Understanding Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime
In order to understand Weiskel's argument on the sublime, it would be helpful to briefly review the influential treatises on the sublime by Longinus, Immanuel Kant and Edmund. Longinus understands the sublime as intrinsically related to linguistics, as being achieved mainly through language and literature. The "linguistic sublime" causes one to transcend oneself. When one perceives an experience as producing ecstasy, he asserts, that experience can be considered sublime. According to Longinus, this effect can be achieved through powerful rhetoric; he then examines the sublime nature of the rhetoric of many great writers, including Homer and Sappho. He also considers the sublime to exist in political oration, theorizing "those personages, presenting themselves to us and inflaming our ardor and as it were illumining our path, will carry our minds in a mysterious way to the high standards of subliminity which are within us" (84).
Longinus cautions, however, that writers who strive to achieve sublimity often fail, instead creating "expressions . . . which are not sublime but high-flown" (77). He further elaborates that it is nearly impossible for the common writer to achieve sublimity through rhetoric, stating that, "While tumidity desires to transcend the limits of the sublime, the defect which is termed puerility is the direct antithesis of elevation." Writers easily fall prey to this error, Longinus explains: "[W]hile they aim at the uncommon and elaborate and most of all at the attractive, they drift unawares into the tawdry and affected" (77).
Longinus' theory focuses mainly on a sublime that results from a thing or event that possesses some type of positive literary effect. For Longinus, one is "uplifted by the true sublime [ . . . ] filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard" (78). Edmund Burke, alternatively, makes a distinction between what is beautiful (and pleasant) and the sublime, concluding that an experience that might be considered terrible may instead inspire a peculiar sense of pleasure, a delight derived from terror. It is Burke's opinion that human experience with a negative connotation tends to stimulate the sublime.
Burke proposes that the sublime is "[w]hatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . . any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror" (36). Burke's sublime is achieved through a type of indirect or derived terror, in which one experiences pleasure in the face of pain or terror.
Another magical realist element is that when Tita was born, Nacha swept up the residue the tears had left on the red stone floor. On the floor was enough salt to fill a ten-pound sack that was used for cooking and lasted a long time (7). This element is more magical than sublime because this happening can not occur. However, it is a good example of sublime literature because it illustrates Longinus' notion of accumulation as a feature of sublime language. The salt from Tita's birth definitely dealt with accumulation.
During the Holocaust many people were severely tortured and murdered. The holocaust caused the death of six million Jewish people, as well as the death of 5 million non-Jewish people. All of the people, who died during this time, died because of the Nazis’: a large hate group composed of extremely Ignoble, licentious, and rapacious people. They caused the prisoners to suffer physically and mentally; thus, causing them to lose all hope of ever being rescued. In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, Elie went through so much depression, and it caused him to struggle with surviving everyday life in a concentration camp. While Elie stayed in the concentration camp, he saw so many people get executed, abused, and even tortured. Eventually, Elie lost all hope of surviving, but he still managed to survive. This novel is a perfect example of hopelessness: it does not offer any hope. There are so many pieces of evidence that support this claim throughout the entire novel. First of all, many people lost everything that had value in their life; many people lost the faith in their own religion; and the tone of the story is very depressing.
“Out of the north deep waves rolled down upon the island. They broke against the rocks and roared into the caves, sending up white sprays of water. Before night a storm would certainly strike” (O’Dell, 19). This passage from Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins describes the Ocean that surrounds the island and characters in the story. In this description the narrator, Karana, shows the reader that the people on the island fear and respect the power of the Ocean. The Ocean is depicted throughout the novel as something enormous and powerful. The way the Ocean is seen demonstrates an example of the Burkeian Sublime. According to Burke, the Sublime is an experience that comes from authority and power. A common example for the Burkeian Sublime is looking at the power of mountains. Mountains are Sublime because they’re large in size, and have the power to kill people. Therefore, through looking at Burke’s requirements for the Sublime the conclusion is made that Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins contains the Burkeian Sublime.
Burke, Edmund. "Proportion Further Considered". A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909-1917 (New York: Bartleby.com, 2001). http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/305.html
I frankly confess that I have, as a general thing, but little enjoyment of it, and that it has never seemed to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. . . . But it is apt to spoil two good things – a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible-feeding writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only cases in whi...
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We have spent a good deal of this semester concentrating on the sublime. We have asked what (in nature) is sublime, how is the sublime described and how do different writers interpret the sublime. A sublime experience is recognizable by key words such as 'awe', 'astonishment' and 'terror', feelings of insignificance, fractured syntax and the general inability to describe what is being experienced. Perception and interpretation of the sublime are directly linked to personal circumstance and suffering, to spiritual beliefs and even expectation (consider Wordsworth's disappointment at Mont Blanc). It has become evident that there is a transition space between what a traveler experiences and what he writes; a place wherein words often fail but the experience is intensified, even understood by the traveler. This space, as I have understood it, is the imagination. In his quest for spiritual identity Thomas Merton offers the above quotation to illustrate what he calls 'interpenetration' between the self and the world. As travel writers engage nature through their imagination, Merton's description of the 'inner ground' is an appropriate one for the Romantic conception of the imagination. ...
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middle of paper ... ... Together, it seems as if tension dominates resolution. Resolution can be established at a minor degree, but tension and opposition of ideas plays an initial and grand role in the entertainment of the poem. Works Cited Clarke, R. (n.d.).
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