Saturday, 1 December 2018

The 'Sublime' in Literature


A Few Thoughts on the “Sublime”

Right from the times and the climes of Aeschylus, who’s rightfully got on himself the huge honorific, - “Father of Tragedy,” and has, till date, been the benevolent benchmark for the entire gamut of Western literature on the ‘tragic’ genre, and his ardent advocacy of the ‘sublime’ in poetry, the word ‘sublime’ has always sustained in having gotten unto itself such a delightful, mesmerizing haloed aura that bespeaks volumes to its sustained passionate sway over writers and poets all over the planet!

Interestingly, although Euripides advocates the sublime, himself, and is considered one of the triumvirates on the “terrific three tragedians hall of fame on ancient Greece,” Nietzsche ain’t really considers him so!

In his The Birth of Tragedy, his talk tones down on his admiration for the third of the trio!

To him, Euripides is more vulgar than Sophocles! And he’s got his validating reasons for that too!

Furthering on his ponderance on the sublime, he adds, “What gives to everything tragic, the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them. In this the tragic spirit consists; accordingly it leads to resignation”!

Hence, according to Nietzsche, tragedy takes a detour to a debilitating downturn and gradually to a decline, with Euripides!

Hence, he avers that, ‘Euripides represents the transition into modernity’ and in the ‘New Comedy’ that succeeded him, there was ‘a womanish (I’d personally say sexist!!!) flight from seriousness and terror’, and hence also from the sublime!

Even to Schopenhauer, one among the trio, Sophocles comes under some attack! ‘Shakespeare is much greater than Sophocles,’ he quips!

Longinus’s immortal treatise On the Sublime, written around the first century A.D., has probably been one of the earliest and of the best advocates on the aura of the ‘sublime’ for us all!

To Longinus, therefore, the truly sublime effect, could only be produced by ‘greatness of soul,’ and one can reach its dazzling heights only as heave-ho as one reaches by an arduous journey, or flight!

And he also alludes to the use of ‘figurative language’ as a vehicle for such a ‘flight,’ of fantasy, and adds (to the delight of Stanley Fish and his comrades) that, it is not just the writer who is transported by the power of the sublime, but the reader as well!

No wonder, Longinus has been such a striking influence on the Romantics, along with Kant, who’s the master-influence on the Romantics, for his advocacy on the subjective, or the ‘I’ to the experience of the ‘sublime’!

Lyotard alludes to the importance of Kant’s take on the sublime in the latter’s Critique of Judgement, for the inquiring mind to get an idea on the intricacies and the delights contained within the modernist art works galore, and on their ‘avant-gardish’ sensibilities in their painting, art and music!

Kant’s intellectual contemporary, and an equally vociferous and vehement votary to the sublime, Edmund Burke has also doled out his delightful deifications on the sublime, in his treatise titled, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful. Well, in many ways, this work of Burke is a pioneering, trendsetter of sorts! It also marks the first defence for the artistic merit of horror in literature!

To Burke, interestingly, the beautiful and the sublime are diametrically contrastive in their appeal!

He says, “There is a wide difference between admiration and love. The sublime, which is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, and terrible; the latter on small ones, and pleasing; we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered into compliance.”

No surprise then, that Kant, quoting his pal Burke, quips on a similar note! To Kant, as with Burke, woman is always associated with the ‘beautiful’ and the male with the ‘sublime’!

He vouches to his facts, rooting that, the ‘fair sex’ has ‘as much understanding as the men’, but still, the woman has ‘a beautiful understanding, whereas the men ought to have a deep understanding, in tangent with the sublime!

[Thanks much to Dr. Angeline, on RR, for providing a delightful spark on the subject]!

To be contd…

No comments:

Post a Comment