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.