MATS MALM

 

 

On the Technique of the Sublime

 

 

THE SUBLIME IS CLEARLY an inexhaustible source of discussion, although the intensity of interest in the topic may wax and wane. Lately, it has even been incorporated in modern text theory. This interest in the sublime can be traced to the treatise Peri hupsous by an unknown author usually dubbed Longinus. Although this work is no longer at the center of discussion about the sublime, the contribution of Peri hupsous to the rhetorical tradition has been extraordinary, not only in associating the literary sublime with the grandeur of its sources, but also in opening for wider discussion considerations about the impact of art on its audience. The readers initially most interested in the treatise (Boileau, Addison, and Blair, for example) focused mainly upon the literary aspects of the sublime. However, when Edmund Burke released his theories on the sublime in 1757, he hardly treated literary aspects at all, and Burke's empiricist and psychological approach was succeeded in turn by the philosophical views of Kant. Thus, by the end of the eighteenth century the most influential discussions of the sublime turned from a specific interest in literature to a more general aesthetics. That trend has continued to the present; in most studies Peri hupsous takes a back seat to explorations of the psychological, ethical, and philosophical potential of the sublime in the work of Burke, Kant, and others. The smaller the focus on Peri hupsous, the smaller the focus on the literary aspects of the sublime.

In the following, I will attempt to understand one aspect of this treatise not by systematizing it, but by relating it to the systematization of contemporary rhetorical tradition. The nucleus of the synthesis of rhetoric and the expressive sublime, I suggest, is inherent in the reorganization of traditional rhetorical devices in Peri hupsous. This does not explain the sublime, but it may to an extent explain the literary impact of the sublime according to Peri Hupsous. Eventually, the technique of the sublime advanced in Peri hupsous may shed additional light over the general development of imagery in eighteenth-century literature, as well as over the interrelations between literary technique and the developing ideal of imagination as the essence of poetry.