Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

20Kate ChopinI have relied upon the versions of Sappho that appear in Russelland Grube primarily because these are the translations NeilHertz cites, and it is his particular reading of Sappho’s lyric thatis the object of this critique.4. Peter De Bolla interestingly defines sublime discourse as discoursethat produces the very excessiveness it purports to describe (TheDiscourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and theSubject [New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 12): “the discourse ofthe sublime . . . is a discourse which produces, from within itself,what is habitually termed the category of the sublime and indoing so it becomes a self-transforming discourse. The only wayin which it is possible to identify this newly mutated discursiveform is via its propensity to produce to excess. . . . Hence thediscourse on the sublime, in its function as an analytic discourseor excessive experience, became increasingly preoccupied with thediscursive production of the excess.”5. Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and theSublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1–20.Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.6. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. Margaret Culley (New York:Norton, 1976), 15. Subsequent references are to this edition andoccur in the text.7. Grube, Longinus on Great Writing, 4.8. Suzanne Guerlac, The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire,Lautréamont (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 3.Guerlac emphasizes that the Longinian sublime is not “merelyrhetorical” but “occurs as a force of enunciation determinedneither by subjective intention nor by mimetic effect” (11).Thus, she argues, “the Longinian emphasis on the act ofenunciation, and, in particular, the call for the dissimulation offigurative language, is incompatible with the mimetic structureof metaphor that is at the basis of the analyses of the romanticsublime” (194). Unlike Weiskel, for whom the sublime functionsas a transcendent turn, Guerlac finds in the sublime “the sitewithin the metaphysical tradition, and within the tradition ofaesthetics, of resistance to mimesis, to metaphorical recuperationor ‘resolution’ and to aesthetics” (194–95); see 182–93 forGuerlac’s discussion of Weiskel’s Romantic Sublime (which I citein note 12).