Linda Austin - Lament and Rhetoric of Sublime

8/7/2019 Linda Austin - Lament and Rhetoric of Sublime

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The Lament and the Rhetoric of the SublimeAuthor(s): Linda M. AustinSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Dec., 1998), pp. 279-306Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2903041 .

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The Lament and theRhetoric of the SublimeLINDA M. AUSTIN

]rN English pastoral elegies we often hearintermittent sighs and cries of woe.They may consist of repetitive statements of loss, as in FrancoisVillon's famous "Oufsont les neiges," or they may be onomato-poeic exclamations. Such cries-which I will call elements oflamentation, for reasons that should emerge below-disruptthe Greek epics and tragedies as well. Lamentation veers awayfrom the cognitive and the pictorial toward sound. It does notapproach a "literaryimitation of the visual," the modusoperandiof the meditative, philosophical, and imagist tradition in lyricpoetry; instead, lamentation evokes "a voice crying" by formu-lating, as much as a linguistic medium can, the noise of trauma.1Margaret Alexiou has shown us the history of the rituallament in ancient Greece,2 but in modern historylamentationhas no generic line. So although ancient laments in elegiac me-ter were sung to the aulis, no exclusive meter of lamentationexists. In written lyrics the title "lament" has been given tomourning cast in various forms: for instance, Robert Fergus-son's comic laments in Old Town dialect forvarious Edinburghfigures exhibit many features of the elegy; Thomas Hardy's"Lament" in his elegiac Poemsof 1 9 1 2-I13 does not differgener-ically from the other pieces in the series; and Shelley's "Ado-

? iqq8 byThe Regents of the UniversityofCaliforniaI Hugh Kenner, "The Experience of the Eye: Marianne Moore's Tradition," South-ernReview,n.s. 1 (1965), 760.2 See TheRitualLamentin GreekTradition(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974) .

279


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280 NINETEENTH- CENTURY LITERATUREnais" and Arnold's "Thyrsis,"which most of us treat as pastoralelegies, echo Bion's "Lament for Adonis" and Moschus's "La-ment forBion."

To identifythe features of lamentation before marking itshistorical emersions, we have to go back to the brief periods ofintense mourning within larger works, such as those in theBook ofJob and the Iliad. These "insets" of lamentation are au-ditory and gestural, and their topoiare exclamations of ineffa-bilityand the ubi sunt,often together. As the ubi sunt catalogslosses, the ineffability(or inexpressibility) topos inscribes ourconfrontation with the idea of death and absence.3 Both mayregistershock and grief through a language of trauma.The rhetoric of such traumatic expression is ancient; Lon-ginus firstdescribed it in his treatise on the sublime. In the sec-ond half of the eighteenth century,when to critics and philoso-phers the sublime became not just elevated language or aparticular landscape but a moment of terror and an imagina-tive event, some writers explored the dramatic possibilities oflamentation in the form of the lyric. In 1821 Shelley wrote'A Lament," a shortmourning piece in sublime rhetoric. Inter-est in the uses of this rhetoric persisted-in Richard HarrisBarham's "Epigram" (published 1847), and, as I shall suggest,even later.In Shelley's 'A Lament and Barham's "Epigram" mergesome of the most popular and influential currents in philosophyand art; they are enactments of the sublime that reflect con-temporary theatrical conventions. Yet both poems are tuckedinto spare places of today's anthologies and are seldom dis-cussed. This is in part because, as performances, theyare espe-cially vulnerable to the dangers that have dogged sublime ex-pression since antiquity; Longinus warned that "attempts toreach beyond" the sublime could "run aground on tawdrinessand affectation."4With these hazards in mind, I shall arguethat a rhetoric of lamentation surfaced at the turn of the eigh-

3 The ubi sunt is characteristic of medieval laments. The topos of ineffabilityor in-expressibilityhas been discussed widely as a defining feature in the response to death.See, for example, W. David Shaw, Elegyand Paradox: TestingtheConventions(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), p. 5.

4 Longinus, On GreatWriting(On theSublime),trans. G.M.A. Grube (New York: Lib-eral Arts Press, 1957), p. 6.


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 281teenthcentury,whenreformulationsof the sublimein philoso-phyand medicinemade itpossibleto performthe momentofshockandlossusingLonginianrhetoric.

A(2DLamentationthat expressesthe shock ofdeath has an ancientname,gdos,whichreferredoriginallytothekinswoman'sshrillcryforthe dead.5In the Greekepics theartlessg'os differsfrompenthos(collectivepublic griefforthedeath of a hero) and fromthrenos(the lamentationsung byprofessionalmournersduringthe wake). Go'osis notkommos,the lamentexchangedbetweenchorusand actors in Greektragedy,butindividuallamentation;6 in Homericritualsitdes-ignatesthespokenlamentof intimatemourners.The wordsofthegodosare notpolished ormusical,as is thethrenos;goosen-velopsthemournerin a privateconfrontationwiththe factofdeath,withitsineffability.Itrefersto theactualwordsoflamen-tation,ratherthanto the ritualitselfor theemotion.The epiccanquote thegdos,thoughfrequentlyitpresentsit as spectacleratherthan sound. Thus the threefriendsofJob, seeinghismisery,liftup theirvoicesand eyesand weep; each tearshismantleand sprinklesduston his head (Job2:11-12). Theseactionssuggestthatin an episode or momentof the utmostshock-whetherofaweor ofgrief-languageislessexpressivethan thebody.Indeed, thewordsand phrasesof lamentation

oftenwindround in endlessrepetitionor break off.Theydono morethanpointtowardsome unreachablesorrow.G6oscomprisesgestures,bothphysicaland linguistic.Forinstance,Bion's "LamentforAdonis,"like Moschus's"LamentforBion,"is a repetitiveandprotractedstatementofwoe:I weep forAdonis; lovelyAdonis is dead. Dead is lovelyAdonis;the Lovesjoin inweeping.Sleep no more, Cypris,amid crimson

5 SeeAlexiou, pp. 13, 102-3.6 These distinctionsare examined in Gregory Nagy, TheBestoftheAchaeans: ConceptsoftheHero in ArchaicGreekPoetry(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 94-95, 11!2. G6os is usually interchangeable withprothesis,a psychological term that cansuggest the dissolvingof consciousness. See also Dennis Kay,MelodiousTears:TheEnglishFuneralElegyfromSpensertoMilton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 41.


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282 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATUREraiment.Awake,wretchedgoddess, and in sable robe smite thybosom and say to all, "LovelyAdonis is dead."7

Similarly,the contrapuntalmovementof the lamentationinEuripides'sTheDaughtersofTroyoverwhelmsthecoherenceofindividualspeeches. In performance,single lines of Andro-mache and Hecuba maybe heard simultaneously,or theymayecho eachotherin a hauntingand disengagedstichomythia:ANDROMACHE. Achaeans our mastersto bondage are halingmeHECUBA. Woe!ANDROMACHE. Whydoest thou chant mypaean of misery-HECUBA. Alas!-ANDROMACHE. Formyburden ofwoe,-HECUBA. 0 Zeus!ANDROMACHE. For the anguish I know?HECUBA. Ah children!ANDROMACHE. No more are we!HECUBA. Gone is thegolden prosperity,Troyis no more!ANDROMACHE. AhhaplessHECUBA. Gone are thehero-sonsthatI bore!ANDROMACHE. Woe!-8

Pose and movementare evidentinGreekaswell as inbiblicallamentation.In one ofthemanyscenesof mourningfromtheIliad,Andromache'swordsoverthebodyofHectoramplifythehorroroflossbutalsorepresentthepostureoflamentation:"the folkwail forhim throughoutthe city,and griefunspeakableand sorrowhast thoubroughtupon thyparents,Hector; and forme beyondall othersshallgrievouswoes be left.For at thydeaththou didstneitherstretchout thyhands tome fromthybed, norspeak to me anyword ofwisdom whereon I mighthave pon-dered nightand daywithsheddingof tears."9

In theabovepassages expressionis truncated,repetitive,andrecursive.Lamentationsounds like some formsof prayer-7 Bion, "LamentforAdonis,"in ThePastoralElegy:An Anthology,ed. ThomasPerrinHarrison, Jr.,trans.HarryJoshua Leon (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1939), p. 34.8 Euripides, The Daughtersof Troy,in Euripides,trans. Arthur S. Way, 4 vols. (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1912), 1, 401-3 (11.577-84).9 Homer, TheIliad, trans. A. T. Murray,2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.Press, 1925), II, 617-19 (XXIV,11.740-45).


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 283litanies or antiphonal chants. Sentences rephrase sorrow; wordsmaybe descriptive or,more simply,exclamatory, but always theyreturn to the scene of death or the utterance of grief.The wordsof the gdos obviously are not unintelligible sounds, but theyapproach onomatopoeisis; the wailing in The Daughters of Troycomes closest. Phrases have the quality of gestures: one hears,in the lament, inchoate cries; one sees the semaphores of in-effability-hand-wringing and wailing.In the epics the goosis an auditory effusioncomplementedwith images- of mourners weeping, flailing their arms, cover-ing their faces, rolling in dirt. In later odes and lyrics,insets oflamentation echo the biblical and classical laments: "But 0 theheavy change, now thou art gone, / Now thou art gone, andnever must return!" from "Lycidas" (1637) conveys the ele-mental "O" of trauma as it circulates the repetitive phrases ofepic grief.10Similarly, early lines in Shelley's "Adonais" para-phrase Bion's "Lament for Adonis." In both "Lycidas" and "Ado-nais" the physical gestures of grief are missing, of course, yetthey may be suggested by some of the phrases themselves. Thegriever's "Ahwoe is me!" in "Adonais" (1. 154) is a performativephrase that conjures the spectacle of the body in an agony ofmourning." One hears and in effectsees, in verbal sound andsemaphore, the griefof the survivor.By "performative" I mean a rhetoric that is gestural, thatsuggests or refers the reader to physical movement. When Shel-ley wrote "Adonais," the line 'Ah woe is me" evoked a spectacleof the tragic figure in an attitude of lamentation, an attitudethatwas inscribed not only in the epics and lyricsof antiquitybut also in the stage directions for drama on both the "legiti-mate" and the "illegitimate" stage. In England the tragedyandhistorical spectacle that had been the glory of the Elizabethantheater endured well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, tomany contemporary and modern commentators, the poetic

10JohnMilton,"Lycidas,"in CompletePoemsandMajorProse,ed. MerrittY.Hughes(Indianapolis: OdysseyPress, 1957), p. 121, 11.37-38.I' The varied injunctions to weep (11.1, 2, 19, 28, 37) recall the repetitions in an-cient lamentation. See Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Adonais," in The CompleteWorksofPercyByssheShelley,ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 1o vols. (New York: Gordian Press,1965), II, 387-410.


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284 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATUREtragedies of the Romantics, whether staged or not, had a facti-tious Elizabethan quality: speeches were verbose and overly de-scriptive, performances were often static and tedious. But assome of these critics also acknowledge, this drama providedacting vehicles for some of the great early-nineteenth-centurytragedians like Edmund Kean and, later, Charlotte Cushman.12The melodramas that filled the illegitimate theaters like-wise had borrowed their lofty expression from eighteenth-century classical tragedy and its characteristic inflection, ges-tures,and movement. The language of melodrama was inflated,its physical action broad and unnatural. In melodramatic deliv-ery, emphasis fell on numerous words and syllables, and facialexpression was exaggerated-the body and face had to expressunbridled emotion. Generally,however,melodrama was a morerobust form than tragedy.Whereas a long descriptive speechoften locked the body of the tragic actor in a staticpose on cen-ter stage, the stage directions of melodrama stimulated perpet-ual motion: the actor was walking, gesturing with her or hishands, contorting her or his face.'3 Anyone who reads one ofthese old melodramas-Edward Fitzball's burletta The InchcapeBell (1 828), forexample, or the sensation novels that inheritedtheir theatricality,like Collins's The Woman in White (1859-6o)-notices the frenetic energy of the entire stage business.When Shelley wrote "Adonais" in 1821, broad and em-phatic acting had been in vogue on the illegitimate stage foratleast thirtyyears. In light of Shelley's own dramatic composi-tions,his use of performativewords and phrases in "Adonais" isnot surprising. 'Ah woe is me" echoes both the "Ayme" from"Lycidas" (1. 56) and the lamentation from antiquity. But be-cause Shelley,withother poets, was imagining the dramatic di-mensions of the lyric at a time when, as Allardyce Nicoll re-

12 The influence of Romantics like Byron, Shelley, Baillie, and Coleridge on the-atrical drama is generally thought to have been ruinous. The verylong speeches wereresistant to staging,but a splendid performance often could bring to life some of theshorter,elliptical (and seeminglyincoherent) passages. See EnglishPlays oftheNineteenthCentury,ed. Michael R. Booth, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969-76), I, 6-8, 18.

13 For the differencesbetween eighteenth-centurytragedies and the new melodra-mas, see Booth,EnglishPlays,I, 21, 2 7. See also theshort section on melodramatic actingin Michael R. Booth, EnglishMelodrama(London: HerbertJenkins,1965), pp. 190 - 2 10.


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 285marks, "poetic authors, in spite of their lordly air of superiority,were not above indulging in the tricksof the inferior style,"theutterance also evokes a familiar melodramatic gesture.'4

Because "Adonais" is not a lament but an elegy, hints ofmelodrama quickly evaporate. Like other poems of the genre,it works through lamentation. In a psychoanalytical readingof mourning language, the loss of a loved one forces grieversto recognize their own deaths, a glimpse that is often quicklycovered by the obverse triumph of survival contained in themourner's effortsto grasp reality. Repeating "You're dead,""Thyrsis is dead," and "now thou art dead" conveniently em-beds "I'm alive." 15Heard amid these echoes, the "Ah woe is me"of "Adonais" efficientlyperforms the selfish and social func-tions ofmourning. Thus lamentation fulfillsan important ther-apeutic role despite its apparent meaninglessness.In general, the gdos occurs early in the pastoral, academic,or funeral elegy. It is traumatic language, as we say now: itsounds spontaneous and involuntary; it is meant to exhibit amind and body temporarilyout of control. Traumatic languagesignals internal dissociation, a state in which events are regis-tered but not understood. The condition, as well as its sympto-matic language, is unsustainable; it does not seem able to sub-sistapart frombelated accounts of it,from a point of cognitiverecovery.'6By itself, then, the phrase of woe expresses an internalmovement that is not necessarily therapeutic. It is a dramatictopos,and the mourner who cries "Woe is me" has literallydis-appeared into her or his grief.The mourner is now a mere per-

14 AllardyceNicoll, A HistoryofEnglishDrama, i660-i900, 6 vols. (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1965), IV,78-79.15 Alexiou discusses the selfishnesslatent in the survivor'smourning (see pp. 150-58, i82-84). In his elegant Freudian treatment of the elegy,Peter M. Sacks notes therole of traumaticlamentation in "the crucial self-privilegingof the survivors" (TheEn-glishElegy:Studiesin theGenrefromSpenserto Yeats[Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,

1985], p. 19).16 CathyCaruth describes trauma in thiswayin UnclaimedExperience:Trauma,Narra-tive,and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 91-92. See alsoKevinNewmark, "Traumatic Poetry:Charles Baudelaire and the Shock ofLaughter," inTrauma: Explorationsin Memory,ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.

Press, 1995), p. 253.


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286 NINETEENTH- CENTURY LITERATUREsonification of sorrow-an enactment or attitude. In its histor-ical context, then, "Ah woe is me" echoes ritualisticlamentationfrom the epics and from an immediate source, melodrama. Bythe 182os it had become the theater of trauma, specializing inthe response to the sublime moment.

The ancient rhetoric of lamentation wasabsorbed into grand movements of melodrama as a result of aculmination of trends in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century philosophy and medicine. It was the similaritybetweenthe mental motion of the sublime (as Kant and Burke imag-ined it) and some forms of insanity (as the medical literaturepictured them) that exposed the ancient, ceremonial rhetoricof lamentation to an internal view. In thisview,the death of an-other forces the mourner to foresee his own inevitable death, aterrifyingidea that plunges him into self-obliterating shock,mixed withthe griefof actual loss.For Dennis, Blair, Burke, Kant, and all of their commen-tators, as well as for eighteenth-century seekers of the pictur-esque, the occasion of the sublime is death, in the guise of somesupernatural or supersensible power that stimulates instinctsofself-preservation. It appears as a premonition of the subject'sown death, a vision of natural destruction, a loss. The Roman-tic sublime, beginning with Burke's 1759 account, no longerfocused on rhetoric or the stock sources of the experience thatJohn Dennis listed in his famous essay The Grounds ofCriticismin Poetry(1704); instead it concentrates on the imaginationor the emotions during the encounter withdeath. Death epito-mizes Kant's idea of the sublime, that "absolutelygreat"thingthatstretches the imagination of the survivorto itslimits.17WithBurke and Kant the sublime ceases to be simplya phe-nomenon and becomes a movement in time, during which theimagination moves to an emotional extreme. Kant in 1790 callsthis movement "vibration," an "alternating attraction toward,

17 See Immanuel Kant, CritiqueofJudgment(1790), trans.J.H. Bernard (New York:Hafner Press, 1951), p. 96.


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 287and repulsionfrom,the same object"(p. 97)-namely death,in one ofits manifestations.Burkeimaginedthe sublimeas a"mind ... hurriedout of itself,bya croud of great and confusedimages."18The idea of thesublimeexpressedbyKant and Burkeco-incides with contemporarymedical conceptions of mentaldissolution.The physicianand philosopherJohannChristianHeinroth,adaptingseventeenth-and eighteenth-centuryhy-drodynamicaltheoriesof thebody,picturedmelancholiaandastatelikethesublimeas oppositeinternalmovements.In hisTextbookofDisturbancesofMentalLife(1818) Heinrothconceivesofmentaldisordersintermsofexcessor deficientenergy,whichhe classifiesas "exaltations"(hyperstheniae)or "depressions" (as-theniae).These firsttwo ordersencompass insanityand melan-cholia, respectively.(In the third order were mixed distur-bances [hyperastheniae].)The idea of an object threateningthecohesion ofthesubjectisprominentin Heinroth'sdescriptionsof the firsttwo states.19In melancholia Heinroth detects "a ten-dencyto lose oneself in one centralpoint and thusgraduallyfade out into nothing" (I, 222). For him the sense of losingoneself in the idee fixe (a dominatingpassion) is a crucialele-ment ofmelancholia,"forthelifeofthepatientrevolvesaroundthe one object which has enslaved the disposition,so that thisobjectis an idee fixeof thepatient,whokeeps thinkingabout itand is drawntoit as though bythe forceofgravity"(I, 19 1). In-sanity (ecstasis) corresponds to contemporaryversionsof thesublime moment: in thisstateof exaltation,he writes,a mindwithno anchoring object tends "to expand withoutlimit andthus also fade out into nothing."An unreflectivedisposition,exaltationproduces "the bliss of self-oblivion"(1,292929-23) .2OAs Hugh Blair mentions in his 1783 essay on the sub-ject, the sublime "isan emotion whichcan never be long pro-

"I Edmund Burke,A PhilosophicalEnquiryintotheOriginofourIdeasoftheSublimeandBeautiful,ed.J.T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 62.19 See Johann Christian Heinroth, TextbookofDisturbancesof Mental Life,or Distur-bancesoftheSoul and TheirTreatment,trans.J.Schmorak, 2 vols. (Baltimore:Johns Hop-kins Univ. Press, 1975), I, 214-15.20 In his nosology Heinroth places ecstasismelancholia(quiet insanity) in the thirdorder, hyperastheniae,which mixed the two extremes (see I, 214-15).


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288 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATUREtracted."'21As a result,the verbal reaction to the sublime mo-ment becomes a rushinto incoherence-"temporary aphasia"to a later commentator,Thomas Weiskel.22One's confronta-tion with the "absolutelygreat"thing now vents itselfthrougharhetoricresemblingthat of the ancient g'os. Sighs, repetition,and onomatopoeia discharge the momentaryeffectsof the sur-vivors'terrorbeforethe prospectofdeath.This traumaticsub-lime,juxtaposed withthe medical picture of severe melancho-lia (what we now call "depression"),seems to have strayedfarfromits classical identityas noble expression.The grand stylewas a controlled effectengineered by agreat writer.(Nicolas Boileau says of Longinus, "Souventil faitla figure qu'il enseigne; et en parlant du Sublime, il est lui-mesme tres-sublime.")23YetLonginus,asMichelDeguyremindsus, "treatsnot the relation between rhetoric and persuasionbutthe relationbetween the 'stupefying'(Oavccda-tov[thauma-sion]) and 'ecstasy' ('KcrTacns" [ekstasis]) ."24 In fact,lamenta-tion that emulates the psychicmovementof the Romantic sub-lime signifiesthis event in grammaticaland tropic disordersthatreproduce some of the rhetoricalfeatures of the grandstylethat Longinus describes. In the middle chapters of histreatisehe discussesdevicesthatcarrythe "truestampoflivingpassion" (p. 33). Disconnected, haltingutterancewithoutcon-junctions (asyndeton), signalingagitationor surprise;accumu-lating figures (anaphora and polyptoton); apostrophe; verbalcondensation;and syntacticalinversions(hyperbaton)can eachsuggest"in the rightplace" thesublimefrenzy(p. 11).There are, then, more than coincidental similaritiesbe-tween expressions of sublimityand grief. When the speakermourns a loss (real or imagined), her rhetoricconveysaphasia,

21 "The Sublime in Writing,"in his Lectureson Rhetoricand BellesLettres,ed. HaroldF. Harding, 2 vols. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965),I, 75.22 See The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structureand Psychologyof Transcendence

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 30.23 "Trait6 du sublime ou, du merveilleux dans le discours," in his OeuvresCompletes([Paris]: Gallimard, i966), p. 333: "when he speaks of the Sublime, he is himself verysublime" (my translation).24 Michel Deguy, "The Discourse of Exaltation (MeycaAryopeLv):Contribution to aRereading of Pseudo-Longinus," in Of theSublime:Presencein Question,trans.JeffreyS.Librett (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993), p. 13.


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 289the condition towardwhich both the sublime and the lamenttend. Paratacticallines (asyndeton), inversions,and greatimag-istic condensation, in addition to ejaculations and lapses ingrammar,all compose a relativelynonvisual and nonconcep-tual speech, the senseless sound of shock in the sublime andlamentation.In the panic of sudden dissolution- towarda cen-trifugalnothing or into a centripetal abyss of the idee fixe-lamentation records what nosologies since the turn of thecenturyhave termeda manic-depressionthat can be "exalted"or "retarded,"close correlatesof Heinroth's hyperstheniaeandastheniae.25Lamentation enacts the hystericsand paralysis of woethroughaposiopesis, themovementtowardsilence. We hear it,paradoxically,in refrains,ellipses, and outbursts.Both emo-tional states-sublimityand grief-surface in an identical pos-ture because each representsa momentarybut profound dis-composure. That rhetoricalmarvel "woe is me," declaring thetotal self-absorptionofthemourner,personifiesthespeakeraswoe-her individualityis utterlyerased in this theatricaliden-tification.Such dissolutionmay,followingthe old mechanicalimages of the organism,be centrifugaland centripetal:thuslanguage may be driven to the limit,as John Sallis imaginesinhistreatmentof thesublime.26Followingthegrand style,itmayevaporateintoellipses;or,ratherthantrailingoff,itmayrepeat

25 Emil Kraepelin's sixth edition of LehrbuchderPsychiatrie(1899) firstcombined allof the various manic and melancholic disorders into one disease, manic-depressive in-sanity.In its maniacal form the illness was characterized by "psychomotor excitement";depressive stateswere marked byvaryingdegrees of "psychomotorretardation"(quotedin Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholiaand Depression:FromHippocraticTimestoModernTimes[New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986], p. 191). For the survival of the term"melancho-lia" into the twentiethcentury,seeJackson'saccount ofthe debate over the existence of"involutionalmelancholia" (pp. 207-1 1) and the discussion of the classificationof de-pression (pp. 211-19). For similar descriptions of symptoms in twentieth-centuryAmerican psychiatry,see the Diagnosticand StatisticalManual ofMentalDisorders,2d ed.(Washington,D.C.: American PsychiatricAssociation, 1968), pp. 36, 125. This was thefirstedition to followthe nomenclature and classificationof the International Classifi-cation of Diseases, 8 (ICD-8). For the uses of "melancholy,""melancholia," and "depres-sion," see JenniferRadden, "Melancholy and Melancholia," in PathologiesoftheModernSeWf:PostmodernStudies on Narcissism,Schizophrenia,and Depression,ed. David MichaelLevin (New York: New YorkUniv. Press, 1987), pp. 240-41.

26 In Spacings- OfReasonand Imaginationin TextsofKant, Fichte,Hegel (Chicago: Univ.of Chicago Press, 1987) Sallis describes the sublime as "movement at the limit"of themind'sownboundaries(p. 123).


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290 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATUREitself,windingaround a centralcore ofgrief.Elements of thegrandstyle,thebasisofnoble expression,nowserveas traumaticutterance.The formulations of Boileau, Dennis, and Burke origi-nated in a picture of a body thatwas unsettled,transportedinecstasyor sunk in melancholia. In his Salon de 1767 Diderotrecords his view of a mountain lake in conventionalizedges-turesof the sublime effect:'J'etaisimmobile,mes regards er-raientsans s'arretersur aucun objet,mes brastombaienta mescots, j'avais la bouche entre'ouverte."27This paralysisis a con-ventionalreaction to one of nature'sgrand scenes, but it alsoinscribesthe instantofhelplessness beforemagnitudeand in-finitythatthe lamenttoo records:'je ne vous diraipointquellefut la duree de mon enchantement;l'immobilitedes etres,lasolitude d'un lieu, son silence profondsuspend le temps,il n'yen a plus,rienne le mesure,l'homme devientcomme eternel"(pp. 134-35) .28 Likewise, in its frequent stage directions call-ingforarmsextended above thehead or stretchedforward,forposturessuggestingsupplicationor agony,themelodrama ex-hibitedsubjectsin thethroesofsublimemoments.Having tem-porarilylostthepowerofwords,theymust,like one ofthechar-acters in WilliamDimond's TheFoundlingof theForest(1 809),"gesticulate[their] transport"(quoted in Booth,EnglishMelo-drama,p. 9go).The manydumb charactersin theseplays (likethe foundlingin TheInchcapeBell), who were called to strikesome ofthemore immoderatepostures,suggesttheinversere-lationbetweenspeechlessness and feelingin melodrama.These imagesofthebodyand face in griefor in the throesof "elevation,"'joy,"and "grandeur"were all stockgesturesofthe actor's art and had been inventoried in manuals like TheThespianPreceptor(181 1) .29 In 18o6 the physicianSir CharlesBell offereda medical basisforclassifiedgesturesof thebody-

27 Denis Diderot, Salons, ed.Jean Seznec, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1983), III, 134: "I stood still,myeyes wandered withoutfixingon any object, myarmshung at mysides, mymouth was halfopen" (mytranslation).28 "I can hardly say how long myspell lasted; the stillness ofthe figures,the solitudeof a place-its deep silence-suspend time, there is no more of it,nothing measuresit, one becomes as ifendless" (mytranslation).29 See Booth, EnglishMelodrama,pp. 197, 205-6.


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292 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE"stupefaction,"Bell perceives the consequence of a "lethargyofwoe" (pp. 115-16): it mixes the laxness of sorrow (melancho-lia) with the startsof grief (tumult). Ifwe recall Diderot, mo-tionless and agape before the landscapes ofJoseph Vernet,wecan nowsee the same affinitiesbetween exaltation and depres-sion, between sublime transportand melancholic absorption:"ma voix coupee, mes idees confondues,je restaistupefaitetmuet" (Salons, III, 133) .32 Like Heinroth's hyperastheniae,theopposites are mergedand interpretedbroadly throughsimilargestures.

Late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-centurymedicineand philosophy offered,then,an internalpictureof the com-motion behind thebursts,clogs,and fragmentsof the sublimegIos. Both Heinroth's ideas of mentaldisturbancesand the Ro-mantic sublime visualized internal motion; descriptions likeDiderot's of the sublime attitudeimagine thisturbulenceerupt-ing in gestures.The moment of shock, whetherrecorded anddescribed as in Diderot's Salon or performed,suggestssublimeaposiopesis. Words become inadequate or unavailable. In thissense,as recent studieshave noted, theperformative"seems tospan the polarities of . . . the extroversionof the actor, the intro-versionof thesignifier."33Incoherent or inchoate displays of grief not only violateLonginus'sdemand thatthe sublimeprovide"reflectionswhichreach beyond what was said," but,ifprolonged, theyoftensinkto bathos, thus confirmingtheparadox of the ancient treatise(p. 1o). For in bathos the prescriptiverhetoricdoubles as thelistof "defects"thatimpede sublimity.In section 3 ofOn GreatWritingagitated rhythmsand shortsyllables-all gustsof "thefrenzied spirit"(p. 1 i) -become "hollow and artificialswell-ings" (p. 6). Sinking (bathos) and sublimitycan in thislightcome confusinglyclose. In hisilluminatingstudyofeighteenth-centurypainting Michael Fried records Diderot's distaste for

32 "My speech cut off,my ideas disconcerted, I was left stupefied and mute" (mytranslation).33 Andrew Parkerand Eve KosofskySedgwick, introduction to Performativityand Per-formance,ed. Parker and Sedgwick (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 2.


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 293grimace,"the mannered workingup of physicalgestureand fa-cial expression."34Such histrionicswere directed to theviewer,but Diderot himselfindulges in grimacewhen dramatizinghisown reactions to Vernet's landscapes. And by the nineteenthcenturythesublime reactionhad become so codified and con-nected to melodrama thatits rhetoricwas in peril of sinking.

The wedding of a philosophical-medicalpictureof internal dissolution to Longinian rhetoricinvitedarereadingof the ancient ceremonialg'os. Lamentation presentsnothing,asJean-LucNancysaysof the sublime; it movestowardan abyss of language (speechlessness); it is overwhelmedwiththe idea ofloss,ratherthanwiththe lostobject.35The particu-lar image is no longer coherent,so the focus is the terrorof lossitself.When writersattemptedto create a sublime lyricseparatefromthe epics and elegies, theybased iton inexpressibilityandgesture,the dramatictopoiof lamentation.This lyricwas the-atrical,not poetical; itsmodels werefromcontemporarymelo-dramaratherthan fromtheElizabethan stage.Comparing Shelley's 'A Lament" of 1821 (published in1824) and Richard Harris Barham's "Epigram" (published in1847) withWordsworth's"Aslumberdid myspiritseal" ( 799)and Hardy's "During Wind and Rain" (1 917), we see that eachcan be read as a dramatic expression of the response to thesublime. Each confrontsrather than contemplatesthe ineffa-bilityof loss or of death; each looks and sounds broken andunfinished;the ubi sunt motifoperates implicitlythroughall.Shelley'sand Barham'spoems,whichI shalldiscussinmorede-tail than theothers,are performativepieces.In Shelley's poem the rhetorical question "When will re-turn"in the firststanza is followedbya refrain,the g'os: "No

34 Michael Fried, Absorptionand Theatricality:Paintingand Beholderin theAge ofDiderot(Berkeleyand Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1980), p. 97; see Diderot, III, 1 12.35 See Jean-Luc Nancy,"The Sublime Offering,"in Of theSublime,p. 53.


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294 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATUREmore -Oh, never more!" As the poem conveys the sound ofwailing and woe, itgushes toward sublimity:

O World!0 life!0 time!On whose last stepsI climb,Tremblingat thatwhere I had stoodbefore;Whenwillreturnthegloryofyour prime?No more Oh, never more!(CompleteWorks,IV,96-97; 11. 1-5)The lines exemplifythe extroversion of acting and the introver-sion of meaning: ejaculations and dashes demand the emphasesand heavy pauses that typified the delivery of contemporarytragedians.36The poem's images and semantics, meanwhile, aredim. The theme of the lyric-presumably lost time-emergesthrough linguistic gesture: the deictic "at that where" conjuresthe hand-wringing of lamentation; "at that" points toward aplace the poet can define only as "where [he] had stood before."Trembling "at" the sight of the "before" now lost to him, the poetgrasps at several abstractions ("world," "life," "time") in order todefine his position.Stanza II presents dead figures of time and loss in discretesets. Like those of stanza I, these too are canceled bythe wail of"No more":

Out of thedayand nightAjoy has taken flight:Freshspring,and summer,and winterhoar,Movemyfaintheart withgrief,but withdelightNo more-Oh, never more! (11.6-io)

Deixis and the desultory figures for youth and time togetherdeflect the lyric'sforce into a series of rushed and broken ejac-ulations, the elements of sublime expression. Inversions in lines8-9 raise for a moment the chiasmic force of pleasure, beforethe refrain interrupts and cancels all delight. The fluidityoflamentation in the elegy-emulating the mourner's tears-is

36 Booth mentions William Macready in EnglishMelodrama,p. 207.


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 295here checked by such hyperbaton, as well as by verbal compres-sion and exclamation.37 The result is effusion and contraction,both obscuring vision. The awkward "a joy"- rather than "myjoy"- suggests a dissociation blocking any memory of an objectof happiness.In light of Shelley's work in dramatic form, which culmi-nated in The Cenci (1 819), we can easily view "A Lament" as hisattempt to write a g'os through a theatrical medium. The pieceis too short and elliptical to belong to the corpus of poeticaland abstract tragedies for which the Romantics were known; itappears instead to require the spectacle of melodrama. Thisimpression is strengthened by the Bodleian manuscript of thepoem, which reveals that Shelley's interest while composing thepiece layin its delivery. Under stanza "I" Shelley has written "Letoit etait [sic] formt' des etoiles errantes, et de foudre, entrelesquelles on voyait des [space] enflammes. [space] le demuere[sic] brulant comme le feu, froide comme le glace [sic] .38Shelley is testing images in order to describe the emotions attheir limits. Accordingly, we might rephrase his sentence withHeinroth's extremes in mind: beneath a terrible fate we livepassionately ("brulant comme le feu") and paralyzed ("froidcomme le glace"). Joining traditional rhetorical and physicalpostures, the images convey the ecstasisof sublime shock andthe stupefaction of melancholia, opposite yet visually indistin-guishable, as in Bell's anatomy of grief-since, as Heinrothwrites, "only the nature of the pull is different"(I, 223). Belowthe two stanzas of the lament in Shelley's Bodleian manuscriptis the cadenced sentence, "When the mournful surges ring theshipwrecked seaman's knell" (pp. 4-5). This balanced line, un-derscoring the aural basis of the entire composition, offersameasured, dirgelike sound of lamentation, which Shelley re-jected for the shrill cry.

37 Esther Schor makes this point about the late-eighteenth-centuryelegy in BearingtheDead: The British Cultureof MourningfromtheEnlightenmentto Victoria(Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), p. 51.38 PercyBysshe Shelley,Bodleian MS. Shelleyadds. d. 7: A FacsimileEditionwithFullTranscriptionand TextualNotes,ed. Irving Massey,vol. 2 of TheBodleian ShelleyManu-scripts(New York:Garland Publishing, 1987), pp. 4-5.


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296 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURETo Nicoll, one of the traits that makes Shelley "entirely acloset playwright"is "his failure to deal with a theatrical con-vention" (IV, 196-97). In The Cenci, Shelley's most theatricaldrama, the convention is the bodily expression of speechless-ness. Cenci declares, "And yet I need not speak," but he goeson to impress silence on the air and the pavement: "0, thoumost silent air,that shalt not hear / What now I think!" (quotedin Nicoll, IV, 197). As the notations accompanying the manu-script of "A Lament" show, however, Shelley knew that mute-ness required a truncated, un-Elizabethan utterance, and he

conceived of this lyric in sound and rhythmrather than in im-ages or semantics. 'A Lament" is an exercise in the sublime ef-fect and tragicacting. It suggests thatShelley's interest in dramaextended beyond the poetic to the melodramatic.Whereas in 'A Lament" Shelley composed a tragic speech,Barham in his "Epigram" educes the presence of the melodra-matic actor. Barham, known from the l840s on as Thomas In-goldsby, the author of The IngoldsbyLegends, employs the stocktheme of sublime expression, death and lost time. Like Shel-ley's poem, Barham's employs a rhetoric of exaltation, but whileShelley gestures toward the sublime ether through deixis, Bar-ham expresses the ineffabilityof loss through another perfor-mative technique, citation:

What Horace saysis-EheufugacesAnnilabuntur,Postume!Postume!Years glide away,and are lost to me, lost to me!Now,whenthe folksin the dance sporttheirmerrytoes,Taglionisand Ellslers,Duvernaysand Ceritos,SighingI murmur,"O mihipraeteritos!" 39Like personification, imitation of the great masters of rheto-ric-here in a Horatian ode-is a mainstay of elevated lan-guage. Longinus observed this in his treatise: "even those littleinclined to inspiration become possessed by the greatness of39 [RichardHarrisBarham], TheIngoldsbyLegends,orMirthand Marvels,ed. R.H. Dal-ton Barham, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1goi), II, 460. Dalton Barham collected"Epigram" for the Third Series of the Legends,published posthumously in 1847. SeeWilliam G. Lane, RichardHarris Barham (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1967),pp. 164, 177.


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 297others"(p. 22) .40 Asan efficientand securewaytoachievesub-limity,Barham recitesHorace's words,translatesthem intoEnglish,and thenrepeatsone lineinthe originalLatin,callingattentionto the act of recitation.Barhammakes"Epigram"his piece, ratherthanHorace's,by embeddingdirectionsfordelivery.The speakeris to sighand murmurhis lastphrase;he is to separatethesyllablesof"postume"and enunciate"lost to me" in order to stresstherhyme.Other marksforemphasisand intonation(exclama-tions,"Now")guidetheperformance.The dashin the firstlinesignalsthespeakertopausebeforerecitingthelinesof thean-cient. The pause (one of the trademarksofMacready'sstyleduringthe actor's tenureat Covent Garden [1837-39]) im-presseslistenerswiththedepthofthecharacter'sfeeling.4'Pro-nunciationof separatesyllables,gulpsand interjections,em-phasison singlewords,and pausesallwerestandardpracticesof melodramaticdelivery.No doubt"Epigram,"like 'A Lament,"was conceivedas aperformance:as thepoet speaksof thesublime,he was to besublime.Auden,infact,includesBarham'slinesinhis1938an-thologyof"lightverse,"poetrythathe definedinpartas per-formative.42Bothpoems revivetheceremoniallamentationoftheancientsthrougha contemporarymedium,melodrama.Asversdesocie&4Barham'spoem conveysthe ubisuntof lamenta-tion notjust by usingHorace's wordsbut by droppingthenamesof famousdancers.Foralthoughthepoem, like Shel-ley's,lamentslost timethroughgrand verbal gestures,it hasa particularobjectofmourning:the loss ofbodilyvigor.Thusthe ballerinasof line 6 are like theepic heroes,thegloriousphysicalspecimensoverwhosecorpsestheGreeksmarveland

40 Suzanne Guerlac argues that citation "appears to be embedded in the veryoper-ation of sublimity"("Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime," New LiteraryHistory,16[1985], 276).41 See Booth, EnglishPlays of the NineteenthCentury,I, 3; and English Melodrama,p. 207.

42 See W. H. Auden, ed., The OxfordBookof LightVerse(Oxford: Clarendon Press,1938), pp. ix,357-58. Oliver Elton noted "Epigram" in hispraise of Barham as a metristand rhymerin A SurveyofEnglishLiterature,1780 -i88o, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan,1928), IV, 1-53.


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298 NINETEENTH- CENTURY LITERATURElament. In Barham's piece they are not slain but rather over-taken by the parallel, stronger movement of the years, whoseinexorable gliding wastes away all bodies.In referringto dance Barham offers a visual complementto the elegiac tone of Horace's lines. For by 1847, the date that"Epigram" appeared in the Third Series of The IngoldsbyLeg-ends, the names of the dancers belonged to the recent but re-ceding golden age ofRomantic ballet. Only the career of FannyCerrito was still flourishing: Marie Taglioni, the oldest of theballerinas, had given her farewellperformance in 1844; PaulineDuvernay had been retired for ten years afterdancing many ofTaglioni's roles in Drury Lane in the early thirties;and FannyElssler, Taglioni's rival, had been at the height of her fame inthe late thirties and early forties. Thus the names become in-corporated into lamentation's ubi sunt, its catalog of losses. Al-most all of the dancers have vanished from the stage -Taglioniwas the first;Cerrito the latest. The ethereal body of the Ro-mantic ballet is already buried here, in the dancers' names.

Barham's use of ballet covers a theatrical, as well as an ele-giac, aspect of the sublime. If he had indeed seen all four of thewomen whom he names perform (and all had had London en-gagements during the 83os and 1840s), then he had witnessedgreat changes in the technique and staging of ballet. Of thefour, Elssler was probably the most traditional dancer, notedfor her "mime" work in the balletdaction, a cousin of melo-drama. But the others had become famous for their roles in"white ballets" like Giselleand La Sylphide.Marie Taglioni wasthe mistress of this "Romantic" ballet, a form that, like melo-drama, filled the stage withghosts and goblins. (In fact,WilliamMoncrieff based his 1841 melodrama Giselle; or, The PhantomNightDancers on the French ballet.) The white ballets stagedthe internal picture of the sublime through an aerial technique(ballon) that freed the classical body. The immobile torso re-laxed; and pointework, formerlya discrete series ofmomentaryposes, began to articulate the fluid movements of the wholeform. Taglioni transformed ballet from an execution of dis-crete pirouettes and entrechatsto dances performed, itwas said,on "the tipsof her toes"; she was usually drawn withabnormally


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 299tinyfeet performingher signature role in La Sylphide.43Cerrito,ten years younger than Taglioni, rivaled her in ballon as La Syl-phide.A tiny,athletic dancer known for her high leaps and ex-tensions, Cerrito could bound and fly all over the stage; thechoreographer Jules Perrot created another white ballet, On-dine, especially forher in 1843 (the same year she danced a pasde deuxwiththe majestic Elssler before Queen Victoria) 44 EvenElssler's technique, which in its emphasis on mime reverted tothe classical style,combined pointework with a flexuous upperbody-a modern union.

When Barham introduces these names as "folks,"he usesthe current term for the gypsies, peasants, and above all, ap-paritions of the white ballet-the cast of effervescent andrarefied creatures thatTheophile Gautier described as "shadesdissolved into mist."45 In the 1830s the dance, through theseelemental beings, had come to epitomize sublimity of move-ment. Ballet gave physical expression, that is, to the internalmotion of the sublime -its headlong rush to the limitsof imag-ination, its temporary elision of the subject. Thus Taglioni'sseeminglynatural movements altered the spectacle ofballet: inhis tribute to the dancer's final performance in 1844, Gautierwrote that,afterLa Sylphide,the Paris Opera "was given over tognomes, undines, salamanders, elves, nixes, wilis,peris-to allthat strange and mysterious folk" (p. 73) . Similarly,MichelDeguy has figured the sublime as "a pineal apex where thebody is united with and suspends itself in the soul, a utopia ofinfinitesimalweightlessness as at the labile peak of the highestleap" (pp. 9-10). Deguy's rhapsodic words transferto the imag-

43 See MaryClarkeand ClementCrisp,Ballerina:TheArtofWomenin ClassicalBallet(London: BBC Books, 1987), p. 30.44 See Clarke and Crisp,p. 40.45 Gautier, "Farewell Performance of Marie Taglioni," rev. of i July 1844, in his TheRomanticBallet, as Seen byThtophileGautier:BeingHis NoticesofAll thePrincipalPerfor-

mancesofBalletGivenatParis duringtheYearsi83 7-i84 8, trans.CyrilW. Beaumont, rev.ed. (London: C. W. Beaumont, 1947), p. 73. Taglioni's farewellperformance tookplaceinJune 1844 at the Paris Op6ra. She danced La Sylphide.46 For a surveyof the arcane literature thatmayhave inspired the use of stage ap-paritions in the white ballets, see Juliet Neidish, "Whose Habitation Is the Air,"DancePerspectives,16, no. 6i (1975), 4-17.


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300 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATUREination the qualities of a sublime movement that ballet in theearly nineteenth century evoked through a body dissolving andtransfiguringitself

A line of past or passing women, the dancers in "Epigram"form a spectacle of the Romantic sublime, a "fade out intonothing" (as Heinroth described ecstasis). Their movement re-flects the mourner's sense of the motion of his own life, and thesublime dance provides the vehicle of lamentation, in additionto being the object of loss itself.But, as in Shelley's "ALament,"speech and gesture seem artificial and excessive, even for thesolemn subject: in the shiftfromritual to drama, the sacral char-acter of lament has been lost and replaced by stagecraft.In "Epi-gram" thissubstitutionresults in a blatantly comic performance,one that "sends up" the sublimity of ballet and lamentation. Inmy view, line 5, Barham's single contribution to "Epigram," isa deliberate piece of bathos: "sport their merry toes," a phraseunlike any that the balletomane Gautier used in his reviewsofthe dance, does not summon the illusion of bodilessness thatwhite ballets created in gauze and tulle; instead, it launchesa nonsense pun in Hudibrastic rhyme. Barham enacts a fail-ure of the sublime-a failure, in the Longinian sense, of nobleexpression -and our performer appears "gesticulat[ing] histransport" over the legendary "cherry toes" ("Ceritos"). In averbal spoof of ballon, or lightness, the poet burlesques the ec-stasis,the expansion without limit,that the Romantic ballerinasembodied.

Romantic ballet's feat was to surmount the melodramaticbody, its leaden movements and swelled gestures, in order toachieve a sublimitywithout words. "Epigram" and "ALament,"in contrast, indicate the extent to which melodramatic actinghad become the stylized delivery of tragic and epic expressionin the nineteenth century. Melodrama conventionalized ges-tures that had been inscribed in lamentation as farback as theepic gdos at a timewhen the Romantic sublime made these ges-turespsychologically significant-signs of the inadequacy of allutterance in moments of ecstasy and stupefaction. As both ofthese poems also illustrate, the lyric did not convey sublimegrief in a way that suited the general taste of readers: it de-pended too much on histrionics and on "failures" of noble


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 301rhetoric. The obscurity of both Barham's "Epigram" and Shel-ley's "A Lament" is tied to the fate of melodrama itself, nowlinked solely with the unnatural, inflated language and actionof the illegitimate theater.Canonical lyric poetry has advanced a restrained, evencryptic, expression of trauma that conceals passion in images.Consider one of our most cherished lamentations, Words-worth's mysterious "Lucy" poem 'A slumber did my spirit seal"(1799), as an example. Like. Barham's and Shelley's pieces,Wordsworth's is syntacticallyaphasic, a result of itsattempts toexpress and represent the ineffable-loss and death. Short, dis-junctive lines move the girl away from anthropomorphic lan-guage and move the speaker away from an emotional and co-herent expression. Pairs of paratactic observations convey aninsensibility of both speaker and dead object. The effect isfrozen, traumatic utterance, an inhibited version of Diderot'sphysical reaction to the sublime ('J'etais immobile . . . "). Likethe impassive "thing" who "neither hears nor sees," this speakeruttersa dead language; hiswords are imprecise.47The stupefiedpoet of 'A slumber" represents a similarly passive "Lucy" with-out motion, force, or feeling. "Il n'y en a plus," wrote Diderotof his sublime experience, "l'homme devient comme eternel."Likewise, Lucy becomes part of the diurnal course of nature,but the earth to which she is impervious also lacks vitality:itis but "rocks and stones and trees," a list of detritus with whichLucy is "Rolled round" (11.8, 7) . So what sounded like ecstasisinDiderot's enthusiastic responses toVernet's landscapes is here aclose linguistic relation; what Sir Charles Bell, anatomizing ex-pression, called the "lethargyofwoe."Arguably, Wordsworth's 'A slumber" was also an attemptto dramatize the response to the sublime. Just as the leadenBarham cannot conjure the white ballet and itsvision of bodilytranscendence but can only repeat names, so the mourner inWordsworth's lament cannot name the thing thatrolls Lucy butcan only list elements that have no agent. If we consider "A

William Wordsworth,"A slumber did myspirit seal," in "LyricalBallads" and OtlwrPoemts,I797-i800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,1992), p. 164,11.3, 6.


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302 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATUREslumber"to be a self-lamentin a league withthe two shortpo-ems above (and Wordsworth,Paul de Man says,"is one of thefew poets who can writeprolepticallyof their own death"),48then we have another way to hear the distraughtphrases like"She seemed a thing"-as unsuccessful attemptsto describethe ineffable.Language is a corpse because thespeaker cannotimagineenough.Shelley's notations in the manuscriptcopy of "ALament"well characterizethe two kinds of emotional responsesto pow-erfulintimationsof death. Eyestrainedon whatHugh Kennerhas called the "voiceless"visual poetry (p. 760) ofsome mod-ernistshave been more receptiveto the sublime that is "froidcomme la glace" than "brulantcomme le feu." The lyricis ourmostpersonal form of expression,and decades of imagistpo-etryhave oftenmade itprohibitivelyprivate. (This may explainwhy"Aslumber,"unlike the othertwopoems I have discussed,has provokedso manyreadings,most of thempsychological.)The triumphof a visual language of restraintover a gesturallanguage ofeffusioncame withimagistpoetry,whichprojectedall emotion onto the object. Butjust as melodrama survivedinstagedirectionsoftwentieth-centuryplays,so thehistrionicsofpassion continued to sound in the lyric.49Thomas Hardy's"During Wind and Rain" (published in 1917) juxtaposes thetwo stylizedresponses to the sublime; the poem reads like acomposite of the performativeand the imagist. Some linescompress memories and emotions into objects ("Clocks andcarpetsand chairs/ On the lawnall day"; "Down theircarvednames the rain-dropploughs"). Others, variationson a re-frain,lament the passing of time: in "Ah, no; the years,the

4* Blindnessand Insight:Essaysin theRhetoricofContemporaryCriticism,ad ed., rev.(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 225.49 Just how long melodrama prevailed is debatable. Some contend that it disap-peared in the second half of the nineteenth century(between i 86o and i 870). Booth

contests this theory with evidence from stage directions of early-twentieth-centuryplays. He does allow that "certain peculiarities" of acting-judging again from dia-logue and stage directions-became "somewhat" less emphatic as the nineteenth cen-turyaged (see EnglishMelodrama,p. 203) .50 Thomas Hardy, "During Wind and Rain," in The CompletePoetical Worksof ThomasHardy, ed. Samuel Hynes, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982-95), II, 239-40; 11.24-25, 28.


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 303years" (1. 13) and "Ah,no; the years 0! " (1. 6) we again hear therepetitious moaning of the ancient gdos. Because many of ussubvocalize while we read, the poem can have a disconcertingeffect:lines of gesture and emphasis ("They sing their dearestsongs-/ He, she, all of them-yea" [11.1-2]) elicit fromus amute performance. They signal the body to gesture, the voiceto pause and emphasize. For W. David Shaw-as a result, per-haps, of his own delivery- the poem "reaches sublime heights."Shaw does not mean the sublime of classical expression, butrather the sublime of stupefaction and ecstasy: "During Windand Rain," like the sensations of melodrama, "has the power tochill and ravishreaders" (p. 130).51

In his journal of 1762 Edward Gibbonnotes: "It is surprizinghow much Longinus and Mr. Bourke dif-fer as to their idea of the operations of the sublime in ourminds. The one considers it as exalting us with a consciouspride and courage, and the other as astonishing every faculty,and depressing the soul itself with terror and amazement."52The distinction between the Longinian sublime (the grandstylethat exalts the subject through self-dramatization) and theRomantic sublime (a response to inconceivable magnitudethat dissolves the subject into an inner abyss) is an eighteenth-century discovery. Gibbon continues: "If it should be foundthat the sublime produces this double, and seemingly contraryeffect; we must look out for some more general principleswhich may account for it" (pp. 18o -81 ). The principle is self-annihilating movement-between exaltation and depressionin medicine, ecstasyand stupefaction in philosophy.Both the Longinian and the Romantic sublimes are dislo-cations that occur through an overwhelming rush of images or

51 But Shaw does not align sublimitywithlamentation. To his ear, "Ah,no, theyears0!" is "buoyant."Because he does not hear the gdos,he has trouble coordinating theimages with the refrain,which "seems to pull against the bleak sentiment it appears toexpress" (p. 129).52 GibbonsJournaltoJanuary28th,1763: MyJournal,I, II, and III, and Elhemirides,in-tro.D. M. Low (New York: W.W. Norton, n.d.), p. i8o.


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304 NINETEENTH- CENTURY LITERATUREa confrontation with emptiness and loss. This is the instant inwhich the mind loses itself. It has been defined as a pathologi-cal moment, and indeed only medicine has attempted to de-scribe a prolonged dissolution, into either insanity or melan-cholia. In philosophical accounts, recovery always occurs. InKant's dynamic sublime, the vertigo lasts only a moment; thenreason resolves it into a conceptual unity-"infinity," "nature."Longinus's rhetorical sublime is likewise a successful confronta-tion, because noble expression itself demonstrates the subject'smastery of imponderables. In this sense even the temporaryaphasia characteristic of verbal reactions to sublime experiencesis a sign of recovery.Deguy, for example, imagines the sublimeof Longinus as "adverse speech snatched from death. . . . Sub-limity at once belongs to the mortal curve and surmounts it,overhangs it tangentially like a remarkable 'turning point"'(p. 9). Here Deguy describes the sublime from the static pointof its successful conclusion, much as Kant did. And Neil Hertz,also following Kant, has called the instant "the sublime turn"-"the turning away from near-annihilation, from being 'underdeath' to being out from under death."53As philosophy and medicine hurried to close the episodeof terror and "adverse speech," the dramatic artssought to rep-resent it through movements of the body and patterns of lan-guage. English melodrama, remembered now as an overblownimitation of earlier English tragedy,sought to express the senseof verbal insufficiencythat interest in the sublime reaction hadstimulated. (In thislight, the abstractlanguage of German meta-physics mayhave deprived the English stage of theatrical drama,in Allardyce Nicoll's view, but it also inspired a performativeut-terance and gesture through its dynamic accounts of ecstasis inphilosophy and medicine.) 54If the melodramatic rhetoric of exaltation almost alwaysdeflated, as Longinus had warned, then it is partlybecause ourears and eyes are accustomed to a subtler drama- one of un-

53 "A Reading of Longinus," in his TheEnd oftheLine: Essays on Psychoanalysisand theSublime(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), p. 6.54 See Nicoll's judgment, IV, 192. Detractors implicate abstract, poetical languagein general, and particularlythe imitation of the Elizabethans, in the poor quality of dra-maticwriting.See Booth, EnglishPlays, I, 6-9.


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THE LAMENT AND THE SUBLIME 305derstatement and projection, ifnot of stupefaction. We are dis-concerted, moreover, by signs of the performative in the lyric.It should be eloquent even as it confesses its inadequacy, butlamentation sabotages the form by straining beyond linguisticexpression. The lament belongs to the arts of gesture, melo-drama, and, most fittingly,dance. Perhaps that is why pieceslike Barham's, Shelley's, and Wordsworth's are truncated, whytheir grammar and syntax seem to occlude a visual field. Thepoems deflect the impact of the sublime moment to the body,whose gestures complement the nonconceptual, auditory forceof the language. One hears at the sublime moment the obdu-rate melancholia of "A slumber did my spirit seal" or the rushand disintegratingecstasyof Shelley's "ALament."Barham's and Shelley's lyricsremain unread today becausethey display an awkward change in signifyingpractice from theritual of lamentation to its performance and, finally,to thetranscription of that performance. In attempting to translatethe spectacle of grief unbound, these poems reinterpret thespeech and gestures of ritual through a theatrical form ofwhichthe text is but an inadequate script.As WVIadGodzich and Jef-freyKittayobserve, any "movement from performance to text"requires all of a reader's store of "cultural competence"9 to "mit-igate" the effectsof loss and excess.55 In "A Lament" and "Epi-gram" these effects are exaggerated, for as transcriptions ofancient rituals and melodrama these poems are doubly re-moved-first from the sacral, then from the theatrical space.Because of the difficultiestheypresent for the modern reader,the poems may only reinforce currentlyacceptable boundariesof transcribed grief.Hence lamentation, through its excesses and losses, helpsdefine the "elegy." Trauma and depression-real depression,which, Julia Kristeva remarks, "speak[s] of nothing"-lie be-yond our notion of the lyrical,which comes always from thepoint of linguistic mastery.56So, for example, whereas the rit-

See The EmergenceofProse:An Essay in Prosaics (Minneapolis: Univ. of MinnesotaPress, 1987),p.( 6.

56 Black Sun: Depressionand Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Colum-bia Univ. Press, 1989), p. 51. Kr-isteva'sdescription of depressive speech aligns itwiththe sublime response: "the very syntacticstructures. .. are often characterized bynon-recoverable elisions" (p. 34).


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306 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATUREual and civic tribute in a public elegy tame outbursts of griefby focusing on the meaning of an individual life, the ceremo-nial movements and rhetoric in lamentation exhibit shock andmake no attempt to read or distance survivors fromdeath. It isthrough meditation and ritual that the elegy has become an in-stitution in the service of the common weal. As an institutionthe elegy is, in Dominick LaCapra's words, a "normative" modeof "'binding' withvariable relations to more ecstatic, sublime,or uncanny modes of 'unbinding."'57In contrast,lamentation enacts the sublime moment of un-binding, and early-nineteenth-centurydrama-however codi-fied it now looks-performs that moment. Imagine Romanticlamentation as the rhetorical bridge between two parallel con-ceptions of movement in philosophy and medicine at the turnof the last century.The restless and gesticulating lyricsof Shel-leyand Barham are effortsto dramatize the ancient gdos in lightof these new ideas. That theywere writtenwith recourse to theperformative arts suggests an effortto extend the lyricto theportrayal of violent sensations, sensations that had found theirsupreme expression in the emerging arts of the body-melo-drama and the Romantic ballet.Oklahoma StateUniversity

Linda Austin - Lament and Rhetoric of Sublime

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