Tragic Joy and the SublimeAuthor(s): D. N. Bandyopadhyay and R. Jahan RamazaniSource: PMLA, Vol. 105, No. 2 (Mar., 1990), pp. 301-303Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462564 .

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Tragic Joy and the Sublime

To the Editor:

I found R. Jahan Ramazani's paper "Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime" (104 [1989]: 163-77) absorbing and stimulating reading. However, Ramazani's correlation of the tragic and the sublime seems to be based on assumptions not beyond challenge.

Ramazani explicitly assumes, following the Romantic poetics of the sub- lime, that "tragedy is the primary aesthetic example" of the ideal of the sub- lime and that "the theory of the sublime is close to being a theory of what Yeats calls tragic joy" (163). This correlation may not adequately explain the nor- mative basis of the sublime. The tragic forces are not the only determinant of the sublime. Hupsos 'elevation' leading to ekstasis 'transport' reflects the sub- lime ideal. It consists of the perfect conjoining of noesis'great conceptions' and sphodron kai enthousiastikon pathos 'inspired and vehement passion' that works as the primary principle of the sublime. In the Longinian analysis, its root lies far down in the epical vastness and ekpleksis'enthrallment.' In fact, Ramazani seems to set a premium on the Kantian interpretation of "threat- ening rocks," "clouds piled up," "lightning for flashes," "thunder peals," and "the boundless ocean in a tumult" as conducive to the sublime (Critique of Judgement [1790], trans. J. H. Bernard, 2nd ed., London, 1931, 125) and seeks to establish an interrelation between violence and the sublime. In trying to de- termine the sublime's affective basis, Ramazani takes his cue from such the- orists as Burke, Kant, Heidegger, Hertz, and Weiskel and repeatedly emphasizes death's relation to the sublime:" . . . death precipitates the emotional turn- ing called the sublime" (164), " . . . death is its ultimate occasion" (163), "[t]he sublime is inextricable from the death drive" (173).

The Kantian analysis of the alternating attraction and repulsion of the representation of the sublime in nature should, in fact, be judged according to the heroic principles. Ramazani refers to Yeats's correlation of the tragic and the sublime in Shakespeare's Lear and Sophocles's Oedipus, for which he seeks support in Longinus. But a greater part of the Longinian explication is projected against an epical background. Longinus furnishes dramatic exam- ples only when he substantiates the rhetorical sublime (Peri hupsos, chs. 15, 23, 40), but in the discussions on the affective sublime (chs. 9, 10), he desists from citing examples from the dramatic or tragic genres. Longinus fills these chapters with references to the Homeric epics and points out "how [Homer]

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associated himself with the sublimity of his heroic themes" (ch. 9).

Though Ramazani concentrates on such associated factors as fear, pain, and so on, Longinus discounts the necessity of these emotions in the evocation of the sub- lime: "For some emotions can be found that are mean and not in the least sublime, such as pity, grief, and fear" (ch. 8). Moreover, it is not death as such that is empha- sized by Longinus. The Sapphic ode concentrates not on death but on the emotions attendant to the lover's frenzy, and the analysis of the Homeric sailors under the clutch of death does not simply focus on the idea of death but describes the storm by singling out its most terrifying properties (164). This passage is, as Longinus suggests, a picture of limitless terror, destruction, and danger in which death is simply one factor. It is there- fore misleading to suppose that death is the only govern- ing item for evoking the sublime. Longinus discusses other subjects equally endowed with grandeur and maj- esty. Some pertinent examples are the Homeric exalta- tion of the heavenly powers, the battle of the gods, and the majestic representation of divine nature.

D. N. BANDYOPADHYAY University of Burdwan, India

Reply:

D. N. Bandyopadhyay questions my analysis of the sublime because it diverges from that of Longinus. But the sublime according to Longinus is not my primary paradigm; it is a version of the sublime that interests me insofar as it adumbrates certain features of the Romantic sublime, especially the dialectic of deathlike defeat and vigorous counterassertion. Apparently annoyed that I emphasize subsequent versions of the sublime, Ban- dyopadhyay returns to Longinus and finds, not surpris- ingly, that some aspects of the sublime articulated by Burke, Kant, Schiller, and others are not in Peri hupsos. The Romantic and the Longinian sublimes overlap but are hardly identical. Challenging my "assumptions" not about the sublime but only about the Longinian sub- lime, Bandyopadhyay disagrees with me on two counts: the correlations of the sublime with tragedy and of the sublime with death.

First, the sublime and tragedy. In both its Longinian and post-Longinian incarnations, the sublime disregards the laws of genre, so many theorists of the sublime hap- pily skip from prophecy to oration, from epic to lyric. Because the rhetorical and affective features of the sub- lime transgress such literary boundaries, only a fool would try to fasten the sublime to a single generic prov- ince. Therefore, my discussion of the sublime in Yeats

encompasses not only tragedy but also elegy, prophecy, apocalypse, and the curse. Bandyopadhyay quotes me as saying that "tragedy is the primary aesthetic exam- ple" of the sublime and goes on to argue that this is not the case in Longinus. But the full sentence shows that I make no such claim about Longinus: "In theoretical discussions the sublime overlaps with epic, tragedy, lyric, and prophecy, but of these genres tragedy is the primary aesthetic example for Kant and Schiller, as well as a fre- quent touchstone for Longinus." Although Kant and Schiller take most of their examples from tragedy, Lon- ginus does not. He discusses excerpts from tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and so tragedy is for him an important source, but he also quotes vari- ous works by Homer, Sappho, Herodotus, Demos- thenes, and Plato. Thus, I agree that the Longinian sublime traverses such genres as epic and love poem, never having argued that it was confined to tragic drama.

Second, the sublime and death. In the eighteenth cen- tury, theorists begin to argue that death is the occasion of the sublime, as death becomes ever more solitary, secular, and final. I quote Edmund Burke, for example, who states that "ideas of pain, and above all of death," precipitate the sublime, and Yeats later instances this as- sociation in his poems of "tragic joy." Here too Ban- dyopadhyay returns to Longinus and finds that the focus there is not, of course, exclusively on death. Even so, Longinus, having influenced later theorists, anticipates in some of his examples their more overt interest in death.

Reviewing these examples, Bandyopadhyay claims that the Sapphic ode is not really about death but about love and that the Homeric quotation is not really about death but about a frightening storm. Let's take Sappho first. Surely this is "love," but it is love described in the language of death and dying: "I cannot speak; / my tongue is broken, a subtle fire runs under my skin; my eyes cannot see, my ears hum; / cold sweat pours off me; shivering grips me all over; I am paler than grass; I seem near to dying." Struck deaf and dumb and blind, shiver- ing feverishly and pale-this may not be literal "death," but literal "death" is not an experience we can have in life, so poets have long suggested that such love is a worldly foretaste of death. The treatise's next example of sublimity is the Homeric passage about the sailors, and Longinus twice quotes from the line that associates these nearly dead sailors with Sappho's nearly dead lover: "they are carried away from under death, but only just." Longinus adds that the sailors almost seem to be "facing death many times with every wave that comes." Obviously, neither the Sapphic nor the Homeric charac- ters die, but because they rehearse annihilation and yet survive the threat, they exemplify sublimity. In the di-

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alectic of the sublime the first phase is suffused with in- timations of mortality; of course, we can't experience death directly as long as we're alive, so such emotions as this Homeric terror and Sapphic love are exactly the kinds of affective anticipations of death emphasized by later theorists-feelings that give way, in the final phase of the sublime, to the opposite feelings of power and transcendence.

Further, Longinus subtly links these death rehearsals to our "terrifying" encounter with the "danger" of Sap- pho's and Homer's overwhelming words. Although many other of Longinus's examples center on war, de- struction, fury, horror, killing, and rage, such specta- cles are not sufficient in themselves to precipitate the sublime. Rather, orators or writers must be able to in- corporate this violence into their own rhetoric, so that hearers or readers will experience a kind of proleptic death, becoming overwhelmed or terrified. Out of such defeat arises the illusory counterassertion that "we have created what we have only heard"-an illusion permit- ting the "joy and pride," or transport and elevation, that Longinus terms the sublime.

R. JAHAN RAMAZANI University of Virginia

Poetics against Itself

To the Editor:

Roger Seamon's article ("Poetics against Itself: On the Self-Destruction of Modern Scientific Criticism," 104 [1989]: 294-305) is itself good evidence against his claim that poetics as a branch of literary study is about to fall off the tree of knowledge. It would be a shame for his powerful generalizations to be lost because of the mistake he makes in concluding his argument. His per- spicuous categorization and analysis of the group of projects that he names as scientific criticism should, rather, be of great help to the very project whose immi- nent death he incorrectly predicts.

Having followed the progress of literary study and the changing perceptions of the object(s) of that study, Sea- mon concludes that when students of poetics recognize that the field of their study is not literary works or even texts but the reader's production of meaning, then the specific literariness of the study will have disappeared and there will be no scientific literary criticism. Sea- mon's error seems to me to be his mistaking a change of the focus of study for a change of the object. He misses a sense of the hierarchies of theories and of their embeddedness; scientific fields of study are nested such

that the study of any particular subject depends on the conclusions of a broader one. That study in both broad and narrow fields proceeds simultaneously and that the fields inform each other may well obscure their hierar- chical relation. Seamon has correctly observed that liter- ary theory has recently discovered this dependency. His mistake is to infer that the more particular field has disappeared.

As Ellen Schauber and I argued in The Bounds of In- terpretation: Linguistic Theory and Literary Text (Stan- ford UP, 1986), poetics is a subcategory of the study of language interpretation; one cannot understand how a poem can be meaningful unless one understands how language is meaningful. It is, then, reasonable to claim that poetics falls within the bounds of the study of semantics, or pragmatics (depending on how one wanted to define the relation between those two aspects of linguistic study). Conversely, if linguists study the overall system of language interpretation, their descrip- tions should in principle be able to describe the interpre- tation of all language texts, including those that a particular culture subcategorizes as literary. Since lin- guists have consistently refused to take literary texts into account as part of their database, it is not surprising that the grammars they have produced have not been able to account for many salient aspects of those texts that are now considered literary. This is a methodological failure of linguistics, but not an argument for a distinc- tion between literary and nonliterary texts.

At an even higher level of generalization the study of the system of poetic interpretation belongs, as Seamon correctly notes, under the rubric of semiotics-the study of all sign systems. But if there is a higher level of gener- alization, there is also a more particular, or lower, level of generalization. Far from having been put out of busi- ness by the recognition of its dependency, poetics can now define its own purpose more precisely: the project of poetics is to study the systematic production and un- derstanding of meaning by both speakers (poets) and hearers (readers and audience), under the pragmatic or sociocultural conditions of significance that, in a given society, are categorized as literary.

Although Seamon almost recognizes this purpose, he fails to take the final step and notice that as long as a culture considers that it has literary texts, as long as it retains a separate category or several separate catego- ries for those texts, then even if the current tools of description cannot account for the distinction, poetics hasn't put itself out of business. It must, however, rede- fine itself. Poetics can now be seen as parallel to the study of other subsystems of interpretation within a community-the production of meaning in, for exam- ple, legal-judicial systems (judicial opinions, legal

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