From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature

Yi Zheng

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612491851
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume presents a historical-textual study about transformations of the aesthetics of the sublime—the literary and aesthetic quality of greatness under duress —from early English Romanticism to the New Poetry Movement in twentieth-century China. Zheng sets up the former and the latter as distinct but historically analogous moments and argues that both the European Romantic reinvention of the sublime and its later Chinese transformation represent cultural movements built on the excessive and capacious nature of the sublime to counter their shared sense of historical crisis. The author further postulates through a critical analysis of Edmund Burke's Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, William Wordsworth's Prelude, and Guo Moruo's experimental poem "Fenghuang Niepan" ("Nirvana of the Phoenix") and verse drama Qu Yuan that these aesthetic practices of modernity suggest a deliberate historical hyperbolization of literary agency. Such an agency is in turn constructed imaginatively and affectively as a means to redress different cultures' traumatic encounter with modernity. The volume will be of interest to scholars including graduate students of Romanticism, philosophy, history, English literature, Chinese literature, comparative literature, and (comparative) cultural studies.

Chapter One

Envisioning a Culture of the Sublime Aesthetic

In contemporary philosophy, aesthetics as an established philosophical enquiry has two applications: a restricted sense of the study of beauty in art and nature and a general reference to the whole process of human perception and sensation—those feelings of pleasure and pain that are not simply reducible to clearly defined intellectual concepts (Malpas 34). In his study of Lyotard’s idea of art, the sublime, and the postmodern, Malpas also points out that as a particular discipline of inquiry, aesthetics emerged during the eighteenth century in Europe and since then formed a key part of the work of many Anglo-European thinkers (34). One can further observe that in recent cultural, literary, and philosophical discussions, whether about the debates on modernity and postmodernity with which Malpas is concerned or about particular aesthetic tenet’s historical formulation across time and space, aesthetics is almost always used both as a philosophy of art and as a general account of perception and feeling.

The point of interest in this chapter is the coming-to-be of the modern aesthetics of the sublime as a particular historical formation. It is discussed as a historical-aesthetic process that becomes important culturally in eighteenth-century Europe and is later thought of and sought after similarly in a cultural and poetic revolution in early twentieth-century China. By general consent, the discussion of the sublime, sometimes called the aesthetics of greatness, is perhaps the single most important concern of eighteenth-century English aesthetics. While at the same time, at least according to Samuel Holt Monk, “no single definition of the term would serve in any single decade for all writers . . . but the word naturally expressed high admiration, and usually implied a strong emotional effect, which, in the latter years of the century, frequently turned on terror” (233). For Burke, who clearly specifies in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), “terror is in all cases whatsoever the ruling principle of the sublime” (58). This terror-grounded formulation of the aesthetics of the sublime highlights the sense of crisis in the (pre-)Romantic longing for historical and literary greatness. It reveals the historical concern in the concerted aesthetic movement, which can be described as a historical aestheticism. In what follows, I explore such historical-aesthetical tendencies in the English and continental European (pre-)Romantic construction of a modern aesthetic culture, that is, aesthetic, literary, and cultural figurations originally and imaginatively set up as timely redemption of a crisis-ridden modern history.

Historical aestheticism

Burke’s (in)famous description of the spectacle of the French Revolution is as historical, in the sense that it is about a neighboring event, as it is aesthetic: “As to us here our thoughts of everything at home are suspended, by our astonishment at the wonderful Spectacle which is exhibited in a Neighboring and rival Country—what Spectators, and what actors! England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty, and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud! The thing indeed . . . has still something in it paradoxical and Mysterious. The spirit it is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner” (Burke, “To the Earl of Charlemont” 10). Burke’s concern is more with the affect of the splendors of the French struggle for liberty on the English audience. For him it is as if the historical event is staged for its implications, which depend on its power of affection and evocation for reflection. Burke is both moved and wary, he admires the spirit but fears its ferocity, just as he had aspired to and was fearful of its excess in his theory of the sublime. His task, therefore, is to comprehend and redirect the spectacular historical show, for and on behalf of his audience.

The relationship between aesthetic figuration and historical change awaiting redirection, as staged dramatically here by Burke and echoed elsewhere in contemporary aesthetic debates, is the central question of aesthetic-literary modernity in Europe at the turn-of-the-eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It continues to be one of the most important questions in the writing of literary and aesthetic histories. Its intersection is the recurring theme in recent cultural discussions and is deemed vital in understanding the institution of modern aesthetic culture. Indeed, in their study of the emergence of modern literature in early German Romanticism, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy locate the beginnings of the modern literary institution in the aftermath of a “triple crisis”: the social and moral crisis of the bourgeoisie, with newfound access to culture; the political crisis of the French Revolution; and the Kantian critique urgently in need of its own critical recasting (4-5). In their delineation, the Kantian crisis of the subject is located not in philosophy but in a radical modernity, and the project of early German (Jena) Romanticism opens up “not a crisis in literature, but a general crisis and critique” for which literature or literary theory is the “privileged locus of expression” (5). It is privileged because it presents itself as the most properly critical formulation of the crisis of modern history. The Romantic ambition, literary or philosophical (they become one in the Jena project), therefore, is concerned little with the invention of genres and erection of aesthetic doctrines, it is “always” the result of the ambition “for an entirely new social function for the writer . . . and consequently for a different society” (6).

The interest of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s historical aesthetic study of the Jena project is in their establishment of a theory of literature in Romanticism. For them it is a “literature” reformulated as the “privileged locus of expression” of the crisis of modern history (5). They define the Romantic project by placing it against the background of specific social, political, and philosophical crises, but develop the social function of the writer as, and in, the continuous philosophical recasting of the Kantian (loss of the) subject. The building up of the literary absolute as the ultimate social function of Romanticism, for them, lies in its radical displacement, resurrection, and redefinition of philosophy. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy account for the establishment of the literary absolute as a philosophical aftermath relocated in the crisis of history. It points to an understanding of Romanticism radically different from the kind that reads its advent as literature’s move to autonomy or therapeutic restitution. They highlight the correlation between aesthetic figuration and historical change. More importantly, their account exemplifies the story of the “reordering of the field of aesthetic experience” (Price 262) in Europe from the late eighteenth into the mid-nineteenth centuries. This reordering is marked by “an intensification of interest in the mental image and in the difficulties of assimilating it to the problems of ontology and epistemology, on the one hand, and to those of ethics, on the other” (Ferguson 1). It is a reordering of perception and experience which betrays an historical anxiety in its presentation as a philosophic-categorical aftermath, a process that is defined by Malpas as the coming-into-being of aesthetics. In fact, “the intensification of interest” marks the advent of a modern aesthetics that attempts to inaugurate “an era which disowns the historical inheritance that defines it” (Bourke 199). Richard Bourke’s insight places the Romantic aesthetic movement accurately at its historical junction and points out that at its center is a desire for and at the same time an anxiety about historical discontinuity. And while for Bourke the difficulties of historical as well as poetic continuity as experienced by the Romantics are brought about by the disruption of the French Revolution, for Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the Romantic is introduced as an aesthetic reprieve in which the literary becomes the privileged locus of expression of the crisis of modernity. Such aesthetic movement is a culturally capacious reconstruction whose point of departure consists in a deliberate hyperbolization of literary agency as a means to counteract the social, political, and cultural problems of the modern moment. This, I argue, is also what defines and underwrites the historical aestheticism—a reinvoked and redefined aesthetic imperative as historical direction—embedded in the texts and conceptual implications of a host of late eighteenth-century European aesthetic philosophers from Schiller to Burke.

Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s reading foregrounds the sense of crisis in the urgently emphatic formulation of an aesthetic modernity. Their account also displays that the modern reordering, or rather, reinvention of the aesthetic field is preoccupied with the motif of beginnings and the centrality of historical and cultural translation. The latter often manifests itself as an operating structure of transference in the conceptual underpinning and textual modus operandi of key aesthetic texts. For example, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s understanding, the end of the Jena project is dependent upon the location of its beginnings, and the hyperbolization of literary agency as the very critical formulation of modernity is the translation of an historical anxiety into an epistemological problem. However, this translation is not what Jerome Mc-Gann diagnoses as the displacement of history when he exposes the “grand illusion” of Romanticism. The Romantic for McGann is the turn of the “imagination and nightmares of a poetic freedom” from “the ruins of culture and history” (91). Proceeding from the idea of the Romantic hyperbolization of literary agency, however, I would argue in what follows that this turn is, rather, an aesthetic practice of “rich distance”: William Gilpin’s “beautiful distance” extols the “obscurity” that makes it possible to observe objects without seeing their “awkwardness,” whereas I am invoking the richness of a distance that blurs fine distinctions and allows alteration—the replacing and displacing of the distances (Gilpin 34; see also Harrison 62-67) that try to reengage the disruptions, legacies, and challenges of culture and history.

Understood as such, the Romantic preoccupation with beginnings as the first concern in the process of the literary reformulation is the locus of the interchange between the aesthetic and the historical. As beginnings are structures of intentions, attitudes, and feelings, and according to Said, they are the first instance of difference, “they make a way along the road” (13). The question of beginnings is thus a question of the will to difference, as well as a question of boundaries—of the end, the limit, and the directions of a given trajectory. It is precisely in its preoccupation with beginnings that the modern aesthetic, emerging in the late eighteenth-century Europe where the excitement as well as terrors of dramatic changes reigned, is set up as the most properly critical formulation of the crisis of modern history. And because of its beginnings in such concerns of the crisis of history, European Romanticism, the inaugurating composition of the modern aesthetic imperative, is understood as a reaction formation. It is seen as “a complex of responses to certain conditions which Western society has experienced and continued to experience since the middle of the eighteenth century” (Butler 184). For instance, in response to the modern condition, Friedrich Schiller conceives the aesthetic as the historical detour of a cultural redress. His Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man stress the immediacy of a timely conception of an historical aestheticism to heal the wound inflicted by “culture itself” upon modern humanity (35). In this proposal of an “aesthetic education of man,” the aesthetic is instrumental to the realization of a history that has inevitably lost its innocence and harmony on its way to maturity, a history that cannot be redirected otherwise. In the Letters, Schiller defines the aesthetic as the only “impulse” that would move rationality and sensuousness, unhappily divorced in modern times, toward a somewhat dialectic emergent, the “sublime humanity.” Thus Schiller establishes the task of the aesthetic philosopher as the director of history: “Given then, I shall reply to the young friend of Truth and Beauty who wants to learn from me how he can satisfy the noble impulse in his breast in the face of all the opposition in his century—give the world on which you are acting the direction towards the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring about its development” (53).

In Schiller’s project, the act of rectification stresses both the sense of agency and a progressive history, but it is foremost an art of education, of radical redirection, as well as conservation of the “time-honored.” Its radicality is cast in the “quiet rhythm of time.” As a blueprint for the feat of the aesthete, philosopher, or poet, it rests on a deliberate distancing: the prerequisite for the emergent director of the history of modernity is his refuge in the sanctuary of the ruins of antiquity, the ever lost glory of Greece, a classic—ruined—civilization as wilderness, as invigorating outside to the effeminate, mundane, and deprecated “modern culture.” Schiller cries out with unconcealed sentiments against the tendencies of his “time”: “No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite. Let some beneficent deity snatch the infant betimes from his mother’s breast, let it nourish him with the milk of a better age and suffer him to grow up to full maturity beneath the distant skies of Greece. Then when he becomes a man, let him return to his century as an alien figure; but not in order to gladden it by his appearance, rather, terrible like Agamemnon’s son, to cleanse it” (51).

Schiller’s proposal is the call for a new barbarian, whose rearing is tortuous. It echoes the Romantic longing for the originary elsewhere. The golden age of the classical past is invoked to engender him as the avant-guardian—the vanguard and custodian—of a future modernity. Schiller’s indulgence in aesthetic barbarism is not nostalgic, but progressive. It is the will to redirect the progress of history, to counteract the terror of modernity, which highlights the cleansing project of his cultural avant-guardianism. Though in the end the Schillerian ideal of human nobility, which can be achieved through the aesthetic solution of politics, is beauty and freedom, his proposal of cultural redemption is by way of the sublime: the project of cleansing is an affective traversal and translation of terror.

The beginning of a modern aesthetics of the sublime from Burke to Kant

The theme and variations of the sublime are the privileged loci of expression of the modern aesthetic as it has developed in Europe since the eighteenth century. In fact, Martin Price’s charting of the reordering of the field of aesthetic experience coincides with the moment when the picturesque moves toward the sublime (262). It is no accident that the key figure of English reaction to modernity, Burke, is also the key figure in the English theorization of the sublime. If Schiller’s cultural notion of avant-guard demonstrates the modern ambition of historical aestheticism by relocating the past to guard and guide the present course, Burke’s aesthetic figuration is born directly out of his sense of historical crisis. Luke Gibbons suggests, in his pioneering study of Burke’s engagement with Irish politics and culture, that “as an aesthetics of extreme situations, Burke’s theory of the sublime may be seen not only as a philosophical enquiry but also as a fraught, highly mediated response to the turbulent colonial landscape of eighteenth-century Ireland” (23). For him, this explains Burke’s obsession with theatricality and terror as something essential in the experience of the sublime, something “orchestrating exemplary actions” (26), and his figuration of public executions as the most exemplary of events that function as the ultimate “dramaturgy of the real” (5-7). In Gibbons’s remapping, Burke’s theory of the sublime is a philosophical response to a keenly felt historical problem, culminating in an aesthetics of exemplary events as an intersection between the epistemological and the historical. Still, like many others before him, Gibbons concludes from this that “Burke’s aesthetics often picks up where his politics leaves off” (6). I suggest, however, that Burke’s figuration of an aesthetics of exemplary events demonstrates that, for him, the aesthetic is not only supplementary to political discourse, but it also represents in the first instance an historical imagination. In Burke’s construction of the sublime as an aesthetics that orchestrates exemplary actions, the aesthetic is the very stage upon which history can be redirected culturally and affectively, just as the effect of his exemplary events is through the theatricality of the real.

Burke begins his cultural address of the crisis of modernity as a Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. However, his fears and exaltations, his exaggerated obsession with tastes, smells, touches, and gratifications, come to be understood, later, in an aesthetic epistemology, as a “homespun psycho-physiology” (Eagleton, “Aesthetics and Politics” 53); his eager and timely inquiry into the ideas of the sublime and beautiful becomes records of a Kantian “bathos of experience” (qtd. in Ferguson 2). Frances Ferguson’s treatment of Burke illustrates his modern fate. While Eagleton shows contempt for Burke’s concerns with the “mere debased modes of access to the world” (“Aesthetics and Politics” 33), Ferguson juxtaposes Burke with Kant and locates the Burkean “bathos” in his insistence on the model of sensory testimony but finds he makes no “thorough-going distinctions” (2). Thus, his aesthetic philosophy is cast as empiricism turned against itself. Whereas the Kantian aesthetics, the other philosophically and culturally monumental project, for her, “not only addresses such a central problem of empiricist aesthetics—the relative standing of objects and representations—but goes a long way toward resolving it by the simple argument of structure” (2)

The construction of a Burkean empiricism-turned-against-itself leading to the triumph of the Kantian transcendental structure, is, of course, one of the usual stories in modern European philosophy. It casts the Burkean and Kantian differences simply in epistemological terms, and shows a certain lack of interest in situating the historical grounding of both the Burkean and Kantian turn to aestheticism. I will demonstrate that, in fact, for neither Burke nor Kant is “the relative standing of objects and representations” the interest of their argument, or the central problem of their aesthetics. For the Burkean inquiry, the difficulties of classification leading to dark obscurity of concept are the foremost topic of discussion. Whereas although the project of the Kantian aesthetic is the movement that erects the argument of structure, the triumph and interest of Kant’s form is much less the distinction between the aesthetic objects and the real than the establishment of the a priori of an artificial system. His form is a restructuring of the subject and reconstruction of a regulative structure in the face of the “bathos of experience,” the challenge and threat of modernity. In brief, although the Burkean and Kantian differences in constituting a modern aesthetic beginning may appear epistemological ones, the contested nature of these lies in their different cultural philosophical choices in reaction to historical anxiety: what is usually construed as an intra-aesthetic debate in the post-Romantic account of the sublime should be better understood as an historically situated cultural story.

Kant begins to define the sublime as the relations between “our” limitedness and the chaotic, terrifying limitlessness of the beyond: “We may describe the sublime thus: it is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think the unattainability of nature regarded as a presentation of ideas” (Critique of Judgment 108). The gesture of concession, of deference to a determinate insufficiency, however, is only the first step in the structure of mastery: this effort—and the feeling of the unattainability of the idea by means of the imagination—is itself a presentation of the subjective purposiveness of our mind in the employment of the imagination for its supersensible destination (Critique of Judgment 108). In Slavoj Žižek’s reading, this is a unique point in Kant’s system, a point at which “the gap between phenomenon and Thing-in-itself, is abolished in a negative way, because in it the phenomenon’s very inability to represent the Thing adequately is inscribed in the phenomenon itself” (203) and the paradox of the sublime is the mediation of this inability, a “successful presentation by means of failure, of the inadequacy itself” (204). However, Kant’s structure of the sublime paradox does not end with the mediation of the a priori inadequacy. It is a process of final conquest. In his sublime, this effort to first demonstrate then overcome a human inadequacy by revealing it is a step in an a priori design that “forces us” to realize something supersensible whose purposiveness the feeling of the sublime displays, and meanwhile accedes to the dominion of reason. And this accession to law and reason is our “aesthetic judgments upon the sublime.” This act of mastery depends very...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature
• Chapter One: Envisioning a Culture of the Sublime Aesthetic
• Chapter Two: The Imperative of the Romantic Aesthetic and Burke's Inquiry into the Sublime
• Chapter Three: Wordsworth's Poetic Prelude to Modern History
• Chapter Four: The Construction of the Sublime as an Aesthetic Movement across Time and Place
• Chapter Five: Guo Moruo and the Reformation of Modern Chinese Poetry in a Sublime Poetics
• Chapter Six: Rewriting Qu Yuan and towards a Sublime Denouement
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index