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.

Jacques Lacan, the Mirror Stage, and the Double

"The Mirror Stage" must be the most productive few pages of theory ever written. I go back again and again to the ideas in this very short paper Jacques Lacan delivered in 1949 (though I understand its genesis came several years earlier). For me, the concept of the fundamental alienation at the heart of subjectivity caused by the gulf between the image of wholeness we see in the mirror as a baby and the ungainly mass of our uncontrollable somatic functions at that stage of development is widely applicable.

In an essay for school, I called the image in the mirror "that most thoroughgoing of all archetypes: the self." The image is that through which we conceive of ourselves. I have productively used this concept when looking at bildungsromans in which protagonists form an idealized image of their self sufficiency -- and then proceed to fail to reach that image in various ways.

But the mirror stage also seems productive in terms of the "double" that I've been yakking about recently in relation to Pound and Eliot. If the self and the image of the self are both selves, then by definition we're witnessing a doubling. The double is uncanny for the very reason Freud points out: "this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed" (Freud, "The Uncanny"). The double, in this sense, might often be seen as the return of the earlier assemblage of uncontrolled drives. One is confronted not just with a strange but familiar version of one's self; this uncanny interlocutor is by turns a terrifying and embarrassing eruption of one's own ghastly lack of control.

It seems this idea has some connection, in reverse, to one of the ideas in Herman Rapaport's Between the Sign and the Gaze. Rapaport is interested in the fantasm as a frame for the viewing of another thing. His example is Plato's allegory of the cave, which requires that one imagine a cave in order to understand something about reality. That is, it is not necessary that the cave itself actually exist; it is a stage upon which an intellectual drama unfolds. Rapaport feels that this fantasm, i.e. the imagined cave, must be offered in order to represent the unrepresentable. According to this view, philosophy and literature are filled with fantasms.

Rapaport reads the mountain in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mont Blanc as more than simply an image; it is instead a frame that allows the staging of desire, which for Rapaport means an encounter with the libidinal experiences of our earliest years. It is not a signal of the return of the repressed, but more like a forum through which our desire is articulated.

It may not be any great insight that the double I've been discussing seems to exemplify Rapaport's fantasm, but it does seem useful to continue considering the mirror stage as a fundamental forging not just of an alienated self, but a self that carries the burden of another, less developed, self with it all the time. Though it always affects our ability to make meaning of our interaction with the world, the actual imago itself may appear from time to time to haunt us.

Spooky Beautiful T. S. Eliot

I enjoy Eliot's poetry. I understand that he held some very unpleasant social, racial, and political opinions, but the poetry is finely crafted and often...beautiful. That's such a dangerous word, of course, because it announces a value judgment so boldly. Any use of the word "beautiful" is condemned to spend the next several paragraphs justifying it -- a justification usually unsatisfying both to those who agree and those who disagree. But it's fortuitous that I just wrote about Freud's "The Uncanny" yesterday, because I've selected a section of Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday" whose beauty seems to depend on an imagined image loaded with uncanniness. Here it is, the first stanza of Section III:

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

Eliot sets up a doubling of the poetic speaker. The speaker looks down the stairs and sees himself (i.e. "The same shape") struggling. This is uncanny in a few ways. First, all doublings throw into question the child's separation from the original caregiver (perhaps the mother). Second, and in a related way, there's the temporal aspect of the self on the second level of stairs as the adult version of the child on the first level.

Thirdly, and perhaps most important to Eliot's project in "Ash-Wednesday," the double has a spiritual aspect. Freud follows Otto Rank in pointing out that: "the 'immortal' soul was the first double of the body. The invention of such doubling [is] a defence against against annihilation." Freud suggests that this invention is child-like, representing the extreme narcissism of childhood. He argues that, "when this phase is surmounted, the meaning of the 'double' changes: having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death." The protective double created during one stage of development becomes a terrifying figure for the adult.

The quoted excerpt of Eliot's poem is fascinating because it places the speaker in the perspective of the adult who contemplates himself as a child (rather than the adult contemplating the immortal soul created by child-like thinking). The relationship between Eliot's doubles is perhaps even more uncanny than Freud's because of the temporal overlap of the former. The adult on the second stair and the child on the first coexist; the struggles of the child are ongoing. Even though he is on the second level, the "deceitful face of hope and of despair" plagues him. In other words, the narcissistic stage of childhood is not surmounted at all -- as evidenced by his continued reflection on himself as a child.

What makes this so moving is it throws into question the speaker's whole spiritual struggle. It's no accident that Eliot's speaker is climbing stairs, which acts as a figural motif indicating spiritual enlightenment and the path toward heaven. The coexistence of the second floor adult with the first floor child problematizes the notion of spiritual progress. The "devil of the stairs" appears to be narcissism, the perpetual concern with the self. (Though a full reading of Section III continues the journey...and continues the problematization).

All this commentary may seem to be moving too far away from the poem itself, but this interpretation is supported by some textual evidence. For example, the stanza rhymes (or nearly rhymes) insistently (stair, banister, air, wears, despair) -- except for the word "below," the sound of which jolts the reader. The propulsiveness of the rhymes pushes one forward, but there is that nagging "oh" sound pulling the reader back down again. Also, the inclusion of the second "of" in the last line maintains iambic meter, which is a regular and pleasing rhythm, but it oddly departs from a more standard conjuntion that would simply join "of hope and despair" rather than "of hope and of despair." In other words, the phrasing is regular and irregular at the same time. This doesn't just reproduce rhythmically the semantic contradiction of simultaneous hope and despair, it arrays double against double, adult against child, and self-centeredness against spiritual purity.

Okay, I wasn't able to come back to why I find this "beautiful." That's maybe too large a task for tonight. Perhaps I'll be better prepared to make a rousing return to that idea after I read Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime later this week.

Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny"

The first section of Freud's essay examines the etymology of the German word heimlich. Rather than being an exercise meant to discover clarity and univocality, Freud's investigation leads to a productive ambivalence of meanings. Heimlich means "familiar and comfortable" as well as that which is "concealed and kept hidden." Freud reads in his linguistic evidence the inability of language to refer to the world unambiguously.

This is a useful observation for my purposes for two reasons. First, it effectively undercuts that objectivist strain of modernism that believes in the possibility of scientific accuracy available in carefully controlled and concise language. Second, it reintroduces psychological processes into the poetic attempt to make meaning. That is, language is not solely a system of cognitive or intellectual meaning; it is also a system through which desire moves...or attempts to move. Language, like the self, is the site of struggle, the locus of desire and its restriction.

Freud identifies two temporal transformations that cause the uncanny. The first is the transformation from child to adult; the second is the transformation from primitive culture to civilized culture. (Please note that several of the terms in this last phrase probably need quotation marks to indicate pointed irony, though ambivalence is probably more what I'm aiming for). Freud examines literary tales to identify several tropes and how they make the transformations on each of the stated levels. Since I don't have the energy to write about all of the tropes raised by Freud, I'll choose "the double" because I think it may be applicable to some of the modernist poetry I've been reading.

(There's probably a larger conversation I need to have about my views on poetry itself. Though I recognize I need to provide a better explanation of how I read lyric poetry as distinct from other literary forms such as narrative fiction, I don't think I can accomplish it just yet. There will hopefully be more to come on this topic when I read Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism in early August).

Ezra Pound's poem "The Rest" provides an opportunity to examine ambivalence, uncanniness, and desire all through the figure of the double. "The Rest" takes as its subject the American poets Pound left behind when he became an expatriate. He speaks to those like-minded artists who are left to starve in the harsh artistic barrenness of America. In a way, its an address to his double, the person he may have become had he stayed in the U.S. This haunting double raises the problem of the uncanny: America is both the "familiar and comfortable" home, but it is that which must be put behind in order to emerge as a worldly artist.

Like Freud's ambivalent heimlich, Pound's exile at the end becomes troubled by its own opposite. The poem's final stanza hollows out the triumph he seems to be claiming: "Take thought: / I have weathered the storm, / I have beaten out my exile" (17-19). Weathering a storm means surviving a difficulty, but it also means he was seen safely through. Weathering can be seen to wear one down or slowly dissolve the substance of being, but it might also be viewed as the force which shapes the remaining substance. "Beaten" is also ambivalent. In one way, the speaker physically beats his double, who remains at home in America to read Pound's poem about how they've been broken. To beat a path means to make an escape, but also to wear down by traveling back and forth. In a figurative sense, Pound travels back to America by writing of it. Like the ontological necessity Hegel describes in the master/slave relationship, Pound is an exile only because he is an American.

It might be too much to say that "The Rest" is uncanny, but it does reveal an ambivalent transformation between childhood and adulthood as the speaker compares a later self to another possiblity for his earlier self. And, though I don't have time to examine it more closely, there also seems to be something going on at the sociological level. Rather than Freud's primitive-to-civilization, however, Pound might actually reverse the trajectory. Those in America who love the beauty of old-world European high culture are "thwarted" by the "systems" and "control" promoting what Pound calls "false knowledge." Heimlich is the European home from which we came, but the ambivalence involved in Pound's poem suggests that this home is only a home-away-from-home where Pound is left to contemplate his ghostly double.