I was reading along in Deborah Eisenberg’s NYRB review of Motley Stones by Adalbert Stifter (translated from the German Bunte Steine by Isabel Fargo Cole) when I got to “The word that comes irrepressibly to mind regarding Motley Stones is ‘sublime’ in its now rather archaic sense that encompasses vastness and violence as well as extreme beauty.” I confess the word sublime has always made me uneasy; it covers too much ground and carries too heavy a freight of Significance, and I wish writers would pick something more specific and readily understandable. Unless, of course, they’re using or referencing the “now rather archaic sense” that the OED (entry updated June 2012) defines as follows:
9. Of a feature of nature or art: that fills the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; that inspires awe, great reverence, or other high emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur. Cf. sense B. 1b.
a1743 J. Baillie Ess. Sublime (1747) 10 Heavens diversified by numberless Stars, than which I grant nothing can be more Sublime.
1762 Ld. Kames Elements Crit. I. iv. 266 Great and elevated objects considered with relation to the emotions produced by them, are termed grand and sublime.
[…]
1996 D. Sandner Fantastic Sublime iii. x. 116 Such sublime landscapes appear often in Frankenstein.B. n.
1. With the.
[…]
b. That quality in nature or art which inspires awe, reverence, or other high emotion; the great beauty of grandeur of an object, place, etc. Cf. sense A. 9.
The sublime is an important concept in 18th- and 19th-cent. aesthetics, closely linked to the Romantic movement. It is often (following Burke’s theory of aesthetic categories) contrasted with the beautiful (beautiful n. 2) and the picturesque (picturesque n. 1), in the fact that the emotion it evokes in the beholder encompasses an element of terror.
1727 A. Pope et al. Περι Βαθους: Art of Sinking 16 in J. Swift et al. Misc.: Last Vol. The Sublime of Nature is the Sky, the Sun, Moon, Stars, &c.
1757 E. Burke Philos. Enq. Sublime & Beautiful ii. §7. 51 Greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime.
[…]
2004 Times Lit. Suppl. 10 Dec. 18/3 The sublime—with its connotations of the elemental, the raw, the primitive, the unfathomable and the disturbing—has driven all before it.
Now, I get the “element of terror” bit, and the 2004 TLS quote expands on it acceptably in “its connotations of the elemental, the raw, the primitive, the unfathomable and the disturbing,” but I’m bothered (probably unreasonably) by Eisenberg’s addition of “violence.” That seems to me to push it too far. But I am by no means a specialist in “18th- and 19th-cent. aesthetics,” and I wonder how others feel about it.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering about the etymology, here’s the OED’s take on it:
Etymology: < (i) Middle French, French sublime (adjective) excellent, admirable, perfect (c1470 with reference to a thing, probably 1549 with reference to a person), (of a person) occupying a high rank or office (1540), (of a person or thing) rising up high, attaining a great height (1552), (of a thing) set or raised aloft (first attested later than in English: 1572), (of a muscle) superficial (1745 or earlier), (noun) the brain (1659; now obsolete), the grand and elevated style in discourse or writing (first attested later than in English: 1669), that quality in nature or art which inspires awe, reverence, or other high emotion (1690),
and its etymon (ii) classical Latin sublīmis (also sublīmus) high up, elevated, high, (of breath) shallow, panting, tall, lofty, aspiring, grand, elevated in style, majestic, exalted, noble, eminent, illustrious, in post-classical Latin also designating a muscle lying near the surface (1618 or earlier) and designating a branch of geometry which uses the methods of calculus (1684 in the passage translated in quot. 1715 for sublime geometry n. at Compounds), probably < sub- sub- prefix + līmis (also līmus) oblique (see limulus n.).
I confess the word sublime has always made me uneasy
And yes, to save you the trouble of searching, I have used it myself, e.g. “a peach tart so sublime”; I contain multitudes.
“All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime
Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long”
–a gen-you-wine Nobel laureate in Literature*
*The last two lines of the stanza are apparently borrowed from a previous lyricist known only as “Trad.” or “Public Domain.”
Mötley Stönes
Nikki Sixx meets Mick Jagger!
(Like, sublime, man!)
Needless at the Hattery to point out that this
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sublime
is where the term really comes from in this sense (though the Romantics admittedly made their own Frankenstein Monster out of it.)
If you think of the “violence” of a volcano or a landscape or lightning, the use of the word may not seem so strange or far from Burke.
Stifter himself compared the volcano and the boiling pan of milk. He saw himself as looking for the Sublime in the boiling milk. You will encounter the passage somewhere in Motley Stones.
If you think of the “violence” of a volcano or a landscape or lightning, the use of the word may not seem so strange or far from Burke.
Ah, that makes perfect sense — thanks!
From Eddyshaw’s wikilink
>Longinus (/lɒnˈdʒaɪnəs/; Ancient Greek: Λογγῖνος Longĩnos)
Looking around, that doesn’t seem to be a misspelling of the Greek. Did Ancient Greek evolve a nasal pronunciation of a geminated N? Or was that just a convention for spelling a nasal N? Or what’s up there?
I love the optimism behind the other random suggestions of authorship for On the Sublime. “It may not have been written by Longinus, but surely it was written by someone of the few names that do come down to us, rather than someone whose name is lost.”
To add to what Tom is saying, Stifter should not be taken for someone who writes a text full of stormy human passion which is echoed, prefigured or reflected by violent natural occurrences. He says himself (I think this is from a foreword to “bunte Steine”):
“Ein ganzes Leben voll Gerechtigkeit, Einfachheit, Bezwingung seiner selbst, Verstandesmäßigkeit, Wirksamkeit in seinem Kreis, Bewunderung des Schönen, verbunden mit einem heiteren gelassenen Sterben, halte ich für groß: mächtige Bewegungen des Gemütes, furchtbar einherrollenden Zorn, die Begier nach Rache, den entzündeten Geist, der nach Tätigkeit strebt, umreißt, ändert, zerstört und in der Erregung oft das eigene Leben hinwirft, halte ich nicht für größer, sondern für kleiner, da diese Dinge so gut nur Hervorbringungen einzelner und einseitiger Kräfte sind, wie Stürme, feuerspeiende Berge, Erdbeben. Wir wollen das sanfte Gesetz zu erblicken suchen, wodurch das menschliche Geschlecht geleitet wird.”
Basically he wants to deemphasise strong and sudden passions and their natural equivalents: storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, because they are less great than a life lived in restraint, service to those near and dear and love of simplicity, justice and beauty, and writers should seek to make visible the soft law by which the human race is directed.
This outlook is pursued most extremely in his longer works, which approach plotlessness, to the extent that
Hebbel promised the Polish Crown to anyone who would voluntarily read the whole of Stifter’s 800 page novel “Nachsommer”.
Source: https://literaturkritik.de/begemann-giuriato,24103.html
I should take more advantage of being King of Poland. My first piece on Der Nachsommer is here, and I pursue the novel in one way or another for another thirteen posts.
The novel really is close to plotless. It is a remarkable, neurotic achievement. I believe you will see the neurosis in Motley Stones, too, the sense of “restraint,” as Paddy says, pushed to an artistic extreme.
Even iffier than sublime is the nominalization sublimity.
I long ago folk-etymologized `sublime’ as `up against one’s limits’ but know no Latin.
…oh. “About the High”, then.
(I have quite the vocabulary of disembodied Greek roots. Hypsilophodon “tall-crested tooth”, Hypsibema “high step”, hypsodonty (having very high-crowned teeth) and hypselodonty (having ever-growing teeth), and there you go.)
That would explain why he has a reputation of describing every tiny beetle on a meadow.
I’m not sure what you mean.
– [ŋg], [ŋk] and [ŋkʰ] were indeed consistently spelled γγ, γκ and γχ as a matter of convention. (They still are, except today the last two spellings are pronounced [ŋg ~ g] and [ŋx]; gangster is transcribed γκάγκστερ. I’m not sure what γγ is today.)
– Ancient Greek, up to around the time in question in fact, distinguished a falling from a non-falling tone on long vowels and diphthongs. The falling tone was marked by a so-called circumflex, which sometimes came out rounded on top, sometimes tilde-shaped; in other words, the tilde is a handwritten circumflex and has nothing to do with nasality, if that’s what you mean.
I forgot when Jesus was put in that position.
Let me try…
“A whole life full of justice, simplicity, subduing of oneself, rationality, effectivity in one’s circle […presumably meaning “not having effects beyond one’s circle”, “humility”?], admiration of the beautiful, together with cheerful relaxed dying, I consider great; mighty movements of the moods [alliteration unintentional], wrath that arrives frightfully rolling, the desire for revenge, the lit-up spirit that strives for action, throws over, changes, destroys and often throws away its own life in its excitement I consider not greater, but smaller, because these things are [basically just?] productions of singular and one-sided forces, like storms, fire-spitting mountains, earthquakes. We want to seek to spy the gentle law by which mankind is guided.”
The opposite of Goethe, basically. Too bad Spengler apparently never heard of him – he’d have turned Stifter into a grand antithesis to the Occident, someone who might epitomize other Cultures but could never be appreciated here.
Mas los sublimes montes, cuya frente
a la región etérea se levanta,
que ven las tempestades a su planta
brillar, rugir, romperse, disiparse,
los Andes, las enormes, estupendas
moles sentadas sobre bases de oro,
la tierra con su peso equilibrando,
jamás se moverán.
They’re moving west about as fast as your fingernails grow, and they show no sign of slowing down.
γκ and γχ […] are pronounced [ŋg ~ g] and [ŋx];
Quoth WP: “[ɡ] word-initially and in some loanwords; [ŋɡ] otherwise, often reduced to [ɡ] in informal speech” and “[ŋx] and [ɲç]” respectively. “X and Y” here means “X before back vowels, but before front vowels Y”.
I’m not sure what γγ is today.
“[ŋɡ] and [ɲɟ] in formal registers, but often reduced to [ɡ] and [ɟ] in informal speech; also pronounced [ŋɣ] and [ɲʝ] in some words (e.g. εγγενής, έγγραφο, συγγραφέας)” “And” has the same sense as above.
TIL that Latin limina were the threshold and lintel of a doorway — where your property began — and by extension borders and other limits. Lewis and Short say of sublimis: etym. dub.; perh. sub-limen, up to the lintel. So Jack’s “up against” was not totally wrong.
Plautus has it: limen superum, quod mihi misero saepe confregit caput: Inferum autem, ubi ego omnis digitos defregi meos. So even if the Romans were short, the doorways were lower. Oh, the humanity!
Oh yes, I forgot the palatalizations.
de Vaan derives sublimis (there is also a variant sublimus) from limus “transverse, oblique”, with the original meaning being “transverse from below upward”. He notes that there seem to be no convincing IE cognates for limus.
Well, limen is also ‘cross-member’ or something like that. “Transverse from below upward” raises more questions than it answers, if you want my opinion.
Wiktionary suggests Germanic: E limb, Da lem (also in medlem = ‘member’ [of a group]).
@ Lars M,
IIRC Harold Bloom’s Western Canon has a long discussion of Victor Hugo’s poetry and his concern with the sublime, but I don’t have a copy at hand so can’t check this at the moment, but suspect that’s where I got the idea of sublime as having something to do with limits. I could also have been influenced by the notion of sublimation in physics, where for ex dry ice sublimes into vapor without passing through an intermediate liquid phase.
Well, if the Latin is in fact “up to the lintel,” that’s the same as “as high as it can go.” I don’t know exactly what they were thinking in the 14th when sublimation = “elevation/refining” was introduced tor the process of distillation. (It’s not clear whether it only applied to what we’d call sublimation + condensation now, or included liquids).
@Amateur reader: I like your series on Nachsommer. I don’t know whether you’re aware that Heinrich Böll wrote an epilogue to that novel – as a member of the war and post-war generation, he was of course deeply distrustful of bourgeois balanced perfection and saw a dark abyss below it that he teases out in said epilogue. I can’t find it online, which probably would have pleased Böll mightily, as he was an avid campaigner for improving authors’ copyright protection.
I also could claim the Polish crown, but it would get crowded; besides you and Jesus, there is also the Virgin Mary to share it with.
Perhaps it’s time for another War of the Polish Succession if there are multiple claimants?
I assume Böll did not pay royalties to Stifter’s estate on “Epilog zu Stifters Nachsommer,” however much he favored expanding copyright protection for his own generation of authors? But if it took more than a century for the Stifter book to be translated into English, who knows when we can expect an English version of the Epilog. (I must say that my own suspicion is that Germany did not tumble over the edge into the abyss in the 1930’s because it was too bourgeois, but rather if anything because it was insufficiently bourgeois.)
@ Lars M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven
@JWB: Whether writing a parody of or a mock sequel to a famous work is copyright infringement or a cause for paying royalties is a separate question from how long copyright should extend. I don’t know his opinion on that; as far as I remember his Ende der Bescheidenheit, his main point of contention was that authors and their heirs had as much as a right to make money of their works as publishers had.
Concerning the relationship of the bourgeoisie with the Nazis, my impression is that Böll’s beef was mostly with an “apolitical” cultured bourgeoisie who submitted to the authorities of the day and condoned the Nazis (as lesser evil compared to Socialism and the unwashed masses it represented), plus with an aestheticism that made it possible to listen to Classical music and quote Goethe while committing unspeakable atrocities.
I hear many people who just Want A Hit of Heavy Stuff have, these days, moved on to the Sublemon.
Well, blaming Kultur and Ästhetizismus for atrocities is rather different from blaming the bourgeoisie IMHO …
Not in a German context, where they come together in the Wilhelminian ideal of the Bildungsbürger.
Well, the other Latin etymological dictionary (Ernout/Meillet) also derives sublimis/sublimus from limus (“sans doute”), glossing it as “qui monte en ligne oblique, qui s’élève en pente”. Festus’ etymology (sublimem … a limine superiore, quia supra nos est) “paraît être un calembour”.
The Wiktionary suggestion is one of those proposed IE cognates of limus of which de Vaan says that “[N]one of the cognates adduced for limus in IEW is convincing by its semantics, nor does the vowel always fit”
Mention “sublime” to a student of political science, and she’ll respond with “Burke!”
@jack morava: “IIRC Harold Bloom’s Western Canon has a long discussion of Victor Hugo’s poetry and his concern with the sublime…”
The pdf of the book I have before me has 58 instances of “sublime” (>1 per 10 pages). Sublimity is at the heart of Bloom’s discourse. But there’s not much specifically on Hugo in the book.
@Hans: “an aestheticism that made it possible to listen to Classical music and quote Goethe while committing unspeakable atrocities.”
To weep over Werther while killing other people’s children. I doubt it’s a narrowly German thing. It reminds me of Fado Tropical by Chico Buarque (the great Brazilian songwriter), where a brutal Portuguese governor admits (translation mine): “You know that deep down I’m a sentimental one. We all inherited – in our Lusitanian blood – a fair amount of lyricism (in addition to syphilis, of course). Even as my hands are busy torturing, strangling, butchering, my heart closes its eyes and weeps sincerely.”
Yes, the Bykov novel I’m reading now makes a point of the sincere sentimentality of torturers.
To weep over Werther while killing other people’s children. I doubt it’s a narrowly German thing.
No, it’s not; the differences between individual cultures are more with what they are sentimental about. But there was a believe in Wilhelminian and Early 20th century Germany that High Culture and a Classical Education would inoculate people against barbarity, a belief that was thoroughly shattered by the Nazis.
Ach, the Wilhelminians have much to answer for. I note FWIW that at least according to wiki auf Englisch “[t]he term Bildungsbürgertum was coined in 1920s Germany, by the political right-wing to communicate anti-bourgeois sentiment,” although obviously it is common for labels to lag the phenomena they are applied to. But in any event this sent me down a rabbithole of reviewing some of Nietzsche’s enjoyable rants against the Second Reich. Some of the more colorful ones from 1890 are conventionally taken as evidence of insanity even when they offer objectively sound advice (e.g. the unsolicited recommendation to the ruling house of Baden that it disassociate itself from those horrid Hollenzollerns asap), but maybe the high point is the pre-insanity missive of 24. Februar 1887 to Reinhart von Seydlitz.
The German text can be found here if you scroll down a bit (everything’s in chronological order): http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/correspondence/ger/nlett1887g.htm. An early (and thus now public-domain) English translation of a variant text (with the specific negative personal reference to the then-Kaiser expurgated for publication by Nietzsche’s sister) can be found here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche#To_Seydlitz_-_February,_1887
“[D]ie stupideste verkommenste verlogenste Form des ‚deutschen Geistes’, die es bisher gegeben hat.“ Pure comedy gold.