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CHAPTER ONE
1
The Sublime
The North American continent possesses every feature that a theory
of the natural sublime might require, including mountains,
deserts, frozen wastes, endless swamps, vast plains, the Great Lakes,
and hundreds of unusual sights, notably Yellowstone, Mammoth
Cave, Niagara Falls, and the Grand Canyon. Likewise, its tornadoes,
hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters are among the most
terrifying phenomena one could encounter anywhere. It would be
tempting to say that had no theory of the sublime existed,
Americans would have been forced to invent one. In a sense, this is
what happened, for by the middle of the nineteenth century the
American sublime was no longer a copy of European theory; it had
begun to develop in ways appropriate to a democratic society in the
throes of rapid industrialization and geographic expansion.
The American sublime drew on European ideas in the fine arts,
literature, and philosophy. In art history the concept of the sublime
is often applied to paintings that are unreal, monstrous, nightmarish,
or imaginary. In architecture a sublime building usually is vast
and includes striking contrasts of light and darkness, designed to
fill the observer with foreboding and fear.(1) Intellectual historians
and literary critics have been particularly interested in eighteenth-century
and early-nineteenth century texts on the sublime. David B.
Morris writes:
The discovery of the sublime was one of the great adventures of eighteenth-century
England: accompanying the establishment of a commercial
empire, the growth of industrialism, the invention of the common
reader, and the rise of the waltz, a taste developed among almost
all classes of society for the qualities of wildness, grandeur, and overwhelming
power which, in a flash of intensity could ravish the soul with
a sudden transport of thought or feeling. . . . Sublimity liberated the
eighteenth-century imagination from all that was little, pretty, rational,
regular, and safe--although only for as long as the moment of intensity
could be sustained.(2)
As Marjorie Hope Nicolson notes, English writers on the sublime
(including Dennis, Shaftsbury, and Addison) agreed that the most
important "stimulus to the Sublime lay in vast objects of Nature--mountains
and oceans, stars and cosmic space--all reflecting the
glory of Deity." To them, the experience in nature was primary; the
"rhetorical" sublime was "only secondary." Despite this agreement
on the primary stimulus of nature, however, it was difficult to classify
the emotional content of this "moment of intensity." Shaftsbury
argued that the sublime was the highest form of beauty. Addison
saw the sublime and the beautiful as distinct categories. Burke
agreed with Addison on this point, but he emphasized the terror of
the sublime whereas Addison spoke of "pleasing astonishment" and
"awe."(3) One can easily give too much weight to such differences,
however. As Nicolson says, the important point is that "during the
eighteenth century the English discovered a new world. In a way,
they were like the imaginary cosmic voyagers who, from Lucian to
writers of modern science-fiction, have traveled to the moon or
planets to find worlds that puzzle, amaze, astound, enthrall by their
very differences from our world."(4)
An actual new world had been discovered in the western hemisphere--one
which, according to the first explorers, contained a
wild profusion of monsters and previously unknown phenomena,
including bullfrogs as large as dogs, mosquitoes the size of bats,
mountains 50 miles high, strange winds that caused a living man's
body to rot, earthquakes that toppled mountains, and enormous
seagoing lions that seemed to glide over the water. Howard
Mumford Jones surveyed the profusion of creatures and marvels
described in early travelers' reports and concluded that "the New
World was filled with monsters animal and monsters human; it was
a region of terrifying natural forces, of gigantic catastrophes, of
unbearable heat and cold, an area where the laws of nature tidily
governing Europe were transmogrified into something new and
strange."(5) Descriptions of such marvels continued unabated
throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, establishing
a discourse about the Americas as an anti-Europe, a strange
world that challenged every presupposition about nature.
Since this discourse was well established by 1700, it should not be
surprising that the intellectual ferment over the sublime was transmitted
to the American colonies, although, as is the case whenever
a complex of ideas is carried from one culture to another, its content
was transformed in the process. A modified form of the sublime
emerged that was in harmony with American political, social,
and religious conditions. Because it had originated in classical
antiquity, the sublime was peculiarly suited to Americans as they
increasingly sought to emulate the Roman Republic and the
democracies of ancient Greece, after about 1750. As Jones notes, in
the revolutionary years "classicism remained a powerful force,
whether for propaganda, historical precedent, warning, or the theory
of a republic."(6) In the years after the revolution, as Americans
fashioned a discourse that identified the new nation with the landscape,
their language gradually became permeated with classical
ideas--not least the idea of the sublime. As Raymond O'Brien
notes, "Pre-Romantic concepts of mountain gloom, Old World
superstitions of the forest, and puritanically mundane views of
nature were dissipated more slowly in the colonies; consequently
there is a time lag apparent between the formulation of landscape
theories of the sublime and picturesque and the adaptation of
these ideas in America."(7) Such ideas reached a large audience only
in the nineteenth century.
The history of the sublime from antiquity shows, if nothing else,
that, although it refers to an immutable capacity of human psychology
for astonishment, both the objects that arouse this feeling and
their interpretations are socially constructed. The objects and interpretations
vary not only from one epoch to another and from one
culture to another but also from one discipline to another, and a
large volume would be necessary to provide a history of the sublime
from antiquity to the nineteenth century. Here a short summary
must suffice.
As conceived in the first century, the sublime was defined as an
attribute of oratory and fine writing. The anonymous author usually
identified as Longinus wrote:
If an intelligent and well-read man can hear a passage several times,
and it does not either touch his spirit with a sense of grandeur or leave
more food for reflection in his mind than the mere words convey, but
with long and careful examination loses more and more of its effectiveness,
then it cannot be an example of true sublimity--certainly not
unless it can outlive a single hearing. For a piece is truly great only if it
can stand up to repeated examination, and if it is difficult, or rather
impossible to resist its appeal, and it remains fairly and ineffaceably in
the memory. As a generalization, you may take it that sublimity in all its
truth and beauty exists in such works as please all men at all times. For
when men who differ in their pursuits, their ways of life, their ambitions,
their ages, and their languages all think in one and the same way
about the same works, then the unanimous judgement, as it were, of
men who have so little in common induces a strong and unshakable
faith in the object of admiration.(8)
The sublime is identifiable by the repetition and the universality of
its effect. In this definition, the sublime is not an esoteric quality.
Rather, it is available to everyone, regardless of background.(9)
Discussions of the sublime usually begin with Longinus and then
jump to early-eighteenth-century England, where the topic was
taken up and elaborated by many authors--most notably Edmund
Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1756, became the most influential
work on the subject. In the United States it went through at
least ten editions before the Civil War.(10) Most discussions treat `sublime'
as a noun, seldom noting that during the interval between
Longinus and Burke it was also a verb meaning to act upon a substance
so as to produce a refined product. Alchemists seeking to
bring substances to higher states of perfection employed sublimation
in their efforts to attain the philosopher's stone. Alchemy gave
the term `sublime' a special coloring that anticipated the later
response to industrial objects. Before the eighteenth century it was
not yet common to praise as sublime an object of natural grandeur,
such as a vast forest seen from a mountaintop or a tempest raging
over the sea, but it was common to call the process of converting a
substance into a vapor by heating it and then cooling it down to a
refined product `sublimation'. Metaphorically, `sublime' suggested
pure realms of thought and attempts to obtain hidden knowledge.(11)
Alchemy was not a failed proto-chemistry; its practitioners did not
see themselves as objective scientists. Alchemists were not neutral
observers, and what happened in their beakers, vials, and retorts
were not objectified experiments. They believed that material transformations
worked upon the spirit.
In contrast, the general tendency of the new science of the seventeenth
century was, as Mulford Sibley puts it, "to despiritualize
nature, to wipe out the distinction between animate and inanimate,
and to create a sharp separation between the inner and outer
worlds."(12) Seen in this perspective, the eighteenth-century form of
the sublime is not only a rewriting of Longinus; it is part of the
Enlightenment project of defining reason, a project that included
not only the creation of the encyclopedia but also the definition of
what was not reason. As Michel Foucault has argued, to define science
it was necessary to define what it was not. The mystical relation
between man and nature assumed by the alchemist was
replaced by the ideal of scientific objectivity. The alchemical connotations
of `sublime' were largely forgotten. Burke and his contemporaries
provided a checklist of the objective attributes in objects
that could be expected to call forth sublime emotion, and Burke
often speculated on how external objects affected the body.(13) The
sublime of the eighteenth century was a permissible eruption of
feeling that briefly overwhelmed reason only to be recontained by
Why did the sublime reemerge when it did, fastening attention
on particular natural objects? The literature of the Middle Ages and
of the Renaissance marginalized the sublime. Nicolson's Mountain
Gloom and Mountain Glory investigates the dramatic revaluation of
the natural landscape that occurred after the late seventeenth century
in England. For centuries mountains were thought to be the
deformities of a fallen world whose surface had been smooth at the
creation. Until c. 1650, mountains were "warts, blisters,
imposthumes, when they were not the rubbish of the earth, swept
away by the careful housewife Nature--waste places of the world,
with little meaning and less charm."(14) But this attitude began to
change as astronomers demonstrated the existence of mountains
on the moon and the planets and as geologists proposed theories
that explained the formation of mountains through natural
processes. Equally important, John Calvin argued that there had
been mountains in Eden, and that they existed at the creation. No
part of the natural world was inherently ugly or evil. Man's soul was
deformed; the world was not. Calvin believed that God could be
seen in the beauty of nature: "On all his works he hath inscribed his
glory in characters so clear, unequivocal, and striking, that the most
illiterate and stupid cannot exculpate themselves by the plea of
ignorance." Protestants increasingly looked for God in "the mirror
of his works."(15) Americans would later incorporate this view in a
powerful version of the natural sublime. The central point is that
the sublime was not part of a static view of the world, nor was it part
of a proto-ecological sensibility that aimed at the preservation of
wilderness. Rather, to experience the sublime was to awaken to a
new vision of a changing universe. The reemergence of the sublime
was part of a positive revaluation of the natural world that by the
eighteenth century had become a potential source of inspiration
and education.
This revaluation was well underway by the time of Burke. He
established an absolute contrast between the beautiful, which
inspired feelings of tenderness and affection, and the sublime,
which grew out of an ecstasy of terror that filled the mind completely.
The encounter with a sublime object was a healthy shock, a
temporary dislocation of sensibilities that forced the observer into
mental action. To seek out the sublime was not to seek the irrational
but rather to seek the awakening of sensibilities to an inner
power. Burke wrote to a friend after seeing a raging flood in
Dublin: "It gives me pleasure to see nature in these great though
terrible scenes. It fills the mind with grand ideas, and turns the soul
in upon itself."(16) Burke's sublime was subjected to rational controls;
he created a list of the attributes in objects that could arouse this
passion: obscurity, power, darkness, vacuity, silence, vastness, magnitude,
infinity, difficulty, and magnificence. Herder later argued that
Burke had relied upon a Newtonian idea of attraction and repulsion
according to which the beautiful attracted and the sublime
repulsed. While this view is oversimplified, Burke's version of the
sublime ultimately seems to rest on the view that human beings
respond to certain terrible or vast objects in predictable ways.
Similar usage of the term has continued since his time, and most
textbook definitions of the sublime refer to powerful natural scenes
that are universally available and that deepen and strengthen the
mind of the observer. The Oxford English Dictionary notes this
sense of the term as "Of things in Nature and Art, affecting the
mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power;
calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion by reason
of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur."
When Kant adapted Burke's theory to his own, he argued that
because the sublime included pleasure as well as pain it was not the
opposite of the beautiful. Kant linked the beautiful to quality and
the sublime to quantity, and argued that
the beautiful brings with it a direct feeling of the expansion of life, and
hence imagination; the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure, which arises
only indirectly, being produced by the feeling of a momentary
checking of the vital forces followed by a stronger outflow of them, and
as involving emotional excitement it does not appear as the play, but as
the serious exercise, of the imagination. Accordingly, it cannot be united
with sensuous charm [the beautiful]; and as the mind is alternately
attracted and repelled by the object, the satisfaction in the sublime
implies not so much positive pleasure as wonder or reverential awe,
and may be called a negative pleasure."(17)
The function of this negative pleasure was to unite aesthetics with
moral experience. As John Goldthwait summarizes, for Kant "the
sublime makes man conscious of his destination, that is, his moral
worth. For the feeling of the sublime is really the feeling of our own
inner powers, which can outreach in thought the external objects
that overwhelm our senses."(18)
In the Critique of Judgement Kant divided sublime experience into
two forms: the mathematical sublime (the encounter with extreme
magnitude or vastness, such as the view from a mountain) and the
dynamic sublime (the contemplation of scenes that arouse terror,
such as a volcanic eruption or a tempest at sea, seen by a subject
who is safe from immediate danger). The mathematical sublime
concerns that which is incomparably and absolutely great. But since
every phenomena in nature is measurable, and therefore great only
in relation to other things, the infinity of the sublime ultimately is
an idea, not a quality of the object itself. In the presence of this
apparent infinity, Kant's subject experiences weakness and insignificance,
but then recuperates a sense of superior self-worth, because
the mind is able to conceive something larger and more powerful
than the senses can grasp.(19) In this experience the subject passes
through humiliation and awe to a heightened awareness of reason.
In the dynamic sublime, the individual confronts a powerful and
terrifying natural force. Kant notes that "we can, however, view an
object as fearful without being afraid of it." He gives the following
examples:
Bold, overhanging and as it were threatening cliffs, masses of cloud
piled up in the heavens and alive with lightning and peals of thunder,
volcanoes in all their destructive force, hurricanes bearing destruction
in their path, the boundless ocean in the fury of a tempest, the lofty
waterfall of a mighty river; these by their tremendous force dwarf our
power of resistance into insignificance. But we are all the more attracted
by their aspect the more fearful they are, when we are in a state of
security; and we at once pronounce them sublime, because they call
out unwonted strength of soul and reveal in us a power of resistance of
an entirely different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves
against the apparent omnipotence of nature.(20)
Contemplating such dangers makes the subject realize that nature
can threaten only his physical being, leading him to feel superior to
nature by virtue of his superior reason. For Kant both the mathematical
and the dynamic forms of the sublime are not attributes of
objects; they are the results of a dialogue between the individual
and the object, a dialogue in which the distinction between the
senses and the ego is forcibly manifested. "Sublimity, therefore,
does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own
mind, insofar as we may become conscious of our superiority over
nature within, and thus also over nature without US. . . ."(21)
From Burke to Kant to later thinkers, the natural world plays a
smaller and smaller role in definitions of the sublime, and the
observer becomes central in defining the emotion as the mind projects
its interior state onto the world. Burke insisted on the centrality
of the natural scene in evoking the sublime. Kant emphasized
that the mind was central in apprehending the sublime, thus shifting
attention from physical nature to its perception.
Touristic practice came to somewhat the same conclusion as formal
philosophy, arriving there by a different route. For at the same
time that philosophers were deemphasizing the external object as
the stimulus to sublime feelings, tourists were having more and
more difficulty capturing the elusive emotion. Elizabeth McKinsey
traces such a declension in Niagaran Falls: Icon of the American Sublime.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, she notes, the sublime
was seldom an accessible emotion: "Changes in the image of
Niagara Falls after about 1860 indicate a profound shift in attitude
toward nature. Both the actual scenes at the Falls [marred by excessive
tourism] and the aesthetic assumptions of artists who journeyed
there reveal the eclipse of the sublime as a motive force in
American culture."(22)
Since touristic experience and formal philosophy seem to point
to the same conclusion, it would only seem necessary to illustrate
the gradual disappearance of the sublime with extensive examples
from the nineteenth century. But it will be the burden of this book
to describe the popular sublime, a history of enthusiasms for both
natural and technological objects that has lasted until our time and
that answers to classic aesthetic theories only partially. This history
will not trace the intellectual's sense of an attenuating connection
to the world, nor will it be concerned with the sublime in literature
and the fine arts. Rather, it will trace the continual discovery of new
sources of popular wonder and amazement, from the railroad to
the atomic bomb and the space program. Such a history requires a
different definition of the sublime, one that treats it less as part of a
self-conscious aesthetic theory than as the cultural practice of certain
historical subjects. Even if the sublime is not a philosophical
absolute but a historicized object of inquiry, I will argue, the sublime
experience still retains a fundamental structure, regardless of
the object that inspires it or the interpretation that is given to the
experience.
At the core of any sublime experience is a passion that Burke
defined: "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature,
when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and
astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are
suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so
entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor
by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises
the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by
them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible
force." The Grand Canyon is a good example of such a natural
object. William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, wrote in a
visitor's book that the canyon was "too sublime for expression, too
wonderful to behold without awe, and beyond all power of mortal
description."(23)
The millions who travel to the Grand Canyon visit it in order to
sense a magnificence that cannot be described or grasped through
descriptions or images but must be experienced directly. The huge
scale can produce an awareness of human insignificance, of natural
power, of immensity, and of eternity. The experience of visiting it is
akin to the classical definitions of the sublime, even if there is little
reason to believe that ordinary Americans self-consciously visit such
a site with either Burke or Kant on their lips. The canyon exemplifies
much of what Burke said about the sublime, and it exercises a
powerful hold on the imagination of most who visit it, particularly if
they do more than merely park their cars and look at a small part of
it from the rim. The first reaction to this sublime object is often
incomprehension. Joseph Wood Krutch realized this in observing
both his own reactions and those of others on first peering over the
rim into the abyss: "At first glance the spectacle seems too strange
to be real. Because one has never seen anything like it, because one
has nothing to compare it with, it stuns the eye but cannot really
hold the attention. For one thing, the scale is too large to be credited. . . .
We cannot realize that the tremendous mesas and curiously
shaped buttes which rise all around us are the grandiose objects
that they are. For a time it is too much like a scale model or an optical
illusion. One admires the peep show and that is all."(24) At first
one stands outside the object as though one were looking through
a frame at a peep show. It requires much more effort to "relate
one's self to it somehow"; indeed, that may take days.
Krutch provides a specific example of Burkean astonishment, a
state in which all internal reflection is suspended. The Grand
Canyon opens up suddenly in the midst of a high plateau, and the
Colorado River is so far away that it seems to be a small stream
when it is in fact 300 feet wide. The canyon's sheer size is difficult
to grasp. Its depth is so terrifying that many pull back in fear after
their first glimpse. A late-nineteenth-century traveler reported one
group's experience: "Our party were straggling up the hill: two or
three had reached the edge. I looked up. The duchess threw up her
arms and screamed. We were not fifteen paces behind, but we saw
nothing. We took a few steps, and the whole magnificence broke
upon us. No one could be prepared for it. The scene is one to
strike dumb with awe, or to unstring the nerves; one might stand in
silent astonishment, another would burst into tears. . . . It was a
shock so novel that the mind, dazed, quite failed to comprehend
it."(25)
But the Grand Canyon does more than suspend the mental faculties.
Burke points out that "to make any thing very terrible, obscurity
seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent
of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of
the apprehension vanishes."(26) The canyon meets this requirement
admirably, because it is so large that proportion and scale are confusing
for a long time after one first looks into it. Furthermore,
because of weather conditions and because of the shadows cast by
the walls, much of the canyon is obscured a good deal of the time.
The Grand Canyon contains virtually all of the elements Burke associated
with the sublime in natural landscapes, including power,
vacuity, darkness, solitude, silence, vastness, infinity, magnificence,
and color. It is 280 miles long and up to 18 miles wide. It seems infinite
in both time and space, presenting 2 billion years of geology in
15,000 feet of tilted-up stone, carved down by the Colorado River. It
offers so many intriguing views and so many vantage points that it
can never be seen in its entirety. Burke noted "that height is less
grand than depth; and that we are more struck at looking down
from a precipice, than at looking up at an object of equal height."(27)
Who would deny that the mile-deep Grand Canyon is more impressive
than a mile-high mountain range?
A well-traveled Welshman, Colin Fletcher, had these Burkean
reactions when he first came up to the canyon's rim: "And there,
defeating my senses, was the depth. The depth and the distances.
Cliffs and buttes and hanging terraces, all sculptured on a scale
beyond anything I had ever imagined." His initial reaction also
included a strong sense of light, fusing colors, and a powerful
silence. "In that first moment of shock, with my mind already
exploding beyond old boundaries, I knew that something had happened
to the way I looked at things."(28) The novelist and essayist
Frank Waters noted that the Grand Canyon is unlike such landscapes
as the prairies, the Rockies, or the bayous of Louisiana,
which can be depicted reasonably well in photographs or paintings.
In contrast, the Grand Canyon is a complex system of views which
no single image can possibly convey. "It is the sum total of all the
aspects of nature combined in one integrated whole. It is at once
the smile and the frown upon the face of nature. In its heart is
the savage, uncontrollable fury of all the inanimate universe, and at
the same time the immeasurable serenity that succeeds it."(29) In
these contradictions, the Grand Canyon contains most of the qualities
Burke finds essential to sublimity, and it illustrates Kant's mathematical
sublime.(30) The first geologist to survey the region,
Clarence Dutton, recognized this exemplary quality and named
one of the most impressive lookouts Point Sublime.(31)
In contrast, the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens in
Washington State on May 18, 1980, exemplifies the dynamic sublime.
An overwhelming force, it hurled millions of tons of pulverized
rock into the air, creating a cloud that rose 60,000 feet. The
volcano literally blew its top, reducing its height by 1500 feet. Dust
fell to the thickness of half an inch 500 miles away, and nearby it
covered fields with 8 tons of ash per acre.(32) The eruption evaporated
a lake, melted a glacier, set innumerable forest fires, changed
day into night, and unleashed mudslides that swept away every tree
in a 120-square-mile area. The cloud of ash and rock moved so fast
that drivers found they could not outrun it and were trapped in a
blinding dry rain.(33) The Portland Oregonian noted: "Eclipsing
Dante's horrible dreams of Hell, the mountain poured out burning
pyroclastic clouds that incinerated everything they touched--animal,
vegetable, mineral." One witness said: "When the mountain
went, it looked like the end of the world."(34)
Yet more than one observer realized that the eruption's meaning
could not be reduced to death and destruction. A pilot who saw the
eruption from a safe distance recalled: "I consider it a great privilege
to have seen it. It was just a beautiful show."(35) Many said that it
was the most exciting thing they had ever seen. The Rocky Mountain
News commented: "If it weren't for the loss of life and the devastation
done to the environment, the eruption of Mount St. Helens in
Washington might almost be enjoyed as one of the most awesome
spectacles of unleashed energy that nature can display."(36) There
were thousands of eyewitnesses to the blast, which had been long
anticipated. Tourists were drawn to the site by tremors in the weeks
before the eruption, and the governor had to cordon off the area
and even evict people from their own land, creating much resentment
among property owners. Despite the barricades and numerous
public warnings, however, at least 77 people died, including an
84-year-old man named Harry Truman who had lived on Spirit
Lake at the foot of the mountain for half a century.
Because the eruption had long been anticipated, one television
reporter and many amateur photographers recorded the blast on
film. Yet no medium could capture the totality of the event. For
example, an amateur photographer who had his camera pointed at
the mountain at the moment it erupted made ten images that
recorded the event as well as photography could; but even these
images do not record what it looked like entirely satisfactorily,
because the cloud grew so quickly that during the sequence the
photographer had to switch from a telephoto to a 50-millimeter to
a wide-angle lens.
