The Sublime

Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

The aesthetic category of the sublime has interested me for some time. I have posted several times on the subject and also published an essay on Goethe and the sublime, which dealt with Goethe's earliest geological writings. In response to that essay, Glenn Most, a scholar from whose writings I have much profited, wrote me and asked why Bodmer did not appear in my references in that article. So, I plunged a bit deeper into the subject and investigated Bodmer's writings on the subject, which also led to an essay that appeared in the Goethe Yearbook. In both essays, mountains played a prominent role.

Goethe Girl in Monument Valley

Since that time I have encountered very different kinds of mountains from those that feature in European writings. For the second time I am visiting friends in northern Arizona. On the first visit two years ago we drove to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, and I also had an opportunity to see the red sandstone formations in Sedona. This past week we made a whirlwind trip to Monument Valley and Natural Bridges in Utah and Canyon de Chelly and the Petrified Forest in Arizona. (900 miles: glad to get out of the car at the end.) My friends agreed that there is something "alien" about these formations, as in "outer space." It is true that some Indian tribes have lived in them or in their vicinity, but they cannot be cultivated or farmed in the sense of agricultural communities, in contrast to their domestication in most parts of Europe.

West Mitten Butte in Monument Valley

One is amazed at the grandeur of the Southwestern mountains, especially when they appear in groups. Their otherworldly character comes perhaps from their isolated and overpowering presence, as they tower over a "landscape" lacking any evidence of human cultivation. Some 18th-century theorists of the sublime asserted that mountains, oceans, and other large natural phenomena were evidence of divine creation. Evidently the Indians in this part of the world found them sacred, yet it is difficult to imagine Adam and Eve walking or working in this landscape or being "stewards" of this creation. The fact that you can't DO anything with these mountains contributes to their sense of being alien. Thus, in the 19th century Westerners felt no compunction about building railroads through them (e.g., through the Petrified Forest) or mining them.

In my next post I will discuss Goethe and the sublime.

The Mountain Sublime

I love this portrait from 1736 of Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777), by the artist Johann Rudolf Huber (in the Burgerbibliothek in Berne). Haller's Die Alpen, a long poem of 50 rhyming stanzas, is one of the earliest poetic treatments of mountains. In it he contrasts the rural peace and innocent virtue of the inhabitants of the Alps with the vices and corruption of civilization. He clearly sounded Rousseauian themes avant la lettre. Haller was also an exceptionally important anatomist, physiologist, and naturalist. I read Die Alpen back in graduate school, never imagining I would ever think about it again.

Yet my present work on the sublime, in connection with Bodmer (another figure we read in grad school that I also never imagined I would consider anew), has led me to think about Haller and his poem of "mountain appreciation." The sublime, as I have written in an earlier post, was all about mountains. Well, not all about, but more than any other grand natural phenomenon -- the ocean, the starry skies above, erupting volcanoes -- mountains came to represent the sublime in nature.

I think that has something to do with the fact that people started interacting with mountains increasingly, beginning in the 17th century. The earliest 17th-century accounts of encounters with the Alps spoke of being both appalled and enthralled. John Dennis wrote in 1688, pondering the origins of the Alps, of his "delightful Horrour" and "terrible Joy." Marjory Hope Nicolson, who has written the most erudite account of the sublime in external nature, is the author of Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory.

Bodmer, in discussing the sublime (das Erhabene) as such -- in contrast to the sublime style, about which he more generally speaks of (das Hohe, or the high style) -- is loath to attribute it to nature. He does write of the often terrible and frightening effects of nature -- thunderstorms, landslides, volcanic eruptions -- but he does not consider these effects sublime. Even the dumbest person can be astonished (shocked, frightened, etc.) by these. And, when it comes to great works of nature and of art, well, God did not put us in the world in order to sit around and be astonished all the time. The experience of the sublime is of a different sort, the meeting of great minds with the ultimate truths of existence. Thus, in Bodmer little interest in the Alps, with which he was surrounded his entire life.