4. Symbols of the Sublime: The Sea and the White Whale

Edmund Burke’s ‘Terrifying’ Sublime

Prior to the Romantic period, there was a common thread running through the literature of the 18th century where writers would put emphasis on the pleasure and pain of the sublime (Shaw 2006, p.5). This common thread did not least develop due to Edmund Burke‟s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.2 It must be noted that Burke‟s aim is to illustrate how the passions are represented by the aesthetic concepts of sublimity and beauty (Scott 2002). However, since the focus of my thesis is set on the sublime, I will minimise my analysis of Burke‟s treatise to selected sections which focus primarily on the notion of sublimity.

The first part of Burke‟s Enquiry explicitly dedicated to the sublime is
„Part I, Section VII: Of The Sublime‟. The introductive sentence already serves as Burke‟s standard definition of the sublime which echoes throughout the remainder of the treatise:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (Burke 2005, p.110)
Burke presents the reader with a clear-cut negative tone to his understanding of the sublime. This negative stress distinguishes Burke from his predecessors‟ understanding of the sublime. The latter regarded it as “liberating and exhilarating, a kind of happy aggrandisement”, whilst Burke rather used adjectives such as “alienating and diminishing” (Paulson 1983, p.69). For Burke, terror is the single source of the sublime. Even death, as an ultimate end, “is scarcely an idea of more terror” (Burke 2005, p.116). „Part II, Section II: Terror‟ provides numerous connotations of terror from the empirical world such as dangerous and poisonous animals or vast scenery, most strikingly the ocean. Burke conjectures that the ocean is so terrifying due to its vastness.
In other words, senses function as the intermediary between the cognitive dimension of the sublime and the natural dimension of the sublime. So depending on how the subject sees, hears, touches, or even tastes and smells an object, he or she will have corresponding cognitive associations with that object. Gasché (2012, p.27) claims it is not the terrible object as such but the idea of it that incites the feeling of the sublime. Burke asserts along similar lines that a terrible object is only then sublime when it is beheld from afar and the beholder is not directly exposed to it.³ Once exposed to it, the terrible object is simply terrible and the beholder fears for his or her life instead of pondering the sublimity of that object.
Now I will turn to another striking factor that adds to the terrible effect of the sublime, which is obscurity. Burke‟s argument in favour of obscurity intensifying sublimity runs as follows:
To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds […].
(Burke 2005, p.132)
As Burke expands on the idea of obscurity, there is a compelling reason to argue that in doing so he deviates from his initial empiricist worldview. When a thing is obscured, in any given way, it is no longer within the realm of sensory perceptions. The ideas one has about “death”, “night”, “ghosts”, or “despotic governments” (Burke 2005, p.132), are terrifying and therefore sublime precisely because these entities cannot be presented to the mind as clear and definite images (Shaw 2006, p.51). There are things which are sources of the sublime even if they do not look that way ⁴, that is, in spite of lacking terrifying components as Burke (2005) recalls: “many things from which we cannot apprehend any danger have a similar effect [as those which do cause terror], because they operate in a similar manner” (p.211). By making obscuring itself, the sublime can thus be deceitful.
I have noted previously in this section that the Enquiry adopts a negative tone to its definition of the sublime. It is therefore not puzzling that Burke should depict light as something terrifying as well. Burke develops the claim that light is only then sublime when it leaves a “strong impression on the mind” (Burke 2005, p.156), as does the sun or lightning. Moreover, light is capable of inducing pain just as much as other sublime objects; for example, being exposed to extreme light, regardless of its amount, becomes more or less blinding. That the sublime is able to deceive can be well observed by the example with light. In contrast to traditional connotations of light being pure, Burke (2005) argues that light in fact can resemble darkness: “After looking for some time at the sun, two black spots, the impressions which it leaves, seem to dance before our eyes.” (p.157). And this is the very deceptive effect of light, unlike darkness which is also terrifying yet simple and true⁵ to its nature.
Throughout the Enquiry Burke (2005) employs various other binary oppositions such as delight and pain, society and solitude, clearness and obscurity, in order to show that “opposite extremes operate equally in favour of the sublime” (p.157). The sublime is thus “shown to consist of two equally important, although mutually incompatible, experiences” (Gasché 2012, p.26). Burke demonstrates that there is a “double aesthetics” (Zelle 1995) inherent in these dichotomies that functions similar to the concept of a „double standard‟. Subsequently, Burke also places the sublime in a pairing with its antithesis being the beautiful. Yet this is only logical if one ascribes negative properties to the sublime, which Burke has done in the Enquiry. The same would hold true if he were to solely ascribe positive properties to the sublime. By drawing a sharp distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, Burke underestimates the essence of the sublime.