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.

                          

TRANSCENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME

Having now devoted over 50 posts to the topic of "the sublime" in one form or another, I find myself giving thought as to whether or not other comics-critics would have any takes on these matters.  I tend to doubt it, though, and the least self-aggrandizing reason I can concoct for said critics' general disinterest in the sublime comes down to their affection for a type of transcendence that I find to be of lesser interest.

Sublimity, as coiner-of-the-term Longinus pointed out, is not something that takes part in the everyday or the "agreeable"-- a term which Kant may have borrowed for his own theories of art and the sublime.  This translation of Longinus says:

A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself. That which is admirable ever confounds our judgment, and eclipses that which is merely reasonable or agreeable. To believe or not is usually in our own power; but the Sublime, acting with an imperious and irresistible force, sways every reader whether he will or no. Skill in invention, lucid arrangement and disposition of facts, are appreciated not by one passage, or by two, but gradually manifest themselves in the general structure of a work; but a sublime thought, if happily timed, illumines an entire subject with the vividness of a lightning-flash, and exhibits the whole power of the orator in a moment of time.


Though all of Longinus' statements on the sublime are significant, they are not all necessarily correct. I believe that all of art exists to "take [a reader/listener] out of himself," but not that every effect that does so is sublime.  In this essay I quoted and/or paraphrased a great deal of Aldous Huxley's 1953 essay "On Self-Transcendence, comparing and contrasting Huxley's concepts of "downward transcendence" and "upward transcendence" with cognate concepts in Carl Jung's system.  In the middle of these two forms of transcendence, Huxley describes "horizontal transcendence" in terms that may compare with Longinus' idea of the "that which is merely reasonable or agreeable."

In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self- transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby, or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through self-identification with any human activity, from running a business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to educating children or studying the mating habits of birds. Horizontal self- transcendence is of the utmost importance. Without it, there would be no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, indeed no civilization.

Why does Huxley say that horizontal self-transcendence is "of the utmost importance?" I presume that it is because "self-identification with any human activity" may be deemed the bedrock of cognitive experience. It is the way every human being learns his or her individual propensities: what one likes to do, what one does not like to do, what one is good at doing, and so on. I'm enough of a Bataillean to state a slight disagreement, to the effect that there will always be the temptation to transcend the horizontal plane of the "reasonable and agreeable."  But I take the point-- assuming that I have read Huxley's point correctly-- that there is a primacy to the horizontal plane, albeit not a supremacy.

Unfortnately, most comics-critics are of the view that the realm of the reasonable and agreeable is the one to which all other forms of transcendence should be reduced.  Not that the practice is confined to critics, whom I'll explore a little more in Part 2.  Often it's a prime source for humor.

Harvey Kurtzman's story "Man and Superman" (WEIRD SCIENCE #6, 1951)  is a spoof not of the Man of Steel on that character's own terms-- Kurtzman would produce such a spoof two years later in MAD, with the famous "Superduperman." Rather, "Man and Superman" spoofs the comics medium's happy ignorance of basic scientific principles. Charlemagne, a thick-headed "muscle culture" nut, exposes himself to a physicist's ray, which increases his density to fantastic proportions, just as one sees in countless superhero origins.

However, the upshot of the satire is that Charlemagne ignores the scientist's warnings about how his "expenditures of energy" will cause him to "wilt away."  Not only does his mass constantly cause him to fall through walls and floors-- a consequence of greater mass that Superman never had to deal with-- he, the massive muscleman, ends up evaporating into "rapidly dispersing neutral mesons."

Of course Kurtzman's made-up science is no more probable than that of Superman. What's significant in the aesthetic sense is that Charlemagne's admittedly lunk-headed attempt to transcend the limits of normality is shot down by the author's all-knowing appeal to reason and logic.

In the next essay I'll show how this paradigm informs the reductive principles of certain critics of fantasy-literature, both within and without the medium of comic books.

MIRROR VS. LAMP. PT. 1

The title of the book identifies two common and antithetic metaphors of
mind, one comparing the mind to a reflector of external objects, the other
to a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives.
The first of these was characteristic of much of the thinking from Plato to
the eighteenth century; the second typifies the prevailing romantic conception of the poetic mind.-- M.H. Abrams, preface to his own THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP (1953).

Are the products of human culture bound to the finitude of human existence, or do they contain a moment of transcendence, an "eternal validity?"-- Edward Skidelsky, summarizing the positions of Heidegger and Cassirer vis-à-vis culture, in ERSNT CASSIRER (p. 214) 

I confess that I never got around to reading Abrams' famous lit-crit book.  Its title simply came to mind after I finished reading Skidelsky's book, and found myself returning to the dichotomy proposed by Hegel re: "reflective" and "speculative" forms of philosophy-- a dichotomy I first explored in this essay.  In that essay I complained that almost all comics-criticism today is practiced in the "reflective" mode, which would seem a natural analogue to Abrams' "mirror," given that the mirror connotes the ideal of reproducing the world as it is.  It's not much of a stretch, then, to see an analogous relationship between Hegel's "speculative philosophy" and Abrams' "radiant projector," given that the root word of "speculate" is "to look"-- and how can one look at anything, without a source of light?  Further, the speculative mode is an active one, imagining the interaction of an "intellectual intuition" with the world even as we apprehend it, while the reflective mode is passive, the same way that the mirror is passive in its reflection of appearances.  Mirrors don't show their reflective qualities unless some phenomenon provides light whereby those qualities may be seen.  The lamp requires human intervention to make its illuminative qualities come alive, but once activated, its nature in reality and as metaphor suggests continued activity rather than a passive operation.

I should note in passing that Abrams and Skidelsky propose tenable yet wholly opposed views of cultural history. 


For Abrams, the "metaphor of mind" in which a human subject seeks to reproduce the world "as it is" has dominated human culture from the era of Plato until the 18th century, while the metaphor that posits the mind as making an illuminating contribution to the world's ordering is one of comparatively recent vintage.

For Skidelsky, though, what I am calling "speculative philosophy," the philosophy of the lamp, is one that dominated human culture at least since the Renaissance, which is as far back as this author extends his cultural analysis-- and such cultural speculations have usually affirmed that, yes, some transcendent validity is indeed possible .  The rise of the technical sciences, which in Hegelian terms causes the rise of "reflective philosophy," is the comparative newbie on the block, and under the scrutiny of the so-called exact science, all culture is indeed "bound to the finitude of human existence?"

The solution to the contrast is not a hard one, though.  While it's possible to cite exceptions to Abrams' Aristotelian view of literary culture from Plato onward-- I mention one such exception in my reading of Longinus-- he's probably right that literature was dominated by the mimetic impulse, at least in Europe and the United States. Yet for many authors the "real world" was a glass through which one could perceive, however "darkly," the hand of God or similar abstractions.  Thus finitude could lead one to infinitude.

In contrast, philosophy was the primary home of such abstractions for many years.  But with the rise of technical sciences, philosophy had to throw more of a "light" on its own operations.  And so philosophy increasingly began to frame its abstract questions in more formally logical terms, as we have seen in the rise of "symbolic logic"-- which is another way of saying that the idea of infinitude is seen as derivable from finite causes. 


Yet it may be observed that at the same time the Romantics' aversion to scientism led them to endorse in literature abstractions no longer possible in philosophy.  This transformation of literary priorities didn't occur overnight, for even through the 19th and early 20th centuries, the ideal of "fantasy" in literature remains disreputable for authors seeking a literary reputation.  Yet by the late 20th century, fantasy's highly abstract evocations of the infinite are embraced by such authors as Borges, Calvino, Lessing and Eco.  None of these authors maintain any continuity with the literary tradition of " the Romantics" as we know them today.  Yet it may not be a coincidence that some moderns find themselves embracing those modes of thought rejected by many modern philosophers, who apparently hunger for the validation given "the exact sciences."


This hunger for what Walter Cerf deems the tendency to "solve intellectual puzzles rather than give the true conceptual vision of the whole" will be one of the subjects of Part 2.

TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I -- PART 3

Let us next consider whether we can point to anything further that contributes to sublimity of style. Now, there inhere in all things by nature certain constituents which are part and parcel of their substance. It must needs be, therefore, that we shall find one source of the sublime in the systematic selection of the most important elements, and the power of forming, by their mutual combination, what may be called one body. The former process attracts the hearer by the choice of the ideas, the latter by the aggregation of those chosen.-- Longinus, Chapter X, On the Sublime.
 

 Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.

-- Tolkien, from a letter he wrote and cited in
ON FAIRY-STORIES.

Neither of these quotes influenced my choice of the name for the "combinatory sublime;" that name came from some half-remembered passages from Ernst Cassirer's writing on Leibniz.  I have chosen to pass on looking for that passage, though, for as I remember it had no particular application to art/literature.  Far more interesting are these references to the idea of "combination" in the works of (1) the writer known for putting forth "the sublime" as a formal literary term, and (2) one of the foremost defenders of the "sense of wonder" in Western culture.

Of course, Longinus, despite his conviction that the sublime is "beyond nature," is not concerned with marking out any borders between different phenomenalities.  Tolkien is, though throughout his essay he makes clear that he is defending only one genre within the sphere of literature.  The Oxford don does not make very many comparisons between the "fairy tales" he loves and other metaphenomenal forms, and only invokes the isophenomenal for purposes of making the virtues of fantasy clearer.

Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being “arrested.” They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control: with delusion and hallucination.
 

In essays like this one I've stated that even isophenomenal works have their own form of sublimity, which I choose to call the "atypical-sublime."  I have tended to subsume the two categories of the metaphenomenal, the "uncanny" and the "marvelous," under the rubric of the "strange-sublime," but in this recent essay I began to rethink this, asserting that each phenomenality should possess its own form of sublimity, based on the parameters of the world conjured forth.

But how to make such a distinction, given that I've stated that all three phenomenalities have an identical capacity for the sublime?

The answer comes swift if not clear in all respects: they have the same capacity in terms of "might," in terms of the "dynamically sublime"-- but they do not all have the same capacity in terms of "the magnitude of associations," that is, "the combinatory-sublime."

In other words, the further a given work ventures into the domains of the metaphenomenal, the greater its capacity for "endless combinations in living shapes that move from mind to mind."

And the proof of this will be the subject of Part 4.

TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I -- PART 1

I began writing about the various iterations of "the sublime" as defined by such authors as Longinus, Burke, and Kant with the intent of comparing this affect with the more widely known "sense of wonder."  As I sought to formulate some common ground used by all authors, I came up with this:

Longinus, Burke and Kant all agree that the affect of sublimity comes into being only through a subject's contact with some overwhelming power/might/infinitude.
 

This suggested to me the affect Rudolf Otto termed the *mysterium tremendum,* but even prior to reading Otto I did not think that this was an adequate characterization of all aspects of sublimity/sense of wonder.  Here I noted:

In AGE OF WONDERS David Hartnell centers his definition of the term "sense of wonder" in an awestruck fascination with strange phenomena that does not suggest the aspect of the *mysterium tremendum:*
 

Similarly, at times I sought to expand on the meanings explicitly stated by the philosophers, to bring it into line with my impressions of the sublimity in myth.

Neither Burke nor Kant demonstrate any great fascination with mythic symbolism as such. However, I would expand some of the terms they use to describe the sublime, such as "might" or "magnificence," to include the sense of a greater mythic pattern that brings the events of a given story into the wider "family" of mythic narrative.

Once again, I repeat the W.B. Yeats quote I used in my first post here as a touchstone for the "familial" nature of myths of all kinds:

“It is the charm of mythic narrative that it cannot tell one thing without telling a hundred others. The symbols are an endless inter-marrying family. They give life to what, stated in general terms, appears only a cold truism, by hinting how the apparent simplicity of the statement is due to an artificial isolation of a fragment, which, in its natural place, is connected with all the infinity of truths by living fibres.”
 

Now, however, rather than simply seeing this as an "expansion," I think that I was actually seeking to conflate two distinct aspects of the sublime.

I'll be expounding on the dichotomy further in Part 2, but I end this retrospective post by noting that the majority of my posts dealing with "the sublime" deal with only one species of its nature, what Kant calls the "dynamic sublime" in CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT.  Most of these posts have dealt with the sublime in its aspect of "might," but there is another aspect that proves equally important, particularly with regard to my recent attempt to suss out the quality of sublimity within the three phenomenal worlds, seen here.

SYMBOLIC VICTORIES

In my MYTHCOMICS #8 post I wrote:

I’ve stated in the past that I don’t think all literary stories must have complex symbolism simply to be “capital-L” literature. Joyce’s DUBLINERS stories have a simpler artistic aim than his ULYSSES, but both are Literature. But when I see how well Dick Matena puts across a complex meaning using a thoroughgoing knowledge of symbolism, I’m all the more disappointed in the bulk of both European and American artcomics. The artists behind them continually trumpet the inferiority of popular comic books to their artistic strivings, but few of them have shown the ambition to attempt even something as complex as this 8-page Matena story, much less a ULYSSES. It’s as if most practitioners of Western artcomics took as their “Bible” Zola’s fulminations on behalf of naturalism, but never actually read the actual Zola novels to see how much symbolism the author himself used.

The problem, however, isn't limited to artcomics-culture. In THE SPHERE OF LONGINUS, I agreed with the verdict of M.A.R. Habib to the effect that Longinus seems to be the first extant literary theoretician to oppose Aristotle's notion that "universality and typicality" (Habib's words) were to be valued over those literary elements that incited wonder and emotional transport.

To double-check Habib's conclusions, I recently reread Aristotle's POETICS to see whether or not I could find in it any validation of "wonder" for its own sake, as opposed to functioning as part of some rhetorical or persuasive scheme. The closest I found was this statement about *dianoia,* which is Aristotle's word for not just the dialectical arguments presented by a work's characters but also for all forms of "thought" in a given work:

Under Thought is included every effect which has to be produced by speech, the subdivisions being,--proof and refutation; the excitation of the feelings, such as pity, fear, anger, and the like; the suggestion of importance or its opposite.

However, the very next sentences establish that all of these elements are subsumed to their role in dialectical argument:

Now, it is evident that the dramatic incidents must be treated from the same points of view as the dramatic speeches, when the object is to evoke the sense of pity, fear, importance, or probability. The only difference is, that the incidents should speak for themselves without verbal exposition; while the effects aimed at in speech should be produced by the speaker, and as a result of the speech. For what were the business of a speaker, if the Thought were revealed quite apart from what he says?

Thus, though I can find no passage in the POETICS where Aristotle meditates on symbols as such, this suggests that he saw them as essentially vehicles of dialectic, as against Longinus, who considers the elements of "the sublime" to go beyond the limits of mere "persuasion."

Aristotle does devote a chapter of the POETICS to the subject of metaphor, and acknowledges its central importance:

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance.

However, this too does not address the ways in which metaphor works in an affective sense, only in a (somewhat) cognitive manner. Philip Wheelwright remarks:

"...our ways of thinking about [metaphor] need to be rescued from misleading habits and particularly from the long tyranny of the grammarians. The familiar textbook definition, descended from Aristotle and Quintillian, is based upon syntactical, not semantic considerations."-- THE BURNING FOUNTAIN, "Metaphoric Tension," p. 102.

Wheelwright then pursues a detailed analysis of the different ways in which both simile and metaphor carry differing levels of "semantic energy-tension." In other words, Wheelwright's theory, as with that of Longinus, is intimately concerned with the ways in which one may cognitively appreciate the affective dimensions of symbolic communication, rather than committing the logical fallacy of seeing the affectivity as just another cognitive function.

I suspect that most artcomics critics are of an Aristotelian mind. They appreciate works that seem to function as instances of well-wrought *dianoia,* because they as critics can then interpret such thoughts in terms of either ethical or aesthetic criticism-- neither of which is adequate to take in the whole of artistic endeavor, as I explained here.

But in fairness, this mistake is one that much of Western criticism pursued over many centuries. So if nothing else, they come by it honestly.

PARALLEL PATHS: THE SUBLIME AND THE MYTHIC

In this essay I demonstrated a parallel between Kant’s concept of the sublime and my concept of the uncanny. In Kant the sublime is that affect arising from the subject’s perception that a given phenomenon seems boundless, even though it may not really be boundless, as in the case of sublime natural phenomena (storm-clouds, mountains, etc.) The uncanny applies to literary elements that suggest a transcendence of ordinary “isophenomenal” causality even though those elements do not transcend in the cognitive sense, as do elements of the other category of metaphenomenality, “the marvelous.”

To expand on the caution I expressed before in the above essay, this parallel does not imply identity, for the sublime can appear in any work regardless of its phenomenal category. I mentioned Maugham’s book THE RAZOR’S EDGE, which contains the sublime affect even though it’s an entirely isophenomenal work, while Poe’s HOUSE OF USHER, a work of uncanny metaphenomenality, has its own sublimities. The same aesthetic applies to the marvelous form of the metaphenomenal, but I stress that a work is not automatically sublime just because it contains marvels that do transcend causality. As mentioned earlier I’ll be examining the 1960 comic-book story “Superman’s Return to Krypton” as an example of this form of sublimity, but first—more Philosophy 302.

As noted earlier, Kant doesn’t give adequate examples of the literary sublime. Longinus, the earliest extant writer to use the term, doesn’t supply more than a few examples, one of which is the “silence of Ajax” scene in Homer’s ODYSSEY. Thus, though one of Longinus’ definitions of the sublime is to say that it is “beyond nature,” he can characterize the sublime in terms that have nothing to do with “nature” as such. By contrast Kant most often characterizes the sublime in terms of natural phenomena, though he does not define it in those terms alone. If one agrees that Longinus’ example is indeed sublime, then a full consideration of the sublime cannot be confined to awesome natural forces, or even to what Douglas Wolk calls “the crush of the infinite.”

Fortunately, though Longinus and Kant don’t give one much to build on, another anatomist of sublimity was more prodigal in his use of examples: Edmund Burke. His 1756 work, "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", is an empiricist take on the affects of the sublime and the beautiful, and is also one of the works to which critical idealist Kant directly responds in the AESTHETIC JUDGMENT. As a post-Kantian I certainly disagree with Burke’s attempt to reduce all affects down to pure sensation. However, Burke provides many useful examples. Most of them are taken from works with marvelous content—the Bible, Virgil, Milton, the Faerie Queene—but at no point does Burke call any of these sublime merely because they are marvelous. His examples are usually presented under categorical headings that suggest aspects of the sublime—“terror,” “power,” “infinity”—but it’s significant that one of his most telling examples is taken from the isophenomenal Shakespeare play HENRY IV:

All furnished, all in arms,
All plumed like estridges that with the wind
Baited like eagles having lately bathed,
Glittering in golden coats like images,
As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer,
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.
I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly armed
Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury
And vaulted with such ease into his seat
As if an angel dropped down from the clouds,
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus

Burke then justifies calling this scene "sublime" due to its “richness and profusion of images.” This would not be the only criterion applicable to marvelous works, but it applies well in terms of the 1960 Siegel-Boring Superman story.

What sets this superhero-romance tale apart from hundreds of other Superman stories of lesser complexity is indeed its “richness and profusion of images,” as well as (to extend Burke's terms into post-Kantian territory) their symbolic resonance. In AGREEABLE YOU I indicated that one scene alone, with its imagery of violent natural phenomena, might suggest the sublime, not so much in terms of Kant as in terms of Doug Wolk's (erroneous) reading of Kant. But as I said at the end of that essay:

There's another sense in which pop-culture stories can be sublime, beyond their actual depiction of "boundlessness."

Obviously I’m not implying that a 26-page comics-story, in which Superman accidentally time-travels back to his pre-apocalyptic homeworld Krypton, is on the same level of visionary complexity as PARADISE LOST. Nevertheless, the mythic symbolism of the former story should not be discounted, particularly when that symbolism exceeds that of many of the artcomics works touted by Wolk. I’ve mentioned in this essay that a Freudian-flavored interpretation of the story might view the Man of Steel’s return to his homeworld, and his encounter with a woman who name reproduces the syllables of his mother’s name twice, to be a recapitulation of the incest symbol-complex. But it might also be viewed more profitably in a Jungian context, given that the Superman character does not compete with his father as the Freudian paradigm insists he should. Indeed, while on Krypton Superman not only befriends Jor-El, he also becomes more like his father, showing a propensity for scientific invention rarely seen during his heroic phase on Earth. In addition, the sense that all of the wonders of Krypton, natural and man-made, hang upon the precipice of disaster gives the story an aura of tragedy, albeit a very sexy tragedy: more ROMEO AND JULIET than HENRY IV.

I could expound upon other images in “SriK,” such as the peculiar behemoth-creature at the story’s beginning, who leads Superman into his temporal misstep the way the “Questing Beast” of Arthurian tales would lead knights into misadventure, but the general point is made: that sublimity follows along any path that arouses the emotions of fear and awe, even if that path leads one down the hardscrabble roads of commercial comic books.

Neither Burke nor Kant demonstrate any great fascination with mythic symbolism as such. However, I would expand some of the terms they use to describe the sublime, such as "might" or "magnificence," to include the sense of a greater mythic pattern that brings the events of a given story into the wider "family" of mythic narrative.

Once again, I repeat the W.B. Yeats quote I used in my first post here as a touchstone for the "familial" nature of myths of all kinds:

“It is the charm of mythic narrative that it cannot tell one thing without telling a hundred others. The symbols are an endless inter-marrying family. They give life to what, stated in general terms, appears only a cold truism, by hinting how the apparent simplicity of the statement is due to an artificial isolation of a fragment, which, in its natural place, is connected with all the infinity of truths by living fibres.”

As noted above, one of Burke's categories for the sublime also references "infinity."

PARALLEL PATHS: THE SUBLIME AND THE UNCANNY

In Kant’s preface to the first edition of CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, he makes a distinction regarding those things that can be the proper subjects of “cognition” and those that cannot. This distinction largely parallels the modern terms I’ve been using in my discussions of phenomenality: the “cognitive” and the “affective.” In essence the JUDGMENT is devoted to showing the extent to which humanity’s affective propensities have universal philosophical relevance, despite the fact that said propensities are not subjects of cognition . The first half of the book deals with how human affects apply to the idea of universal taste regarding “the fine arts.”

Section 210 of JUDGMENT is the first time Kant schematizes three of these affects (my word), which he calls “the three sorts of liking.” They are the “agreeable,” the “good,” and the “beautiful.” Later, however, Kant also distinguishes the “sublime” as something of a development from the beautiful. Kant was far from the first to theorize on “sublimity,” as will be seen from this essay on Longinus. But Kant’s cogitations on the matter have become among the most influential on literary studies.

The world that Kant presents as a subject for cognition is one I have termed “isophenomenal,” in that everything in it is subject to laws of reason and causality. To an extent this sounds much like Tzvetan Todorov’s “category of the real,” of which he writes in THE FANTASTIC:

“It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished a basis for our definition of the fantastic.”

But there’s actually a substantial difference between the ways in which Kant and the Freudian-influenced Todorov view this “reality,” and it inheres in their handling of affects. Todorov explicitly rejects theories of fantastic fiction that embrace subjective feeling, while Kant attempts to deduce which if any universal laws may be found in or suggested by the affects.

As an example, here are Todorov’s remarks on Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” from “The Uncanny and the Marvelous,” a key chapter of his book:

“Although the resurrection of Usher’s sister and the fall of the house after the death of its inhabitants may appear supernatural, Poe has not failed to supply quite rational explanations for both events.”

Because these explanations are within the limits of the rational, Todorov calls “Usher” an example of “the uncanny bordering on the fantastic,” the latter being his term for fiction that seems to leave unresolved the question of whether the events of the story are marvelous or not. However, a Kantian system might have more to say about the affective aspects of “House of Usher” than Todorov cares to.

It’s interesting that in Todorov's brief examination of “Usher,” he does touch on its affective nature, as he notes: “the sense of the uncanny [in the story] is not linked to the fantastic but to what we might call ‘an experience of limits.’” Todorov takes this observation no further than the bounds of doctrinaire Freudianism, saying that “The sentiment of the uncanny originates, then, in certain themes linked to more or less ancient taboos.”

Kant also deals with limits in his description of the affects he calls “the beautiful” and “the sublime,” but in a more thoroughgoing philosophical manner. Unlike the categories of “the agreeable” and the good,” the other two are relevant to judgments of universal taste:

"The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness..."-- Section 245.

Though this and similair statements demonstrate that Kant understood that boundaries or the lack of them could be crucial to an understanding of aesthetics, Kant does not give specific examples of artworks that incarnate either the beautiful or the sublime. He does devote considerable space to how nature, even though it is not truly unlimited, can create the effect of illimitability, which in turn invokes in the human mind the experience of sublimity:

“…consider bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky [and other examples of furious nature]... Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range..."-- Section 261.

This, far more than predictable twaddle about Freudian taboos, explains why generations of Poe’s readers have taken pleasure in the macabre events of the story. The facelike façade of the Usher House, the brooding tarn, and Madeleine rising from “death” to strangle her brother with supernormal strength—all of these are perilous presences which readers can contemplate from afar, with mingled pleasure and displeasure, because they do not threaten us directly.

Todorov thinks that the rational order, Freud’s “reality principle,” has won out in the Poe tale because Poe does not literally have the house smitten by the hand of God, after the fashion of more marvelously-oriented Gothics like THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO. But I believe Poe only includes these realistic devices as a means of showing that even with those sops to rationality, the affect of sublime terror remains undiminished.

I titled this essay “parallel paths” to make it clear that I am not suggesting a one-to-one correspondence between Kant’s “sublime” and the "Phillipsian" version of “the uncanny.” I’m simply demonstrating that Kant’s concept is a fit vehicle through which one may understand the process by which uncanny works can be cognitively isophenomenal yet affectively metaphenomenal. It’s certainly no less possible to experience the sublime in works that are overtly marvelous, like OTRANTO, or even in works that simply evoke the sublime against an isophenomenal background, such as Maugham's novel THE RAZOR'S EDGE. But a work like the Maugham novel is merely "atypical" in that the sublime mental states of the character do not override the realistic concerns of the narrative, as I believe they do in "Usher" and in other true works of the uncanny. Thus RAZOR'S EDGE is both cognitively and affectively isophenomenal at the core, making it the obverse of a marvelous work like CASTLE OF OTRANTO.

THE EMPIRICIST OF DREAMS

“What does rock ‘n’ roll mean but fucking?”—Nigel Cox, TARZAN PRESLEY.

""Say, whoever you are, you know what Freud said about dreams about flying? He said it means you are really dreaming about having sex."
"Really? Then tell me, what does it mean when you dream about having sex?"-- Neil Gaiman, SANDMAN #15.

My title is one of my many puns-that-no-one-else-gets. This time the source is more obscure than usual, as it's the first line of Clark Ashton Smith’s epic poem THE HASHISH-EATER: “Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams.”

So who’s the “empiricist of dreams?” Well, though Sigmund Freud's far from being the only reductivist in the game, he does cast a long shadow over the interpretation of dreams and related fantasies, whether explicitly (as in the statement of the SANDMAN character Rose Walker) or indirectly (as in the quote from a Nigel Cox book-- which I confess I obtained from a secondary source).

To be sure, certain manifestations of pop culture *are* about nothing but sex, though maybe not quite in terms of Freudian psychology. Whatever one thinks about the multivalence of rock 'n' roll, clearly "Skinemax" movies and Tijuana Bibles can't be concerned with very much else. However, the Sandman’s riposte to Freudian dream-interpretation should remind one of the perils of overstatement.

In this essay I asserted that Frederic Wertham, obsessed with finding evidence of comics’ overabundant sexuality and violent transgressiveness, was unable to comprehend that certain fictional fantasies, such as the fantasy of crimefighting, might have some relation to an audience's fear of violent crime in the real world, as opposed to those fantasies being a "cover" for something else, like hatred of one's father. Later, in yet another essay I approved of Carl Jung’s ability to see fantasies as having their own integrity as psychic creations, as opposed to being camoflague for other psychological conflicts. Jung might have expanded on the Sandman’s riposte by saying that even though human beings cannot fly, fantasies of flight don’t automatically translate into the more “realistic” activity of sex. It's as easy to suppose that the fantasy of flying could connote for an audience the pleasure in being able to behold what is impossible in the normal world. From such contemplations, not tied in and of themselves to specific "realistic" referents, there arises what Kant calls sublimity and what the 1940 film THIEF OF BAGDAD calls "the beauty of the impossible."

The battle between Freudian reductionism and Jungian amplification has been fought on other fronts, as when Northrop Frye describes the “distinction between two views of literature that has run all through the history of criticism. These two views are the aesthetic and the creative, the Aristotelian and the Longinian, the view of literature as product and the view of literature as process.”—Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, p. 66.

Frye probably borrowed the terms "product and process" from the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, while his opposition of Aristotle and Longinus may remind some readers of this blog of a similar opposition by R.A. Habib, which I reprinted in THE SPHERE OF LONGINUS. I frankly don’t like Frye's terms “aesthetic” and “creative,” which Frye himself doesn’t use often, either in the ANATOMY or elsewhere. I much prefer the opposition he makes in another essay, quoted here, between a story’s “narrative values” and its “significant values.” In contradistinction to what Frye writes in this section of the ANATOMY, I would say that while I agree that Aristotle is indeed more aligned to the view of literature as product, this goes hand-in-hand with a tendency to see literature as a means of transmitting “significant values.” Thus literature is just one step up from rhetoric, in that its purpose is to convey those values through a fictional façade, much as Freud would’ve believed that a dream’s purpose was to convey the psychological truths of sexual repression. In contrast, though Longinus wasn’t without his own concern for “significant values,” on the whole he seems more concerned with pure “narrative values” when he speaks of how poetry’s effects bring forth the internal ecstasy he calls “the sublime.” This in turn squares up with Jung’s tendency to value dream-fantasies for their own communicative power, not as representations of something else.

I may as well also reference this essay too, where I compared the two different species of Frye-values with Jane Ellen Harrison’s concepts of *moira* and *themis.* In essence art and literature worship at the fanes of both “gods,” even if particular works may be more slanted toward one than the other. The flying horse of Powell’s THIEF OF BAGDAD seems to signify the raw exuberance of fantasy far more than it does sex, but the aerial ballet of Superman and Lois in Donner’s SUPERMAN is clearly more in the Freudian mold. In between the two I find Gaiman’s SANDMAN, for though I quote one of its stories to support Jungian priorities, that work generally succeeds in “worshipping” both *moira* and *themis* in such a way that one can hardly separate “narrative values” from “significant” ones—a consummation devoutly wished by many readers, if one rarely achieved.

THE SPHERE OF LONGINUS

"What is beyond nature drives the audience not to persuasion but to ecstacy. What is wonderful, with its stunning power, prevails everywhere over that which aims merely at persuasion and at gracefulness."-- Longinus, Part I, ON THE SUBLIME, trs. Arieti and Crossett.

"This seemingly simple opposition and prioritization is an index of a broad shift away from a classical world-view: whereas Aristotle actually prescribed necessity and probability, universality and typicality; as the bases for poetry's engagement with the world, Longinus advocates precisely what deviates from such universality. It is an aesthetic premised not on what is central to human experience but precisely on what escapes such centrality..."-- M.A.R. Habib, A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY, p. 125.

In addition to Professor Habib's perspicacious pronouncement on Longinus (circa anywhere from 1 to 3 A.D.), I would add that in a sense Longinus is also a distant literary ancestor to any critic attempting to understand art through a comprehension of its symbolic nature, as opposed to whatever overt discourse the work may offer (or seem to offer).

To be sure, Longinus' influence was nowhere near as prevalent as that of Aristotle, with the result that the formative years of literary criticism were much more devoted to (bringing in my Langerian terms again here) the "discursive" rather than the "presentational." Longinus did see some revival by Europeans during both the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, and though many of his views are clearly conditioned by the Greco-Roman culture he shared, his emphasis on poetry's ability to go "beyond nature" in its effects, rather than to simply persuade like your average rhetorician, was as Habib says an important step away from regarding art as primarily discursive in nature.

I won't get into the tangled matter of "the sublime," which would involve how the notion evolved through varied treatments by Addison, Burke, Kant and others. But in short Longinus' reasoning depends on certain concepts or images being able to induce a kind of "ecstacy" in those who identify with these symbolic representations, and with this piece of logic (which seems self-evident to me at very least) Longinus successfully opposes the notion that literature depends first and foremost on the "mimesis" of real life propounded by Aristotle.

Admittedly, Longinus is not dealing with signs and symbols after the same fashion as modern critics. Still, his insights prove useful for myth-criticism, to the extent that myth-criticism too tries to demonstrate that while all human-created literary signifiers may share equal origins in theory, in practice some are "equal-er" than others.

More on this in GESTURE AND GESTALT PART 5.