Rob Wilson and the American Sublime

I'm not sure if Rob Wilson's The American Sublime is a good book, but it's definitely a tiresome one. It's written in that hyper-theoretical style that distances itself from making immediate sense. That isn't to say it doesn't make sense, but the reader who struggles mightily through the dense, jargon-laden, poorly-crafted prose is often not quite sure. And by "the reader," I mean me. And a good example comes quickly; here's the first sentence of the introduction:

"If there is strength in America's size and numbers, there is also a threat posed to the subject of that sublimity: "Hey you! I say to the H-bomb. / Miami Vice says to me" is the way Bob Perelman stages this struggle between the democratic ego and the forces of technology and information that now threaten to magnify, dwarf, and abolish it."

Prose this bad should never have been published. I'm driven crazy by the first use of the word "that." What does "that" refer to? Well, America's "size and numbers." And why does the author so boldly assume the reader is going to agree that America's size and numbers are sublime? It would seem the author's priority, as an academic writer, would be to support such an assumption rather than sneak it in. And to develop a complex argument by both refusing to state it and relying on a poetic snippet to (barely) exemplify it is inefficient and off-putting. All of the parts of the book I read utilized this same frustrating style. There's also a befuddling attempt on Wilson's part to employ the word sublime in some form or another in nearly every sentence.

If value must be found in the opening sentence, it is that it gestures toward Wilson's primary argument (if parsed very carefully). According to Wilson, the American sublime involves one's interaction with a vast landscape of nature and technology that gets internalized, creating a subject implicated in American power and ambition. Through the twentieth century, the form of the sublime changes strategies in its relationship with American power, ending with postmodernism, which challenges "the long-standing American sacralization of force" (10).

I'm honestly not certain what I make of this argument, as it often comes across as tautological. For example, one of Wilson's goals is "to provide a definition of the American sublime as a poetic genre that implicates the lyric ego in the production of America as a site of the sublime" (9). So the sublime produces the sublime? Um, okay.

Edmund Burke and the Sublime

Edmund Burke insists that aesthetic responses are first and foremost physiological responses. When he suggests that the sublime operates by terror and the beautiful operates by love, he means that one has the physiological experience of these "passions" (e.g. tension or relaxation). As physiological reactions, these extreme experiences elude reason. Confronting the sublime, Burke writes that "the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it."

Up to this point, there is an exclusive relationship between subject and object: each object gets experienced directly by the subject. But this relationship enters language. Burke contends that words elicit a physiological reaction based ontheir uses in the subject's past, even though these connections are no longer conscious:

"Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds, which being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil [...] and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of their occasions."

From this perspective, words create physiological responses because they refer back to earlier experiences to which the word was applied. Rather than being a signifier in a hermetic signifying system, the word possesses a history for the subject. Each use of a word relies upon earlier uses. The direction of this movement points back to childhood. Although Burke doesn't mention this specifically, the word comes to activate childhood memories, those experiences during which children learn language. A complex word gets laid over an experience from the past, and when that word is used, the past is in some way recovered.

In this argument, Burke provides the warrant for a shift to Oedipal terminology. He takes this step fully when he writes about the father: "[t]he authority of the father, so useful to our well-being, and so justly venerable upon all accounts, hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental authority is almost melted down into the mother's fondness and indulgence." The authority of the father is associated with the sublime, while the love of the mother is associated with beauty. Our aesthetic responses to objects take place within this paradigm of memories.

In spite of these similarities, however, it rewards the careful reader to distinguish between the "delight" of Burke's sublime and the pathology of Freud's repression. Burke describes the sublime as a terror mitigated by distance. He writes that "terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close." For Burke, the viewer is not truly endangered by the sublime object. Instead, the somatic symptoms are aesthetically recreated to enforce the sublimity of the law-giving father. In this way, the initiate is brought into existing social relations, a sublation involving the assumption of social power through the denial of selfhood.

In speaking of the Deity as the ultimate authority, Burke writes: "whilst we contemplate so vast an object [...] we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him." But he reiterates the social value of this subjection by again stressing the benefits gained through this process: "If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving benefits, we cannot but shudder at the power which can confer benefits of such mighty importance." The sublime is a delight because it dramatizes one's initiation into the law of the father, through which the assumption of power takes place. To relive the terror aesthetically is to reenact one's emergence into social power.

Sigmund Freud's theory of repression and the unconscious focuses on drives which cannot be sublimated into aesthetic responses, i.e. energy which must be repressed. For Burke, that which exceeds reason is given a harmless aesthetic release as the sublime, while for Freud the uncanny represents the return of the repressed in a truly terrifying form: "among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns" ("The Uncanny"). Whereas Burke posits a vast, obscure sublime into which one both disappears and is created, Freud presents "[s]evered limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm" as examples of a self constructed as guilty and implicated in crimes of desire that exceed the power of aesthetics to sublimate. While Freud's conception creates its own problems for the subject's autonomy, it avoids what is, for Burke, ultimately a complicity with the status quo based on one's acquiescence to the authority of the sublime object.

Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore is justly appreciated for her carefully detailed poems that reveal her observation of the natural world. If, as she claims, "it is human nature to stand in the middle of things," then she does so in her poetry, bringing objects (and especially animals) closer to the reader.

But the poem from which the above quote comes, "A Grave," also shows a bit of the symbolism she is often credited with avoiding. This becomes apparent right at the beginning of the poem. Moore often comes up with titles that lead directly into the poem, the classic example being "The Fish," which begins as if the title was the beginning of the first line. "A Grave" is less clearly this type of beginning, causing the reader to wonder if the poem is titled "A Grave" because it concerns one's final resting place, or because those words begin the first phrase: "A grave man looking into the sea." This ambiguous beginning creates a situation in which neither the grave nor the sea (or the man) are objects-in-themselves; they operate as figures for one another.

Moore explains about the sea "you cannot stand in the middle of this." It is too vast and, more importantly, filled with the emptiness of death. I hope I can be permitted such an oxymoronic phrase because, although Moore insists that "the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave," she nonetheless describes it in great detail, as is her general poetic tendency.

But it seems that these descriptions do not describe the truth of the sea as an object; the end of the poem explains that the activities of the ocean only create an appearance: "and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbouys, / advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink-- / in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness." Some might read this and say that the ocean is given pure object status; it is without consciousness; it is only the activity within and around it. But my reading, and one that I feel may have been intended during its composition, assigns some importance to the human understanding of this pure object. In other words, the poem's project is not just to achieve objectivity; it is to understand human powerlessness in the face of such a vast object. The poem deliberately starts with the human perspective, explaining the desire to understand.

In a way, this poem replicates the Romantic sublime in which the vast natural object traumatizes the person who experiences it. But the resolution of the experience is very different; the poem doesn't chart the speaker's restorative revelation at the end of the poem. The experience is so traumatic, in this sense, that the human disappears in the face of it. In the same way that the grave symbolizes death, the ocean initiates the sublime and terrible death of subjectivity, so vast and uncontrollable that it abolishes the human.

But this is nonetheless a human drama. A poet still writes the poem; a reader still reads it. The victory of the object is one that is witnessed by the vanquished human, and though the poem doesn't chart the viewer's existential angst, it nonetheless proceeds through meaning-making systems of those whose meaningfulness has been brought into question. Very ambiguous, but Moore's line that things interact with the ocean "neither with volition nor consciousness" is written in language and understood through symbolim, giving at least some hope that our actions are not meaningless.

More on Weiskel on the Sublime

In my last post, I described the temporal experience of the sublime as outlined by Thomas Weiskel. But Weiskel moves beyond this observation to consider the meaning of such experience. He finds a parallel in Freudian psychology that, though certainly complicating matters, integrates the sublime into another framework which has shown to have many applications. I haven't decided whether or not this theorization, although fascinating, can be used to help me make sense of modernist poetry.

First, I'll try to summarize Weiskel's expanded narrative of the sublime. He argues that the sublime object (such as a massive object in nature) initiates a desire to be inundated, which in turn sets off the subject's anxiety about such an inundation, which inaugurates a reaction against the desire for inundation, which brings about the active defense of the self. Parallel to this process is the oedipus complex in which "inundation" is the attempt to possess the mother, the anxiety of inundation is the appearance of the superego which threatens castration, and the "reaction formation" that offers defense is the identification with the father.

Next, one must ask what this parallel narrative offers us. It seems to me that one benefit to Weiskel's attempt to map these two ideas on one another is that it encourages an analysis of aesthetics that is particularly psychological. While I don't pretend to know everything about aesthetics, my exposure has usually focused on formal elements. Order or chaos, harmony or dissonance -- the properties of the artwork itself are often taken as evidence of its aesthetic value. But Weiskel encourages a dynamic psychological understanding of aesthetic responses. Those who refuse to find the sublime experience Freudian may find, in refuting Weiskel, that it is more appropriately Lacanian or Kristevan (or whatever) -- but it is inevitably psychological.

But this is all very general. The question remains: is this specific idea useful? Can I use it to approach poetry, especially of the modernist period? Honestly, I'm having a hard time at the outset. There could be two reasons. First, it seems easier to me to identify an oedipal arrangement in narratives than in lyrical poetry. (Again, I need to investigate this further, but it will have to wait).

Second, the poetry I'm reading now is from the modernist era, and this group of poets, though diverse, seems interested in putting the mind through a very different set of challenges. The sublime objects in nature confronting the Romantics are absent in modernism. Today I read Hart Crane, who, at the beginning of "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," writes: "The mind has shown itself at times / Too much the baked and labeled dough / Divided by accepted multitudes." This is not the fate of the mind in Wordsworth or Shelley. I started reading William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All," which also begins with an observation about the mind in an anti-Romantic condition: "There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world."

While I have more thinking to do about these two poets, the traumas of modernism, the divisions and barriers affecting the mind, are more quite different than the experiences of vast nature in Romanticism (e.g. Wordsworth's "The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion"). This is an unsatisfactory investigation of Weiskel's theory, of course, but I intend to keep these ideas at the ready as I continue reading.

Thomas Weiskel on the Sublime

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.