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…
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