Postmodernism and the Sublime

From what pure wells

Of milky light, what soft o'erflowing urn,

Are all these lamps so fill'd? these friendly lamps,

For ever streaming o'er the azure deep

To point our path, and light us to our home.

How soft they slide along their lucid spheres!

And silent as the foot of time, fulfil

Their destin'd courses: Nature's self is hush'd

And, but a scatter'd leaf, which rustles thro'

The thick-wove foliage, not a sound is heard

To break the midnight air.

As I delve more and more into my research on the sublime in the 18th century, I occasionally find that the concept crops up in other contexts. This week I encountered it in a review of The Pregnant Widow, the new novel by Martin Amis, in The Weekly Standard. At one point the reviewer, David Gelernter, comes to talk about "sublimity," especially in connection with the beauty and power of nature. He contrasts sublimity, an emotion that leads to thoughts of God, "or at any rate of man's more-than-natural nature (frogs and chickens don't go into transports when contemplating waterfalls)" with the "hard and dry" environmentalism of the present day, which "tells us only how small man is, not how large he could be, and generates scalding steam clouds of apocalyptic press releases and naggings and scoldings in lieu of great literature." The above lines from "A Summer Evening's Meditation," by the poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) -- the "lamps" in line 3 refer to the stars, "the living eyes of heaven" -- exemplify the great literature Gelernter might have had in mind.

It is true that sublimity (in contrast to the sublime style in writing) was first associated with natural wonders. Newton's discovery of the laws of the heavens seems to have directed people's eyes outward into the vaster reaches of nature and forced them to contemplate what in earlier ages they more or less ignored. And it is not surprising that they considered that these wonders were the work of the Almighty. Indeed, Barbauld's poem suggests as much. It continues:

But are they silent all? or is there not

A tongue in every star that talks with man,

And wooes him to be wise; nor wooes in vain;

This dead of midnight is the noon of thought,

And wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.

At this still hour the self-collected soul

Turns inward, and beholds a stranger there

Of high descent, and more than mortal rank;

An embryo GOD; a spark of fire divine,

Which must burn on for ages, when the sun

(Fair transitory creature of a day!)

Has clos'd his golden eye, and wrapt in shades

Forgets his wonted journey thro' the east.

This is indeed splendid poetry, and it is difficult to imagine that anyone today would consider writing a poem expressing such sentiments. Gelernter attributes our loss of awe and wonder to the irony that characterizes the postmodernist attitude to life: been there, done that. When irony tyrannizes your thinking, he writes, you are detached from everything, passionate about nothing. Irony is the default reaction of the characters in Amis's novel, which takes place in 1970. The events it describes, however, remain "strikingly familiar today: feminism, victimism, contempt for the West and especially America, hostility to religion, indifference to art." This song seems tired, Gelernter writes, but those who "sing" it -- "intellectuals, academics, reporters, and the other culture leaders who have seats in the choir of Western civilization" -- have been at it for near on 5o years. Though they seem testy, they know no other song. They remain "stuck" in attitudes of their youth.

Of course, by the end of the 18th century, the sublime had been secularized, so to speak; God no longer spoke to men through his works but took up residence in "the gaps." Thinkers were well into the process of demystifying, desacralizing, debunking not only the divine realm but also the world of men and women by then. (Think Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Das Wesen des Christentums [1841] was translated by George Eliot as The Essence of Christianity.) I remember when I first read the German Romantic writers that I seemed to recognize in a flash a line of intellectual descent from Friedrich Schlegel (especially the Athenaeum Fragments) to Jacques Derrida. Irony of ironies, Schlegel became a Roman Catholic, taking refuge from the soulless world.

Bodmer and Breitinger, on whom my current research is focusing, lived and worked well before that time. Indeed, both seemed to have been very pious men. Bodmer, however, had been influenced by John Locke, especially by the importance Locke attributed to the senses in our encounters with the world. In his treatises Bodmer extolled poetry that evoked great emotions in us, especially through the proper use of figurative language. Thus, the sublime style in poetry. John Milton's Paradise Lost, which Bodmer translated into German, was his model of the sublime poet par excellence. Bodmer's emphasis on the subjective, emotional reaction to poetry, however, became part of the progress of sublimity as awe in the face of the wonders of creation to sublimity as a gauge of the darkness visible within ourselves.

Picture credits: The Wedgwood Museum Trust, Barlaston, Staffordshire (Barbauld); Richard Whitelock

The Sublime, Again

Ernst Cassirer, in his book The Philosophy of Enlightenment, devotes a chapter to "Fundamental Problems of Aesthetics." Cassirer points out the uninterrupted exchange of ideas in aesthetics in the 18th century, with the thread of ideas becoming so "intertwined that they can scarcely be distinguished in the finished fabric and traced back to their various origins." French, Germans, Italians, the English -- all seemed to echo and parallel each other. In German letters, however, the problem of aesthetics took on a decidedly philosophic cast, indeed, was "placed under the guidance and care of systematic philosophy." The initial systematic spirit was Leibnizian, which received its doctrinal codification under Christian Wolff, and culminated in the Kantian sublime.

I am tracing the reception of the sublime in German letters. The point of entry seems to have been the writings of Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, whom I have already discussed in earlier posts. On the one hand, Bodmer and Breitinger are, like their antagonist Gottsched, advocates of "neoclassicism" in poetry. They accept the rationalist poetics of Boileau as set down down in his L'art poétique. Two important aspects of that poetics. The first concerns form: genres are a given, not something invented by the writer. Thus, you don't add merry songs to a funeral ode. The second concerns subject matter, based on the conviction that some things are simply contrary to nature and that a poet violates the truth of nature by choosing subjects that venture beyond certain boundaries. I would add here that the subject matter of most contemporary fiction, theater, film, etc. violates this 18th-century conception of nature, which is understood as an orderly, and ordered, system. We are talking about the Enlightenment, remember. "Dysfunction," especially if rewarded, would not be acceptable.

Gottsched was perfectly in accord with these restrictions, but Bodmer and Breitinger found a way to expand neoclassical practice. Expression, including the use of figures and metaphors and such other rhetorical conventions, became the place for an artist to do something new and at the same time reveal his mastery. Bodmer and Breitinger found the justification for their advocacy of the "new" and the "marvelous" in poetry in the treatise of Longinus on the sublime.

Ironically, it was Boileau, the strict neoclassicist, who also introduced Longinus into European aesthetics, with his translation of the Greek's treatise in 1674. Basically this treatise -- On the Sublime -- discusses how ancient poets, great ones and not so great ones, moved their readers by the power of poetic expression. Thus, most of it is a discussion of "figures." It is not that Bodmer and Breitinger's "critical" works on poetics, from the early 1740s, foreground Longinus so much as that their treatments are totally informed by Longinus' treatment of figures. Interestingly, the German word for "sublime" -- erhaben -- is not mentioned often in these works. It is only in 1746, in his Critische Briefe, that Bodmer devotes a chapter to a definition of the sublime: "Lehrsätze von dem Wesen der erhabenen Schreibart" or "Theorems concerning the Essence of the Sublime Style." In other words, as Boileau had written, the sublime is "a certain power of discourse the aim of which is to elevate the soul."

Bodmer and Breitinger were men of the early 18th century, when art had not yet been divorced from ethics, and were not interested in the violent emotions that came to be associated with the sublime by mid-18th century. Thus, neither pays much attention to natural grandeur, which forms the starting point of discussions of the "psychological" sublime. This would be articulated by Edmund Burke and culminated in the writings of Mendelssohn, Kant, and Schiller. Bodmer and Breitinger did play a role in this transformation, however, but I will save that for the next post.

Picture credit: Karol Mack

Manhattan Circumnavigation

Okay, this is not about Goethe, but about a Goethe scholar. However, no one back in Louisville, where I come from would have ever imagined I would become a scholar of Goethe. Even less would they have imagined that I would become a kayaker and go paddling in the Hudson River. Yesterday, I joined a group of 55 for a circumnavigation of the island. The top picture is from a rest stop in Astoria, Queens; the other shows the rough waters of the East River.

Tomorrow I hope to get back to the sublime. I have come across something interesting. Though Bodmer was the person who introduced this term into German literary discourse, he was writing about sublime poetry, or the sublime style in writing. He was not writing about what people came to associate with the sublime in the 18th century, namely, grand mountains, the vast ocean depths, and other splendid natural phenomena. This absence would not be worth noting, except for the fact that Bodmer lived his entire life in Zurich, surrounded by the Alps.

My friend Felicitas Hoppe, in a recent small book, Der beste Platz der Welt, describing her stay in a small village in Switzerland, compares the sight of the Alps to the ocean.

Happy Birthday, Bodmer!

The Swiss man of letters Johann Jacob Bodmer was born on this day, July 19, in 1698. Bodmer was a figure that, if you were studying German, you encountered in graduate school. He was always linked with another Swiss literatus, Johann Jakob Breitinger, and the two B's were further presented as oppositional figures to a certain Leipzig literary "pope," Johann Christoph Gottsched. The opposition between the two critical camps -- Zurich and Leipzig -- came down to the issue of figurative language in poetry. Both Bodmer and Gottsched were apparently figures capable of attracting a number of acolytes, indeed very many of those who were working as writers or critics in the early part of the 18th century in German-speaking lands. The battle between the two, carried out with much invective, went on during the decade of the 1740s.

Gottsched was in some ways a more commanding figure, especially physically, which may have something to do with why he is more likely to be heard of today than is Bodmer. Lessing reacted pretty harshly to Gottsched's neoclassic literary recommendations in 1759, after which it was felt that Gottsched's time as arbiter of taste was over. Later, Goethe, in his autobiography, penned a satiric portrait of Gottsched, and this view has pretty much stuck.

Bodmer must have had a milder character, and seems to have been much loved by his friends and "pupils," including the painter Heinrich Füßli, or Henry Fuseli, as he was known after he emigrated to England. The portrait of Fusseli with his mentor indicates the reverence with which Bodmer was held by those who knew him. Among his literary acquaintance and correspondents were the poets Wieland and Salomon Gessner; the critic and philosopher Johann Sulzer; Johann Casper Lavater, author of the famous "physiognomic fragments" (to which Goethe contributed); and the educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

Bodmer was instrumental in launching the career of Friedrich Klopstock, but there is much more to his literary influence. Important in connection with my current research, he is probably the principal conduit for the transmission of the aesthetic concept of the sublime into German letters. Later, he translated John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, and his enthusiasm for Milton was the bone of contention between him and Gottsched, who found the Englishman's flowery language too "Baroque." If Gottsched represented the influence of French poetics in German letters, it was Bodmer who introduced English literary currents. Being from a "republican" nation, he felt great admiration for England. Peter Hanns Reill, in his book on the German Enlightenment and the rise of historicism, has noted that the early journal published by Bodmer and Breitinger, The Discourses of the Painters, was much influenced by Joseph Addison's Spectator essays, especially its "cosmopolitan description" of English customs.

When the Sturm und Drang era of German letters began, in the late 1760s, Bodmer was pretty much regarded by the young shakers and movers as superannuated, but this literary movement was precisely a reaction against the French neoclassical poetics recommended by Gottsched. Sturm und Drang writers, including Goethe, had by now discovered the liberating effect of English writers, including Shakespeare and Ossian, a discovery that owes much to Bodmer's pioneering efforts. This image of Bodmer as a young man shows, however, the different time in which he and Goethe came of age. This may, however, have been the way Bodmer looked when Henry Fusseli first knew him.

Outsider artists

OMG: I notice I have not posted anything for ten days. Besides writing the conclusion to the book on freedom of speech, I have been busy, mostly reading Joyce Appleby's long book (494 pages) on the history of capitalism, for which I also had to write a review. The review was finished this morning, and will now "sit" over the weekend to see whether I am ready to send it off.

Instead of Goethe and the 18th century, let me post a few pictures of works by artists that I have been looking at in the past couple of weeks. One is quite established, though in his lifetime he was not well recognized, at least not in art schools, according to my friend Barbara Cushing, with whom I went to see an exhibition of his works at the Whitney. I am talking about Charles Burchfield, a really weird but also wonderful painter. The painting below, for instance, is called An April Mood. Talk about April being the cruelest month ... I prefer the works (many watercolors) that seem to emit light and color. You can see others on the Whitney website.

I'm not sure whether the other two artists whose works are here will be pleased to see themselves called "outsider artists," though I am linking them with Burchfield because they seem to be pursuing a course that sets them off from other artists who are "hot" these days. Their works are ephemeral and off the beaten path, so to speak, which fits with the circumstance of my getting to know them. And those spiky trees in the Burchfield painting certainly suggest the work of Tom Loback.

I met Tom several years ago when I was out for a morning walk on the greenway along the Hudson River. For a long time he worked anonymously, and the first New York Times piece to take note of these river-side sculptures did not identify him. There was a second sculptor at that time, but his pieces, in contrast to Tom's driftwood sculptures, required string to keep the many parts together. Tom's are intricately fitted together and have become more complex over the years. He told me back then that he lives "downtown" (maybe the Village?) and that he takes the subway up to 125th and then walks down along the river picking up driftwood and building his sculptures. A couple of days after I took the photo at the top of this post (click on image to enlarge), I biked along the river and noticed several more sculptures, even more ambitious. I also like seeing them when I am kayaking on the river.

Bridget Polk I met for the first time the other day, though I had seen her balanced rocks earlier. Her photos of the rocks are way better than mine, but I include one of my shots here since it shows her at work. Having written on Goethe's encounters with geology, I am obviously fond of artists who work with rocks. As can be seen from her website, Bridget likes natural materials, though her giant balloons are really cool.

"Goethe Country"

When I was writing my dissertation and also traveling more in Germany than I have in recent years, I would like to visit places associated with Goethe, for instance, Frankfurt (Goethe's birthplace), Sesenheim (site of Goethe's romance with Friedricke Brion; now in France, but in Goethe's time very much German in character), Wetzlar (home of Lotte Buff, who became the "Lotte" of The Sorrows of Young Werther, and where Goethe spent several months in a legal internship). And, of course, I have been to Weimar and spent time seeking the vanishing traces of Goethe's residence there. Virginia Woolf calls such pilgrimages "scientific," in that we visit the country where a great novelist lived in order to see to what extent he was influenced by his surroundings."

I came across Woolf's comments yesterday in an old issue (June 26, 2009) of the Times Literary Supplement, an excerpt of a review from 1905 of two books: The Thackeray Country and The Dickens Country. According to Woolf, one cannot really speak of "country" in connection with Thackeray or Dickens. Country, she writes, "calls up a vision of woods and fields, and you may read through a great number of these masters' works without finding any reason to believe that the whole world is not paved with cobble stones. Both Thackeray and Dickens were Londoners; the country itself comes very seldom into their books, and the country man or woman -- the characteristic product of the country -- hardly at all."

In contrast, Woolf claims that writers like Walter Scott or Thomas Hardy have "made the country theirs because they have so interpreted it as to have given it an ineffaceable shape in our minds, so that we know certain parts of Scotland, ... of Dorset as intimately as we know the men and women who have their dwelling there .. and so we may say not only that novelists own a country, but that all who dwell in it are their subjects."

Germany in the 18th century was a land of considerable local variation, and Goethe's early literary work in particular cherishes these differences. Partly this was an effect of the Storm and Stress aesthetics, a reaction against the universalizing tendencies of French neo-classicism. In the end, however, Goethe himself went neo-classicist, and one would be hard put to say (though many have tried) exactly where, for instance, Elective Affinities takes place. My Better Half points out that The Italian Journey, the account of Goethe's two years in Rome, contains references to the fruits of the south and to food eaten, but no mention of the specific qualities of Italian food. Likewise, the one longish encounter with a woman, in Naples (June 2, 1787), with the German-born Duchess of Giovane: we seem to witness the scene as if through a veil. All that is personal and particular has been leeched out. It was one of Goethe's "achievements" to transcend the specifically poetic character of places.

My Better Half also points out that Goethe made up for this lack of specificity in his scientific writings, in particular when writing of rocks. Goethe amassed collections of minerals and rocks from his travels, for all of which he penned exquisitely detailed labels. But Goethe's rocks are not the moors of, say, Brontë/Heathcliff country (pictured at top). Bernd Wolff, in his trilogy of novels on Goethe's geological explorations in the Harz mountains, sought to supply this missing "country."

Goethe's move away from the particulars of German history and culture to abstractness may have something to do with his rejection of nationalism. The rejection started with his animus toward the Romantic poets, especially their return to "German" themes in their writing. Especially after the Napoleonic wars, Goethe became a "cosmopolitan."

Picture credit: Live for the Outdoors; Bao and Eddie's blog

Goethe-Schiller Friendship Once More

A recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement had a review of poets' friendships that reminded me of my recent posts on Rüdiger Safranski's book on the Goethe-Schiller friendship. The TLS review concerned a new book by Christopher Ricks on the literary "friendship" between Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell, "under the sign of Eliot and Pound." The quotes are there because the relationships were not really personal ones, as in the case of Goethe and Schiller, but of literary influence.

The reviewer (Benjamin Markovits) opens with the observation that many poets become famous in pairs and that their friendships seem to matter more than the friendships of other writers. I'm not sure if the numbers ("many") really bear out this claim, and Markovits doesn't mention, for instance, Wordsworth and Coleridge. In any case, I like the reason he gives: "the pressure on poets to re-invent their tradition -- it is easier to make up a game if you have someone else to play it with." Ricks' book, True Friendship, offers an analyses of these games, with close textual readings. Ricks suggests (according to Markovits) that unconscious borrowings by poets are more interesting that conscious ones, "suggesting as they do the way a poet engages with other poets on a level deeper than his or her critical opinions."

The relationship between Goethe and Schiller was more "programmatic" than the relationships Ricks describes. We are talking about Weimar classicism, after all. A major difference with 18th-century writers, even supposedly "modern" ones like Goethe, however, is the extent of conscious (rather than the "deep levels" noted by Ricks) borrowing of literary predecessors. Earlier poets were quite proud of being part of a continuous literary lineage, and showed their "legitimacy" as poets by drawing on the heritage. Shakespeare didn't feel less of a writer of sonnets because Petrarch also wrote them. "Originality" -- suggesting lack of literary origins -- first came about in the 18th century, but it was not something that earlier generations of poets would ever have been proud to claim about themselves.

I think that what distinguishes Goethe from earlier writers is that he went out of his way to hide the traces of the influence of earlier writers. There is a well-known scene in The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which Lotte and Werther witness a violent thunderstorm. She exclaims, "Klopstock!" This exclamation refers to a poem by Klopstock admired by everyone with any feeling in the 1770s. As Werther writes, recounting the moment, "I remembered at once that magnificent ode of his which was in her thoughts, and felt overcome by the flood of emotion which the mention of his name called forth. It was more than I could bear. I bent over her hand, kissed it in a stream of ecstatic tears, and again looked into her eyes. Divine Klopstock! If only you could have seen your apotheosis in those eyes!" (Victor Lange and Judith Ryan translation).

Much has been written about the influence of Klopstock on the young Goethe, for instance, by Meredith Lee. Goethe, as he recounts in his own autobiography, read Klopstock avidly as a child. But the passage in Werther is followed by another comment that indicates that Goethe is ambivalent about this influence: "And your name [i.e., Klopstock], so often profaned, may I never hear it uttered again!"

This is "anxiety of influence" avant la lettre. Since the reign of "originality," all that is left is unconscious assimilation of both poetic and non-poetic factors.

Picture credit: Cabinet Magazine; Goethezeit-Portal