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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
1. Kantian Blake
IN AN ESSAY OF 1833, ENTITLED THE "BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE faculty in the productions of Modern Art," Charles Lamb lambasts what he calls the "material sublime" (1) of John Martin's paintings. In an argument that passionately privileges spirituality over materiality and imagination over visual presentation, Lamb criticizes Martin's panoramic canvas "Belshazzar's Feast" (1820) for being too material. Although Lamb considers the "towered structures" of Martin's art as belonging to the "highest order" (Elia 259) of the material sublime, the term itself--invented, it seems, by Coleridge--is not an honorific. In Table Talk, Coleridge uses the term to describe the furious images of Schiller's dramas, the sheer sensual tumult of Schillerian theatricality: its excess of material effect over spiritual meaning. "Schiller has the material sublime," he remarks; "to produce an effect, he sets a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames.... Shakspear drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow." (2) For Coleridge, the sublime of Schiller's drama is mired in materiality and sensation; Shakespeare's, however, rises effortlessly into the region of mind. For Lamb, too, the material sublime designates a privative attachment to materiality, a fixation on sense that in Martin's case discloses a "defect of [the] imaginative faculty" (Elia 262). Wedded to matter over mind, material sublimity seeks to present in a pictorial, corporeal form ideas that should properly, according to Lamb, have a "poetic" (Elia 264), supernatural or imaginative denotation. In the case of "Belshazzar's Feast," the fearful judgment of God upon the self-regarding King Belshazzar at his table in his stupendous palace is too "material" because Martin presents the written judgement of God in a blaze of flight on an immense wall: a brilliant blaze that is seen both by the crowds at the feast and by the spectators of the canvas. Lamb insists, however, that this divine writing is seen only by the King in the Biblical account, and not by the spectators. For this reason, the sublimity of the scene resides in the immateriality of the King's terrified, phantasmal reception of God's sentence, and not in any gaudy materiality of blazing light on a panoramic, architecturally immense structure.
In the way Lamb sets it up, Martin's painting sustains only a perilous hold on the sublime. For this kind of art is, he says, the product of a "[d]eeply corporealized" mind, "enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality." Against this, the sublime for Lamb belongs to the "intellectual" (Elia 264), not the material eye. The material sublime is, in this sense, well on the way to being engulfed in--and identified with--a kind of debased spectacle: specifically, with crude theatricality and sensationalism. Effecting an erasure of mind and of the imaginative faculty, material sublimity becomes a vitiating, privative and expropriatory simulacrum of the sublime.
Lamb's formulation of the sublime belongs, of course, to that broad shift in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries that saw the displacement of sublimity away from the materiality of the external object, and its relocation in the self-conscious interiority of the subject. If the eighteenth-century sublime variously staged a crisis in the subject's relation to an overwhelming externality--whether figured as nature or God--the romantic sublime, which received its privileged philosophical formulation in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790), installed the scene of that sublime in and as an agon of the subject's mental faculties. The empirical, physiological emphases of Burke's sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) were themselves, indeed, part of this resituating of the sublime in the passions of the subject rather than the qualities of the object: part of what Thomas Weiskel calls the eighteenth century's "nascent psychological aesthetics." (3) This shift was, in its turn, a refinement or extension of the eighteenth-century's reformulation of the classical or Longinian sublime, a recasting that shifted the sublime away from being a question of style to being one of affect, away from rhetoric to psychology, away from the discourse of poetics to that of aesthetics.
It was Kant who described Burke's sublime in the Enquiry as a "merely empirical exposition" of the affective states of the subject, as a "physiological" and "psychological" discourse standing in stark contrast to his own "transcendental" deduction of the formal conditions of aesthetic judggment. (4) For Kant, indeed, Burke's account of the sublime and the beautiful remains too entangled in the sensuous, the bodily, the corporeal; and fails to explain the formal ideality of the subject's faculties in a discipline of transcendental critique. Insisting that "the sublime is not to be looked for in the things of nature, but only in our own ideas" (CJ 97), Kant discovered the sublime in what Gilles Deleuze calls the "fundamental discord" (5) of the subject's faculties: the discord, that is, between what Kant dubbed the "faculty of presentation" and the "faculty of concepts" or, to use his favored terms, between the "imagination" and "reason" (CJ 90). In Kant, when the imagination (always, for him, a sensuously synthesizing faculty) is unable to "present" to the mind an image of something that exceeds its synthetic grasp--say, a mountain, a sea, a desert, the heavens--the faculty of "reason" takes over in a thinking of the totality or infinity of the object that the imagination fails to grasp empirically. A bifurcation thus opens up in the faculties of the subject between the sensuous and the rational, or the imagination and reason, in an irreducibly equivocal experience of pain for the imagination and pleasure for the faculty of thought. The "sublime," then, becomes a rational exceeding of the project of sensuous presentation in the subject's experience of a simultaneous (rational) elevation and (sensuous) deprivation.
Certainly, Blake inherits Kant's valorization of the mental over the material sublime. Indeed, according to Vincent de Luca (the most attentive commentator on the Blakean sublime), Blake's and Kant's sublimes share an "identical structure" because, even though the terms "imagination" and "reason" are valued antithetically between the two writers, Kant's Keason corresponds to what Blake calls the "Intellectual powers," while the Kantian Imagination is equivalent to Blake's concept of the "Corporeal Understanding." (6) Thus in a celebrated letter to Thomas Butts of 1803 Blake offers his definition of the "Most Sublime Poetry" as "Sublime Allegory," that is, "Allegory addressed to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding." (7) Here, as de Luca notes, a superior faculty of the mind--the "Intellectual powers"--is roused to act via the agency of a sublime poetry that causes the mind to eclipse the miseries of the "Corporeal Understanding" through the transcendences of spirit. Consequently, as in Kant, the sensuous or corporeal--materiality itself-is reduced in the name of the supersensuous.
For de Luca, the Blakean sublime is roundly Kantian in its elevation of mental over material determination, of intellectual power over corporeal understanding. Yet, at the same time, the Blakean sublime does not involve for de Luca any romantic-ideological celebration of the sublimity of artistic creation, but instead is a "textual sublime" (de Luca 30) that occurs in the act of reading itself. According to de Luca, Blake's sublime is a readerly sublime in which the interpreter--encountering the sheer, massed materiality of the Blakean illuminated text, especially in the late epics--meets a "barrier" or "wall of words" (de Luca 31, 89) that, equivocally, both arrests the reader's understanding and spurs him or her on in an agonistic effort of reading. Consequently, says de Luca, "The crucial sublime event takes place in the actual difficulties of the reading experience" (de Luca 31). The thick corporeality of the Blakean text--its hectic "crowding of characters and of reference," its sheer material density--thus produces the "tension necessary for the sublime experience" (8) by both impeding and enabling the play of the intellectual powers.
While acknowledging the persuasiveness of de Luca's reading of Blake in terms of the textual sublime, Tilottama Rajan argues that de Luca's Kantian emphases tend to "absorb" Blake's texts into a "hermeneutics of the sublime as opposed to a deconstruction of sublimation"; (9) that is to say, Blakean textuality is construed as promoting an idealizing sublime that instates the priority of "mental `realities'" (Supplement 272) over against material signification. Signifying matter is thereby lifted--or "sublimated"--in a hermeneutic of mental transcendence, as the material "barrier" or "wall of words" is overcome and the reading subject "grasps the transcendental" (Supplement 272). This idealizing structure is consonant with de Luca's insistence that there is in Blake a "habitual association of the sublime with a manifestation of intellect and a flight from the corporeal" (de Luca 27). However, Rajan argues that there is also in Blake a "specifically romantic genre [that is] defined by Friedrich Schlegel when he speaks of a metawork that contains not only the text but also the story of...
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