Let's continue our discussion of Longinus's work
on the sublime, and I've added the Greek title here (peri hypsous)
in case you're interested. Sometimes the "y" is a "u" --
depends on how you spell it in English, but that's why I put that there, just so
you know. Now in this video I'd like to talk about
the problem of definition. How do we define the sublime? And as
we'll see, part of the problem is that it's very
difficult to define, and we tend to kind of go in
circles. If we start very broadly, Longinus, when he talks about the sublime,
he refers to it as a form of "ekstasis" ...
which is related to our word "ecstasy," though we shouldn't think of the drug
here necessarily! So ekstasis: this first little bit "ek"
means "out of" and
the last bit "stasis" means "standing." The idea is that you're literally
standing beside yourself as if you have some kind of outer body experience.
That seems promising, but again and again with the sublime
we have to ask a follow-up question: well, what leads to that? what makes you stand
outside of yourself? And so we keep kind of going further
back to look for causes, and it's hard to really pin this down.
Another example he uses: he talks about a lightning bolt. We've talked about
this in a previous video. So the sublime is as sudden as a
lightning bolt. It just hits you and boom, you are transformed. You're
changed. Well, how does this happen? It's a nice
comparison, but other than the suddenness we don't
really have much to go on here in terms of what creates this power.
The problem that we're dealing with, in other words, is what's often
called a tautology.
...
If something is a tautology you can call it
tautological, or, as i like to think of it, toddler logical! Now a tautology
is really a circular form of reasoning. So let's draw a quick circle here.
If you call some ... oops, arrow is not quite in the right spot ...
if you call something sublime (there we go)
and then you try to define it, and you say, well, the sublime is
grand or elevated, then what you've done in a sense
is you've given synonyms. We can extend these synonyms for a
long time. We can say, well, it's exceptional,
it's amazing, it's awe-inspiring, and so on and so forth,
but in a sense you're going in circles because you are kind of
redefining the sublime with other words. But you're not giving an exact
definition, and you can see this problem also in
Longinus' definition close to the top here, where he says, "The
sublime, wherever it occurs, consists in a certain loftiness and excellence of
language." Well, what is that loftiness? What is that
excellence? We're really dealing with a receding
horizon here, because every time we say the
sublime is this, then we say, well, what is this? How
do you define that? And that's kind of one of the
difficulty that Longinus experiences. In section two, he comes at
it from a slightly different angle, and he talks about the difference
between nature and art. Nature and art--
this is an interesting distinction, in part because you're going to see it
all the time in literary theory. When you jump ahead to the 17th and 18th
centuries you see this discussion all the time. Are
the rules of art natural or are they artificial?
And if you are, for instance, on the nature side, then you might say, well,
to create a sublime masterpiece you need to be a kind of
genius. You need to be a genius and you're most likely born as a genius.
So you're born as one and you can't learn the rules, kind of through book
learning. So art would mean that you can find the
rules
through a book, let's say,
or by studying with a master. And if you're on the side of nature then you
say, no, this is actually just something you're born with, and you
do it naturally and there are no rules. Now Longinus tries to kind of
make these things come together a little bit, so he says, first of all, nature
is not entirely lawless. Nature is not lawless. There are some
rules
and then when it comes to art he says, well, actually,
if we think of where the rules of art come from, they tend to come from nature.
So art teaches us what is natural,
and this is a wonderful solution because it basically says, well, art is natural.
Art teaches you what is natural and the two kind of
coalesce into one. You're going to see this again and again.
Alexander pope tends to do this as well, but often there's a slightly
different emphasis depending on the author. So for
Alexander Pope the rules (he really focuses on the rules) tend to
be natural, and then when you move to the Romantics,
let's say, they completely flip it on its head and
they say, well, nature is organic and those organic rules which are
different for for every creature, every plant, every
tree, and so on, those organic rules are the only
rules we have.
There you can see that this is not entirely a solution to our problem.
Does this help to define a sublime, to say, well, they're kind of
natural and they're also part of art? Not necessarily. So after the second
section, then, Longinus goes on to talk about what is
not sublime, which is another solution, and we'll get to that in a moment.
The other thing that he does is he tries to talk about both
effects and causes. So, effects and causes.
It can be hard to distinguish between them sometimes.
You think that Longinus is talking about the same thing all the time, but he
actually switches back and forth. Early on he's often talking about the effects
of the sublime. For instance, when we think about what
the sublime does to us, we might say, well, it makes us feel
exalted. We feel
exalted -- wonderful feeling. We also feel things like joy and pride,
in part because when we read a sublime work of art we feel as if
we had written it, as if we were the the author. So there's a sense of
identification with the process of writing.
We also feel ennobled of course. Our soul feels enlarged. We feel
more moral perhaps. We feel elevated. And these types of works are memorable.
Notice the one that Longinus does not include:
that would be the persuasion aspect. The effect is not that we're persuaded
of a particular view. That has to do with rhetoric,
and Longinus is always careful to distinguish between the sublime and
rhetoric. Even though they share a lot of the
poetic figures in common, poetic metaphors and so on, they are
not the same, because rhetoric is more
premeditated, as we said in a previous video, and it's more about persuasion.
Now if we think about how useful this is, these effects,
in terms of thinking then about defining the sublime
it doesn't help as much, does it? Because then we say, well,
what makes us feel exalted? Why do we experience joy and pride?
How are we ennobled? These are wonderful things to say.
But they don't give us a kind of formula, and that's the difficulty. If you were
trying to create a book of rules about the sublime,
it's almost impossible, because where do you start?
The causes are more helpful, and this is section 8 in the text, where he talks
about the five causes of the sublime. But even there
you'll see that there's a bit of a receding horizon.
So, for instance, I'll just list a few of them here. If you think of
grand thoughts, which is the first one: you have to be a great thinker in a
sense, or have a good soul, you have to be
striving for nobility. Well, what are these grand thoughts?
What is nobility?How do we define these things? So it's a good criterion,
but it still kind of makes us ask some questions.
Same thing with the second one: passionate language.
What is passionate? Or the third one: poetic figures.
Yes, we need them. But how can we tell when they're used properly?
And when are they used badly? So we have a couple more here,
but you kind of get the point. These are useful things,
and we're getting closer, but we're still not quite there!
And really the point of this video is just to demonstrate
the difficulty of defining the sublime. And why we often kind of feel like we're
going in circles. Now, as mentioned, in sections three
through seven, Longinus deals quite a bit with what
the sublime is not. So, the sublime is not ...
and then he lists three things. Let's go through these fairly quickly
and see if they help us as well. The first one is bombast,
and bombast is a kind of elevated language, but it sounds
grand and yet it kind of falls flat. The example I like to give to students is
that if you think of like a high school band
trying to sound like a symphony orchestra,
they're overdoing it! They're trying to play some classical piece of
music and they're just not nailing it. It
sounds grandiose and it sounds too over the top. So that's bombast, and
if we draw a kind of diagram here we can say that
if we think of the sublime, the sublime moves us from what is
ordinary to what is sublime. And then another form of this
is where we kind of overshoot the mark and we get bombast,
and then it falls flat. The term for that falling flat is bathos. That's
the term usually given, which is the Greek word for depth.
So we kind of descend again and this is like an anti-climax.
It doesn't quite come off. So bombast then overshoots the mark,
doesn't work, and leads to bathos.
The description of this that Longinus gives us is he calls this a
kind of swelling, but not a good swelling. He compares this
to dropsy. So, dropsy is where you are retaining
too much liquid, too much water, in the body,
and your body is kind of swollen. Think of swollen ankles, or something like
that. That's not impressive. That's kind of
disgusting. Okay so bombast is different from the
sublime, although you may be wondering
again, well, how can we tell the difference?
How do we know when somebody has overshot the mark? Maybe some people love
that high school band playing like an orchestra!
The second thing that is not sublime is what Longinus calls puerility.
And this word "puerility" comes from the Latin "puer," which means boy.
So "puer." The first four letters here. It means a kind of
boyishness, childishness, and for Longinus
this occurs when people are showing off. If you're an author and
you try to do too much, you have lots of
metaphors, lots of similes. You just try to kind of
pack your work with fireworks. Well, you're trying too hard in a sense,
and he calls this frigid. It's cold. It doesn't have the right level of
passion. The opposite of this, and this is our
last thing that the sublime is not, he
refers to this as false sentiment. Okay, so false
sentiment, which is where you have too much emotion, and we can think of
this as being melodramatic,
too sentimental, too much emotion. It becomes
sappy quite quickly. Again, this seems quite useful, but the
thing I want to point out here is that a lot of the description
of what the sublime is not is actually very similar
to what the sublime is! Actually, at one point he states this
very clearly. Longinus writes, "Those ornaments of style,
those sublime and delightful images, which contribute
to success, are the foundation and the origin, not
only of excellence, but also of failure." Which is really fascinating. To
demonstrate this, let me give you a few examples. So, first
of all, if we think of the sublime
and what is not sublime, he refers to both as a kind of swelling.
Both are a form of swelling. So how can we tell the difference between them?
Secondly, he often talks about confused imagery, ...
where you have lots of metaphors together, let's say.
Sometimes this is considered sublime and sometimes it's considered bombast.
How can we tell the difference between these two?
And then the last one here is what we sometimes refer to as the deliberate
mistake. This is a really fascinating one,
and actually as you go on and you read more literary criticism, you'll see this
one all the time. Critics love to do this, and
it's kind of problematic. So what a deliberate mistake is ...
it's where you're reading an author and something
seems off, something seems erroneous or problematic, and then you turn it around
and you make a virtue out of it. Let me give you an example here.
At one point Longinus is talking about how Homer uses these two prepositions
that he squeezes together into one word, and
the new proposition that he creates is "hupek" which means something like
"up out of." He's using this to describe
a storm. So this might seem bad -- it might seem like Homer is forcing
things -- but this is what Longinus writes, "Moreover, by his bold and forcible
combination of prepositions of opposite meaning he
tortures his language to imitate the agony of the scene."
In other words he's describing a storm. He's describing
terror, and it's as if the poet is getting carried away with his emotions.
He's so frightened, and so impressed and in awe, that he squeezes the words
together to express the tension. Sounds grand, doesn't it? But how do you
know that's what's happening, and how do you know that this is not
an actual mistake instead of a deliberate mistake?
And then one more example here. In section 22, he talks about
a rhetorical device or poetic figure called
hyperbaton, which is where you mix up your words. The order of the words is not
what we tend to associate with proper grammar.
But here's how he describes it: "By hyperbaton we mean a transposition of
words..." So words are kind of transposed, they're
moved in different directions. "... or thoughts from their usual order,
bearing unmistakably the characteristic stamp of violent
mental agitation." And then listen to how he describes this
in what follows. It's as if he has is trying to show himself how
how much he is affected by this emotion: "In real life we often see a man under
the influence of rage, or fear, or indignation, or beside himself with
jealousy, or with some other out of the interminable list of human
passions, begin a sentence, and then swerve aside into some
inconsequent parenthesis, and then again double back to his
original statement, being borne with quick turns by his distress, as though by a
shifting wind, now this way, now that, and playing a
thousand capricious variations on his words, his thoughts, and the natural order
of his discourse." Right, that sounds pretty sublime doesn't
it? Or you could just say that somebody is
unable to speak properly and is making mistakes!
So which one is it? How can you tell the difference?
Hopefully you've seen from this video the difficulty that Longinus faces.
Because often the very things that lead to bad writing are in the
hands of a true craftsman also the things that make for
great writing.