45 SUBLIME

Jonathan Lamb

The work of art no longer wants to mean something; rather, it wants to be something.

(Blumenberg, 2000, p. 46)

It is evident that the “affective turn” in reenactment distinguishes an overflow of sensations and emotions that is symptomatic of a very powerful identification with an historical event, or a character within it.

Under that pressure of feeling, it is no longer possible for the reenactor to consider him- or herself critically in relation to the action being performed since the performance and the action are to all intents and purposes the same. At such moments of intensity, reenactment introduces into what otherwise might have been simply a device of representation a pressure of aesthetic excitement known as the sublime. The sublime is the only ancient treatment of literary imitation, or mimesis, that goes beyond the bounds of formal requirements of probability, meter, decorum, genre, diction, tropes, and so on, in order to demonstrate how passion is transfused from the original to the copy so that the whole being of the imitator, not to mention the imitation itself, is caught up in what is imitated. This is no less true of the original itself, whether it is an event, phenomenon, or text, since its authority is about to be shared with its representation, its conception with its effect, its past manifestation with its present instance. The sublime perpetually eliminates the difference between the thing itself and its image—a feat that many might claim as the sine qua non of a successful reenactment, whether it is called the sublime, “period rush,” “Nirvana,” or “Goose Bump City” (Horwitz, 1999, p. 379, p. 213).

At first sight, Longinus’s On the Sublime makes a modest claim as a “rhetoric” or “techne” a recipe book of poetic and oratorical devices that was the specialty of the Sophists. When Plato complains of knowledge and persuasion being put up for sale by scholars who see nothing wrong with turning truth, beauty, and passion into commodities, the Sophists are whom he had in mind.

Longinus presents himself during the Second Sophistic (circa 200 ce) as one of them, introducing his treatise as a set of “plain Directions... how and by what Method” the sublime may be attained (Longinus, 1739, p. 2). Where his method differs from others is that it aims not simply to define sublimity but to produce it. His idea of sublime performance is to transform precept into action and description into an event. So the praise accorded to Longinus down the ages is always in the same vein: he is sublime on the sublime or, as Alexander Pope puts it, “he is himself the great sublime he draws” (Pope, 1711, p. 39).

Sublime

The only ancient critic to accord the Pentateuch the status of great literature, Longinus includes Moses's account of the creation of light, “And God said—What?—Let there be Light, and there was Light” (Longinus, 1739, pp. 23—24). Look how exactly he invites us to observe how this remarkable feat of coincident utterance and event (“and there was light” not “and then there was light”) comes down to us in a quotation which is then re-quoted in order to demonstrate that the magnificence of divine illocution is not weakened by repetition. This is reenactment of the first water. To do what one is talking about belongs to a unique line of rhetoric that finds mere representation as unexciting as Plato says it is in the Republic (mimesis). But it comes at some cost. Longinus puts it like this:

The Sublime, endued with Strength irresistible, strikes home, and triumphs over every Hearer... [its] Force we cannot possibly withstand [for it] immediately sinks deep, and makes such Impressions on the Mind as cannot be easily worn out or effaced.

(Longinus, 1739, pp. 3, 15)

It is like a battle where the first onset favors the agency of the sublime while the audience lies bruised and supine. However, in the second phase, a transfusion of energy takes place, “For the Mind is. so sensibly affected with its lively Strokes, that it swells in Transport and an inward Pride, as if what was only heard had been the Product of its own Invention” (Longinus, 1739, p.

14). This reaction Edmund Burke called delight, as opposed to pleasure. Pleasure is a pure emotion, but delight is terror blended with rebounded power. For those reenactors whose enthusiasm is not bounded by meticulous attention to the paraphernalia of the performance of a historical event, the pains of an exact imitation—marching in bare feet, trying to sleep in icy weather under a single blanket, finding en route the only food that will be consumed—are the overture to the overpowering sense of inhabiting, not just representing, a historical moment.

Longinus's attitude to figurative language runs closely parallel with the scene of overthrow and recovery that marks the first encounter with the sublime. He gives an example from Demosthenes's speech “On the Crown,” where the orator is describing an unwarranted attack upon an innocent man:

There are several Turns in the Gesture, in the Look, in the Voice of the Man who does violence to another, which it is impossible for the Party that suffers such Violence to express. in the Gesture, in the Look, in the Voice—when like a Ruffian when like an Enemy, when with his Fist, when on the Face.

(Longinus, 1739, p. 55)

Rather than simply state that the violence he mentions included striking the victim on the face, Demosthenes reenacts both the disorder of the attack as the aggressor, who has no definite purpose except to insult and wound, and also as the waylaid individual suffering the welter of gestures, shouts, and blows. In conveying this, Demosthenes himself is caught up in violence without a reason, and as it were, spontaneously resorts to the figure of asyndeton (syntactical disorder) that does to his words what the aggressor's assault is doing to someone's presence of mind and face. The only appropriate responses are gestural: motions of the arms, repetitions, and fragments broken off from any intelligible sequence (gesture). The figures of the sublime are all like this: the aposiopesis or interruption that breaks off in the middle; the litotes or double negative that can only affirm something by denying its opposite; the apostrophe or address to a conjured other party that turns a description into a confrontation or appeal; the ellipse which

Jonathan Lamb

dissolves words into expressive silence.

Is there not an echo of this in the puns and neologisms of the devoted reenactor: “wargasm” going hand in hand with a terrifying familiarity with the dead (Horwitz, 1999, p. 210)?

Immanuel Kant, who like Burke had read the early sections of On the Sublime with great care, wrote a book in imitation of the Philosophical Enquiry called Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, in which he attempts distinctions between the terrifying, noble, and splendid sublimes, using the same ad hominem empirical style as Burke: “This is what we all feel at one time or another” (1764, p. x). In his third Critique, the Critique ofJudgment, he renounced this “empirical anthropology” as unsuitable for the sublime (1952, p. 132). He now understood the sublime as the aesthetic of iconoclasm: not the creation of light but the prohibition against images was his prime instance of it from the scriptures. He understood the correspondence between the dynamic (or Longinian) sublime and the mathematical sublime as arising from an embarrassment of the imagination: it cannot frame phenomena that have no limit, and it cannot count a number that is infinite. In short, the sublime attributes of God cannot be represented by an image or a sum. How then might Kant account for the rebound of energy that Longinus had called “inward pride” and Burke “delight,” the surge of self-love that saves the overwhelmed imagination from total prostration and makes the delivery of a quotation sound (and feel) like an illocutionary command? Kant explained it as a force that leaves the imagination wounded, unable to act, with no choice but to relinquish responsibility for representing such a disabling experience to the reason. Reason of course makes no attempt to frame or measure it; translating it instead into an abstraction, and so controlling it as a symbol, rather as mathematicians control the enigma of infinity with the sign of the lemniscate, or as geometricians control parabolas with the sign ofpi.

This affords the human mind a sense of transcendental greatness he calls Ergiessung.

The relevance of Kant's intervention to the project of historical reenactment turns on the question of imagination, whether images can act by their own force as images without paralyzing the sensibility of the reenactor, or whether the shock of coming so close to the presence of a historical event induces the mind to find some substitute for empirical perception. There is no doubt that R.G. Collingwood took Kant's route out of this difficulty. But if we take a popular example of a reenactment, namely the haka or challenge that begins each match of the New Zealand All Blacks, it is a short reenactment of the defiance hurled at enemies by Maori ariki (chiefs) before fighting them. The most popular belongs to the cornered Te Rauparaha, chief of the Ngati Toa, who emerged from his trench wiping the filth from his arms and thighs, his eyes bulging and his tongue extended, shouting, “Ka mate, ka mate, ka ora, ka ora.” “Is it to be death or life?” It is a question overwhelmed by the urgency with which it is put; and it is a quotation that grows consubstantial with its source.

45 SUBLIME

More on the topic 45 SUBLIME: