Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Awakening 23Longinus appreciates in the poem of Sappho “is clearly nota representation of unity, or of a unified body. The body isportrayed as broken, fragmented” (282). Rather, Longinusappreciates “the force of enunciation” through which Sapphois able to portray, and ultimately unify, the fragmented body.In Guerlac’s view it is this “force of enunciation whichunifies these fragments, combin[ing] them into a singlewhole; embodying the text and the body—which now servesas a figure for the unity of composition of the text” (282).Although Guerlac appears to challenge the notion that thesublime implies (or helps construct) a unified subject, shedoes not question the prevailing view that the Longiniansublime entails the achievement of textual unity or dispute hisreading of Sappho’s lyric. Like Longinus’, Guerlac’s readingrepresses Sappho’s emphasis on semiotic and erotic transportand reiterates the view that the sublime text functions as anantidote to division. Guerlac’s “force of enunciation” repairs, notunderscores, fragmentation and helps to maintain textual unity,if it is not indeed equivalent to it. For if the effect of figurativelanguage is to give the semblance of unity, how can it followthat “there is no stable ground or truth or sincerity in the eventof sublimity, which, through a force of enunciation, disrupts thestable identity of the subject” (285)? Unity remains the mastertrope whether the “force of enunciation” or the subject producesit; Guerlac now ascribes to it the unity and power previouslyascribed to the subject.Guerlac fails to notice precisely what Ferguson remarksin her elegant article, “A Commentary on Suzanne Guerlac’s‘Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime’ ”: “the capacity ofrhetoric to produce what we might call ‘a subjectivity effect’ ”(292). Ferguson argues that although Guerlac substitutesrhetoric for subjectivity and ascribes to the former thefunction previously reserved for the latter, nothing has reallychanged. What difference, Ferguson asks, does it make if thesubject is divided when language is not? “Figurativity thuscomes in aid of the notion of unity, in substituting for theshattered bodily unity a figurative wholeness. What is thusdisconnected in one register is unified in another” (293).