Friends and acquaintances have often asked about the topic of my dissertation. When I answer that I’m writing on George Eliot and the sublime, they look at me blankly. Even those who know that Eliot was a nineteenth century female novelist are left guessing. They aren’t sure what the sublime entails. For many people, the word either refers to a nineties punk rock band or suggests indulgence in fine wine and rich chocolate. . .
This confusion is understandable since the sublime is, by its very nature, indescribable. An experience of the sublime is an intimate encounter with something beyond oneself, something so overwhelming that it creates a temporary block in the flow of comprehension and communication, a momentary possession of the imagination and the senses by something that they cannot contain or express. Perhaps the best way to approach a definition of the sublime is to give a personal example.
In the summer of 2009, as part of a week-long cruise in Alaska, I found myself at the top of a zip-line, a pair of nylon ropes extending from a rocky cliff at one end to a sandy beach at the other and attached to a rather flimsy-looking nylon seat with plastic buckles. I was told to sit down and brace my feet against a metal gate while I was strapped in. Then the gate was opened and I was on my way down: 1300 feet down, to be exact, at a speed of 60 miles an hour. What made this a sublime experience, however, was not the decrease in altitude from the cliff where I was buckled in to the beach where I landed nor the speed of my descent: it was the initial split-second on the line after I had plunged into the void. The nearest objects to me at that moment were two-hundred-year-old pine trees over three hundred feet below. The mountain to my left and the beach immediately ahead of me seemed hundreds of miles away; the people on the sand were well out of reach of the sound of my voice. I was literally dropped into thin air with nothing to break my fall, little to support me, no one to hear me. I have never known such wondrous terror in my life: it absolutely possessed me.
This experience of the sublime was intensified by the disinterested beauty of the natural scene around me: the mountain was a sheer rock face, dappled brown and gray, with a few small bushes clinging to its sides; the bay beyond the beach was bathed in peaceful late afternoon sunlight; the pines stood upright in the outstretched shadows of the cliffs above them. All of this was incredibly beautiful and absolutely indifferent: it would not matter in the slightest to the continued growth of the trees, the stately majesty of the mountain, or the placid waters of the bay if the ropes broke and I plummeted to my death.
A second or two later, this all-consuming terror was transformed into a new feeling of overpowering exaltation; in a sublime turn, I was lifted out of concern for my own existence by embracing the same indifferent beauty and natural power that had threatened me so intensely a moment before. I laughed out loud as I reveled in the open spaces around me, the golden rays of the setting sun, the uplifted branches of the ancient trees, the craggy outcroppings of the mountain now behind me. When I landed on the beach a minute later, exhilarated from the ride, I wanted nothing more than to experience those sublime moments again. . .and again.
Although it may seem self-congratulatory to use myself as an example of someone who has had a sublime experience, my rationale for detailing this personal instance is to illustrate the sublime sympathy portrayed in George Eliot’s novels. In Eliot’s fiction, the sublime is a universal human occurrence, accessible to the educated and the uneducated, the poor and the wealthy, the believer and the agnostic. Eliot based her characterization of sublime sympathy, of leaving behind isolated individual consciousness to identify wholly with another, on the eighteenth century philosophy of the sublime.
These late Enlightenment philosophers founded their understanding of the sublime in turn on its origins in classic Greek thought. Disturbed by the Enlightenment’s questioning of divine mercy and transcendence, writers such as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke revived the classic belief that the divine could inhabit the individual human psyche. They entertained the possibility that they themselves could both exercise mercy and comprehend infinity, their minds and emotions capable of expanding to contain the eternal and contracting to feel the pain of one individual overpowered by the sudden realization of his or her own mortality.
While we are centuries on from this revival of the sublime, the ability to see beyond ourselves, to pursue the human potential for unsurpassed knowledge and all-encompassing mercy, remains. Paradoxically, given its nature as an extremely individual experience, the sublime brings people together through their shared embrace of human limitations and transcendence of those limitations. Particularly in a postmodern age in which religion is no longer the connective tissue that it once was, the sublime has become a spiritual bond, uniting and empowering people from diverse backgrounds and life experiences.
I hope this blog post helps to shed some light on the sublime focus of my dissertation! Feel free to post or send me a comment if you’d like more information.