THE THREE-PART HARMONY OF SUBLIMITY

For others, the advent of spring means cleaning out the house.  For me, it means yet more terminological revisions to my previously advanced terms regarding the experience of sublimity.

First, prior to any such revisions, a quick revisit to the cognitive and affective conditions that describe my trinity of phenomenalities.  In NOTES ON NORTHROP FRYE AND THE NUM-THEORY I defined the three phenomenalities in terms of their relationship to "causality," insightfully defined by Roger Caillois as "the changeless everyday reality."

“the marvelous”— cognitive and affective aspects of phenomena both exceed causality
“the uncanny”—causality cognitively preserved, but affectivity exceeds causality
“the naturalistic”—cognitive and affective aspects are both contained by causality

In ODDLY OR STRANGELY SUBLIME, I advanced these terms for the differing operations of the sublime within these phenomenalities.

Since works of an entirely naturalistic phenomenality are always defined by limitations, in which it is deemed impossible to transcend the cause-and-effect universe, such works do not evoke "arresting strangeness" in Tolkein's sense. They do, however, depict worlds in which "the typical" is frequently superseded by "the atypical." This may include anything from an anomalous event, such as a bank robbery, to a personal epiphany, such as Conrad's narrator describes by catching a ship at sea in a mood of sublime repose.

This kind of sublimity/sense of wonder, which does not break with the order of causality, I term the "odd-sublime," in that whatever takes place in the naturalistic world does not transcend either the cognitive or affective aspects of that orderliness.

Works in the sphere of the uncanny and the marvelous, however, fall into a category best termed the "strange-sublime." Marvelous works break with both the cognitive and affective aspects of normative order, while uncanny works break with the affective aspect appropriate to causal relations but largely stay within the cognitive sphere of causality.

I later decided that I didn't think "oddity" worked as well as "atypicality," and without otherwise revising this aspect of my system made a one-on-one substitution in NUM-INOUS CONFRONTATIONS, VIOLENT SUBLIMITY, the first essay in which I applied my evolving concept of "the sublime" to three phenomenologically-distinct works.  Of my naturalistic example, the character of "Dirty Harry" from the film of the same name, I wrote of this form of naturalistic sublimity:

At this point, if no other, Dirty Harry takes on a transcendent quality. I would call this particular quality (revised since I last wrote of it here) as the "atypical-sublime." In a naturalistic world, even the most extreme actions by hero and villain can never be more than atypical occurences in a world dominated by typical events.
 

I undertake the revisions of the currently reigning terms-- "atypical-sublime" and "strange-sublime"-- because I've decided that my terms ought to be able to reflect the phenomenological difference between the types of "strange-sublime" in the uncanny and the marvelous.  I've protested Tzvetan Todorov's totalizing tendencies, wherein he views an "uncanny" story as one subsumed by Freud's "reality principle:"

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.

Nevertheless, though a work like HOUSE OF USHER is not subsumed by causality and the reality principle, unlike (say) Poe's PURLOINED LETTER, it also does not share the exact same relationship to causality as that of Walpole's CASTLE OF OTRANTO.  In order to keep the distinctions of that relationship to "the real," I've devised three terms to reflect the causality-relationship of each phenomenality.

In NUMINOUS CONFRONTATIONS, I used the heroes of three adventure-films to contrast the different phenomenalities of each film.  These respective heroes can also be used to define the relationship of the sublime in each film to the causal order.

Again, 1971's DIRTY HARRY is entirely defined by a naturalistic phenomenality.  This phenomenality is not "real," any more than any other fictional production.  However, because all the forces and presences within DIRTY HARRY attempt to be identical with the causal order that we perceive in our shared cultural existence, any sublimity generated by the film-- in particular, by the conflict between the hero and his opponent-- must be termed an "iso-real" sublimity; that is, one limited to the forces and presences that are "the same" as what we know in "the changeless everyday reality."

1973's ENTER THE DRAGON breaks with this "everyday reality" not in terms of the cognitive aspects of causality, but with the affectivity appropriate to a purely naturalistic universe.  Of one metaphenomenal detail of DRAGON I wrote:

A hall of mirrors certainly does not violate our ideas of causality, so it is not metaphenomenal in any cognitive sense, but because it does suggest the metaphenomenal in an affective sense-- pushing [the villain] Han more toward the domain of the supervillain proper-- this scene in particular captures violent sublimity in one of its two metaphenomenal modes, both of which I still designate as "the strange-sublime."
 

All of the tropes I've designated in my critical writings on film *can* be expressed within a purely naturalistic phenomenality, where both the cognitive and affective aspects are "iso-real."  But uncanny works always push beyond the boundaries of the naturalistic in an affective sense.  This more exaggerated, perhaps more improbable form of affectivity generates a different manifestation of sublimity, one that is rooted in "the real" but transcends it partially.  For this reason I term this manifestation a "supra-real" sublimity.

Finally, with 1977's STAR WARS audiences manage to combine the two most famed genres of the marvelous: "science fiction" and "fantasy."  There are significant phenomenological differences between the two genres, which come down to a different approach to the nature of reality.  In science fiction an apparent "marvel" results from some discovery of a hitherto-unrecognized principle or application of science, while in fantasy,, the "marvel" results from some transcendence of all principles of reality.  Thus most of the characters in STAR WARS use "marvelous" devices like droids and ray-guns without regarding the devices as marvelous, though of course they remain so for the audience.  In contrast, the Jedi powers of Luke Skywalker and his fellow Jedi, though given a smattering of science-fictional rationalization through the concept of the Midi-chlorians, has far more in common with ideas of magic as promoted in otherworldly magical fantasy-fiction. 

Despite all the quarrels between exclusivist fantasy-fans and SF-fans of the same stripe, in a narrative sense the marvels of science fiction and fantasy work the same way: they invoke forces that are not commonly explicable within the domain of "the real."  For that reason, the type of sublimity I discern within the marvelous-metaphenomenal I'll term an "anti-real" sublimity.

MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS, AND STORIES TOO

In STRENGTH, IN NUMBERS  I made this generalization about the corpus of stories within the famous folktale-collection Grimms' Fairy Tales:

I would generalize that most of the Grimms' folktales fall into one of these two categories [i.e., having the plot-dynamicity labeled "basic strength" or the one labeled "might"].

In contrast, I only pegged one Grimms' tale which displayed the plot-pattern of "dominance," focused on two contending superior forces.

But that's just one story-collection.  How do these three deductively-extrapolated patterns disperse over the whole of literature?

I suppose my view may be influenced by a lifetime of genre-reading.  Nevertheless, genre-- and I consider folk literature to be a close relation to genre literature-- has been the dominant type of narrative (both in written and oral forms) favored by the majority of human beings in historical time.  And basing my view on everything I've read of what other people generally read, the "middle type"-- the one that Goldilocks pronounced as "just right" in another context-- is the one that I believe would rack up the highest statistics, were any kind of statistical evaluation feasible.

I hinted at the predominance of the "might" pattern in my QUICK SCHOPENHAUER POST: 

As I've mentioned elsewhere I find Cioffi's term "anomaly" useful to describe the element or elements that provide the motive force of the narrative, so it would seem that the anomaly expresses the narrative's need for conflict/transgression.

To make my meaning more explicit, I'm saying that the dominant type of story within genre narrative-- which narrative is the dominant narrative experience of historical mankind-- is one in which the characters who inhabit a normal, "typical" continuum-- characters usually possessed of no more than "basic strength"-- is confronted with an atypical anomaly-- be it a natural force or a character-- which impinges its "might" upon the continuum's static equilibrium. The anomaly may be any number of things within the scope of the Num Formula: a ruthless criminal (naturalistic), a bizarre psycho-killer (uncanny), or a blood-hungry vampire (marvelous).  As different as these three examples are in terms of phenomenality-- with one appealing to what I've called the "odd-sublime," the other two to the "strange-sublime"-- they are identical in terms of function in terms of how the plot-dynamicity works out.

If the "might" pattern is, as I assert, the dominant pattern in genre-literature-- thus supervening the patterns of non-genre literature as well-- then this would support H.P. Lovecraft's belief as expressed at the start of his critical history of the terror-tale, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Of course no one can be sure as to which emotion was the first to be kindled in the breast of nascent humanity.  But it's possible that the confrontation of mundane "basic strength" with the power of sublime "might" is the dominant pattern because it has the greatest appeal across all genre-types.

More on these matters in a forthcoming Part 2.

SUBMARINE SUBLIMITY

At the end of THE THREE PART HARMONY OF DYNAMICITY I said:

In a future essay I'll relate these three levels of dynamicity to the more general concept of *sublimity,* which I relate to science fiction's "sense of wonder"-- of which Verne's book is a leading exemplar.

Possibly I shouldn't have implied that "sense of wonder" was characteristic of science fiction alone, since I devoted this entire essay to the proposition that isophemenal literaure could capture the sublime as well as any metaphenomenal work, using the specific example of Joseph Conrad,  noted pooh-pooher of fantastic tales. I said, among other things:

Plainly, in contrast to the TYPHOON passages I cited earlier in my Conrad analyses, this is Conrad picturing a naturalistic scene with just as much "sense of wonder" as anything in fantasy or science fiction.

And of course the literature of the metaphenomenal-- be it uncanny or marvelous-- may also draw on naturalistic descriptions to the same end of conveying wonder.  Here's another section from Chapter 24 of Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA:

Actual petrified thickets and long alcoves from some fantastic school of architecture kept opening up before our steps. Captain Nemo entered beneath a dark gallery whose gentle slope took us to a depth of 100 meters. The light from our glass coils produced magical effects at times, lingering on the wrinkled roughness of some natural arch, or some overhang suspended like a chandelier, which our lamps flecked with fiery sparks. Amid these shrubs of precious coral, I observed other polyps no less unusual: melita coral, rainbow coral with jointed outgrowths, then a few tufts of genus Corallina, some green and others red, actually a type of seaweed encrusted with limestone salts, which, after long disputes, naturalists have finally placed in the vegetable kingdom. But as one intellectual has remarked, "Here, perhaps, is the actual point where life rises humbly out of slumbering stone, but without breaking away from its crude starting point."

Finally, after two hours of walking, we reached a depth of about 300 meters, in other words, the lowermost limit at which coral can begin to form. But here it was no longer some isolated bush or a modest grove of low timber. It was an immense forest, huge mineral vegetation, enormous petrified trees linked by garlands of elegant hydras from the genus Plumularia, those tropical creepers of the sea, all decked out in shades and gleams. We passed freely under their lofty boughs, lost up in the shadows of the waves, while at our feet organ–pipe coral, stony coral, star coral, fungus coral, and sea anemone from the genus Caryophylia formed a carpet of flowers all strewn with dazzling gems.

What an indescribable sight! Oh, if only we could share our feelings! Why were we imprisoned behind these masks of metal and glass! Why were we forbidden to talk with each other! At least let us lead the lives of the fish that populate this liquid element, or better yet, the lives of amphibians, which can spend long hours either at sea or on shore, traveling through their double domain as their whims dictate!

This dazzling vision-- very much in accord with one of the qualities Edmund Burke found in the sublime, "the richness and profusion of images"-- describes nothing that is either uncanny or marvelous, except for the brief reference to the futuristic diving-suits of Nemo and narrator Aronnax.  Nearly everything in this passage shows Verne attempting to capture the wonder of real submarine life-- most of which, I'm told, he managed to render with extraordinary faithfulness.  Yet without doubt the entire tonality of the scene is charged not with the "atypical-sublime" that one might find in a Conrad wonder-producing story, but with the "strange-sublime," which possesses a different character simply by virtue of the presence of the overall qualify of "strangeness."  Without the marvels produced from the genius of "superman" Nemo--  the diving-suits, the Nautilus-- this richness of imagery would be inaccessible to the eyes of humankind, at least in this fictional universe.  Thus even naturalistic details within a marvelous cosmos might be said to take on "the strange-sublime."

To touch on the concerns mentioned in THREE PART HARMONY, the above section from LEAGUES parallels the first section quoted in the earlier essay: all energies in the excerpt are "at rest," whether or not they are capable of greater activity.  This renders all agents in the except as "microdynamic."

How, then, is the section "sublime" if there is no sense of "might" or of danger?  Kant very definitely alloys the sublime with a sense of possible peril-- thus calling once more for what should now be a very familiar Kant-quote:

“…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.

Schopenhauer more or less agrees:

"The feeling of the sublime arose from the fact that something positively unfavourable to the will becomes [an] object of pure contemplation."

In this essay I disagreed with both Kant and Schopenhauer and allied myself somewhat more with Burke, for all that Burke was of the Empiricist faction:

I can agree with every aspect of [Schopenhauer's] statement but one. For the word "positively" I would substitute "potentially." 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. However, none of them go so far as to say that this power must be invariably unfavorable to the human will.

Indeed, I would say that many of the most familiar "wonder-inducing" scenes in fantasy and science fiction-- of C.S. Lewis' kid-heroes stepping through a wardrobe to encounter the snowy world of Narnia, of 2001's space-station revolving in orbit to the strains of Johann Strauss-- represent nothing either "threatening" or "unfavorable."  These, I believe, are just one aspect of the sublime, which depends first and foremost on the sense that the subject experiencing the affect feels overwhelmed in some way, even as narrator Aronnax feels at the "indescribable sight" of the world of the coral realm.  Having already addressed the dual nature of the numinous in the above-linked essay, I won't repeat myself on this score.  But the multifarous nature of sublimity is worth keeping in mind as I continue to develop some of these distinctions re: dynamicity.

ODDLY OR STRANGELY SUBLIME

Does one necessarily *need* "arresting strangeness" to convey a sense of the marvelous? It would seem not, but at the same time there must logically be a coherent asesthetic governing these very different approaches to enchantment... -- from this essay.

As much as I admire the deductive reasoning behind C.S. Lewis' introductory essay in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN-- analyzed here and in my other essays referencing Lewis-- one might criticize Lewis for broadly implying that the "awe of the numinous" could be associated only with those things that suggested a "mighty presence," i.e., gods or God, while things of the ordinary/isophenomenal world could only imply "fear."  Clearly Joseph Conrad could find both wonder and terror in the "marvels and mysteries" he creates in his stories, most if not all of which take place in an isophenomenal world of naturalistic presences.

What can save Lewis' insight, however, is a closer look at the the terminology employed by Rudolf Otto, whom Lewis quotes briefly but does not explore in depth.

Quoting myself once more:

In my own conception the pure horror film doesn't necessarily need the element of the supernatural, but it does need the element of the *mysterium,* which is my shortened form for the two Latin phrases invoked by Rudolf Otto is his classic IDEA OF THE HOLY, where he explains the numinous experience in terms of the *mysterium tremendum,* the overwhelming mystery that compels fear and trembling in the viewer, and the *mysterium fascinans,* which compels the viewer to be attracted to the fascinating mystery.

Lewis' trinity of fear, dread, and awe-- which I've paralleled to my Todorov-derived trinity of the naturalistic, uncanny, and marvelous-- works quite well as long as one is considering only the *mysterium tremendum,* which seems to be the only aspect Lewis regards.  But Otto's other formulation, the *mysterium fascinans,* suggests a less antipathetic attitude toward whatever-it-is that inspires the sense of something beyond ordinary experience. 

For instance, regard the opening paragraph of Chapter 3 of Conrad's LORD JIM:

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.

Plainly, in contrast to the TYPHOON passages I cited earlier in my Conrad analyses, this is Conrad picturing a naturalistic scene with just as much "sense of wonder" as anything in fantasy or science fiction.  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:*

Any child who has looked up at the stars at night and thought about how far away they are, how there is no end or outer edge to this place, this universe – any child who has felt the thrill of fear and excitement at such thoughts stands a very good chance of becoming a science fiction reader. To say that science fiction is in essence a religious literature is an overstatement, but one that contains truth. SF is a uniquely modern incarnation of an ancient tradition: the tale of wonder. Tales of miracles, tales of great powers and consequences beyond the experience of people in your neighborhood, tales of the gods who inhabit other worlds and sometimes descend to visit ours, tales of humans traveling to the abode of the gods, tales of the uncanny: all exist now as science fiction. Science fiction’s appeal lies in combination of the rational, the believable, with the miraculous. It is an appeal to the sense of wonder.

Now, I've also gone on record as comparing the affect of the "sense of wonder" to the affect identified by Burke and Kant as "the sublime."  Burke and Kant do not make any distinctions as to whether the sublime affect arises from a phenomenon or a fictional work that has either isophenomenal or metaphenomenal characteristics, and as I pointed out here, Burke is as apt to find the quality of the sublime in works as far apart in phenomenality as HENRY IV and THE FAERIE QUEENE.

I have not previously referenced Arthur Schopenhauer's concept of the sublime.  Most of his meditations on it oversimplify its character due to his focus on its antipathetic, *mysterium tremendum* characteristics, as noted on this site:

For Schopenhauer, the sense of the sublime is attained by the aesthetic contemplation of an object that is inherently hostile to one’s will (or to human will in general).

This focus upon hostility, like Lewis' focus upon similar antagonistic states of mind, makes no allowance for the more "fascinated" state of sublimity.  However, in THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, the gloomy philosopher does conceive one notion of the sublime not found in Burke or Kant: the idea that the sublime can appear in differering *degrees.*

I won't quote Schopenhauer's particular examples of sublimity's degrees, since they are all predicated on what I deem an incomplete vision of the concept.  But the notion of such a concept having different degrees proves very useful for my investigations of the sublime in fiction, for I too conceive that there are differing degrees of sublimity according to the phenomenalities of a given work.

Since works of an entirely naturalistic phenomenality are always defined by limitations, in which it is deemed impossible to transcend the cause-and-effect universe, such works do not evoke "arresting strangeness" in Tolkein's sense.  They do, however, depict worlds in which "the typical" is frequently superseded by "the atypical."  This may include anything from an anomalous event, such as a bank robbery, to a personal epiphany, such as Conrad's narrator describes by catching a ship at sea in a mood of sublime repose.

This kind of sublimity/sense of wonder, which does not break with the order of causality, I term the "odd-sublime," in that whatever takes place in the naturalistic world does not transcend either the cognitive or affective aspects of that orderliness.

Works in the sphere of the uncanny and the marvelous, however, fall into a category best termed the "strange-sublime."  Marvelous works break with both the cognitive and affective aspects of normative order, while uncanny works break with the affective aspect appropriate to causal relations but largely stay within the cognitive sphere of causality.

And of course, it should go without saying that the aspects of the *tremendum,* which Lewis's schema captures so well, also fall in line with this division, so that his "tigers" can be repositories of the "odd-sublime," whether they inspire fear or fascination, while his "ghosts" and "gods" incarnate the "strange-sublime" in all its aspects of dread, awe, and fascination.

I should note in passing that "the odd-sublime," where it occurs in naturalistic fictional works, sometimes has such a strong familial relationship with the "strange-sublime" that it can cause makers of film-compendia to incorrectly associate the two.  Many isophenomenal films by Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, are listed in such film-compendia as belonging within the sphere of metaphenomenal works.  But a film like 1972's FRENZY carries none of the "strangeness" of 1960's PSYCHO, even though the two films share a basic subject matter (the actions of a psychotic killer).  If FRENZY is sublime at all, it is only "odd-sublime," and shares more kinship in its phenomenality with LORD JIM, while affectively speaking PSYCHO is a phenomenal kissing cousin to THE LORD OF THE RINGS.