SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Literature, Aesthetics, and Freedom from Kant to Joyce

Christopher Kitson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438474199
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Legacies of the Sublime offers a highly original, subtle and persuasive account of the aesthetics of the sublime in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and science. Christopher Kitson reveals the neglected history of how Kant's theory of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment cast a shadow over the next century and more of literature and thought. In each chapter, close readings weave together literary works with philosophical and scientific ones in order to clarify the complex dialogues between them. Through these readings, Kitson shows how the sublime survived well after the heyday of romanticism as a way of representing human freedom. This new context produces fresh interpretations of canonical literary works, by Thomas Carlyle, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce, with reference to important theoretical texts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Kitson follows the sublime's various manifestations and mutations, through the nineteenth century's industrial grandeur and the vertiginous prospects of deep time, into the early twentieth century's darkly ironic and uncanny versions. A welcome contribution to the study of the long nineteenth century, this work reveals an unexamined chapter in intellectual history and in the story of the modern self.

CHAPTER 1

Fear and Freedom

The Legacies of the Sublime

When Immanuel Kant included the “Analytic of the Sublime” in his 1790 Critique of Judgment, he stood in a tradition of aesthetic speculation reaching back over a century. The sublime had been a staple of philosophy and criticism ever since Boileau’s 1674 translation of Longinus. The category was discussed by authors from Addison, Burke, and Kames to Herder and Mendelssohn. It had been brought to bear on topics from art to ethics, history, and theology, and along the way it articulated much about how eighteenth-century subjects thought, felt, and understood themselves. Yet in the period after the third Critique, the sublime lost its ubiquitous place. By the middle and late nineteenth century, it became rare as an explicit topic of discussion. This remained the case until the closing decades of the twentieth century, when the category was resurrected by postmodern theorists with literary critics and, more recently, analytic philosophers following them. With this, the sublime has once again become a mainstay of scholarly rumination, the subject of copious debate about its nature and relevance to the experience of modern life.

This view of the sublime’s uneven history, its career encompassing ubiquity, dissolution and a long dormant period as well as a sudden and seemingly unbidden return to prominence, leaves some important questions unanswered. Did the sublime really disappear without trace in the early nineteenth century? If so, why was it taken up again so readily in the late twentieth? If the postmoderns did not pull the sublime from oblivion, or invent a new one from whole cloth, what was its status in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In fact the view of the sublime as a phenomenon relevant only to two isolated historical moments, while it is an important starting point, is incomplete. It masks a deeper story of how talk about this idea has come to define modern culture in profound ways. Appreciating this involves considering the sublime not only as part of the eighteenth-century or postmodern zeitgeist, but as a category which shaped the debates and influenced the imaginations of those throughout the intervening period. The legacy of the eighteenth-century sublime is a pervasive way of thinking about the modern subject in philosophy and literature and it is in the ostensible gap of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that this more deeply felt influence shows itself.

The Romantic Threshold

Scholarship about the fate of the sublime in the nineteenth century has recently tended towards a fuller view of its influence. The key issue is the sublime’s strangely ambivalent relationship to romanticism. The great majority of the major texts on the sublime were written well before the close of the eighteenth century: Addison’s writings in the Spectator (1712–1714), Burke’s Enquiry (1759), and Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1765) are examples (Ashfield and de Bolla). High romantic authors such as Wordsworth and Coleridge do indeed write on the sublime, but they tend not to give the term quite the prominence it has for, say, Burke. Yet for all this, the sublime is largely held to be a crucial concept for understanding the culture of romanticism. Critical works such as Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime and Frances Ferguson’s Solitude and the Sublime successfully apply the concept to romantic texts. These studies follow Samuel Monk’s influential study The Sublime, which advances the thesis that the eighteenth-century sublime was a crucial element in the large-scale cultural shift from the Augustan to the romantic. In all, there appears to be something of a paradoxical relationship between the sublime and romantic culture. This is summed up by James Kirwan in his Sublimity: “[t]he period that saw the sublime fading from aesthetics also saw the appearance of those very works that we are now most likely to think of as illustrative of the sublime” (Kirwan 126). There seems to be a mismatch between the sublime’s importance in the cultural climate, which is held to increase as romanticism develops, and its presence as a subject of explicit discussion, which at the same time wanes. The sublime as a culturally inflected construct clearly undergoes change in the transition from the mid-eighteenth century to the romantic period; it is no longer the favored category of critics and aestheticians that it once was. Yet it is far from clear that this change is a simple decline.

Kirwan considers the lack of theorizing about the sublime and its increasing cultural prominence to be in fact aspects of the same process. For him, the early nineteenth century sees the sublime shift between discourses. He talks about an “inverse ratio between the interest of aesthetics and the interest of taste with regard to the sublime,” which leads him to conclude that “the ‘decline’ of the sublime in the nineteenth century is, then, a phenomenon confined entirely to the discipline of aesthetics” (Kirwan 127; 128). Yet even localized within the province of aesthetics, things are not so simple as a decline. There is instead an inclusion of what had been called the sublime into broader categories such that it is no longer treated as a separate and clearly delineated entity. Other categories, such as beauty, art, or imagination, take on aspects of the sublime’s role and are inevitably altered in the process. Thus “as the significance of the aesthetic (or more usually Art) per se becomes equivalent to one notion of the significance of the sublime, so the sublime slips into a minor role” (126). The changes of the early nineteenth century, on this view, see the presence of the sublime become more implicit but also more wide-ranging.

Peter de Bolla’s work on the sublime can usefully flesh out the processes which Kirwan identifies. In The Discourse of the Sublime, de Bolla distinguishes ways in which categories can be located in their discursive context. They can take the form either of what he calls a discourse on something or a discourse of something. A discourse on something is “to be taken as a discrete discourse, a discourse which is to be read in a highly specific way, within a very well defined context” (de Bolla 9). Such discourses are marked out by their explicit commitments and positioning; they are “discourses which say ‘read me like this’” (10). There is also a discourse of something, which “does not […] demand that it be read as a discrete discourse on something” (10). A discourse of something is instead characterized by its wide distribution, that it is “made up of a number of discrete discourses” (10). Thus the discourse of politics, for example, will be located “in a wide range of discursive situations—this is clear from our own sense of the political” (10). To put it in de Bolla’s terms, then, what the early nineteenth century witnesses is a marked shrinking of the discourse on the sublime, a decline in the amount of texts which are explicitly and self-consciously part of a definite practice of inquiry into the sublime. It does not follow from this, though, that the discourse of the sublime likewise shrinks. In fact, given the processes that Kirwan identifies, with the sublime becoming more ubiquitous in culture outside of aesthetics and being absorbed into other aesthetic categories, it seems that the sublime became even more present. The discourse of the sublime grows as the discourse on the sublime shrinks. This view is extremely useful in allowing the sublime to be studied across time. De Bolla identifies the political economy of the 1840s as a legacy of the sublime even though his focus is tightly on the period of the Seven Years’ War—something taken up in the next chapter. This view, moreover, is implicit in the several recent studies which locate the sublime in various particular discursive contexts throughout the nineteenth century, such as Vybarr Creggan-Reid’s study of the discourse on time, Ann Colley’s of travel writing, and Stephen Hancock’s of the domestic novel.

Whilst this book is similarly interested in the post-romantic developments of the sublime, it hews somewhat closer to de Bolla’s work than that of Creggan-Reid, Colley, or Hancock.1 Unlike these authors, I do not restrict my analysis to one specific and discrete discourse. This is because, like de Bolla’s, this book attempts to give an account of the sublime’s relevance to a particular tradition of subjectivity and, as de Bolla notes, “categories such as the subject are more likely to be stretched across a vast array of discrete discourses rather than inhering within any one,” so the areas in which these preoccupations interact with subjectivity occur in a great range of texts (de Bolla 8). De Bolla’s project is to show the role of the sublime in producing “the autonomous subject, a conceptualization of human subjectivity based on the self-determination of the subject and the uniqueness of every individual” (8). He does this by showing how structural features of discourses lead to specific ways of conceiving the subject. In particular, he argues that the discourses on the national debt and the sublime led to “a conceptualization of the subject as the excess or overplus of discourse itself; as the remainder, that which cannot be appropriated or included within the present discursive network of control” (6). That is, the subject is underdetermined by legislating discourses, and this means it can be understood as self-determining. This book’s account takes after this thesis. It, too, seeks to show how the sublime associates an excess with the subject’s potential independence.

Kant and the Sublime Tradition

One particular philosophical articulation of this structure has an unmatched influence. This articulation appears at the very threshold of romanticism and makes a powerful intervention in the discourse on the sublime just as it was starting this process of diffusion. Because of this, it profoundly shaped the development of the sublime into the nineteenth century and beyond. This account is that given in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In the Critique’s “Analytic of the Sublime,” Kant inaugurates a way of staging the sublime so that it connotes human autonomy with reference to nature. This reworking of the sublime tradition was so useful in articulating important parts of the post-Kantian intellectual climate that it became very widely influential. In Kant’s account, the subject is confronted with an object which presents itself as a threat to either the subject’s physical being or its cognitive processes. Contemplating this object causes an ambivalent response. This ambivalence is then taken to speak of an underdetermination of the subject by the object, since the threatening object should naturally determine only a negative response. The excess represented by the positive element of the ambivalent feeling reveals the subject’s capacity to judge things outside of what nature determines. This structure bears a similarity to the generation of autonomous subjectivity that de Bolla finds in mid-century British discourse of the sublime. De Bolla’s “discursive network of control” instead becomes, in the context of Kant’s moral philosophy, the heteronomy of the subject’s natural being. The “Analytic” can thus be placed in the context of the broader sublime tradition and can be read as a complex encounter between that tradition and the themes of Kantian philosophy.

As the description above suggests, central to Kant’s account of the sublime is its status as an ambivalent feeling. The sublime is for him a “negative pleasure,” and he states that “the object is taken up as sublime with a pleasure that is possible only by means of a displeasure” (CJ 129; 143). In this, Kant is squarely in the sublime tradition. Affective ambivalence was a commonplace of commentary on the sublime. There is some suggestion of it in Longinus’s rhetorical treatise where the effects of the sublime are distinguished from the “merely persuasive and pleasant” (Longinus 143). The theme was picked up and given prominence in the eighteenth century by John Dennis. In his 1704 The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, Dennis claims that “enthusiastic terror contributes extremely to the sublime” (Ashfield and de Bolla 37). In describing his crossing of the Alps, he dwells upon the ambivalence of the experience: “The sense of all this produc’d different motions in me, viz. a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled” (Dennis 1943; 380). The conceptual chiasmus of “a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy” emphasizes that the feeling is intensely ambivalent. The eighteenth-century author on the sublime who gives most prominence to the theme is Burke, who develops his theory of pain and pleasure as independent of one another in order to account for the sublime’s unique ambivalent relationship to them (Burke 30–31).

Kant is just as forthright as Burke on the sublime’s ambivalent affect. As with Burke’s theory, Kant’s dynamic sublime is impossible without a feeling of fear. He says “that which we strive to resist is an evil, and, if we find our capacity to be no match for it, an object of fear” (CJ 144). Thus “nature can count as a power, thus as dynamically sublime, only insofar as it is considered an object of fear” (144). The dynamic sublime object, then, is, one which, if we were compelled to try to resist it, we would stand no chance, even being destroyed in the attempt, and is therefore an object that naturally and appropriately evokes fear. The mathematical sublime identifies a different but analogous species of natural negative reaction. Mathematically sublime objects make us fear not for our physical wellbeing but for our cognitive abilities. Kant describes this kind of sublime as “a feeling of displeasure from the inadequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude for the estimation by means of reason” (141). The usual role of the imagination in estimating magnitude is thwarted by the sublime object. Displeasure thus comes from a threat to cognitive processes important for navigating objects around us. Kant therefore falls in line with the tradition that takes a negative component to the affect as essential to the sublime. For him, the sublime is occasioned only by those objects which can pose a threat to our ways of interacting with the world either physically or mentally.

For Kant, the negative aspect of the sublime feeling is eminently explicable. If this were all there was to it there would be little to say; it is trivial to assert that threatening objects tend to cause a negative reaction. It is because the experience is ambivalent, not just negative, that the sublime is interesting. The positive aspect of the sublime is what indicates an excess over and above the obvious ways in which natural objects determine our reactions. The discussion of the mathematical sublime goes on to say that it is also “a pleasure that is thereby aroused at the same time from the correspondence of this very judgement of the inadequacy of the greatest sensible faculty in comparison with ideas of reason” (CJ 141). Where an object’s size causes us displeasure from the inadequacy of our imagination, there is also a pleasure derived from the exercise of our reason. Drawing together mathematical and dynamic, Kant asserts that the sublime discloses factors over and above the logic of nature:

For just as we found our own limitation in the immeasurability of nature and the insufficiency of our capacity to adopt a standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its domain, but nevertheless found in our own faculty of reason another, nonsensible standard which has that very infinity under itself as a unit against which everything in nature is small, and thus found in our own mind a superiority over nature itself even in its immeasurability: likewise the irresistibility of its power certainly makes us, considered as rational beings, recognise our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of it and a superiority over nature on which is grounded a self-preservation of quite another kind than that which can be threatened and endangered by nature outside us, whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion. (CJ 145)

The objects of the sublime expose “the insufficiency of our capacity” and “our physical powerlessness,” but the experience of the sublime reveals also an excess on the part of the subject. The positive aspects of the sublime experience are those which are not determined by natural factors, such that we find “a unit against which everything in nature is small,” and “a self-preservation of quite another kind than that which can be threatened and endangered by nature.” In both cases, the positive aspect of the sublime ambivalence shows “a superiority over nature,” a foundation for the self-determination of the subject.

Moral Heroism

The emphasis on autonomy gives away that this interpretation of sublime ambivalence has its roots in Kant’s ethical theory. For Kant, the sublime is very close to ethics: “In fact a feeling for the sublime in nature cannot even be conceived without connecting it to a disposition of the mind which is similar to the moral disposition” (CJ 151). This linking of the sublime with ethics is another way in which Kant revises commonplaces of the sublime tradition with reference to his own preoccupations. The discussion of the sublime as having a close relation to the ethical has a long history. De Bolla, for example, notes that “[i]t is often remarked that eighteenth-century theories of the sublime began in ethics” (de Bolla 32). He says of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson that “if either writer can be said to be interested in aesthetics per se, that interest is clearly tempered by their profoundly ethical standpoints” (32). The investigation into the aesthetic in general, and the sublime in particular, was for these writers occasioned by the enquiry into the moral feeling, so it is not surprising that the sublime was held by them to be ethically elevating. For Thomas Reid, later in the century, the contemplation of grand objects...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1. Fear and Freedom: The Legacies of the Sublime
• Chapter 2. “The Awakening of a Manchester”: The Communist Manifesto, Chartism, Industrial Spectacle, and the Communist Subject
• Chapter 3. Orders of Magnitude: The Time Machine, Deep Time, and Wells’s Mathematical Sublime
• Chapter 4. Details and Detonators: The Secret Agent, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Ironizing of the Sublime
• Chapter 5. Journeys through Nighttown: “Circe,” “The ‘Uncanny,’” and the Inhabited Subject
• Conclusion The Sublime beyond the Uncanny
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover