American Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Submissions 2016 (midterm assignment) 3. Web Highlights

Jessica Myers

10/12/2016

Grappling with the Intangible

          The sublime serves as the encapsulation of the Romantics’ ideals and resistance to the Enlightenment. It seems to be a spiritual or supernatural experience that once described loses some of its essence. A simplified definition explains the sublime as experiencing the paradoxical emotions of both pleasure and pain. However, this simplification does not incorporate the idea that the sublime is an intangible space where human intuition overcomes human intellect, which allows the person experiencing the moment to overcome human tethers and commune with something “Other.” 

          The sublime is not an intellectual experience because it would be at odds with intuition. In her essay, “The Trifecta of the Sublime” (2015), Melissa Holland claims that the sublime experience is one where a person has “the ability to logically reason above the initial fears and emotions that are associated with a sublime interaction.” By focusing on the person’s ability to overcome their fear, they are able to navigate their experience of the sublime, thus leaving the individual in control of the moment. She explains that “[i]t is through language that one obtains the ability to reason and to make cognitive decisions when choosing a reaction” If a person is logically choosing how they react to a moment of the sublime, then they are overthinking the experience. The purpose of a sublime moment is to experience a loss of self and communion or fluidity with other elements around an individual. She also argues that “every human, regardless of ranking or class, has the ability to interact with the sublime,” but they must use “elevated language” to give them the power to choose their reaction; however, not everyone has access to elevated language. Based on her definition, the experience of the sublime is limited to those with education and the ability to reason. Perhaps, the delineation should be made between those who have access to the language to express this experience and those who have experienced the sublime yet are unable to capture the moment in words. Everyone has experienced moments of the sublime; they just might not be able to put their experience down in words that have been published for common consumption.

          Defining the sublime as simply the experience of pleasure and pain is an oversimplification. Christine Ford in her article, “Pleasure and Pain in the Sublime” (2008), expands this definition by claiming that it is “impossible for a character to undergo a dramatic sublime experience without also undergoing some sort of change, either in their mental life or their physical life.” It is not just a paradoxical mixture of feelings; it changes a person. They are not necessarily a new person, but they will not view the world in the same way they did before. There will not be a physical manifestation of this change, but “one of the heart, as it carries them through a lifetime of hardship.” Does that make the sublime something comforting? Or does it simply create a manifestation of what it means to be truly alive? These questions complicate the encounter with the sublime. Literature can describe the results of a sublime experience, but it is limited in its ability to articulate the experience itself. 

          The sublime must be experienced in order to fill in the gaps of what the author is attempting to describe through language. Heather Minette Schutmaat records in her research journal, “An Exploration of the Sublime” (2015), that “I’ve always been so fascinated by these moments, yet remained focused on their ineffability, once referring to it as ‘the gap between feelings and language that I cannot fill.’” This moment of the sublime occurs when a human comes in contact with the largeness of nature. It makes them feel both larger than life and powerlessly small. It is a paradoxical moment in nature where “the embodiment of beauty and terror, and the aura of pleasure and pain” meet to create something intangible and fleeting. It is as if someone were trying to grasp the wind. Once they attempt to take hold of it; it is gone. However, the sublime can be pursued. Many Romantic writers “go in pursuit of the sublime by seeking isolation in the natural world. That isn’t to say that moments of the sublime can be controlled, or staged or artificially created, or are even easily attainable, but it is certainly possible to seek, discover, and experience moments of the sublime.” These writers go in pursuit of this experience because it allows them to contact something that is greater than and outside of themselves. There is no return from the change the sublime creates in them.

          The irony of this review is that I have tried to define the indefinable by describing what the sublime is not, expanding an oversimplification of the sublime, and reasoning that only experience can give a person access to the sublime. Perhaps we should merely be thankful that language has given us a word to express the inexpressible: sublime.