Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

4Kate Chopinand tongue, eyes and skin? She seems to have lost them all, andto be looking for them as though they were external to her. Sheis cold and hot, mad and sane, frightened and near death, all byturns. (10.1–3)Longinus’ insistence that the poem’s sublimity resides in its representationof unity, its ability to connect disparate elements and “bring everythingtogether,” is especially puzzling given that Sappho seems so littleconcerned with univocity. Longinus values the poem because he believesit achieves precisely the opposite of what in fact it does: despite hisassumption that its excellence depends upon Sappho’s skill in replacingthe diverse with the singular, there is little, if any, textual evidence for hiscelebration of homogeneity. Sappho juxtaposes such apparent dualismsas life and death, hot and cold, or sanity and madness not, as Longinuswould have it, in order to create harmony, but rather to unsettle thenotion of organic form upon which his notion of the sublime depends.Rather than unify the disparate, Sappho foregrounds the activity ofself-shattering. Instead of warding off fragmentation, she insists uponit. It is as if the goal of Longinus’ commentary were to domesticate andneutralize the very excessiveness Sappho’s text bespeaks.My principal concern, however, is not with the strength or weaknessof Longinus’ literary criticism. I wish instead to examine the functionSappho’s lyric plays in Longinus’ treatise in order to suggest thathis is a paradigmatic response to the irruption of a threatening andpotentially uncontainable version of the sublime, one that appears torepresent excess but does so only the better to keep it within bounds.The move Longinus makes in relation to Sappho is particularlyinstructive since, as we shall see, later theorists echo it time and timeagain. Longinus’ commentary on Sappho plays a constitutive role inthe sublime’s theorization by shaping the ways in which the subject’sencounter with excess, one of the sublime’s most characteristic andenduring features, may and may not be conceptualized. 4 Neil Hertz’sbrilliant “Reading of Longinus,” which is itself representative of latetwentieth-century American theorists’ commitment to a romantic (orWordsworthian) sublime, continues this tradition by repeating thevery same scenario. 5 Hertz not only recuperates an instance of differencein a literary text and reads it as forming a unified whole; perhapsmore important, he constructs a theory of the sublime that perpetuatesits tactic of exclusion.