The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations || Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling

Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic FeelingAuthor(s): Steven Z. LevineSource: New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 2, The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations(Winter, 1985), pp. 377-400Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468752 .

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Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling

Steven Z. Levine

ELLE-ILE-EN-MER is a small island in the Atlantic off the southern coast of Brittany (fig. 1). In its fantastic configura- tions of grottoes, needles, and reefs formed by the incessant

workings of the wind and waves, Belle-Ile offers as fine an example as any in France of that category of natural scenery that during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to be desig- nated as the sublime. It is not the sublime forces and forms of nature that can concern us alone, however, for as its theoreticians make clear, the sublime is not an ontology but a phenomenology, not a special essence of certain things but rather an experience of a particular kind, born out of the encounter between consciousness and the world.

Gustave Flaubert vividly testifies to the emotional transports provoked by a sojourn in Belle-Ile. In the company of the critic Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert voyages to the remote island solely to see its sea and rocks. Long, precarious walks on the terrifying, primeval cliffs leave the men enervated and exhausted, susceptible to the feeling of an ineluctable immersion in the alluring vastness of nature. Flaubert's

euphoric description of the sights of Belle-Ile is a paradigm of the sublime:

Our spirit revolved in the profusion of these splendors, we drank them in with our eyes; we flared our nostrils to them, we opened our ears to them; something of the life of the elements, emanating by themselves under the attraction of our glances, reached us, became assimilated to us, made us understand them in a less distanced way, made us feel closer to them, by virtue of this more complex union. By force of penetrating us, entering us, we became nature too, we felt her gaining on us and we experienced an immeasurable joy; we would have wanted to become lost in her, be taken by her, or carry her off in us. As in the transports of love one desires more hands to touch, more lips to kiss, more eyes to see, more soul to love, stretching ourselves out upon nature in a movement full of delirium and joy, we regretted that our eyes could not reach to the bosom of the rocks, to the depths of the seas, to the end of the sky, in order to see how the rocks grow, the waves flow, the stars alight; that our ears could not hear the rumbling of the formation of granite in the earth, the pressing of sap in plants, the rolling of coral in the solitudes of the ocean, and, in the sympathy of this



NEW LITERARY HISTORY

contemplative effusion, we would have wished that our soul, everywhere irradiant, could go live amid all this life so as to don all its forms, endure like them, and forever varying, forever undergo its metamorphoses beneath the eternal sun.1

As much as I would like to linger over the pressing and piling up of Flaubert's breathless period, it is not my purpose to do so here. Al-

though dating from 1847, Flaubert's account of his trip to Belle-Ile was published only in 1886. The painter Claude Monet owned this book; a fellow Norman, in his artistic anxiety he compares himself to Flaubert.2 Whether by coincidence or design, it is in the last months of 1886 that Monet undertakes his own journey to Belle-Ile.

When Monet writes that Belle-Ile is tragic, sinister, diabolical, but superb; savage, fantastic, lugubrious, and yet delicious; terrifying, terrible, astonishing, but colossal and grandiose, he is invoking the sublime of the literary and philosophical tradition in everything but the word itself. For Monet in his guise as the solitary traveler far from home, the verbal record of his experience of the sublime is in the seventy-seven preserved letters written daily to family, friends, and business associates; for Monet the painter, the formal working-over, indeed, the sublimation of those primary feelings of which he writes, is found in the series of thirty-eight paintings that he elaborated on the spot and later back home at Giverny.3 Illustrated here are four paintings of the Pyramids of Port-Coton, so called due to the cotton- wool appearance of the churning waters at this stretch of coast known as the "Mer Sauvage." Each one is like its mates in all particulars but size, scale, color, and atmospheric effect. Exact similitude is thus dif- ferentiated, identification deferred in the ongoing compulsion of Mo- net's search for the sublime. The sublime is not to be captured in a single frame.

In keeping with his long-standing working habits of more than twenty years, Monet regularly paints on ready-made canvases of various standard sizes. Within the shrunken limits of the Copenhagen painting (W. 1086, 60 x 73 cm.) (fig. 2), twenty percent smaller than the painting in Moscow (W. 1084, 65 x 81 cm.) (fig. 3), the writhing pyramids of rock take on an enhanced monumentality. This effect of formal concentration is still further magnified by Monet's unusual but idiosyncratic choice of a nonstandard square support for a third version of the motif (W. 1087, 65 x 65 cm.) (fig. 4). Repetitions such as these constitute the germ of Monet's well-known serial method. These multiple images of a single view result in part from the painter's inability or unwillingness to complete an individual picture, os- tensibly on account of changing effects of light and weather. Re-

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SEASCAPES (F TIHE StUBIIME7.

Fig. 1. Belle-Ile-en-Mer, France. Photo by author.

peatedly, as the letters frequently testify, Monet is beset by bouts of fury and despair, and yet, as he puts it, he always recommences the same motif, "always imagining that what I begin will be better and that I'll be able to do it in two or three sessions; sometimes it works but it fails me still more often" (1 Nov. 1886). As a consequence, Monet is forced to finish some of his pictures far from the motif, as in a fourth painting dated at Giverny in 1887 (W. 1089, 65 x 81 cm.) (fig. 5).

The lament of dissatisfaction and doubt regarding the utility of these repetitions alternates with a much more hopeful endorsement of his serial practices. Writing perhaps somewhat ill-advisedly to his jealous mistress regarding his "passion for the sea," Monet recapit- ulates his intentions: "In brief, I'm mad about [the sea]; but I know well that to truly paint the sea one has to see it every day, at every hour, and from the same spot in order to know its life just at that spot; and so I redo the same motifs up to four and six times even" (30 Oct. 1886). But if Monet melodramatically insists on leaving Belle- Ile a victor in his loving struggle with the sea-that "scamp," "minx," and "she-devil" as he calls her-he candidly acknowledges that "to be rained on for hours in order to be able to get in a few strokes of the brush, no, that's madness" (16 Nov. 1886). The sublime experience that Monet seeks to render in paint is precisely that intangible

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NEW LITERARY HISI()RY

Fig. 2. Claude Monet, Pyramids of Port-Coton 1. 1886. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Co-

penhagen.

quality that eludes material possession and whose eventual figuration would constitute the extinction of desire. Hence the endless rework-

ings and repetitions of the series. Nevertheless, in Monet's occasional

square variations (e.g., W. 1087-88), perhaps we are entitled to

glimpse the decorative and affective resolutions of art, no mere rect-

angular window open to the random flux of nature but a definitive or deathly immobilization of change.

The portrait of manic excess, melancholic depression, and recur- rent loss that stems from Monet's letters is very different from the

anonymous account of the artist at work that was published during the period of Monet's stay on the island in the regional newspaper The Beacon of the Loire (Le Phare de la Loire, 6 Nov. 1886). In the local columns of coastal Breton news, we read as follows: "At Port Domois, on Belle-Ile, Breton fishermen are astonished to see a man, dressed like them, in oilskins, heavy boots, and sou'wester, stubbornly painting, during the storm, upon canvases fixed to an easel lashed to the rocks with ropes. Often a gust will rip palette and brushes from the hands of the painter, who begins over again without ever be-

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SEASCAPES OF THE SUBLIME

Fig. 3. Claude Monet. Pyramids of Port-Coton II. 1886. Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

coming discouraged. T1his is Claude Monet, seeking to render the

fleeting splendors of the storm. With the same aim, Vernet had himself attached to the mast of a ship" (fig. 6).4

This is the public version of Monet's enterprise, very similar in tone and substance to the contemporary descriptions of the painter by the art critic who would hereafter become his lifelong friend and biog- rapher, Gustave Geffroy, who by chance was staying on Belle-Ile during a portion of Monet's visit.5 In spite of the dubious testimonial value of the account that I have quoted, whether it is attributable to

Geffroy or rather an unknown local journalist, the description has the value of initiating us into the heroic register of the sublime by route of its reference to a legendary exploit of the famous eighteenth- century marine painter Joseph Vernet (1714-89). This topos of fearlessness in pursuit of the fleeting phenoma of the storm at sea is also featured in the biographies of Turner as well as the marine painters of seventeenth-century Holland.6 The literary topos of the artist-in- the-storm makes of Vernet and Monet intrepid and undaunted col-

leagues of the seafaring explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth

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Fig. 4. Claude Monet. Pyramids f lPort-Colonz III. 1886. Private collection.

centuries, naturalists like Bougainville and Darwin who braved the perils of ocean travel to bring back an encyclopedic knowledge of the world. The empiricist bias of the Enlightenment is well captured in an ode entitled, "TI'hat the study of nature is preferable even to that of the ancients," in which Vernet's risky quest for truth is favorably contrasted to the sterile representation of a storm according to the venerable pattern set by Virgil.7

Illustrated here is the family version of Vernet's notorious exploit (fig. 7). Painted by the artist's grandson Horace Vernet, this depiction was one of the chief successes at the Salon of 1822, which also saw the exhibition of the storm-tossed Bark of Dante by Delacroix. Here are the words with which the Salon catalogtue relates the elder Ver- net's adventure:

Called back to his country in 1752 in order to paint the Ports of France, this

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;::::,: : : :




Fig. 5. Claude Monet. Pyramids of Port-Coton IV. 1887. Private collection.

painter leaves Italy and embarks at Livorno in a small felucca. During the crossing, a violent squall comes up and threatens to break the frail vessel on the rocks. In the midst of the keen alarm of the crew and passengers, J. Vernet experiences no other fear than not to be able to see the admirable

spectacle of a tempest well enough and close enough; tied down at the bow of the vessel, and there, rapturously contemplating the terrible scene that is offered to his view, he confides at one and the same time to his memory and his notebook the fugitive effects of a stormy sky and an angry sea.8

In his article on "Vernet Tied to a Mast in a Storm," George Lev- itine has shown that the various allegations and allegories concerning Vernet's putative exploit differ in their account according to the al- ternative rationalist and Romantic attitudes of Vernet's chroniclers.9 For example, the description in the catalogue accords principally with earlier versions of the story that emphasize Vernet's motives for

studying the tempest, although the word ravissement, ravishment or

rapture, poses the issue of deathly pleasure to which we will have to return. Moreover, the 1822 description follows the rationalist guide- lines for the depiction of storms and tempests in the standard land-

scape treatise of the period, written around 1800 by the painter Val- enciennes (1750-1819). In his discussion of the painting of storms

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in general, Valenciennes enjoins the student of landscape to endeavor to master the feelings of fright and terror that violent storms pro- voke: "It is necessary that the artist who contemplates them make

great efforts over himself, so that the sensibility of his heart does not

prevent him from studying the sublime scenes of a spectacle that he could scarcely admire without shuddering."10 And of storms at sea, Valenciennes royally boasts that when he himself was caught by the

tempest, "we were less frightened by the imminent dangers that we risked than struck with admiration and astonishment by the sight of the most imposing and magnificent spectacle that Nature may present" (p. 273).

Valenciennes's text is full of admiration for the seascapes of Joseph Vernet, and the passages that I have quoted may well represent a rhetorical appropriation of the Vernet-in-the-storm topos which by 1800 had been making the rounds in various forms for a number of

years. The language of Valenciennes's enthusiasm for Vernet's land-

scapes and seascapes may also reflect the recent publication in 1798 of Diderot's Salon of 1767, in which Vernet and the philosophy of the sublime were first brought together. That coupling was in turn de-

pendent on the translation in 1765 of the seminal work on the sublime published during the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke's A

Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the

Beautiful (1757; 2nd rev. ed., 1759). Gita May has studied the textual dependence of Diderot on Burke

and identified the unacknowledged paraphrases that today we would

regard as instances of plagiarism.1' What is important for us to rec-

ognize, however, is that Diderot takes Burke's remarks out of the context of a systematic psychological theory that stems from Locke and applies them to the practical criticism of art. Whereas Burke identifies a universal category of our sensations of nature that is distinct from those feelings aroused by objects of beauty, Diderot con- founds the natural sublime and the aesthetic appreciation of art.

If Vernet's seascapes at the Salon provide the pretext for the in- troduction of Burke's discourse on the sublime into Diderot's criticism, it is not initially Diderot's strategy to acknowledge this. By way of an elaborate and lengthily sustained narrative conceit involving an abbe, his students, and a walking tour in the country, Diderot writes

page after page about the feelings of pleasure, fright, and even self- annihilation that he experiences in the face of a variety of natural sites. Found out in his subterfuge as though by a slip of the pen, Diderot finally confesses that it is the sight of Vernet's pictures that has provoked this hallucinatory meditation on the sublime.12

At the moment of Diderot's demystification of his text, Vernet's art becomes a Burkean catalogue of the effects and aspects of nature that

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Fig. 6. Claude Monet. Storm at Belle-lie. 1886. Private collection.

may elicit the sensations of the sublime: ". . imposing rocks, eternal mountains, stagnant, agitated, and precipitated waters, torrents, tranquil seas, seas in fury, sites varied to infinity, Greek, Roman, Gothic constructions; ... skies, distances, calms, stormy weather, serene weather, the sky of different seasons, lighting at different times of the day, tempests, shipwrecks, deplorable situations, victims and pa- thetic scenes of every kind; day, night, natural and artificial lighting, disparate or fused effects of these lights."13 Several pages after this enumeration Diderot concludes his section on Vernet with an ex- tended paraphrase of some of Burke's most famous ideas; for Di- derot, the philosopher's abstract formulations find material embodiment in the oceanic imaginings of Joseph Vernet. Here is how Di- derot succinctly conflates several of Burke's more prolix remarks:

"Everything that astonishes the soul, everything that impresses a

feeling of terror leads to the sublime. A vast plain does not astonish like the ocean, nor a tranquil ocean like an agitated ocean" (p. 165). And here are excerpts from the prototype in Burke that serves for Diderot's variation:

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of

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Fig. 7. Horace Vernet. Joseph Vernet Attached to the Mast Studying the Effects of the Storm. 1822. Mus6e C:alvet, Avignon.

soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. . . Whatever therefore is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror, be endued with greatness of dimensions or not.... A level plain of a vast extent on land is certainly no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the mind with anything so great as the ocean itself? This is owing to several causes, but it is owing to none more than this, that the ocean is an

object of no small terror. Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more

openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime.14

The oceanic sublime is by no means a metaphor original to Burke. The image descends through Addison and Berkeley from Burke's

acknowledged source in Longinus's Peri Hupsous, or On the Sublime, the first-century treatise on great writing whose fame was revived by Boileau's French translation and commentary of 1674. Although the treatise is principally a rhetorical handbook for the learned manu- facture of elevated effects in poetry and prose, at one point the clas- sical text converges with the existential questions of contemplation and self-transcendence with which the aesthetics of painting from Vernet to Monet are concerned. With reference to our roles as "spectators of the mighty whole," the Longinian text seems to cross the

386

~~1, I : : .: ~~~ ~ I ~ 1: ; ~~ ~~ ::: .~~ , , .. :: ::




centuries and make contact with what we will see in a moment to be the position of Immanuel Kant on the sublime. Here is Longinus, chapter thirty-five:

3. Wherefore not even the entire universe suffices for the thought and contemplation within the reach of the human mind, but our imaginations often pass beyond the bounds of space, and if we survey our life on every side and see how much more it everywhere abounds in what is striking, and great, and beautiful, we shall soon discern the purpose of our birth. 4. This is why, by a sort of natural impulse, we admire not the small streams, useful and pellucid though they may be, but the Nile, the Danube or the Rhine, and still more the ocean. ... 5. In all such matters we may say that what is useful or necessary men regard as commonplace, while they reserve their admiration for that which is astounding.15

It is indeed Kant who goes beyond Burke's and Diderot's views on astonishment and terror as the twin sources of the sublime, and thereby offers an answer to the implicit question of Longinus as to why we are driven "by a sort of natural impulse" to contemplate the astounding universe from our position of frail mortality. Kant had published his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 1764 (Fr. trans., 1796), but it is in the Critique of Judgment of 1790 that the German philosopher explicitly sets out to supplement Burke's taxonomy by proposing a causal explanation for our ambivalent attraction to the sublime. Vernet's seascapes could serve as pertinent illustrations to Kant's text:

Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like-these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security; and we willingly call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature. 6(Fig. 8)

The sublime is crucial to the edifice of Kant's critical philosophy not because of the Burkean or Diderotian frisson that it administers. On the contrary, it is the aftermath of astonishment and terror, what Kant in the passage just quoted calls "a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind," that corroborates the doctrines of pure reason and divine ontology that it is Kant's chief purpose to proclaim. And in

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388 NEW LITERARY HISIORY

Fig. 8. Joseph Vernet. Seascape: Shipwreck. 1777. Musee Calvet, Avignon.

:: :-::::::: : :: --::-: -- :-

I

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this self-conscious aftermath of fear we discover that "in our mind we find a superiority to nature even in its immensity": "And so also the irresistibility of its might, while making us recognize our own

physical impotence, considered as beings of nature, discloses to us a faculty of judging independently and a superiority over nature, on which is based a kind of self-preservation entirely different from that which can be attacked and brought into danger by external nature. Thus humanity in our person remains unhumiliated, though the individual might have to submit to this dominion" (p. 396).

Here we can begin to glimpse a metaphysical explanation for the self-destructive courting of peril that characterizes the anecdotes about Vernet and Monet and the stormy sea. Whatever portion of their motivation might be attributed to the empirical pursuit of a natural effect, there is by Kant's account a determination much deeper, a drive that is anterior even to the claims of the life of the individual. This drive for the sublime finds its expression in the self-

contemplative consciousness that alone in the universe can acknowl-

edge the necessity and destiny of its own death, a cosmic death trans- formed by art into cbnscious spectacle. For Kant, the secure distance of aesthetic contemplation permits art's spectators to establish pro- spective mastery over the abyss, over what Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of 1920 will call "sublime Ananke (Necessity)," the "remorse- less law of nature."17 Freud's metapsychology, however, differs from Kant's metaphysics in the crucial absence of the regulating principle of the divine will.

Against the Kantian triumph of independent human judgment over the sublime obduracy and implacability of nature, we can range the thoroughly pragmatic observation by Valenciennes that in the

tempestuous sea "death has established its domain."18 He acknowl-

edges no attraction for this watery death, and in this sober regard he differs from the pictorial and philosophical representatives of the next generation, such as Girodet, Stendhal, C. D. Friedrich, and

Schopenhauer. Indeed, it is Schopenhauer who will mediate the gap between Kant and Freud, and who will turn out to be the most pertinent philosopher of the sublime with respect to the water paintings of Monet. But first I will return to the sublime confrontation with death that is a hallmark of the Romantic consciousness in painting and literature.

In the following poem about Vernet at sea, the painter Girodet

deepens the theme of the deathly attraction of the oceanic sublime. Written around 1820, the poem was posthumously published in 1829:

Absorbed all together in his pure pleasure, The painter knows to enjoy all nature.

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To know her better, he seeks out danger, On a frail vessel the studious passenger, By the glints of lightning that shine overhead, Always calm, Vernet draws the tempest. Suspended over death, while the anger of the waves Impress pallor on the sailor's face, He admires, he observes, and, braving shipwreck, Glory is his lamp in the midst of the storm.19

Pleasure, joy, knowledge, and death: in French these phrases reso- nate with the energy of a libidinous wish for self-extinction in a watery embrace. In this spirit Stendhal confides to his journal in 1811 the

fantasy of savoring "the pleasure of being drowned." Vernet is quoted as exclaiming, "I too will marry the sea."20 Perhaps now we can better understand the one word that seemed out of place in the catalogue account of 1822, the ravissement with which Vernet is said to have

contemplated the terrible scene. Monet's joy of the sea is likewise couched in an emotional language

of love and violence that often seems to overflow the strict bounds of discursive sense. For example, Monet writes that "it was a joy [jouissance] for me to see that sea in fury; it was like nervous exhaus- tion [enervement], and I was so excited [emballe] that yesterday I was desolated to see the weather become calm so quickly" (17 Oct. 1886). To his dealer he writes that "this coast excites me with passion" (17 Oct. 1866), that "I am excited with enthusiasm for this sinister land and particularly because it takes me out of what I'm in the habit of

doing" (28 Oct. 1886). Nevertheless, Monet remains "impotent in

rendering the intensity [of the sea]" (23 Oct. 1886), "at pains to render this somber and terrible aspect" (28 Oct. 1886). Destructive

reworking, overpainting, and unpainting ensue, and in disgust Monet leaves Belle-Ile, convinced that he has irretrievably besmirched the

images of his impossible desire. After more than two months at work on a campaign that was to have lasted no more than two weeks, Monet writes of his dilemma to his impatient mistress Alice: "I really must

acknowledge that it's no longer possible to find my effects again, and I would have done better to leave three weeks ago, for since that time, I realize now too late, I've only destroyed what I had done well, and, chancing to bring back only incomplete things, it would have been better to have them in their purity of accent .... Finally, I'm still

going to try to save some canvases, the weather really seems to be turning fine" (19 Nov. 1886).

Of course, even with the weather turning fine there could be no

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guarantee for the artistic result, for just then Monet would likely wish for the storm to return. The demands of home life finally intervene to put an end to Monet's solo affair with the "savage sea," and the pictures, much reworked in Giverny, are exhibited in Paris in 1887.

For the purpose of this consideration of Monet and the sublime, the most interesting response to the Belle-Ile series comes from Joris- Karl Huysmans, the author of the recently published and notorious novel, A Rebours (1884). Like Diderot's treatment of Vernet's Salon exhibits in 1767 as a single compelling ensemble, Huysmans writes of Monet's entire exhibition as the expression of a unified vision: "From Claude Monet a series of tumultuous landscapes, of abrupt seas, violent, with ferocious tones, vicious blue, raw violet, harsh

green, of rock-work waves with solid crests, beneath skies in rage.... The savagery of this painting seen by the eye of a cannibal is discon-

certing at first, but in front of the force it discloses, in front of the faith that animates it, in front of the powerful inspiration of the man who brushes it, one submits oneself to the forbidding charms of this

unpolished art."21 "Forbidding charms" is a Baudelairean oxymoron that in Huysmans's article is soon followed by the equally "sublime" paradox of "horrible beauty." The critic's own initial response of re-

pulsion followed by submission is likewise typical of the phenome- nological transformation that characterizes the two-phased Kantian reaction of active astonishment or fright and passive acknowledgment and acceptance. Huysmans's difficulty in arriving at the latter point is in part due to the sheer unexpectedness of the disconcerting colors and textures of Monet's Belle-Ile.

Huysmans contrasts the rough facture of the Belle-Ile pictures- which he describes as "aggregated and compacted masses," "impen- etrable whorls striated with streaks like marble"-with Monet's earlier "truly liquid" seascapes. If the Belle-Ile paintings represent the Burkean sublime of grandeur and terror, what Kant more precisely terms the "dynamically sublime," the Normandy paintings of the 1880s additionally show Monet at work in the second Kantian mode of grandeur and contemplation, what the philosopher names the "mathematically sublime." On the one hand, nature's ineluctable

might is apprehended; on the other hand, it is the acknowledgment of infinite extension, succession, and duration in time and space that gives rise to the characteristic sensation of the mind's sublimity. In this respect the shape in time of Monet's series is itself a figure of the sublime. For, as Kant writes, "Sublimity does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious that we are superior to nature within and therefore also to nature without us (so far as it influences us)."22 Access to the sublime position

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of lucid self-contemplation, free from the imperatives and constraints of both inner drives and outer forces, can thus be effectuated by whatever means are at hand, whether "dynamic" or "mathematical." The sublime is simply the heightened consciousness of beholding oneself beholding the world.

Monet's numerous Normandy beach scenes present both third- and first-person versions of the sublime of oceanic extension as well as the sublime of oceanic might. By means of anecdotal figures inter- polated into the space of contemplation and through the more direct agency of offering the oceanic view as the artist's own, Monet's paintings are mirrors of the human gaze in the sublime instant of the suspension of desire and the self-conscious constitution of the beholding subject. Here modern subjectivity is placed on view. Ac- cording to the Critique of Kant, the redemption of subjectivity as the decisive human function can only be understood in the light of the divinity. Much closer to Monet's atheism and pessimism, however, is Schopenhauer, a writer of the generation after Kant whose influence in France was at its peak in 1886, the year of the translation of his major work The World as Will and Idea (1819; rev. ed. 1844). His renunciation of the insatiable appetites of human will and his contemplative embrace of death as the proper goal of life provide the twin bases for what are to my mind the most provocative interpre- tations of Monet's art that are written during the 1880s and 90s.

For Schopenhauer, art alone releases the spectator from the vicious circle of worldly desire, denial, and frustration that inevitably accom- panies a life subservient to the workings of will. In opposition to Kant, the sublime is now purely defined as the response to phenomena that stand in a hostile relation to the human will to survive; gone are the metaphysics of human superiority to nature which Kant optimistically postulates as a reflection of the superiority of God. Aesthetic contemplation of the sublime may, for the brief instant of its enactment, elevate the individual above the trivial and tragic world of will into the disinterested and hence invulnerable realm of pure ideas; acceding to the sublime, however, constitutes a courageous rejection of the lurid blandishments of life. Here is Schopenhauer, then, on the sublime, illustrated by an exemplary painting of 1882 (W. 781) (fig. 9):

If these very objects whose significant forms invite us to pure contemplation, have a hostile relation to the human will in general, as it exhibits itself in its objectivity, the human body, if they are opposed to it, so that it is menaced by the irresistible predominance of their power [Kant's "dynamically sublime"], or sinks into insignificance before their immeasurable greatness

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Fig. 9. Claude Monet. Sunset at Pourville. 1882. Private collection.

[Kant's "mathematically sublime"], if, nevertheless, the beholder does not direct his attention to this eminently hostile relation to his will, but, although perceiving and recognizing it, turns consciously away from it, forcibly de- taches himself from his will and its relations, and, giving himself up entirely to knowledge, quietly contemplates those very objects that are so terrible to the will, comprehends only their Idea, which is foreign to all relation, so that he lingers gladly over its contemplation, and is thereby raised above himself, his person, his will, and all will: in that case he is filled with the sense of the sublime, he is in the state of spiritual exaltation, and therefore the object producing such a state is called sublime.23

After this theoretical discussion of the general psychological char- acteristics of pure will-less contemplation, Schopenhauer proceeds to rank the natural objects that are variously conducive to the self-conscious insights of the sublime. Sunlight, open spaces, barren plains, rushing torrents, overhanging cliffs, and thunderous storms all give way before the intensity of the oceanic sublime, "where the moun- tainous waves rise and fall, dash themselves furiously against steep cliffs, and toss their spray high into the air; the storm howls, the sea

boils, the lightning flashes from black clouds, and the peals of thunder drown the voice of storm and sea." For the "undismayed beholder," such an oceanic performance and display will yield "the

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complete impression of the sublime": "He perceives himself, on the one hand, as an individual, as the frail phenomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can utterly destroy, helpless against powerful nature, dependent, the victim of chance, a vanishing nothing in the presence of stupendous might; and, on the other hand, as the eternal, peaceful, knowing subject, the condition of the object, and, therefore, the supporter of this whole world; the terrific strife of nature only his idea; the subject itself free and apart from all desires and necessities, in the quiet comprehension of the Ideas" (p. 464). Oceanic might is Schopenhauer's metaphor for the ontological condition that engenders the transcendent consciousness of human mental superiority in spite of physical inferiority; oceanic immensity is likewise seen as representative of the sublime lucidity that is the

philosophical triumph of an encounter in which for only an instant "we feel ourselves pass away and vanish into nothing like drops in the ocean" (p. 465).

The repudiation of will and its replacement by idea is thus the characteristic of the individual in the grip of the sublime. Hence the

topos of the fearlessness of Vernet and Monet in the face of the storm; hence their apparent suspension of the self-interest of the

passing moment in preference for an interest beyond self that is yet the goal of the self. In his clinical and metapsychological postulation of a death instinct that struggles with the Eros of the foredoomed yet foolishly persistent will to live, Freud finds in the philosophy of Scho- penhauer an acknowledgment that "death is the 'true result and to that extent the purpose of life.' "24 Schopenhauer's disciple Eduard von Hartmann had redubbed the death-dealing will the Unconscious in 1868; the continuity of Freud's thought with the pessimism of German idealism and Romanticism must not be left unstressed.

Schopenhauer's deathly philosophy is first put to work in inter-

preting Monet's art in an extraordinary pamphlet by Celen Sabbrin published in 1886. Entitled "Science and Philosophy in Art," the essay reviews a large exhibition of paintings by the French impressionists in New York, advancing the claim that "the pictures of Claude Monet come first as the latest art expressions of scientific and philosophic thought."25 Monet is said to be "occupied in giving expression to the most serious truths of our life" (p. 19), chiefly, that "the indifference of nature to suffering or happiness is terrible to contemplate" (p. 18). The static, geometrical organizations of Monet's pictures provide Sab- brin with the formal evidence that his is an art beyond pleasure, an art of fixation, arrest, death. Here is her description of a painting of Pourville, very much like the one illustrated on the previous page:

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The rock which boldly rises in the foreground is reflected in the rolling sea as a triangle. Here let us note how frequently any distinct object in the foreground of Monet's pictures is sure to be inorganic, inanimate, massive, stable, recalling the blind, immutable forces of unsympathetic nature.. .. The gallery and all surroundings vanish, and it is the sea that spreads before you, with its restlessness. Innocence is depicted upon the siren's countenance. In the past, how many adventurous mariners she has lured on to repose upon her trustful bosom, only to drag them to her distant abode, the dwelling of death. (P. 15)

Sabbrin's principal analogy for the deathly geometry and abstract color relations of Monet's paintings is to the mathematical structure of

Wagner's music. During the course of the 1880s the craze for Wagner constitutes one of the principal modes of access to the philosophy of

Schopenhauer, which was widely taken as the basis for the musician's

tragic vision.26 In 1889 Monet once again has the opportunity to display his Nor-

mandy and Brittany seascapes in the context of a major retrospective exhibition of his art. In comparing the early works with those more recent, the critic Joseph Gayda speaks of the newly enlarged manner of the artist, which has, he says, "in some fashion become sublimated."27 In the alchemical tradition sublimatio represents the trans-

position of a base element into a precious metal, just as in Jung's philosophy sublimatio will represent the transformation of sensuous desire into an abstract ideal. Some such dual process of material and

spiritual transubstantiation is recognized as taking place in Monet's art of the 1890s, most notably in an article of 1892 by the symbolist poet and theorist Camille Mauclair. Deeply imbued with Schopen- hauer's call for human salvation from brute will through a life of aesthetic self-consciousness, Mauclair writes that "M. Monet has ar- rived at a pictorial ideal in which ground pigment is for nought, in which the pictures are truly made out of a dream and a magic breath, in which the process of the color-spot is manipulated so impeccably that it disappears, leaving nothing for the eyes but a mad enchant- ment that gives paroxysms to vision, reveals an unsuspected nature, lifts it up to the symbol by this irreal and vertiginous execution."28

By way of illustration here are two versions of a Normandy subject, The Customs House Cabin of 1882 and 1897 (W. 736, 1458) (figs. 10, 11) in which the rough facture of discrete strokes that proved so

forbidding to Huysmans in 1887 is now aerated, disembodied, ma-

terially sublimated from earthen pigment to vaporous color. The later series is also painted on larger picture formats than those of 1882,

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Fig. 10. Claude Monet. Customs House Cabin I. 1882. Private collection.

thus producing a greater dispersion of visual attention across a broader space (54 x 65 cm. versus 65 x 92 cm.). Whatever the scale of the image, the cabin overlooking the sea is already the substitute formation for Monet's own agency of sublime contemplation.29

Mauclair goes on to speak of the colored surfaces of Monet's pictures, whether of water motifs or not, as "an ocean of pluricolored spots where one discovers the relations of everything and such un-

expected values that from the very truth of the vision of the painter surges up the consoling certitude that the world is what we create." This of course is a paraphrase of Schopenhauer's most famous maxim, "the world as my representation," and Mauclair concludes in the

Schopenhauerian vein that "Monet has touched the sublime."33 To conclude I will return once more to Freud. Psychoanalytic

theory is in the process of formation during these very years of Mo- net's endlessly repeated efforts to capture the sublime, efforts that are now beginning to be appreciated by the critics. First touched on

briefly in 1905 in Three Essays on Sexuality and then more extensively in the Leonardo in 1910, sublimation is described as a process by which conflicts between opposed drives of love and hate, life and death,

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Fig. 11. Claude Monet. Customs House Cabin II. 1897. Private collection.

find a substitute outlet for those feelings that if discharged would

yield intolerable consequences for the conscious life of the individual. The process of sublimation converts the unsayable into the said, the unseeable into the seen; but the underlying drive remains behind in a repressed, unconscious form, ever ready to erupt. At the level of

theory this provides confirmation of the insufficiency of any of Mo- net's individual attempts to retain the sublime. According to Freud, "The repressed instinct never ceases to drive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction. No substitution or reactive firmations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct's persisting tension; and it is the dif- ference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is de- manded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but in the poet's words, 'presses ever forward unsubdued.' "31 Freud takes his

quotation from Goethe, yet another poet of the Romantic sublime; and putting poetry and psychology together, I would say that the oceanic sublime that we have been considering is itself a sublimation. In Diderot's self-annihilation, Kant's self-consciousness, and Scho-

penhauer's contemplation; in Vernet's ravissement and Monet's jouissance, we find the sea offering the opportunity for displacement and

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discharge of the desire to return from the tremors of life to the

inviting tranquillity of death. In an interview in 1889, Monet says, "I've remained faithful to that

sea in front of which I grew up";32 and the wished-for return to the seaside sites of his childhood, of his earliest painting campaigns along- side Boudin and Courbet,33 and of the working trips of his matu-

rity-that regressive return to the maternal sea of his birth-is re-

peated at intervals for the rest of his life. Eros is fooled here, however, for the erotic investment in the oceanic sublime is but a pretext to

permit the triumph of Thanatos, Eros's silent twin: "I would like

always to be before or upon [the sea], and when I die to be buried in a buoy."34 Freud will variously speak of the oceanic feeling or the Nirvana principle as the living embodiment of the hidden drive for

self-dispersion and self-dissolution;35 and for Monet's later critics Nir- vana is the sign for the artist's sublime transcendence of the empirical self.36 To see oneself in the position of contemplating the inevitable and acknowledging that it is indeed to be desired, that then is the

deathly burden of Monet's sublime.

BRYN MAWR COLLEGE

NOTES

1 Gustave Flaubert, Par les Champs et par les greves [1886] (Paris, 1910), pp. 130-31. All translations are my own. 2 Monet to his mistress Alice Hoschede, 30 April 1889, in Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonne (Lausanne and Paris, 1979), III, 247. 3 Wildenstein, II, 198-211, 275-91. Hereafter paintings will be referred to in the text by an initial W. followed by a catalogue number; letters in the same volume will be referred to by date. 4 For paintings of the storm, see W. 1115-19. 5 Gustave Geffroy, Claude Monet: Sa Vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1924), pp. 1-5. 6 Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings ofJ. M. W. Turner (New Haven and London, 1977), I, 224-25; also see the "Life of Ludolf Bakhuizen," in Arnold Hou- braken, Grosse Schouburgh der niederldndischen Maler und Malerinnen [1718-21], Quel- lenschriften fur Kunstgeschichte, 14 (Vienna, 1888), p. 255. Also see Andrew Wilton, Turner the Sublime (Chicago, 1981), p. 99. 7 P. D. Ecouchard Le Brun, Oeuvres (Paris, 1811), I, 58. 8 Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture et gravure, des artistes vivans, exposes au Musee royal des arts (Paris, 1822), p. 185. On the painting now in Avignon, see the exhibition catalogue Horace Vernet 1789-1863 (Rome and Paris, 1980), pp. 68-70. 9 George Levitine, "Vernet Tied to a Mast in a Storm: The Evolution of an Episode of Art Historical Romantic Folklore," Art Bulletin, 49 (1967), 93-100. 10 Pierre-Henri Valenciennes, Elemens de perspective pratique, a l'usage des artistes, suivis

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SEASCAPES OF THE SUBLIME 399

de riflexions et conseils d un eleve sur la peinture et particulierement sur le genre du paysage (Paris, 1800), p. 268. 11 Gita May, "Diderot and Burke: A Study in Aesthetic Affinity," PMLA, 75 (1960), 527-39. 12 On the naturalizing strategy of Diderot's landscape descriptions, see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in Diderot (Berkeley and Los

Angeles, 1980), pp. 122-32, and Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 189-90. 13 Denis Diderot, Salons, ed. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhemar (Oxford, 1963), III, 160-61. 14 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and

Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame and London, 1958), pp. 57-58. For the oceanic sublime in English aesthetics prior to Burke, see Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 489, 20 Sept. 1712: "I cannot see the heavings of this prodigious Bulk of Waters, even in a calm, without a very pleasing Astonishment, but when it is worked up in a

Tempest, so that the Horizon on every side is nothing but foaming billows and floating mountains, it is impossible to describe the agreeable horrour that arises from such a

prospect"; and George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous [1713] (La Salle, Ill., 1960), p. 62: "At this prospect of the wide and deep ocean ... are not our minds filled with a pleasing horror?" 15 Longinus, On the Sublime, in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York, 1971), p. 97. 16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, in Adams, p. 396. 17 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. and ed. James Strachey (New York, 1961), p. 39. Freud's term here is hehr rather than Kant's erhaben. 18 Valenciennes, p. 495. 19 Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Oeuvres posthumes (Paris, 1829), I, 105, cited in Lev-

itine, p. 95. Girodet's own colossal Scene of the Deluge (1806), the winner of the decennial

prize for painting in 1810, is like a monumental enlargement of a dramatic detail in a Vernet shipwreck scene. 20 Stendahl, Oeuvres intimes (Paris, 1961), p. 1368, and Arsene Houssaye, Histoire de

I'artfrancais (Paris, 1860), p. 284; both cited in Levitine, pp. 98 and 96. On the suicidal

"Ophelia complex" in nineteenth-century literature, see Gaston Bachelard, L'Eau et les reves: Essai sur l'imagination de la matiere (Paris, 1941). Monet writes to his friend Bazille of an apparent suicide attempt by drowning: Wildenstein, I, 29 June 1868. 21 Joris-Karl Huysmans, "L'Exposition International de la rue de Seze," La Revue

Independante de Litterature et d'Art, NS 3 (June 1887), 352. 22 Adams, p. 396. 23 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Bk. III, sec. 39, in Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, ed. Albert Hof- stadter and Richard Kuhns (Chicago, 1964), p. 461. For an exemplary Schopen- hauerian maxim of recent criticism, "presentness is grace," see Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood" [1967], in Aesthetics Today, ed. Morris Philipson and Paul J. Gudel, rev. ed. (New York, 1980), p. 234. 24 Freud, p. 44. 25 Celen Sabbrin [pseud. Helen Cecilia De Silver Abbott Michael], Science and Phi-

losophy in Art (New York, 1886), p. 3. 26 On the vogue for Wagner and Schopenhauer in the 1880s, see A. G. Lehman, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885-1895 (Oxford, 1968), and Jean Pierrot, The Dec- adent Imagination 1880-1900 (Chicago and London, 1981).




27 Joseph Gayda, "L'Exposition de la rue de Seze: Monet and Rodin," La Presse, 25 June 1889. 28 Camille Mauclair, "Exposition Claude Monet," La Revue Independante de Litterature et d'Art, NS 22 (Mar. 1892), 418. 29 See my "Monet's Cabane du Douanier," Fogg Art Museum Annual Report 1971-72, pp. 32-44. 30 Mauclair, p. 418. 31 Freud, p. 36. 32 Hugues Le Roux, "Silhouettes parisiennes: L'Exposition de Claude Monet," Gil Blas, 3 Mar. 1889. 33 Eugene Boudin (1824-98) and Gustave Courbet (1819-77) are two painters of the oceanic sublime who profoundly affected Monet's development. Boudin's figure- less sea-sky studies are extravagantly evoked in Charles Baudelaire, "Salon de 1859," Curiosites esthetiques (Paris, 1962), pp. 377-78; Courbet's sexually laden marine imagery is powerfully conjured in Zacharie Astruc, Les 14 Stations du Salon (Paris, 1859), pp. 394-95, 399-400, and Theophile Thore, "Exposition universelle de 1867," Salons de W. Biirger 1861 a 1868 (Paris, 1870), II, 382-83. Thore himself, a French critic deeply imbued with the Romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Germanic countries in which he spent so much time, relates a prototypical experience of the sensation of self-annihilation upon first viewing the immensity of the sea, in Salons de T. Thore (Paris, 1868), pp. 7-8. 34 Monet's remark is quoted in Geffroy, p. 8. 35 On the oceanic feeling, see Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents [1930], tr. and ed. James Strachey (New York, 1961), pp. 11-12, 15, 19-20; on the Nirvana principle, see Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 49-50. 36 See Louis Gillet, who writes of sublimation, nihilism, and Nirvana with respect to Monet's pictorial strategy, in "L'Epilogue de l'impressionnisme: Les 'Nympheas' de M. Claude Monet," La Revue Hebdomadaire, 21 Aug. 1909, p. 409 ("toute forme se sublime derriere ce nuage"), and Trois Variations sur Claude Monet (Paris, 1927), pp. 112-13.

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Documents

The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations || Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling