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Beyond Figuration, Below the Threshold
Some observations on
postmodernism and the
sublime
Nicoletta Pireddu
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Pireddu begins our discussion of transcendence and art as critical principle.
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1. Introduction
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Hegel's Aesthetics
marks a decisive turning point in
the relationship between the beautiful
and the sublime, with important
consequences for the conception and
the role of the work
of art in the modern
age. The inhibition of mental
faculties vis-à-vis
the vastness of nature, the tension
between attraction and repulsion entailed
by the incommensurable and the
unknown, the feeling of awe
for that which exceeds human
limits are all threats to
Hegel's aspiration to totality. Swerving
from the standpoints of Burke
and Kant, the Hegelian sublime
unfolds a harmful infinity: any
experience beyond figuration is negative
since it makes perceivers powerless
by compromising their expressive abilities.
No longer a source of
powerful emotions, nature is precisely
the main obstacle to human
superiority, the enemy against which
the spirit struggles. Civilization attests
to the victory of freedom
over blind necessity, becoming a
tangible sign of mankind's successful
appropriation of the phenomenal
realm.The liberation of the spirit
from the constraints of nature
goes hand in hand with
the development of representation.
This is the reason
why also within the realm
of art the presentable must
prevail upon the unpresentable, and
the finite must encompass the
infinite. Art accomplishes a miracle
of ideality whenever the depth
of spiritual signification penetrates the
exteriority and materiality of the
object, that is, whenever the
internal content of the spirit
finds an adequate form
in the sensible world.
The work of art is
generated by the encounter of
the individual and particular character
of nature with the universality
of aesthetic representation. If the
idea is in perfect harmony
with the concrete reality of
its form, the work embodies
artistic beauty.
We can therefore understand why Hegel
confines the sublime to the
lowest, hence most primitive, of
three progressively ascending artistic levels,
which he defines respectively as
symbolic, classical and romantic art.
The symbolic age which for
Hegel is typical of Oriental
civilizations represents the strife of
art simultaneously against a content
it cannot master and against
an unsuitable sensible form. The
association of form and content
provided by the symbol is
in fact abstract and unstable:
thus it materializes a world
of pure inventions but creates
no authentically beautiful work of
art. In the aesthetics of
the sublime, in particular, signification
exceeds objective reality and makes
the latter appear as a
subordinate and unworthy entity. Any
attempt to express a substance
that is inaccessible to concrete
intuition entails the disappearance of
expression itself. Hegel thus sets
up a contrast between, on
the one hand, the inability
to represent infinity through artistic
objectivity and, on the other
hand, the peaceful balance of
form and content that characterizes
the totality of classical art.
It is by achieving such
completeness that the work of
art can attain a more
advanced stage in the evolution
of the spirit. In this
process, Hegel shifts from the
negative sublimity of Indian art
and of Hebrew poetry which
is founded precisely upon the
recognition of human defectiveness vis-à-vis
an unrepresentable and ineffable divinity
to the absorption of the
ideal and excess within finitude.
Greek art incarnates the essence
of the beautiful: its calm
and its unalterable happiness are
the result of a perfect
accord of the idea with
its sensible
manifestation.Not only does Hegel's Aesthetics
reject the dialectical
relationship between the beautiful and
the sublime; with another remarkable
twist with respect to Burke,
it also cuts the link
between the sublime and the
tragic. Actually, some passages of
Burke's Enquiry
show that the difference between the
tragic and the sublime is
ultimately a matter of emotional
intensity. Both aesthetic experiences produce
delight: a mixture of pain
and pleasure, of sympathy and
self-preservation instinct, "hinders us from
shunning scenes of misery" (Burke
43) in actual life as
well as on stage.
Both
the tragic and the sublime
hence exert a cathartic influence
upon the spectators: they excite
their nervous systems, they awaken
their minds from a state
of indifference, without overwhelming them.
However, the effect of "imitated
distresses" (Burke 43) is "never
so perfect" (Burke 43) as
that of "real calamities" (Burke
43).1
In Hegel, on the contrary, the tragic no
longer expresses the struggle between
involvement and detachment, which qualifies
the sublime experience. Nor does
it dramatize the unresolved conflict
between man and nature, individual
will and destiny as in
the aesthetics of the Enlightenment.
Hegel's notion of the tragic
is in fact associated with
the realization of beauty in
the completeness of artistic
form.
For my present purpose I
want to emphasize that the
secularization of the sublime and
its consequent devaluation in Hegel's
thought, which I have illustrated
above, inaugurates an aesthetics of
the beautiful that prevails almost
unscathed up to our century.
Actually, the attempts to reconcile
the beautiful as a superior
ideal of unity, even though
beauty in post-Hegelian
2
is no longer an expression of eternity.
In other words, after Hegel
the beautiful loses its transcendent
value: it becomes transitory and
irremediably prosaic. Yet, ironically, it
still functions as the aesthetic
reference point, with respect to
which the sublime represents only
a transitional moment, an internal
component.
In the light of such
a prolonged tendency it is
significant to examine the transformations
that philosophy and literary theory
have undergone approximately in the
last two decades. With a
curious inversion of direction, the
sublime has been brought once
again to the foreground in
Europe
3
as well as in the United States, where
such cultural shift has taken on
wider proportions. The attempt to
isolate the causes of this
phenomenon may well seem reductive,
yet it is perhaps neither
accidental nor paradoxical that such
recent rediscovery of the sublime
goes hand in hand with
the development of some trends
of modernism and above all
of postmodernism. If we consider
the epigonic nature of much
contemporary thought and as a
corollary the frequent cannibalization of
literary tradition with parodic intent,
the retrieval of the sublime
out of the canonical works
of Longinus, Burke and Kant,
and its transposition into the
realm of megalopolises and simulacra
can be taken as signs
of disenchantment. The elevation produced
by the blend of pathos
and intellect in Longinus' great
writing, the Burkean sense of
annihilation in front of natural
wonders, or the experience of
the infinity of the Kantian
moral law undergo a radical
estrangement in a secularized and
polluted world. They cannot but
be decontextualized, and deprived of
their original aims. Once re-exhumed
from tradition, the voices of
these philosophers of the sublime
can only remind their postmodern
epigones that the arrow of
time proceeds in only one
direction: it is not possible
to recover the past in
an innocent or painless way.
This is tantamount to saying
that the impulse toward the
infinite which informs the sublime
cannot survive in the postmodern
universe of finitude. The mimesis
of the sublime can easily
shade off into
mimicry.At the same time,
however, it is precisely by
starting from the immanent quality
of contemporary reality that we
can interpret this renewed attention
to the sublime as a
sincere longing for transcendence, as
the formulation of an attempt
to reconstruct a "beyond" of
any kind. The surmise of
such beyond
although it is one which can
no longer be assimilated to
divinity, natura naturans
or a universal moral norm
allows us to overstep the
limitations of the postmodern condition.
From this perspective, the nostalgic
component of contemporary thought predominates
over disenchantment: by recuperating an
aesthetic category of the past
and by elevating it to
a model of experience it
is possible to get out
of the cognitive and emotional
impasse which distresses us, and
hence to nourish new hope
for spiritual
freedom.This paper proposes a survey
of the most relevant ways
in which the current cultural
debates have revisited the category
of the sublime in the
light of postmodernism. The works
of scholars who eventually have
a different origin such as
Adorno and Lyotard have been
in any case vigorously appropriated
overseas, and adopted as methodological
tools for the analysis of
American culture: hence I feel
justified in including them into
my discussion. Actually, in the
United States the interest in
literary and philosophical postmodernism has
been and continues to be
stronger than in Europe. Similarly,
American civilization seems to concentrate
all the positive and negative
qualities underlying the newly emerging
modes of twentieth-century sublime: the
cult of vastness, of speed,
of mass-empowerment, of commodification and
technology, the craving for excess,
the lacerating tension between
extremes.My aim is not so
much to question the philosophical
and ethical premises of postmodernism
as to provide a snapshot
of a cultural tendency. We
will hence step into the
postmodern epistemology and explore, from
within, the status and role
of the sublime. Through a
polyphony of literary and critical
texts we will try to
examine how disenchantment and nostalgia
merge or exclude each other
in the various forms of postmodern sublime.
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2. Some voices of postmodern hypsos
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Precisely disenchantment and nostalgia meet
in The Romantic Sublime,
where Thomas Weiskel proposes
a semiotic and psychoanalytic reading
of the sublime, which he
applies to nineteenth-century English poetry.
Nevertheless, although the critic's attention
is mainly concentrated on Romanticism,
the argument of the book
suggests significant consequences for our
age. My discussion will hence
privilege those aspects of Weiskel's
work from which the standpoints
of postmodernism can best
emerge.Weiskel finds in modernist irony
the major hindrance to the
survival of the Romantic sublime.
The latter must be "abridged,
reduced, and parodied as the
grotesque" (Weiskel p.6) in order
to appeal to the contemporary
sensitivity. In this respect, along
with irony, the postmodern soul
has inherited from modernism the
inability to feel terror or
any other strong emotion vis-à-vis
the infinite spaces that would
astonish the Romantic subject. Ironic
detachment "assures us we are
not imaginative adolescents" (Weiskel 6),
that is, it protects us
from the fear of pathos.
Separated from us by the
screen of critical distance, natural
infinitude now stirs only curiosity.
Yet, the overall observations of
the American scholar perhaps even
against his intention lead us
to deduce that the ideology
of the sublime is not
necessarily on the verge of
exhaustion in the late twentieth century.If on the one hand
a human sublime is nothing
less than an oxymoron& #173;since
the adjective "human" negates the
transcendence of limits that defines
the noun "sublime" on the
other hand it is equally
true that in the history
of literary consciousness "the sublime
revives as God withdraws from
an immediate participation in the
experience of men" (Weiskel 3).
The nostalgia and the uncertainty
of a mind devoid of
the traditional apparatus of spiritual
and ontological sublimation and hence
inevitably secularized trigger a search
for new experiences of elevation
in different contexts, and for
a language able to legitimize
them. The Romantic sublime functions
precisely as a form of
compensation
for the loss of transcendence. It becomes
"a major analogy", "a stunning
metaphor" (Weiskel 4). Actually, in
this text metaphor plays a
pivotal role, since it blends
the two elements that for
Weiskel determine the dynamics of
the sublime, namely, substitution and
rhetoric. It is precisely by
considering the persistence of such
notions from the Romantic age
to the postmodern condition that
we can extend the category
of hypsos
beyond the literary period here privileged,
yet without overlooking relevant
differences.For Weiskel alienation is the
structure of the sublime experience.
The latter is thus opposed
to the beautiful, which implies
reconciliation and participation in the
social order. In so doing,
Weiskel presupposes the creation of
a "credible god-term" (Weiskel 36),
of a "meaningful jargon of
ultimacy" (Weiskel 36) which can
mediate between the subject and
a reality which is no
longer natural, ultimately replacing such
reality. Therefore, in line with
Kant's aesthetics, the sublime adventure
of the Romantic "I" consists
of a paradoxical anagnorisis,I>of a kind of
overturning which transforms the source
of annihilation into an occasion
for "self-empowerment" (Weiskel 4) and
"aggrandizement" (Weiskel 4). The perceiver's
mind resolves the traumatic disequilibrium
by introjecting the external source
of power: the "I" identifies
with the infinity
of the object. However, Weiskel
modifies the context of such
mechanism: he reinterprets in psychoanalytic
terms the idealistic metaphysics underlying
The Critique of Judgement.
The three phases that
we can distinguish in the
Kantian sublime namely, an initial
correspondence between mind and object,
a subsequent disproportion between the
internal and the external, and
a new balance which sees
in excess the symbol of
a relationship with transcendence become
the respective stages of the
Freudian Oedipus complex. In so
doing, Weiskel exploits pivotal analogies
between Freudian psychoanalysis and the
early Romantic philosophies of the
sublime.Actually, Burke emphasizes the ambivalence
of delight,
by presenting it as an attractive
horror, as a negative pleasure
which derives from the coexistence
of the desire to be
inundated by the sublime with
the fear of being annihilated
by it. By combining affection
and privation, delight does not
grant "that smooth and voluptuous
satisfaction which the assured prospect
of pleasure bestows" (Burke 35).
Actually, as "the sensation which
accompanies the removal of pain
or danger" (Burke 34) it
sets up the mind "in
a state of much sobriety,
impressed with a sense of
awe, in a sort of
tranquillity shadowed with horror" (Burke
32). Kant, for his part,
confirms such a tension, which
he describes in almost analogous
terms: "since the mind is
not just attracted by the
object but is alternately always
repelled as well, the liking
for the sublime contains not
so much a positive pleasure
as rather admiration and respect,
and so should be called
a negative pleasure" (Kant 98).
Significantly, Freud's explanation of the
Oedipus complex is founded upon
the same dynamics: the child's
jouissance generated by the fantasy
of possessing the mother goes
hand in hand with the
anxiety of castration that the
threats of the father figure
awaken in him. In this
respect, the identification with the
sublime object in the reactive
phase of the Kantian sublime
corresponds to the child's identification
with the male parent: the
child acknowledges the censoring role
of the Superego over his
own Ego, a function which
legitimates paternal authority. In both
contexts we are confronted with
the same paradox: the subject
can overcome the threats to
self-preservation and to personal freedom
only by succumbing to a
new form of power. The
Romantic "I" is born precisely
of such bounded freedom, which
characterizes the sublime experience as
well as the Freudian family
romance.Nevertheless,
the identity that
The Romantic Sublime
describes in the process of its
formation is, in particular, the
poetic consciousness: the family romance
thus becomes a Künstlerroman;
the authority which is
simultaneously a source of delight
and of castration
anxiety is embodied the figure
of the literary precursor, which
inhibits and stimulates the epigone.
In this way, the "anxiety"
(Weiskel 83) associated with the
transcendence of the sublime can
be enriched with references to
Harold Bloom's notion of "anxiety
of influence,"
4
with which Weiskel, as a student of
Bloom, was unquestionably familiar. Starting
from the premise that the
history of poetry is indistinguishable
from poetic influence, Bloom traces
a genealogy of strong poets
who wrestle with their strong
precursors in order to appropriate
and simultaneously revise their literary
heritage. Through the mediation of
Bloom, Weiskel thus sees the
conflict between poetic generations as
the exemplary instance of agonistic
sublime a topic for which
Longinus is a more useful
reference than Burke or Kant.
Indeed in Longinus, as in
Weiskel's Romantic sublime, the poet's
counterattack takes on the form
of a mimesis of his
precursor, from which he derives
the possibility of elevation. Great
writing the Longinian hypsous
already recognizes "the burden
of indebtedness" (Weiskel 10) which
qualifies the Romantic poet's attitude vis-à-vis
his literary
past, and can eliminate such
burden precisely by being engaged
in a power struggle. Actually
in a passage of his
Peri hypsous
the "road to greatness" (Longinus 22)
is precisely "the emulation and
imitation of the great prose
writers and poets of the
past" (Longinus 22). Only in
this way can these "eminent
personages [be] present in our
minds and raise us to
a higher level of imaginative
power" (Longinus 23). Yet, Longinus'
homage to the authority of
his poetic fathers is not
exempt from the acknowledgment of
the belatedness and weakness of his
age:
At the same time, however, Longinus is equally assertive about
self-confidence and courage in art,
independently of the weight of one's
precursors:
The compromise between freedom and subjection, which is the common
ground for both the sublime
experience and the Oedipal crisis,
thus calls attention to the
issue of originality in the
artistic realm (Weiskel 32). This
question is particularly relevant for
postmodernism, yet in Weiskel's discussion
it does not overstep the
boundaries of the Romantic period.
In fact, if we extend
the horizon of our inquiry
beyond the limits imposed by
the American scholar, we can
realize that the ambivalence of
the Oedipal relationship between precursor
and epigone is nothing less
than the distinctive trait of
postmodern literature, and that such
conflict is resolved with the
same sense of "self-empowerment" entailed
by the Romantic sublime.I> The postmodern ephebus, too,
comes to terms with literary
tradition and overcomes the "burden
of indebtedness" with the introjection
of authority. Only by incorporating
the model that challenges his
own consciousness as a writer
can the postmodern epigone master
the anxiety of influence and
make his voice to be
heard. However, unlike the Romantic
poet, he acquires power and
freedom not so much by
elevating himself towards his precursor
as by dragging the latter
down, by discrediting his authority
from the pedestal to the abyss.
The son's
identification with the father hence
becomes the father's reduction to
the condition of son; the hypsos
deriving from
the emulation of the literary
past is replaced by the
jubilation for its blasphemous manipulation.
In this respect, postmodernism resorts
to parody in order to
deform the sublime adventure described
by Weiskel, and resumes its
ideology with disenchantment.Donald Barthelme's tale The Dead Father
offers perhaps
the most explicit and parodic
reenactment of Weiskel's and Bloom's
agonistic sublime in American postmodern
fiction. The carcass of a
gigantic father is being hauled
across the landscape by his
children who are engaged in
an impossible search for the
Golden Fleece. "Half buried in
the ground, half not" (Barthelme
4), "[d]ead but still
with us, still with us,
but dead" (Barthelme 3), this
paradoxical character is simultaneously moribund
and immortal, but still eager
to impose his weight and
power upon younger generations. The
collective quest through the archive
of mythological and literary tradition
thus proceeds hand in hand
with the children's attempt to
get rid of their father's
burden so as to acquire
freedom. In this respect, Barthelme's
story dramatizes the father-sons conflict
by blending the psychoanalytic and
the rhetorical implications that have
already emerged from
The Romantic Sublime.
As a parody of both the Freudian
family romance and the Künstlerroman
of the struggle
between postmodern epigones and literary
precursor, The Dead Father
revises the conditions for
self-empowerment: the only source of
strength for postmodern sons resides
in the lucid awareness of
their own weakness. "A Manual
for Sons" a handbook that
in the novel the children
receive from a visitor teaches
precisely how to come to
terms with the devastating paternal
influence. The solution does not
lie in the nostalgic dream
of a blank slate which
can obliterate their cumbersome historical
and literary heritage: in
fact
At the same time, however, the manual does not animate
any fantasy of self-aggrandizement which
might result as in
the Romantic sublime
from the epigone's identification with his
powerful precursor: "a son can
never, in the fullest sense,
become a father" (Barthelme 33).
Therefore, if according to the
paradoxical logic of Barthelme's tale
dead fathers can neither be
killed nor replaced by their
progeny, the anxiety of influence
can be cured only by
not taking paternal authority seriously.
The postmodern ephebi must set
up a dialogue with their
literary predecessors without considering them
the repository of truth any
longer. They must manipulate and
contaminate the masterpieces of the
past with their own parodic whim.
Significantly, when the Dead Father realizes the emotional indifference of
his children vis-à-vis his extraordinary
enterprises, he cannot but wonder:
"They don't seem very impressed...
Where is the awe?" (Barthelme
14). Barthelme's disenchanted answer is
that the awe generated by
the pathos
of the agonistic sublime has been
profaned and degraded to the irony of
bathos.We can extract other elements
from The Romantic Sublime
that are essential to
establish a different kind of
connection between the Romantic and
the postmodern sublime. Since the
Romantic poet transposes the experience
of excess to the rhetorical
level by making it ineffable.
Weiskel interprets the mind-object opposition
in linguistic terms, that is,
as a relationship between, respectively,
a signified and a signifier.
According to this semiotic rereading,
the natural sublime consists of
an excess on the level of
signifiers:
The motif of the wasteland of which Weiskel underlines the
continuity from Romantic to modernist
literature effectively depicts such shapeless
and meaningless horizontality. Once again,
Weiskel seems to oscillate between
the will to isolate the
specificity of the Romantic sublime
and the attempt
to emphasize its persistence in
contemporary reality. Actually, on the
one hand he takes the
wasteland topos
of much recent literature as a
mere "abridgement of the sublime
moments" (Weiskel 26) which confines
us to the second phase
of the Kantian system: we
thus "await futilely the restorative
reaction which never comes, except
ironically"
(Weiskel 26. My emphasis). On the other
hand, however, Weiskel does not
exclude the prospect of extracting
some significance from such experience
of loss, and, along with
it, the possibility of elevation
from such apparent
vacuity:
With these observations the American scholar comes very close to
some recent theories of postmodern
sublime, which I will examine
in detail below, that are
based precisely upon the idea
that indeterminacy is itself an
instance of presentation, a Darstellung
in the Kantian
sense of the term. Weiskel's
standpoint which is far more
post-structuralist than Romantic suggests, although
timidly, that "being" and "depth"
as evoked in the sublime
adventure have no independent ontological
status: "perhaps they are reifications
of the signifying power, spontaneously
created by the mind at
some zero degree, in the
mere reflex of making absence
significant" (Weiskel 28). This statement
by Weiskel is particularly useful
to introduce the position of
another American scholar who has
discussed the mechanism of the
sublime in contemporary reality: Fredric
Jameson. Being nostalgic of a
transcendent order for which there
is no room in the
postmodern condition, the "I" for
Jameson cannot but create what
in Weiskel is a new
"jargon of ultimacy" (Weiskel 36):
the quest of the postmodern
subject for a "god-term" (Weiskel
36) takes place within the
urban wasteland and in the
endless play of
signifiers.In Jameson's Postmodernism and
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
Weiskel's observations on
language and the sublime act
as a premise for wider
reflections on the contingency of
being and depth. The metaphorical
sublime is here presented as
a by-product of schizophrenia. Starting
from the very phenomenon that
Weiskel associates with elevation in
Romantic poetry "the breakdown of
the signifying chain" (Jameson 26)
Jameson underlines that like the
schizophrenic the postmodern subject is
confronted with disconnected forms and
impenetrable messages, to the point
of experiencing "pure material Signifiers"
(Jameson 27). Nevertheless, if the
emotional impact of such occurrence
initially consists of "anxiety and
loss of reality" (Jameson 27),
it then undergoes a positive
transformation: it becomes euphoria, and
reaches a sort of "intoxicatory
or hallucinogenic intensity" (Jameson 28).
Jameson reads in these terms
the whole postmodern hyperspace: the
prostration and the subsequent uplifting
in the reactive phase of
the sublime, that in Burke
and Kant derive from the
encounter with nature, are now
generated by simulacra. The exemplary
sources of delight
in the postmodern condition are
not so much the depth
and verticality of the Romantic
world as the glittering mirror
surfaces of the Hotel Bonaventure
and the labyrinthine layout of
its interior, which transcend "the
capacities of the individual human
body to locate itself, to
organize its immediate surroudings perceptually,
and cognitively to map its
position in a mappable external
world" (Jameson
44).The protagonist of "Lost in
the.Funhouse" a short story
by John Barth experiences the
same exhilarating sense of ego-loss
that Jameson associates with an
actual visit to this emblematic
building of downtown Los Angeles.
The mirror-maze of an amusement
arcade is for Ambrose "a
place of fear and confusion"
(Barth 72), a spatial dimension
which is impossible to seize.
Barth's Funhouse decenters and breaks
into pieces the character's subjectivity.
In this architectural and narrative
space, Ambrose's bewilderment on seeing
the "endless replication of his
image in the mirrors" (Barth
94) goes hand in hand
with his dizzy meditations on
the all-encompassing prison-house of language.
He ultimately accepts the fact
that not only he but
all of us "will never
get out of the funhouse"
(Barth 77) in other words,
that there is no substantial,
true reality beyond or underneath
the glossy surface of our
mirages. However, disenchantment does not
hinder him from extracting "some '
moment of truth' within the
more evident 'moments of falsehood'
of postmodern culture" (Jameson 47).
Ambrose finds a source of
self-empowerment and elation in the
decision to perpetuate falsehood, hence
in his metamorphosis from a
hostage to an author of
postmodern fiction, from a visitor
to an architect of stereoscopic
illusions: "He wishes he had
never entered the funhouse. But
he has. Then he wishes
he were dead. But he'
s not. Therefore he will
construct funhouses for others and
be their secret operator" (Barth
97).Paradoxically, the progressive de-realization of
phenomenal reality does not exclude
the possibility of attaining moments
of exaltation: in the hallucinatory
space of megalopolises, in special
effects, even in a technological
and dystopian society, it is
possible to experience "some new,
as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately
impossible, dimensions" (Jameson 36). Thus
in Don DeLillo's White Noise
the anti-human power
of technology turns back against
the inhabitants of Blacksmith the
moment a toxic cloud appears
in the sky. However, despite
the anxiety and the fear
that it stirs in the
characters, the cloud sublimates the
collective yearning for "something large
in scope and content" (DeLillo
6). At the beginning of
the story, "a weekly dose
of cult mysteries" (DeLillo 5)
is the only touch of
transcendence, albeit grotesque, in the
totally commodified life of Jack
and Babette Gladney. Yet, the
"airborne toxic event" (DeLillo 117)
quickly becomes the most intriguing
mystery to penetrate: the desire
for a confrontation with the
infinite and the unknown is
stronger than the obsession of
death with which the same
event haunts the protagonists. Why
can urban squalor and the
alienation of daily life be
a delight, Jameson asks. Ironically,
a conversation between Jack and
a nun lays bare how
and why some faith in
a beyond
can and must be kept alive
in the postmodern
world:
Jack ends up appropriating the moral of the nun's astonishing
speech, which is also the
condition for the survival of
the sublime in the postmodern chaosmos
of simulacra:
we must not take the
nun's dedication as a pretense,
but rather see her presence
as a dedication (DeLillo 319).
Ultimately, who cares whether there
are angels or chemical poisons
among the clouds? Who cares
whether the hues of the
atmosphere at sunset are a
natural prodigy or the by-product
of a chemical reaction? That
which matters is to feel
the impulse to raise our
heads to the sky and
wait until the next sunset
for our overdose of
awe.The euphoric ecstasy that the
metropolitan universe infallibly seems to
grant succumbs however to the
threat of a nuclear catastrophe.
Excluded from the sublime horizon
after Romanticism, nature reasserts itself
in its most devastating and
uncontrollable aspect. Whereas for Jameson
the postmodern hyperspace turns anxiety
into overwhelming hilarity, the scenery
of Alamogordo and Hiroshima evoked
in Rob Wilson's American Sublime
overturns these premises:
powerlessness supplants the sense of
self-mastery. The ineffability of the
atomic disaster re-opens the terrifying
abyss separating the object from
the subject's cognitive faculties, and
referentiality from language that gap
which Weiskel emphasizes in
The Romantic Sublime.
However, as Rob Wilson observes, the
prostration entailed by a nuclear
explosion cannot stimulate belief in
a transcendent entity: it can
only provoke deep bewilderment. The
poetic language of elevated passions
that arise from the reactive
phase of the Kantian sublime
dies both metaphorically and
materially
together with the subject which
is annihilated by the holocaust.
Therefore, after Hiroshima there is
no chance of survival for
the Burkean and Kantian distinction
between, on the one hand,
love for the beautiful seen
as that which the subject
can dominate and, on the
other hand, admiration for the
sublime because of its devastating
impact upon the mind. The
instinct of self-preservation which induces
the mind to withstand natural
forces capitulates to the threat
of irreversible annihilation. Far from
promoting that "empowerment of selfhood"
(Wilson 236) which the Romantic
poet can achieve through empathy
with nature, the nuclear sublime
deprives the subject of the
safe distance that should allow
him/her precisely to recuperate
mental faculties after the shock
of perception. Actually, in line
with the impulse of self-preservation,
Burke's delight
does not derive from the presence
of pain and danger but
rather from their removal. Whenever
such sensations oppress the mind
from too close as in
the case of a nuclear
catastrophe they are "merely terrible" (Burke
36).Angela Carter's novel Heroes
and Villains
calls attention to the ideological implications emerging
from the nuclear sublime, and
particularly to the fact that
contrary to the natural sublime
of Niagara Falls a spectacle
like that of Los Alamos
cannot be adopted as a
model of individual or national
empowerment. The novel imagines precisely
a post-nuclear society in which
the paradigms and the myths
that traditionally invest power with
the aura of legitimacy have
been dismantled. There is no a priori
distinction
between masters and slaves; in
Carter's post-apocalyptic fiction the seemingly
neat division between a "good",
rational civilization and "bad" primitive
tribes falls apart. Marianne the
female protagonist blurs the contrast
between heroic Professors and contemptible
Barbarians by choosing the jungle:
a Professor's daughter, she ultimately
becomes the bride of a
tribe's leader. However, with her
exotic adventure she experiences anything
but the noble savage's benign
innocence. Even more subtly, Carter
produces a further crack in
the heroes/villains conventional dialectics
by introducing in the novel
a third group of "non-connoted"
characters designated as "the Out
People" and described as mutilated
and marginalized creatures. They effectively
stand for a residual, radical
Otherness that hinders the reconstitution
or the overturning of the
binary opposition between dominators and
subaltern.In Heroes and Villains
the boundary-threatening effect of
the nuclear sublime is constantly
at work. In the hallucinatory
and implausible landscape of the
novel the laws of the
conventional natural world are
overwhelmed:
The physical integrity of human beings is equally
undone:
The disintegration of values, beliefs and codes of behavior that
follows the nuclear catastrophe also
erases the most evidently distinctive
feature of the human species,
namely, its outward bodily appearance.
One character in the novel
hence rightly observes: "Perhaps we
should seriously reconsider as to
whether form makes the man"
(Carter 110). Yet in the
aftermath of Carter's sublime experience
provides no surrogate process of
self-definition, and all the more
reason no subsequent prospect of
self-aggrandizement. Dwarfed by their lack
of self-identity, the protagonists of
Heroes and Villains
are equally unable to preserve
the specificity of their own
emotions: their attitude towards the
post-nuclear reality is actually a
mixture of horror, pastoral sentimentality,
despair, irony, complacent curiosity. The
psychological, ideological and aesthetic impasse
that Carter fictionalizes
in this novel is the
climax of a technological apocalypse
in which the subject is
"awe-struck not so much into
belief...as into uncertainty" (Wilson,
229).Therefore, the nuclear sublime invalidates
the compromise between freedom and
authority underlying both Weiskel's Romantic
sublime and Jameson's late-capitalist postmodern
sublime. So far we have
seen with Weiskel that the
Romantic poet can recover the
power of words only by
recognizing a superior order be
it divine or arbitrarily created.
Similarly, with Jameson we have
found a way out of
the postmodern impasse
by developing some "capacity for
gratification in an environment which
increasingly makes gratification impossible" (Lyric
Poetry 262). For its part,
the sublime nuclear experience of
Alamogordo as presented by Wilson
has destroyed any potential
reaction.
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3. A new "promesse du bonheur"?
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Wilson's meditations on the nuclear
sublime and on the limits
it posits to that which
is commensurable and sayable expand
a famous statement by Theodor
Adorno about the loss of
innocence in contemporary art after
the Nazi holocaust: "To write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (Prisms
34). The
subject's yearning for totality as
a source of identification and
aggrandizement remains unfulfilled. This ideal
can only be evoked as
unfeasible through its negation, namely,
through the complete disintegration of
reality resulting from devastating human
actions. For an aestheticsI> prostrated by such events
but simultaneously eager to remember
them, the sublime is not
so much a means of
reconciliation of mind and object.
Rather, it performs the function
of denouncing the reactive phase
of the Kantian scheme; it
reenacts the fusion of mind
and object with the aim
of undoing the expectation of
harmony on the formal level,
by making the work fragmentary and
incomplete.On the one hand, in
the readings of Weiskel, Jameson
and Wilson the continuity between
the Romantic and the contemporary
sublime is established on the
level of contents: actually, their
works stress the evolution of
the contexts that make such
aesthetic experience possible across time.
On the other hand, for
such philosophers as Adorno and
Lyotard it is in the
destruction of aesthetic form that
the sublime manifests itself. From
the section of The
Critique of Judgement
that Kant devotes to the sublime,
they resurrect the notion of
excess with respect not merely
to cognitive limits but also
to the structural boundaries of
the object of perception or
of the work of art.
Contemporary art thus undoes the
sort of Apollonean ideal that
led Stendahl to define beauty
as the "promesse du boneur,"
and in fact stages the
unresolved tension between fragment and
totality, between presentability and unpresentability,
that Adorno explains in the following
way:
We can take Paterson by William Carlos Williams as a mise en
sc»ne of Adorno's sublime. "Rigor of
beauty is the quest" (Williams
3), announces the poetic voice
in the Preface, and Williams
himself avows his effort "to
find an image large enough
to embody the whole knowable
world about [him]."
6
However he soon reduces his totalizing
ambition to a search for
the universal in the particular:
a statement by John Dewey
which had deeply struck him
becomes the aesthetic law of Paterson:
"The local
is the only universal, upon
that all art builds" (Williams
iii). The poem can be
read as a tension between
a local and a global
perspective, order and chaos, memory
and oblivion, presentable and unpresentable:
"In ignorance a certain knowledge
and knowledge,/ undispersed, its own
undoing" (Williams 4). Only the
end of life will arrest
such incessant flux of destruction
and reconstitution of temporary stability:
"Never in this world will
a man live well in
his body save dying and
not know himself dying; yet
that is the design" (Williams
4). Death should come as
the reconciliation of contrasts, as
the aesthetic apocalypse which makes
nothingness coincide with totality. The
moment of death would thus
be the sublime, epiphanic moment
in which the pattern, "the
design" (Williams 4) of Williams's
aesthetic world is no longer
hidden. In fact, however, there
is no apocalypse in Paterson,
which hence overcomes
precisely the traditional notion of
the sublime as "an infinite
presence" (Adorno 282). As I
have already suggested, Williams' sublime
is rather to be found
in the staging of formal
and conceptual "irreconcilable contradictions" (Adorno
282). Therefore, on the one
hand the poem develops alongside
the flow of the Passaic
River as an epic of
both a man and a
city: it hence seems to
follow a preestablished direction toward
a conclusion. Furthermore, the frequent
analogy between the river and
the serpent with "its tail
in its mouth" (e.g.
Williams 214; 233) grants Paterson
unity and circularity.
On the other hand, however,
Williams warns against a facile
reading which accommodates all details
within a reassuring interpretive grid:
"this is order, perfect and
controlled/ on which empires, alas,
are built/ But there may
issue, a contaminant,/...a dissonance"
(Williams 179). Ultimately, that beauty
which initially animated the poet's
quest turns out to be
quite distant from the ideal
of rigor with which it
was associated. It becomes "a
defiance of authority" (Williams 119),
and, first of all, of
the Apollonean authority of classical
beauty. The overall image of I>Paterson<
as "an
abstract design without design" (Williams
244) thus confirms the dynamics
of Adorno's sublime: it is
a poetic collage on the
threshold between composition and decomposition,
between the complex order of
Cubist elements and the ironic
dissolution of Dadaist
ones.Expanding on Adorno, Jean-Franˇois Lyotard
aims at defining the status
of modern and postmodern aesthetics
precisely in relation to two
different ways of articulating the
conflict between the presentable and
the unpresentable. The modern for
Lyotard is still characterized by
a recognizable and consistent form,
as well as by a
nostalgic desire of "solace and
pleasure" (Lyotard 81). Hence it
can simply allude to the
sublime as an absent content.
It is in postmodernism that
pleasure and pain are inextricably
intertwined, thus generating the authentic
sublime sensation. In line with
Kant's theory, Lyotard explains pleasure
as the by-product of the
idea that reason exceeds presentation;
pain, for its part, derives
from the awareness that imagination
is inadequate to illustrate the
concept. The postmodern element, therefore,
"would be that which, in
the modern, puts forward the
unpresentable in presentation itself" (Lyotard
81). In other words, the
postmodern deprives us of the
reassurance of formal integrity, and
thus becomes the obstacle that
hinders taste from matching the
universal consensus required by beauty.
In the absence of a
socially accepted and shared aesthetic
judgement, also the nostalgia for
an unreachable unity and totality
seems to become meaningless. In
the postmodern hence sublime
work, artistic representation is reduced to
a means for conveying "a
stronger sense of the unpresentable"
(Lyotard 81).With this explanation, Lyotard does
not interpret the postmodern as
an aesthetic and philosophical category
resulting from the evolutionI> of the modern and
thus linked to a specific
historical period. After associating the
postmodern to the condition of
knowledge in contemporary reality, the
French philosopher transforms such a
category into a mode of
being, into a state of
latent subversion that modernity itself
makes evident. Therefore, Lyotard concludes
the appendix to his report
on postmodernism by stating that
a "work can become modern
only if it is first
postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is
not modernism at its end
but in the nascent state,
and this state is constant"
(Lyotard 79). The very sublime
that in Hegel's AestheticsI> is devoured and neutralized
by the beautiful now acquires
new strength: precisely as an
internal component of the beautiful,
it can corrode the latter
and unmask its false ideal
of autonomy and translatability. The
return to the Kantian fallenness
of image-making, in this respect,
allows Lyotard to push representation
beyond the formal constraints at
the basis of the Hegelian
philosopy of art. It is
the postmodern sublime that grants
such freedom, one which Lyotard
wants to be
total.Precisely due to its unconditional
nature, this freedom cannot but
realize itself in literary and
figurative avant-gardes: not accidentally, in
order to exorcise the danger
of nostalgia which might subsist
in the postmodern sense of
epigonism, Lyotard ends up identifying
authentic postmodernity with the novatio
of Braque, Picasso
and Duchamp (Lyotard 80). Paradoxically,
such artists are generally located
on the opposite side of
postmodernism, since in their aesthetics
there is no room for
the feeling of exhaustion, nor
for the recognition of a
debt towards the past. Lyotard's
choice thus reinstates a desire
for transcendence, redemption, revolution all
ideals that only the domain
of art can now fulfill.
Postmodern epigonism is overturned into
the cult of a tabula rasa:
a new
promise of happiness can arise
from the invention of "new
rules of the game" (Lyotard
80) with the prospect of
a future emancipation. Yet, precisely
this palingenesis, that the sublime
must prepare, gives voice once
again to nostalgia. It looks
as if Lyotard's ultimate dream
were that of a post-postmodernist
artist "creating from nothingness"
(Opus Posthumous
127) and renewing "the world in a
verse" (Opus
129) like Wallace Stevens'
Ulysses.In his yearning for new
artistic premises, the French philosopher
shares with Stevens a complex
"idea of order" (Collected Poems
128) able to
pervade the works of art
with the sense of an
irrational and spiritual presence which
yet remains beyond the margins
of definition. In a sort
of Kantian via negativaI> the rhapsodic obscurity of
Stevens' poetry treats absence as
the mark of a transcendental
"other". Thus Stevens' poetic design
conceives of representation as boundless,
instead of enclosing it within
the limits of "the transparent
and communicable experience" (Lyotard 82).
It thus performs the function
that Lyotard assigns to the
aesthetic of the sublime, which
"allows the unpresentable to become
perceptible" (Lyotard 80) through allusion.
But this parallel with Stevens
betrays Lyotard's nostalgia for a
fecund imagination and for a
powerful self, precisely that imagination
and that self which in
postmodernist literature and philosophy have
irremediably collapsed onto forms of
global discourse. As a means
for accomplishing the novatio
of a new avant-garde,
Lyotard ends up reasserting the
pre-postmodern "American sublime" (Collected I> 130-31) to which Stevens
devotes a Iyric. As in
Stevens's lines, after Lyotard's envisioned <
I>tabula rasa "...
the sublime comes down/ To the
spirit itself" (Collected
131). The spring for an
aesthetic revolution must be the
energy of a poetic "I"
which finds within itself the
strength for regeneration. Ultimately, the
road of Lyotard's sublime does
not lead to the parodic
disfiguration common to much postmodern
writing. It rather returns to
Stevens's oracular, supreme fiction namely,
to a work of art
equal to the idea of
God, struggling with the inaccessibility
of the abstract, "Invisible or
visible or both:/ A seeing
and unseeing in the eye" (< I>Collected
385).
The plurality of standpoints vis-à-vis
the sublime which contemporary reality
invokes at the levels of
both form and content suggest
a far more articulated overview
than the one which emerges
from the observations of the
Italian scholar Gianni Carchia. Swerving
from some passages of his
Retorica del sublime,
I believe that the many
aesthetics of the sublime produced
by our age do not
always and in the same
way attest mankind's awe for
the realm of ideas from
the standpoint of a humiliated
finitude.
7
Similarly, they do not
necessarily decree the impossibility of
sustaining such radiant ideals from
the standpoint of that bewitched
reality into which life is
inescapably caught.
8
On the one hand as
the nuclear sublime demonstrates
the unreachable and unrepresentable
"elsewhere" weighing on human finitude
can be anything but radiant.
On the other hand, postmodern
aesthetics can draw sublime situations
and elements precisely from the
bewitched reality of a prosaic
universe and not in opposition
to it. Although devoid of
the eschatological dimension, the postmodern
condition does not forsake the
hope of salvation. However humiliated,
our finitude aspires to redemption
by positing as Lyotard shows
an aesthetic infinite, by finding
a paradoxical transcendence in the
immanence of the work of
art itself. Better than any
previous age, postmodernism thus seems
to embody the dynamics contained
in the etymology of the
term "sublime." "Sub limen" designates
an elevation not so much beyond
as precisely below
the limen,
where the latter term refers to the
threshold taken specifically as the
architrave of ancient gates.
The soul
uplifted by the sublime is
thus raised to a sufficiently
high position but it is
not totally unleashed. Not without
some irony, I am tempted
to think of the post-metaphysical
world discussed in this paper
as the most authentic ground
for such bounded aggrandizement. There
is no chance and no
need, either, to get so
high as the sky; let's
stop a bit lower and
content ourselves with the aura
of our everyday, secularized, fetishized
life.
9
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Sources
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Adorno, T. Aesthetic Theory.
Trans. C.Lenhardt. Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul,
1984.___ Prisms.
Trans S.Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1981.Barth, J. Lost in
the Funhouse.
New York: Anchor Press,
1988.Barthelme, D. The Dead Father.
Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1975.Bloom, H. The Anxiety of Influence.
New York: Oxford U P,
1975.Burke, E. A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of
our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful.
Oxford and New York: Oxford U P,
1990.Carchia, G. Retorica del sublime.
Bari: Laterza,
1990.Carter, A. Heroes and Villains.
Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1969.DeLillo, D. White Noise.
New York: Penguin,
1984.Hosek, C and P.Parker
eds. Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism.
Ithaca: Cornell U P,
1985.Jameson, F. Postmodernism, or
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham: Duke U P,
1991.Kant, I. Critique of Judgement.
Trans. W.S.
Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1987.Longinus, On Great Writing.
Trans. G. M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company,
1991.Lyotard, J.F. The
Postmodern Condition.
Trans G. Bennington and B.Massumi. Manchester U P,
1986.Nancy, J.L. ed. Du Sublime,
Pairs: Belin,
1988.Russo, L. ed. Da Longino
a Longino. Palermo: Aesthetica,
1987.Stevens, W. Opus Posthumous.
New York: Vintage Books,
1990.___ The Collected Poems.
New York: Vintage Books,
1990.Weiskel, T. The Romantic Sublime.
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins U P,
1986.Williams, W. C. Paterson.
New York: New Directions,
1963.
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Notes
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1
The merely
quantitative difference between a tragic
clearly emerges from Burke's further
observations in the same chapter:
"Chuse a day on which
to represent the most sublime
and affecting tragedy we have;
appoint the most favourite actors;
spare no cost upon the
scenes and decorations; unite the
greatest efforts of poetry, painting
and music; and when you
have collected your audience, just
at the moment when their
minds are erect with expectation,
let it be reported that
a state criminal of high
rank is on the point
of being executed in the
adjoining square; in a moment
the emptiness of the theatre
would demonstrate the comparative weakness
of the imitative arts, and
proclaim the triumph of the
real sympathy" (Burke,
43). 2 For instance in the works of
Solger e Vischer. See G.
Carchia, "La secolarizzazione del sublime," Retorica
del sublime:
119-32.3 Two collections of critical essays can
be representative of this renewed
and widespread interest in the
sublime among contemporary European scholars:
Da Longino a Longino, edited
by L. Russo and Du Sublime,
edited by J. L.
Nancy.4 The anxiety of influence perhaps explains
also the surprising fact that
Weiskel a student of Bloom
mentions the latter only occasionally
(for instance on p. 27
for the concept of "daemonization").
In fact, The Romantic Sublime
is impregnated with
Bloomian reminiscences in its use
of the concept of ambivalence
and in its Oedipal dynamics
between literary
generations.5 This is what Weiskel defines as
"metaphorical sublime," since in order
to overcome the excess on
the level of signifiers a
term must be substituted in
the sintagmatic chain, and a
signified is thus produced. Therefore,
this kind of experience is
the reader's sublime, because it
reproduced the reader's hermeneutic activity.
In the case of an
excess on the level of
signifieds, the sublime is "metonymical:"
in order to avoid a
kind of "death by plenitude" (27)
the poet's mind must project
and diffuse such excess of
meaning according to temporal and/or spatial
contiguity.6 The quote is taken from the
beginning of Chapter 58 of
Williams' Autobiography, where he talks
about the genesis of Paterson.
The New Directions
edition of Paterson
includes some autobiographical passages by
Williams as an introduction to
the poem. See Paterson:
iii.7 "ammirate testimonianze della realtà delle idee
a fronte della nostra umiliata
finitudine" (Carchia
143).8 "I'insostenibilità di quegli ideali luminosi a
fronte della realtà stregata in
cui la vita non smette
di avvolgersi" (Carchia
143).9 I am grateful to Professor Remo Bodei
for his seminar on the
beautiful, the tragic and the
sublime at UCLA. All remaining
errors are of course
mine. | ||