Rei Terada

Department of English
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
<Rei.Terada@um.cc.umich.edu>

 

Wilson, Rob. American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

 

The American academy rediscovered the theoretical force of sublimity about fifteen years ago, mainly through three post-Freudian efforts–Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime (1976), Harold Bloom’s “Emerson and Whitman: The American Sublime” (in Poetry and Repression [1976]), and an influential series of essays by Neil Hertz, written over a period of years and eventually collected in The End of the Line: Essays in Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (1985). The emphases of these critics differ, but as Rob Wilson observes at the outset of his own revisionary study, the lowest common denominator of sublimation for all is its participation in an Oedipal “ego-quest,” an individual “struggle for strong selfhood” (8). Since the mid-seventies, however, criticism so devotedly post-Freudian has become more difficult to find. It is a commonplace to assume that individualistically psychological work too easily slights the sociohistorical forces that sustain and restrain the psyche and its potential for genius. In Wilson’s words, “to oedipalize the sublime–as is the dominant mode of Weiskel, Bloom, and Hertz–is to dehistoricize its implied workings” (12).

 

Yet, in spite of this, the notion of the sublime has lost no currency. In American Sublime, as elsewhere, the sublime outlives the Freudian matrix of its academic rediscovery to the extent that its description of an outer linguistic limit assists explorations of radical otherness and of power. Wilson states that his book is concerned principally with the ideological convenience of the sublime and that he therefore intends his “genealogy” in the Foucauldian sense, as a “historical knowledge of struggles” (14); in practice, American Sublime reorders primarily literary-historical genealogy. Both of these genealogical enterprises are more questionable on grounds of predictability than of controversy; the advantages of an eclectic Postmodern reading of the American sublime are plain to see. But American Sublime does not come close to achieving these aims, in part because the desiderata seem so obviously agreeable that Wilson hardly feels the need to fulfill them.

 

The first third of American Sublime is composed of three introductions (an “Introduction,” an introductory first chapter entitled “An American Sublime,” and a second chapter entitled “Preliminary Minutiae”), which range from Emerson to Language Poetry to set forth the argument which later, overlapping chapters restate. The “decreative” nature of the American sublime throughout American literary history “voids history and nature of prior presences” (4) in order to cast the reconstruction of the continent as an original, thus more innocent, construction. American emptiness, itself fictive, can then be read as an invitation to produce still more fictions. Wilson also asserts that discussions of the American sublime too often retain a version of poetic genealogy that elevates Bloom’s favorite relentless individualists. The “scenario of the American sublime argued” in 1980s criticism, as Wilson sees it, still begins with Emerson, then moves on to “generate a hugely incarnational son (Whitman), and a fiercely deconstructive daughter (Dickinson), and to filter this power-influx into increasingly self-defensive voices of ‘countersublimity'” (8). Wilson proposes to modify this poetic lineage by attending to Emerson’s lesser-known precursors and by carrying his argument through Modernism–represented here by the work of Wallace Stevens–into contemporaneity with chapters on the “Postmodern” and the “Nuclear” sublime¹; Whitman appears in this scheme as “not so much the cause as the effect . . . of this collective will to the American sublime” (10). Throughout, American Sublime suspends the question of the structure of the sublime while stressing its political usefulness (or its “cash-value,” as Wilson calls it): American poets found in the idea of the sublime a ready-made language for the American will to power.

 

According to the literary-historical narrative which comprises the latter two-thirds of Wilson’s book, Bradstreet introduced the sublime to American literature through the Puritan meditative tradition, which licensed sensual and poetic transport when it “serve[d] the rapture of conversion” (75). Livingston then harnessed the sublime to “an emerging Whig ideology of liberation, on Lockean and Miltonic grounds, evoking the sublime not just as natural but as social/political terror that can be made to work to liberal American purposes” (95), and William Cullen Bryant’s development of a native natural sublime showed “the infinite wealth of this world as transformable to ideal human usages such as poetry” (125). Bryant’s loosely Wordsworthian landscapes also democratized the sublime, proving that “ordinary words and commonplace sites could serve” (125). While Whitman merely embodies more clearly and dramatically the ideals of these precursors, the Modernist sublime exemplified by Stevens “comes to refer less to superlative revelation than to the circumstances in which such a revelation might have taken place” (45). Wilson seems most at home, finally, in the Postmodern era; there, liberated from the obligation to revaluate traditions, Wilson’s restless glances at bits of text are most appropriate, and he can most easily connect “American grandeur” to “that equally vast source of American infinitude reified into power, ‘Capital'” (200). American Sublime is most innovative in its speculations on the “nuclear sublime,” a force “so vast and final in its disclosures of power that it renders the vaunted ‘supreme fiction[s]’ of the Romantic imagination ludicrous or mute” (230).

 

Wilson’s discussions of Whitman and Stevens, in contrast, expose the shallowness of his revisionism. These chapters tread explicitly on Bloomian ground, but seem contented to rehearse Bloom’s arguments in the midst of their supposed refutation of them. Thus Wilson claims that “Walt Whitman became the American sublime in 1855” (134), that Whitman’s is an “exemplary case” (134), and that “all prior American versions seemed wishful tonality more than earthy fact” (135). American Sublime seems in thrall not only to Bloom’s promotion of Whitman but to his grandiloquently Oedipal emphasis when Wilson maintains that “future disciples such as Allen Ginsberg (or Robert Pinsky) . . . must absorb this transgressive language to become their greatest American selves” (143). Wilson’s would-be containment of Whitman thus finally seems timid, amounting to no more than the tautological assertion that “Leaves is fully ‘autochthonic’ if situated in the context of earlier American poetics of the sublime” (163); and his reading of Stevens, which argues that “the spirit of the sublime . . . can only exist for Stevens through counter-movements of the spirit which negate (‘decreate’) false or prior notions of the sublime, even if they are images from his own earlier poems” (177), is hardly more insurgent. Here and elsewhere, American Sublime fails to construct a truly iconoclastic literary history insofar as it relies instead upon foregone conclusions which all good Postmodernists can be counted upon to believe. Thus, to suggest that A. R. Ammons’s Sphere is tempted by the idea of a traditionally sublime “God-drenched voice” (69), it suffices to point out that “the poem, after all, is written ‘For Harold Bloom'” (69). We all know what that means–“a foreshortened view of literary tradition” (70), of which Wilson firmly disapproves. Yet Wilson’s index devotes fourteen lines to Bryant, twelve to Bradstreet, and eight to Livingston, but seventy lines to Stevens, forty-four to Whitman, twenty-one to Emerson, and ten to Harold Bloom. American Sublime thus substitutes a declarative “decreation” of canonicity–fiat multiplicitas–for the reconfiguration of American poetic genealogy it announces.

 

This sort of substitution is unfortunately typical of Wilson’s procedure. On page 39, for example, Wilson promises to “return to quarrel with [Terrence] Des Pres’s Bloom-like and inadequately theorized claim that this ‘American sublime’ has exhausted its very power of imaginative resistance in ‘late Stevens.'” On page 235, however, “it is no wonder that, as Terrence des Pres contends . . . ‘the “American Sublime,” as critics call it, has been missing in our poetry since at least late Stevens.'” Indeed, American Sublime makes little distinction between claiming to take a position and taking one, between talking about historicism or cultural criticism and doing any. Marxism and feminism function more as sources of atmosphere than as bodies of knowledge. A discussion of Bradstreet needs, of course, to consider gender. Wilson therefore refers not to Bradstreet’s voice but to her “woman’s voice,” her position as “a Puritan woman given to the very male art of English poetry” (72); for “Bradstreet would be a ‘merry bird’ and sing a sublime lyric of divine praise, in a summer of bliss. Such, however, cannot be her woman’s lot in that sin-conscious version of Christianity disseminated as American Puritanism” (91). And why not? Because “Bradstreet early–indeed first— undergoes what Harold Bloom has termed ‘the anxiety of influence'” (88).

 

This disinclination to distinguish between a critical stance and its simulacrum extends to Wilson’s very definition of the sublime. It is unclear throughout whether Wilson means by the sublime an experience and its representation, or the representation of a nonexistent experience (the latter would not be a weaker argument, but a different one). On the one hand, “the geographical magnitude of America mythically if not in fact inspired these sublime sensations” (157); on the other, American poets are “convinced by the presence–if not the metaphor–of vast space” (68); and on a third, so to speak, Whitman was “inspired by the scenery if not the sublime of capital” (135). American Sublime finally dissolves into a celebration of the sublime as neither psychological structure nor ideological tool, but as a euphoric “tone” or “mood” far more disembodied and departicularized than anything in Weiskel or Hertz. Wilson refers to “moods of pious arousal” and “literary sublimity” (95), “of moralized rapture” and “self-elected awe” (124), a newer mood of landscape elevation” (94), “a commonsense mood of exaltation” (124), Livingston’s “Protestant-liberal tone” (113), a William Smith lyric “emotive in tone” (103), and so on, until there is no difference between sublimation and making sublime sounds: “Livingston had helped to develop a tradition (or at least tone) of transport” (113).

 

The same confusion crops up in Wilson’s stylistic mannerisms. Wilson often provides a gloss on a term in parentheses immediately following it (when dealing with quoted material he tends to operate the other way around, glossing the quotation, then referring back in parentheses to the quoted term). The resulting system of equivalences, taken seriously, implies a world of astonishing conceptual sloppiness. In the introduction we find “American vastness (emptiness),” “immensity and wildness (‘power’),” “multiple identifications (‘use’),” “art-empowerment (transport),” “poetic language (art),” “beholding (letting go of),” “subjugating (interiorizing),” “recreate/decreate (alter),” and “fullness (vacancy).” These sound like elements of a nightmarish logic problem: If vastness means emptiness, and immensity (which is usually equivalent to vastness) means power, and vacancy (which is usually equivalent to emptiness) means fullness, how many ways are there of looking at a blackbird? If, on the other hand, we don’t take these pairings as equivalences, what are they? Simulacra of bits of analyses, evoking the “mood” of a critical enterprise. American Sublime comes down to its synthetic atmosphere:

 

The American landscape, as site of collective sublimity, has transported poets from Bradstreet to Bryant and beyond into whit-manic tropes of expanded power and higher energy. This continental sublimity, signifying at some semiotic bottom line the project of American expansion (will) taking "dominion everywhere" from Florida to India, has helped to entrench the tropes of a liberal nation legitimating it on its own innermost terms. (37)

 

The critical content of such a passage is hard to perceive, but might be paraphrased, “The landscape encouraged tropes of power that legitimated American expansion.” This is not a moment of summation in particular; open American Sublime to virtually any page and it is saying the same thing.

 

It’s an understatement to say that American Sublime participates in the metaphorization and generalization of the sublime that has for better and worse preserved its critical vitality. Wilson’s is an extreme case, since he carries that generalization about as far as it can go. Other contemporary modifications of the sublime to which Wilson refers in passing, such as Gary Lee Stonum’s reading of Dickinson² or Lyotard’s reflections on the sublimity of Postmodern information systems,³ are more engaging and less reductive. Still, the ease with which Wilson’s obviously well-intentioned “more broadly historical description” (27) of the sublime falls into reifications and mystifications greater than those it charges to its predecessors should give pause to Postmodern criticism as it struggles to define itself against the recent past. The political implications of Weiskel’s meticulous meditations (on the way, for example, in which “the price of [sublimation’s] freedom for will or ego–and of this enhanced sense of self–is alienation from particular forms of primary experience”⁴) are not slight. And Bloom’s inaugural essay on the American sublime does more and better historical work on its second page, surprisingly, than Wilson does in his entire volume:

 

It is noteworthy, and has been noted, that Emerson's two great outbursts of prophetic vocation coincide with two national moral crises, the Depression of 1837 and the Mexican War of 1846, which Emerson, as an Abolitionist, bitterly opposed. The origins of the American Sublime are connected inextricably to the business collapse of 1837. I want to illustrate this connection by a close reading of relevant entries in Emerson's Journals of 1837, so as to be able to ask and perhaps answer the invariable question that antithetical criticism learns always to ask of each fresh instance of the Sublime. What is being freshly repressed? What has been forgotten, on purpose, in the depths, so as to make possible this sudden elevation to the heights?⁵

 

American Sublime is not the Postmodern critique it wants to be because it operates too much by means of its own expedient repressions, “clearing the ground” of contemporary criticism in order to avoid engaging entire schools of thought whose flaws it believes it knows. Wilson never absorbs the point of “American Sublime,” the Stevens lyric he frequently quotes, in which “General Jackson / posed for his statue” and “knew how one feels.”⁶ The point lies in the immediate necessity of the next question: “But how doesone feel?”

 

Notes

 

1. This reorganization is familiar; see, for example, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987).

 

2. The Dickinson Sublime (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990).

 

3. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).

 

4. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), 58-59.

 

5. Poetry and Repression (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1976), 236.

 

6. The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1982), 130-31.