|
[Anonymous] The Sublime in
Exploration Literature The Bedford
Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms defines the sublime as “that
quality in a literary work that elevate the reader to a higher plane.
Most writers have sought to achieve sublimity through a grand style or
nobility of sentiment or subject.”[1]
The term sublime derives from a first century Greek work in which it
was defined as great thoughts and noble sentiments combined with factors such
as diction and arrangement to produce something beautiful.
In the eighteenth century Edmund Burke revised this definition to
include the distinction that while beauty was a limited, mundane emotion, the
sublime was infinite and more powerful. He
also argued that the sublime must utilize terror in its evocation of beauty.[2]
Burke writes that “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas
of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible…is a
source of the sublime.”[3]
He goes on to write that death, even more terrifying than pain, may be
closely associated with the sublime and that while qualities of the sublime
may overlap with qualities of beauty, the sublime requires something greater.[4]
Several years later, Kant explored the topic in Critique on Judgment.
He admitted that “the beautiful and the sublime are similar in some
respects.” Kant writes that the
sublime is accompanied by seriousness rather than a light appreciation for the
superior form of an object or landscape.[5]
Part of the appeal of the
literature of exploration is due to the extremes of beauty and despair, both
of the physical landscape and of the explorer’s emotional make up, that are
revealed. The sublime can be
considered a characteristic of both literature and nature, although the arctic
literature considered in this essay is more concerned with describing the
sublime in nature than in achieving the effect itself.
Several of the works describing Arctic exploration tackle the idea of
the sublime in nature and also in the nobility of the human subject.
Facing the prospect of a long, painful death at nearly every turn in
the harsh, unexplored environment, the arctic explorers had a plentiful supply
of material to produce sublime moments. In “The Worst Journey In the
World,” Apsley Cherry-Garrard recounts his journey to collect the eggs of
the Emperor Penguin. He describes
the aweseome beauty before him on the night before he starts off on his side
trip: “…a
blue sky so deep that it looks black: the stars are steels points: the
glaciers burnished silver…The ice is cracking to the falling temperatures
and…over all, wave upon wave, fold upon fold, there hands the curtain of the
aurora. As you watch it, it fades
away, and then quite suddenly a great beam flashes up and rushes to the
zenith, an arch of palest green and orange, a tail of flaming gold.
Again it falls, fading away into great searchlight beams which rise
behind the smoking crater of Mount Erebus.”[6] Although
Cherry-Garrard is about to embark on a dangerous journey, or perhaps because
he is aware of the danger to him, he appreciates the landscape on a spiritual
level, invoking God’s hand in creating the sight before him.
Later, once the cold and hardship have become a greater reality,
Cherry-Garrard once again notes the beauty of the aurora and even halts, along
with his comrades, to appreciate the awe-inspiring vision.
Cherry-Garrard also memorably describes a view a few weeks into the
journey which gives credence to Kant’s statement that “That is sublime in
comparison to which everything else is small.”[7] “The
view from eight hundred feet up the mountain was magnificent…To the east was
a great field of pressure ridges below, looking in the moonlight as if giants
had been ploughing with ploughs which made furrows fifty or sixty feet deep:
these ran right up to the Barrier edge, and beyond was the frozen Ross Sea,
lying flat, white and peaceful as though such things as blizzards were
unknown…Behind us Mount Terror on which we stood, and over all the grey
limitless Barrier seemed to cast a spell of cold immensity, vague and
ponderous, a breeding-place of
wind and drift and darkness. God! What a place!” Though his
narrative is active and avoids excessive repetition of detail, Cherry-Garrard
still manages to convey the extraordinary hardship his party endured.
The temperature regularly dipped into the –50s and the their hope of
reaching the penguins was diminishing daily.[8]
The men made slow, painful progress on frostbitten feet; even getting
into their sleeping bags at night proved arduous. Not long after they had
departed the men had endured so much they began “to think of death as a
friend”[9]
The presence of this pain and hardship is an essential part of the sublime.
Without it, the landscape would have been simply pretty.
Kant wrote that beauty could exist independently of the observer, while
certain conditions within the observer had to be created to achieve the
sublime.[10]
Certainly, the necessary pain and desperation existed within Cherry-Garrard
and his party to create an opportunity for the sublime to exist.
In
addition, to the sublime they found in the land, the men of “The Worst
Journey in the World” also discovered a kind of gruesome nobility in their
fellow man. The combination of
beauty and pain combined to create remarkable acts from the men, such as when
Bill insisted on helping the others with the difficult task of entering their
frozen sleeping bags, leaving him with no assistance.[11]
Cherry-Garrard comments again and again on the noble behavior of his
companions in the trying circumstances. Other
examples of the sublime can be found throughout the hardship described by the
explorers. In the excerpt from
“Six Came Back” David Brainard describes Lt. Adolphus Greely’s team’s
desperate wait for rescue. Nearly
every journal entry recounts the meager food rations and discouraging tasks of
shrimping and hunting. Amidst the
starvation and suffering, Brainard notices “the brass buttons on Lieut.
Lockwood’s blouse, worn bright by the flying gravel.”[12]
Although he is starving and his thoughts revolve around his suffering
and how to acquire any bits of food for his party, the “dazzling buttons”
transport Brainard to happier times as well as bringing back the acute pain of
his friend’s death. Amidst the
drudgery and death, the shiny objects are at once beautiful and morbid.
Though themselves small, the emotions they evoke make the buttons no
less potent than the awesome cliffs Cherry-Garrard describes.
On June
4th, Several days after spotting the buttons and even deeper in his despair,
Brainard notes “A beautiful day.” His
only elaboration on this statement is a description of the wind speeds.
What beauty he saw in those days of death can only be imagined.
In the same entry he refers to the beauty of Smith Sound, which “is a
beautiful sheet of water today…as smooth as a mirror.”
[13]
Brainard manages to appreciate his surroundings in spite, and maybe
because, of his precarious situation. He
also recognizes the character of the men, who use their little remaining
strength to attempt to give the deceased proper burials.
The horror of having to bury so many combines with the goodness of most
of the men to provide a moving account. Scott
himself describes a day in the middle of his ill-fated voyage as “beautiful
day—too beautiful.”[14]
His men are not making adequate progress and the conditions are wearing
them down. The very elements that
contribute to their failure must also seem beautiful—in this case, the ice
crystals on the surface. Nature
is destroying the men with its small, beautiful creations.
Perhaps the most memorable elements of Scott’s journals are the
instances of the sublime found in human nature.
He describes Oates perseverance and good cheer in the face of
increasingly degenerative health problems.
Oates does not complain through his pain, not wanting to add to the
burden of his teammates. Although
Oates is the ”greatest handicap” in their progress, the other men
unfailingly cheer him on and selflessly attend to him.[15]
The gruesomeness of his good spirit becomes clear when Oates
deliberately leaves the relative comfort of a tent to stumble to his death in
a blizzard. His appalling death
combines elements of horror and bravery to provide an example of the sublime
as present in human nature. In The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe, a master of horror and beauty,
skillfully sketches out moments of the sublime.
He describes the agony Pym experiences after being “entombed alive”
in a fissure as “The
blackness of darkness which envelops the victim, the terrific oppression of
the lungs…unite with the ghastly considerations that we are beyond the
remotest confines of hope, and that such is the allotted portion of the dead,
to carry into the human heart a degree of appalling horror an awe not to be
tolerated-never to be conceived.”[16] Poe
invokes the idea that the sublime is difficult to describe, rare to experience
and accompanied by danger. Although
it involves danger and pain, the danger may be an exhilarating respite from
the more mundane varieties danger and pain.
This passage also supports Burke’s assertion that though the sublime
and the beautiful may exist together, the sublime need not contain elements of
beauty, as we usually understand it.[17]
Because Pym is rarely “beyond the remotest confines of hope,” this
episode only generates excitement and exhilaration on both the readers and the
characters.
Upon escaping the fissure, Pym’s party is confronted with a gorge
“entirely filled up with the chaotic ruins of more than a million tons of
earth”[18]
and the knowledge that they “were the only living white men upon the
island.”[19]
The horror of the realization that the rest of the party has perished,
along with the spectacle of the gorge, combines to create a terrible, yet
awesome moment. Poe goes on to
describe the ultimate sublime moment in Pym, the end of the journey.
Although what lay beyond could only be guessed, the “gigantic
curtain” that covered the entire horizon and the “cataract”
in which “At intervals there were visible…a chaos of flitting and
indistinct images, there came rushing and mighty, but soundless winds, tearing
up unkindled ocean in their course.”[20]
Poe’s accounts of the sublime are exciting and awesome, but they ring
false when compared to the non-fiction accounts.
The journals describe fleeting moments of the sublime amidst unbearable
drudgery and pain, while Poe describes awesome event after awesome event in
meticulous detail. The impact of
such moments is diminished when they are place among other riveting, typical
adventure tales, rather than the realistic descriptions of starvation and
frostbite in the non-fiction exploration accounts. In Beryl
Bainbridge’s fictionalized account of Scott’s expedition, the sublime
appears again. In the middle of a
conversation about “nature study excursions” and “Greeks and their
notions of tragedies” a character speaks that “the ‘joy of being’
incorporates a delight in annihilation.”[21]
The characters recognize, as did their real counterparts, the thrill of
danger and the beauty that can be seen only when such danger, and even death,
is near. Though this
characterization of the “joy of being” strikes the narrator as strange, a
certain pleasure is found in experiencing that which is almost indescribable
in its mix of pain and wonder. Kant
writes about the sublime that “even the greatest power of sensibility is
inadequate.”[22] Later in
Bainbridge’s piece, a character writes of a friend’s death and suddenly
launches into a gloomy, but lovely description of his surroundings.
“We’d started in a wretched wind, pulling the skis in a horrible
light that threw fantastic shadows across the snow…all glittering
back-cloths and eerie pockets of stagy darkness.
As far as I could tell the world was a coffin and the lid of the sky
was about to nail me down.”[23]
The vivid, frightening imagery evokes Burke’s idea that the sublime
“ought to be dark and gloomy.” While beauty was left to be “light and
delicate” the sublime “ought to be solid, even massive.”[24]
The sublime feeling in this case is certainly massive, inundating the
character with a feeling of entrapment. Almost as
suddenly as the character begins his moment of reflection he ends, moving on
to the topic of gangrenous feet. In
this aspect, the fiction imitates the non-fiction closely.
Both Bainbridge’s piece and the non-fiction pieces build up to the
moments of sublime experience in similar ways. Because such moments often
appear suddenly in the middle of hardship and then disappear, they have a
surreal, almost fictional quality, allowing them fit easily into both genres
when handled properly. Sheila
Nickerson writes in “The Arctic in Literature” that: “This
is the dark/brilliant, sharp/misty world of the midnight sun and the sunless
months; the world of the aurora borealis and the fata morgana.
Here icebergs tower and nonexistent mountains appear to block passage.
The moon and sun wear halos and the eyes are quickly blinded by light.
Mirage invites and destroy.” With this
kind of imagery, the explorers had ample time to observe the harsh beauty of
the arctic. However, when reading the accounts, the horror of the expeditions
stands out more than any other characteristic. Why these men would take such
risks and how they remained brave in the face of so much hardship are the
questions that remain with the reader. It
is precisely this agony that made experiencing the sublime possible for the
explorers. Without the horror and
suffering, they would not have experienced the indescribable, awesome moments
of the sublime that the rest of the world can only imagine.
[1] Murfin, Ross and Supriya Ray. The New Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Bedford Books: New York. 1998. p 389. [2] Murfin 389 [3] Burke, Edmund. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: WW Norton and Co. 2001. 549 [4] Burke 550 [5] Kant, Immanuel. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: WW Norton and Co. 2001. 519-520 [6] Cherry-Garrard, Apsley. “The Worst Journey in the World” Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration. Ed, Clint Willis. New York: Thunder’s Mouth P, 1999. 72 [7] Kant 522 [8] Cherry-Garrard 72 [9] Cherry-Garrard 99 [10] Kant 521 [11] Cherry-Garrard 73 [12] Brainard, David L. “Six Came Back” Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration. Ed, Clint Willis. New York: Thunder’s Mouth P, 1999. 244 [13] Brainard 246 [14] Scott, Robert Falcon. “from Scott’s Last Expedition: The Journals” Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration. Ed, Clint Willis. New York: Thunder’s Mouth P, 1999 [15] Scott 111-113 [16] Poe, Edgar Allen. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1994. 148. [17] Burke 550 [18] Poe 150 [19] Poe 151 [20] Poe 174 [21] Bainbridge, Beryl. 350 [22] Kant 525 [23] Bainbridge 362 [24] Burke 550
|