficient means simply did not mess about in the mountains for any such gratifications.

So Longinus was one of many Classical authors, including Aristotle, whose original works became available to Europeans, for the first time in centuries, during the Renaissance. The first distinct era of the post-Renaissance is usually dubbed "The Age of Enlightenment," and I observed here that it was particularly marked by an embrace of heavily rationalized philosophy and literature.

Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, particularly by embracing the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.  

In an essay I've not placed on The Archive, I similarly observed that critics of the period began using Aristotle's term "mimesis" (imitation) to connote the reproduction of observed reality with absolute fidelity-- though that was not the way Aristotle had used the term. 

So the Age of Enlightenment began, at least in part, by an act of rejecting fantasy. But since human beings as a whole are as much attracted to the limitless as to the limited, fantasy literature came back in a relatively short time. The 1600s concluded with the rise of the literary fairy tale, closely followed by the recording of popular oral folktales. The first European translation of the ARABIAN NIGHTS appeared in 1704, and despite the concurrent rise of naturalistic literature, European literature began a perhaps illicit love affair with genies and elephant-stealing birds. The late 1700s birthed both the first Gothic novel (1765) and the first important magical-era fantasy novel (1785's VATHEK) of the post-Renaissance period. For good measure, the year 1785 also hosts the last pure manifestation of the pre-Renaissance genre of "the fantastic travelers' tales," embodied by Raspe's BARON MUNCHAUSEN. These works and others laid the groundwork for the various works in the Gothic and Romantic movements throughout the 19th century, not least Walter Scott's sadly neglected LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, the first important post-Renaissance fantasy in the combative mode. I am not saying that any contemporary readers of any of these works necessarily called them "sublime." But I am saying that even as various European countries got themselves engaged to the rational, they kept getting drawn back to the charms of the non-rational, which some called "the sublime" while others would come to call it "the sense of wonder." In this essay I endorsed an equivalence of the two affective terms, summed up adeptly by this passage.

The affinities of science fiction and Gothic literature also reveal a common quest for those varieties of pleasing terror induced by awe-inspiring events or settings that Edmund Burke and other eighteenth-century critics call the sublime. A looming problem for writers in the nineteenth century was how to achieve sublimity without recourse to the supernatural. ... The supernatural marvels that had been a staple of epic and lesser forms from Homeric times would no longer do as the best sources of sublimity. ... writers sought new forms that could better accommodate the impact of science.-- Paul K. Alkon, SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE 1900.

                          

NEAR-MYTHS: THE TOWER OF BABEL:THE DELUXE EDITION (2021)

This is not my standard review of a "near myth" work, since I'm not going to dissect in detail the stories collected here, which appeared in a couple of JUSTICE LEAGUE titles in or around the period when Grant Morrison transformed the title. Most stories in the collection were written by Mark Waid, who in my view has always been a sort of dull version of whoever he chose to emulate, be it Kurt Busiek with KINGDOM COME or Morrison with his follow-up JLA stories. Thus Waid is significant only as a negative reflection of Morrison, and, for that matter, the JLA writer whom Morrison most challenged during his run: original Silver Age scribe Gardner Fox.

In this mythcomics post I recapitulated the history of the dominant writing-strategies of Silver Age DC Comics vs. Silver Age Marvel Comics thusly:

The JUSTICE LEAGUE comics title of the 1960s has never received a lot of respect even among Silver Age comics-fandom, and one reason may be that the early comic, for several years written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Mike Sekowsky, is perceived as being too "old school." Most team-features in both the Golden and the Silver Ages followed what I'll call a "plot-based model," in which "character moments" are kept to a minimum, as the author concentrates on the events of the plot, usually showing how the members of the team work to overcome some common enemy. The plot-model seems like an easy row to hoe, as indicated by countless spoofs of the model, but DC Comics pursued it almost exclusively, even when Marvel Comics in the 1960s advanced a "character-based model" that over time become the dominant paradigm.

Calling those strategies "the plot-based model" and "the character-based model" was a bit of an oversimplification, though many fans over the years have used similar terminology. Certainly the raconteurs who wrote superhero comics in the early Silver Age did not intend to follow such rigorous models; they were in large part "riffing," trying to find profitable ways to re-invent superheroes for a post-Comics Code readership. DC Comics started its efforts with re-imagined revivals of its most successful costumed characters from the 1940s. But Marvel, the rebranded version of the entity variously called "Timely" and "Atlas," had fewer such major successes, so that the key Marvel creative personnel had to create more original characters. DC initiated the Silver Age with single-character features like The Flash, Green Lantern, and (arguably) the Martian Manhunter, and then launched a team of said heroes in the Justice League. Marvel's superhero line was not initiated until roughly five years after DC's example, and it began with a quasi-emulation of JUSTICE LEAGUE, a team book made up of all-original characters, and only within the next year did the company launch such single-character superhero features as Hulk, Ant-Man and Thor. 

While no reader's experience of the elusive "sense of wonder" in SF/fantasy is paradigmatic, team-books arguably oblige the creators to increase the quantity of SF/fantasy concepts in order to provide multiple threats for multiple protagonists. Thus it's my experience that the first Silver Age team-books, the JUSTICE LEAGUE of Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky and the FANTASTIC FOUR of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, offered the greatest opportunities for stimulating the readers' sense of wonder. Lee and Kirby certainly did not neglect the "plot-based model" of superhero scripting in conceiving of their menaces, whether they were strong concepts like Galactus or weak ones like the Enfant Terrible. Fox, for his part, concentrated on plot more when he conceived of foes for the Justice League, but there are interesting if minor character-moments even in the earliest JLA stories.                                 

I've sometimes expressed to other fans that in terms of raw creativity I deemed Fox's JUSTICE LEAGUE the equal of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, and the reaction I got was usually a negative one. What I believe those fans were favoring in the Marvel team-title was the fact that Stan Lee perfected a strategy of building on his concepts so that they began to seem like part of a larger tapestry of interconnected wonders. Most of Fox's concepts were confined to whatever story they first appeared in, and so they had less cumulative effect than, say, the recurring concepts appearing in DC's single-character features (Green Lantern's "Guardians of the Universe," for example).

Raw creativity, of course, is just one element in communicating the sense of wonder from author to reader; an element that gives the reader the impression of "richness and profusion of images," as referenced in this essay. Based on my formulations there, said profusion provides the potential for the development of fantastic content into the even richer forms of myth, but the actuality of mythicity stems from articulating the raw material into organized patterns of conceptual thought. 

As noted above, Lee and Kirby had their share of so-so concepts, but FANTASTIC FOUR became a testing-ground for all of their best"sense of wonder" ideas. In contrast, what keeps Fox's JLA concepts from attaining their greatest possible development is the fact that each of them was largely isolated from all the others.

Grant Morrison's JUSTICE LEAGUE is a vision of what the Fox-cosmos might have looked like if many of the one-off concepts had been given the same inter-referentiality seen in the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR comics. In contrast, Mark Waid's JLA feels like a regression to Fox's least inspired concepts. Waid trundles out abstruse concepts with potential, all right. In the titular story of the collection TOWER OF BABEL, the Leaguers are put through a series of transformations just as weird as any Fox ever devised. Said transformations are brought about when Batman's enemy Ra's Al Ghul implements strategies Batman himself devised to nullify the abilities of his fellow heroes in case any of them were suborned by evildoers. But even though Waid devotes considerable space to the character-conflicts that evolve as a result of this predicament, he doesn't really invest the proceedings with an independent "sense of wonder," as Morrison did with comparable concepts. In many ways Waid resembles Fox at his least inspired, when he simply churned out this or that concept to meet a deadline, and so failed to make those particular concepts emotionally resonant. Thus "Tower of Babel" is not much better, in terms of evoking the sense of wonder, than an inferior Fox-tale like the 1966 weird transformation tale "The Plague That Struck the Justice League."

Ironically, even though in his JUSTICE LEAGUE stories Morrison eschewed the soap opera dramatics that one often associated with the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, he came closer to the emotional resonance Gardner Fox successfully executed in stories like "The Justice league's Impossible Adventure." Thus Waid fails both the tests of good drama and sense-of-wonder in his lack of inspired work.

THE BEAUTY OF GRAVITY

In the last two sections of FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS, I found myself questioning the conclusions I'd made in the 2012 essay-series GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW. In Part 1, I wrote:

I've noted before that of all the major philosophers to write about sublimity in connection with literature, Edmund Burke is one of the most profligate in providing examples.  However, I note that most of his examples fall into one of two mythoi: the "drama" (PARADISE LOST, HENRY IV) or the "adventure" (THE FAERIE QUEENE).  Schopenhauer, for his part, recognizes only "tragedy" (which I regard as identical with the category "drama") as sublime.
Moving to those readerships concerned with "the sense of wonder," it's my informal impression that when fans of fantasy and SF wax enthusiastic about those works with that quality, they rarely if ever center upon works of the other two mythoi, "comedy" and "irony."  In the domain of prose, works like Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END or Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS are celebrated for their ability to elicit wonder.  But though one can find science-fictional marvels and magical mysteries in such works as Fredric Brown's WHAT MAD UNIVERSE or the deCamp-Pratt COMPLEAT ENCHANTER, I would say such works-- both of which are comedies-- are never celebrated for the "sense of wonder."  Ironic science fiction is often celebrated for its intellectual rigor-- indeed, if one reads Kingsley Amis' NEW MAPS FROM HELL, one gets the impression that no one ever wrote good SF but Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth-- but Amis praises them for satirical visions, not for the "sense of wonder."
So, are comedy and irony in some way inimical to the sense of wonder? 

I then explored Schopenhauer's remarks on how the "serious" forms of literature encouraged emotional investment while the "ludicrous" forms did not, and, glossing this statement by categorizing the forms along Fryean lines, I attempted to show reasons why comedies and ironies did not manifest subimity in the form of "the sense of wonder."

Now, at the time I wrote the CROSSBOW series, my definition of sublimity was still fuzzy, as were some of the philosophical definitions available to me. A year later, I wrote the series TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I, in which I distinguished two forms of sublimity, "the dynamic-sublime," more or less identical with Kant's formulation in CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, and "the combinatory-sublime," which I considered more applicable to literature than Kant's second form, "the mathematical-sublime." Thus, early in the same month that I wrote the CROSSBOW series, I cited (in the essay SUBLIMELY SUPER) this example of the literary sublime:

This example suggests to me is that at the time I was groping toward a vision of the combinatory-sublime, which in the aforesaid essay I defined as sublime because of its appeal to "unboundedness."

So this was the kind of sublimity I found lacking in various works of SF/fantasy, among them being the above examples of works by Frederic Brown and Pohl-and-Kornbluth.

Now, my current system does not claim that comedies or ironies are unable to conjure with either "the dynamic-sublime" or "the combinatory-sublime." In 2012 I had not aligned my concept of "mythicity" with that of the combinatory mode, and so, in the mythcomics essays I began in 2011, I had no problem in finding examples of high mythicity for both comedies (the URUSEI YATSURA story "A Good Catch") and ironies (the "Ed the Happy Clown" continuity from YUMMY FUR).

However, I do think Schopenhauer's distinction does apply to one SUBCATEGORY of the combinatory-sublime. I think it's more difficult for "ludicrous narratives" to bring forth the specific "sense of wonder" theme of "unbounded beauty," the sort of thing one can also get from the great "mind-meld" in CHILDHOOD'S END or Tolkien's vision of elvish elegance in LORD OF THE RINGS. Beauty is harder to get across in works of the ludicrous, no matter the intensity of the "tonal levity" involved. In comedies the reader learns to expect to see another joke or slapstick pratfall just around the corner, while in ironies the reader certainly doesn't expect to see any form of beauty, unbounded or otherwise, to stand against the relentless ennui of entropy.

And thus what I wrote regarding the nature of "conviction" in the CROSSBOW series similarly applies not to the combinatory-sublime in general, but specifically to the subcategory of unbounded beauty.

Because even the unbounded type of beauty needs some degree of gravity, if only for contrast.

COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PT. 2

At the end of Part 1 I said:

In Part 2, I'll deal in more depth as to why such an image should be viewed as "positive compensation," as well as relating this theme further to my formulation of the two sublimities.

To do this, I must first reiterate my conviction that a basic identity exists between two familiar terms. I have argued that the term "sublimity," used with somewhat varying but not conflicting definitions by writers ranging from Longinus to Burke to Kant, is in essence identical to the affect that some fan of science fiction termed "the sense of wonder." According to this Wikipedia entry, I am not the first to make this equivalence, though I don't believe that prior to my first suggestions of this equivalence that I had encountered the writings of any of the authors cited in the entry:

The affinities of science fiction and Gothic literature also reveal a common quest for those varieties of pleasing terror induced by awe-inspiring events or settings that Edmund Burke and other eighteenth-century critics call the sublime. A looming problem for writers in the nineteenth century was how to achieve sublimity without recourse to the supernatural. ... The supernatural marvels that had been a staple of epic and lesser forms from Homeric times would no longer do as the best sources of sublimity. ... writers sought new forms that could better accommodate the impact of science.-- Paul K. Alkon, SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE 1900.

I would affirm that in the circles of science-fiction readers "sense of wonder" probably did connote something apart from other forms of the metaphenomenal, whether in Homeric epic, supernatural ghost stories or the "uncanny" forms of "Gothic literature." However, I don't affirm that this was a legitimate distinction. Those writers who have claimed that "the sense of wonder" must be rooted in a sense of partial scientific believability have simply failed to realize that this "causal coherence," as I now term it, is equally present in both stories which involve real ghosts and stories about Evil Uncle Cadbury dressing up like a spook.

As detailed here, my earliest uses of the term "sublimity" on this blog suffered from my preoccupation with Kant's arguments regarding the "dynamically sublime:"

...since I was primarily influenced by Kant's writings on the "dynamically sublime," at times I attempted to subsume all aspects of "infinitude" under the rubric of "might..."

At the same time, I was aware that it was possible to experience affects of sublimity in isophenomenal works.  An emphasis on "might," though, did not serve me for the example mentioned in the above essay-- "Superman's Return to Krypton"-- than it did in the essay ODDLY OR STRANGELY SUBLIME, where I tried to analyze this Conrad passage in terms of its sublimity-effects:

A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the assurance of everlasting security. The young moon recurved, and shining low in the west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold, and the Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice, extended its perfect level to the perfect circle of a dark horizon. The propeller turned without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme of a safe universe; and on each side of the Patna two deep folds of water, permanent and sombre on the unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within their straight and diverging ridges a few white swirls of foam bursting in a low hiss, a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that, left behind, agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the passage of the ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last into the circular stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the moving hull remaining everlastingly in its centre.

The most I could do at that point was to compare this state of mind with one that Rudolf Otto called "the mysterium fascinans:"

This focus upon hostility, like Lewis' focus upon similar antagonistic states of mind, makes no allowance for the more "fascinated" state of sublimity

The "hostility" I referenced had to do with a specific comment by the philosopher Schopenhauer. However, my statement might just as easily have applied to the element of opposed energies found in Kant's "dynamic-sublime." That said, in an essay written the following year, I stated that I did not mean to suggest an equivalence between Rudolph Otto's two "mysteriums" and the nature of the energy, be it active or passive, in a given scene:

I'm not saying that scenes of "energy at rest" inevitably correlate with the affect of the *mysterium fascinans,* or that scenes of "violent energy" inevitably correlate with the affect of the *mysterium tremendum.*  On the contrary, it's possible to conceive of being "attracted to a fascinating mystery" that happens to be sublimely violent; the Conrad storm-scene simply is not one such because the audience is likely to feel fear on behalf of the storm's victims.  Similarly, the "marvelous stillness" from the LORD JIM passage could just as easily inspire "fear and trembling" if he were describing the stillness of a desert where a human victim could not perservere.  

Again, the above passage, written on 4-1-13, shows the influence of Kant's argument re: "might." But during the month of April, I finally managed to devote time to a prolonged reading of Otto, which I posted under the series-title HOLY NUMINOSITY. By the end of that month, I had decided that although Otto's dichotomy was useful for talking about sympathetic and antipathetic affects, since he was dealing with affects himself, that dichotomy wasn't so applicable to describing the psychological apparatus that nurtured the affects. Thus in the first of the TWO SUBLIMITIES essays, I went back to reread my previous observations regarding the sublime, and observed that I had been trying to "conflate two distinct aspects of the sublime."

So now I would not invoke Otto's "fascinans" as any sort of explanation for a "sense of wonder" in the Conrad scene above: rather, I would say that any wonder/sublimity in it is better explained by the combinatory-sublime. All the vivid effects of Conrad's description upon the mental "eye"-- the "serenity" of the stellar rays, the moon's resemblance to a bar of gold and the sea's resemblance to a sheet of ice-- combine to create the sense of isophenomenal wonder.

Wonder and sublimity, then, will prove of special relevance in Part 3, where I present a counter-argument to the assertion that fantasy is defined by negative compensation.