The most useful idea in Weiskel's first chapter is his three-part structure of the sublime experience. The first stage is the status quo, marked by a standard or habitual meaning. The second stage involves a dramatic and un-symbolizable break from the preceding system of meaning, leaving the experiencer without the means to make sense of the experience. The third stage solves the break, with the destabilized mind "constituting a fresh relation between itself and the object" (24). Weiskel's enumeration of these stages is immediately helpful because it allows insights like the nearly throw-away line in which he posits that modernist literature hovers inescapably in the second phase, not allowing the renewal of meaning (26).
It must be noted that underlying Weiskel's structural account of the sublime experience is a fundamentally psychodynamic perspective. He's a careful reader of Freud, suggesting that the oedipus complex itself mirrors the three-part structure of the sublime. The passing of the oedipus complex becomes, in Weiskel's view, the sort of transcendent move that typifies the sublime experience. In light of this connection, I'm interested in the flow of desire between stages in both of these models.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
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I don't think it would be amiss to also recall the comment of Saint Augustine: "They read, they choose, they love....In reading, they choose, and, in choosing, they love." Weiskel is belated...Bloom, who makes a career of displaying his utter belatedness in regard to "sublimity and appreciation, and the sublimity of appreciation," was there long before. Who can forget the antithetical motto that began his book on Stevens? "It must be broken, it must not bear having been broken, it must seem to have been mended." "It must be abstract, It must change, It must give pleasure." "One must have a mind of winter, or reduce to the first idea, One must learn that to live in the First Idea is not to be human, One must reinvent the first Idea." It's a mere affirmative stance toward the problem of the "function" or "value" of the logos withing an ethos-logos-pathos dialectic; an affirmation which, one could say with a good deal of confidence, by necessity MUST be a distinguishing mark of followers of the Sublime. Indeed, his triumph over the deconstructionists was his pragmatic claim that, at the far edges, ABSOLUTE meaninglessness, and ABSOLUTE meaningfulness embrace. Outside of the absolute, by which they are conditioned, the only difference is a rhetorical or tropological difference--a difference in stance, depending upon the temperamental tropes "Freedom" or "Un-Freedom," "Meaningfulness" or "Meaninglessness." Bloom does well to illustrate this point by positing Emerson as embodying the former stance, Nietzsche the latter. Certainly, Weiskel is simply vulgarized Bloom on this matter, however Bloom preceded him in going to great lengths to vulgarize Kenneth Burke's marvelously ambivelant assertion that, "Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is meaning, there is persuasion." The persuasion concerns whether one "beholds" or "regards," once the wounded Ego has been turned in upon the self, haha...
ReplyDeleteAs a side note...for a rather Burkean version of sublimity, I think that in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov had a dreadful nightmare that had a lot to do with this problematic (though we all know what "choice" he made)...it's worth rereading.
I think it is also helpful to note that every "pathos" or sublimity, necessarily becomes just another ethos or "status-quo." In light of that, Weiskel's judgement of "modernist literature" is valid under the designation to which he appoints it (which is rather controversial IMO), that is, endlessly aporic, tragic, feebly relapsing back into crisis and disjunction. Again, the judgement is his, though it reeks of a displaced progressivism in regard to "meaning." Freud, like Dostoevsky in another respect, over-valued what he believed to be "the cure." Nietzsche died mad and uncontaminated by the non-entity of speech--that is, having identified with dionysos or eternal recurrence, that being a pathos that is its own ethos, a "law unto itself," haha!
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, thanks for your comments. I didn't know anyone was reading my ramblings. I wish I was more prepared to respond in the way your comments deserve. I've read Weiskel; I haven't read Bloom -- at least not on this matter. I'll have to rectify that, and hopefully soon. What I liked about Weiskel is that he formulates an "affirmative stance" in terms of psychoanalytic principles. His use of the oedipus complex to structure the experience of the sublime "socializes" is into the roles represented by "mother," "father," and "child." These relationships can then be contextualized in a particular historical setting. In other words, aesthetic experience becomes a drama of individuation, which becomes a theory of the social. If Bloom does that as well (especially in relation to Stevens, who's on my reading list), I'll have to check it out.
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