The Haunting of Transcendence

Accounts of the sublime routinely describe an experience in which the appearance of a sublime object precipitates a sense of the limits of perception, thought or language, of a power or reality that exists beyond the merely human and, at the conclusion of the sublime experience, of one’s own unique individuality. As this suggests, the experience reinforces a dyadic structure of oppositions (such as subject/object, self/other, seeable/sayable, image/word, or mind/body), as well as an association with lofty ideals, freedom and dignity. Boileau’s 1674 translation of Cassius Longinus’ first century AD treatise, Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime) marks the birth of a modern fascination with the sublime (Kirwan 2005: vii). From this moment, it becomes a key term in the discourse of aesthetics, despite the various forms it assumes in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Peri Hypsous Longinus describes a rhetorical sublime, which he associates with moral, spiritual and intellectual dignity. This emphasis on morality and ethics is repeated in accounts of the sublime throughout the eighteenth century, and then again in the twentieth century when the sublime is celebrated for its liberatory possibilities. In the eighteenth century, interest shifted to the natural sublime, and to the ways in which certain classes of objects affect the subject. John Baillie (1747), James Beattie (1783), Alexander Gerard (1759; 1780), William Gilpin (1794), David Hume (1739; 1777a; 1777b; 1779), Richard Hurd (1762), Lord Henry Kames (1762) and Richard Payne Knight (1805) all made important contributions to the study of the sublime as an affective experience. However, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful was, for the eighteenth century, the most influential analysis of the sublime, and still provides a key point of reference for contemporary discussions of this subject. Although a detailed examination of Burke’s Enquiry is beyond the scope of this study, it is nevertheless important to note some of the significant aspects of the Burkean sublime, in particular because it develops an account of the sublime that is simultaneously empirical and psychological, while also being underwritten by rhetorical principles. 34 AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

According to Burke an experience of the sublime passes through three distinct stages from the state of everyday equilibrium to, first, blockage or standstill, then transport, and finally, inflation. As he writes in the Enquiry:

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case, 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. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect. (1757: 53)

The sublime begins when the spectator is brought to a standstill by an object too vast to comprehend. “The mind is so entirely filled with its object” that “all its motions are suspended.” The second stage commences when the blocking power takes hold of the mind, creating the sense that the subject is being transported by an “irresistable force”. In the third stage of the sublime, the mind recovers and the subject emerges with a heightened sense of his own importance, of the relation he bears to the ground of all things, and a profound sense of “admiration, reverence and respect” for the sublime power. These three stages define the central movement of traditional accounts of the sublime, based on a vertical mode of trans- cendence and a dialectical division between self/other, nature/culture, and body/mind. Amongst the ‘objects’ productive of the sublime, Burke lists terror, obscurity, power, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence, and pain. The first of these terms is, Burke argues, “either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime” (1757: 54). Serpents and poisonous animals are considered as objects of terror, because clearly dangerous (1757: 53), but a dog, who is “sociable, affectionate, and amiable” is not (1757: 61).