The Sublime

Professor
J. Jennifer Jones

Evan P Schneider

Professor Jones

ENG 553: The Sublime

7 February 2007

The Concealed Figure: Hiding in Plain Sight

In Book Four of Homer’s Odyssey, Queen Helen of Sparta recounts with Menelaus several instances of Odysseus’ craftiness in war for the benefit of those gathered at a celebratory feast. She asserts, “He slipped into the enemy’s city, roamed its streets  / all disguised, a totally different man, a beggar . . . That’s how Odysseus infiltrated Troy” (4.276-9). Odysseus’ costume was not deceptive enough, however, to dupe the astute Queen: “I alone,” she announces with pride, “I spotted him for the man he was” (4.281). Somewhat surprisingly, Odysseus’ desire to hide himself persists even after being found out, as is suggested in his attempts to elude identification by “dodging” Helen’s persistent questions. If he is to be wholly effective in his scheme, Odysseus’ true identity must remain undisclosed. His secret (that he is not who he says he is, nor acts his true part) thus discovered, the compromised Odysseus prompts Helen to swear a “binding oath” that she will “not reveal him as Odysseus to the Trojans” (4.282). Though it seems unlikely, the entire subsequent sacking of Troy is contingent on this very instance of concealment. Had the Queen not consented to keep Odysseus’ secret, the hero’s plot would have been foiled and he put to certain death. Odysseus, therefore, accordingly attempts to avoid all suspicion so as to completely surprise and destroy the Trojans. This act of concealing himself as a poor man works to set up Odysseus’ greater, deadlier maneuver that Menelaus praises as a “piece of work the hero dared and carried off / in the wooden horse where all our best encamped” (4.304-5). As such, the exposure of one’s true identity, as seen throughout several episodes of The Odyssey, is an unveiling act replete with connotations of power, defeat, and sublimity.

In “A Reading of Longinus,” Neil Hertz culminates his interpretation of On the Sublime by “dwelling on the idea of concealment” (17). His argument is that Longinus demands that for a piece to be sublime its figures must keep from sight the very fact of their figurativeness (18). From this requisite, Hertz moves to interpret Longinus’ sublime as a figurative representation that hangs precariously between remaining concealed and being revealed: “What Longinus has allowed us to read is that when figurative language is concealed it may sustain the truthful, the natural, the masterful, and so on; but when it is revealed, it is always revealed as false” (18). The literary tension that mounts from this crisis of identity (that is, on finding out that the figure is just a figure) “provides us with a powerful apprehension” that we can characterize as “the sublime” (19). Whereas Hertz is invested in locating the sublime at the a narrowly defined instant after understanding  as can be seen in his dedication to the precise “turn”(19), the “sublime reversal” (16), and the emphasis on a swift “fiat lux” of knowledge (10)  it seems that an act of sublimity that hinges on or is resultant to a revelation must actually reside in the distance between false knowledge (artifice) and true knowledge (the artifice’s unmasking). Part of what constitutes Longinus’ sublimity, in short, is the very prolonged suspension between artifice and reality. That which is false retains the possibility of being true as long as the artifices holds. If Hertz is correct and the sublime is a literary experience reliant on the concealment of artifice, Odysseus’ carefully contrived plans in Troy unfold like the sublime in that nuanced layers of concealment come precariously close to full and fatal disclosure. The repeatedly-postponed revelation of Odysseus’ identity is a series of moments in The Odyssey that conform to Longinus’ belief that “a figure is always most effective when it conceals the very fact of its being a figure” (231). What one must investigate, then, are the meanings and implications of being “effective.”

Hertz’s poststructuralist reading of On the Sublime draws special attention to the power of suggestion and literal transformation innate to an act of sublimity. “The standard justification for why art should be used to conceal art,” he asserts, “was commonly put in prudential terms: one did so, so as not to arouse the suspicion of one’s audience” (16). This discretionary “justification” seems vaguely defensive; that is, concealment acts as a means to repel the audience’s rebuke, scorn, and/or violent retribution for being misled. From Hertz, we must thusly interpret the sublime as an act of preemptive action enacted on the audience. A complex comparison unfolds between Homer and his audience that is not altogether different than the sacking of Troy as told in The Odyssey. [ENDNOTE 1] Odysseus is consciously deceptive in order to gain, and then use to his advantage, the trust of the Trojans, in the same way, according to Hertz, that Longinus uses Demosthenes’ speech, which was “carefully designed to suit the feelings of defeated men” (229) to exemplify how one might conceal figurativeness in rhetoric to rouse an audience. [ENDNOTE 2] The effectiveness of the Trojan massacre comes to light when Hertz’s interpretation of the sublime  in which “surrounded by brilliance, the lesser light (the artifice) disappears from sight” (17)  is brought to bear on the artifact of the horse. It is not the figure itself (Odysseus’ identity) that disappears so mcuh as the idea of its being a figure  that Odysseus and his men are “already crouched and hiding” (8.563) inside the belly of such a monstrous thing, perched and ready to attack. The Trojans ultimately accept the gift through their gates, though they are, just as Longinus warns they will be, full of “an inevitable suspicion [that is attached] to the sophisticated use of figures” (231).

The Trojan horse, as we eventually learn in Book Eight, is a gift of such magnitude that it overpowers and overwhelms the Trojans’ senses: “Now it stood there, looming . . . ” (8.566). Homer’s description of the reception of the horse is arguably sublime in itself, as the double-o diphthong in “looming” works to intensify a sense of apprehension and awe. Ominously large, the horse’s grandeur is further punctuated by the ellipsis that immediately follows, capturing, as it were, the ineffable quality of the art that stands, unbelievably, before the men. It is so astonishing, in fact, that they seem to dispute not merely what to do with the incredible object but its very existence: “Round its bulk the Trojans sat debating, / clashing, days on end.” Divided into three plans for the horse (hack it open, push it off a cliff, or let it stand as an offering to pacify the gods), Odysseus’ fate once again depends on his identity remaining concealed. This instance of near-annihilation, as if to become a compounded sublime turn, is doubled: we know that the Trojans’ fate will be sealed by their choice (the days on end that they debate seem to embody this continuous apprehension), but Odysseus and his men’s fate are also tied to this decision, as they are trapped in wait of either slaughter or fulfillment of their purpose. That is, they will either kill or be killed, but until then, they are suspended, quite literally, in the belly of the horse. And, to add another level of fateful importance to this moment, this is the exact point at which the audience must go all in without reservation  with the hook swallowed completely, they will be had by the art that feels and seems and effects itself as natural. The anticipation of the moment is too much to bear and the audience must give in to the power of the art; therefore, it seems as if their fate, too, is contingent on the Trojan’s choice.

“And what is it that hides the figurative?” asks Hertz. “A combination of sublimity and beauty” (17), a construction of such appropriately aimed fancy and sheer amazingly luster that the receiver is left no choice but to concede to its power. The “bewildering assault,” to use Hertz’s terminology, on the both the Trojans’ and the audience’s senses is complete, leaving them estranged from their notions of reality and subjugated to that which has fully and deliberately captured their attention and emotion. [ENDNOTE 3] But, rather ironically, this is not the moment when Odysseus and his men burst out from the bottom of the horse and commence their slaughter, and it is also not the true sublime moment. Homer states that that moment has already occurred: “For Troy was fated to perish once the city lodged / inside her walls the monstrous wooden horse” (8.573). The Trojans and the audience did not notice that they were being affected by the sublime until it was too late. It was not Odysseus’ army, per se, that killed the Trojans, but rather their inability to notice the artifice of the gift in the first place. Herein lies the dangerous power of the sublime: once one realizes that the figure was a figure all along, it is too late; it was already accepted as real. So, though it would be imprudent to wholly conflate them, the Trojans’ acceptance of the artificial gift at least closely parallels the audience’s acceptance of the artistic representation itself.

Similarly, in escaping the Cyclops in Book Nine, Odysseus conceals his identity and performs a feat of hiding a situation’s figurativeness. The Cyclops, blinded but not incapacitated in reason or in movement, knows that Odysseus will attempt to escape and goes so far as to guess his captives will attempt an escape on the backs of his sheep. Odysseus, in another sublime moment of wits, anticipates this counter-attack and presents his own counter-counter-attack: riding beneath the sheep. The Cyclops feels for the men with his hands but does not “sense” them. Since everything “seems” natural to the giant, he lets the sheep out to pasture and Odysseus’ artifice goes undetected. The brilliance of Odysseus’ ploy is that it comes so near to being found out: Only when the Cyclops has felt the tops of his sheep out of suspicion can the moment bear the stamp of sublimity. The cunning, the disguise, the entire plan played to what Cyclops was sure to attempt to discover, but once he does not find what he suspected, he is convinced that there is no artifice by which he is being duped. As if not to heed Longinus’ warnings, though, about revealing to the audience the inner-workings of the sublime, Odysseus shouts back to the blinded giant from his ship: “Cyclops  / if any man on the face of the earth should ask you / who blinded you, shamed you so  say Odysseus, / raider of cities, he gouged out your eye” (9.558). It is here that Odysseus finally reveals his identity and links himself to both the sacking of Troy and the “shaming” of the Cyclops (an admission that will cost him several more years at sea).

That the audience of the representation  be it the Trojans, Cyclops, or us  is not allowed to know how the sublime works (not knowing, as it were, the sublime’s true identity) is a deeply-disturbing aspect of Longinus’ treatise. Moreover, the fact that the sublime must be pulled off in plain sight, but not discovered, in order to be truly sublime further reveals that the aesthetic experience is a conditional state of wielded power. In brief, the terms and conditions of Hertz’s reading of the Longinian sublime experience unfold like several close calls in The Odyssey. In Odysseus’ successful strategies he conceals his identity in order to supplant his enemies' senses, after which he blindly defeats them. The concealed figurativeness of Odysseus’ ploys (that is, the very concept of the heavily manipulated situations being anything but normal and natural), from which he and his men narrowly escape, lends to these being moments of Longinian sublimity in The Odyssey. In fact, their sublime nature all but depends on the revelation of identity being delayed almost ad infinitum, a delay that, per Longinus, dizzies the reader, but one that also, contrarily, has truly terrible possibilities. In the end, Hertz’s position (that is, outside of the sublime act, deconstructing it and its inherent power implications) brings us to a rather complicated understanding of that which remains hidden in an act of sublime mimesis where the audience, author, and literary figures play into an intricate and artistic game of hide and seek.

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Works Cited

Hertz, Neil. “A Reading of Longinus.” The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia U P, 1985. 1-20.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Longinus. On The Sublime. Trans. W. H. Fyfe. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1995.

Endnote 1: It seems important to note that the “actual” sacking of Troy is never described. It is merely being retold at this point (sung, in fact, by a bard) in The Odyssey, a fact that exponentially complicates the repercussions of this mimetic act, but in ways that are too detailed to embark on delineating in this short piece. [RETURN to text]

Endnote 2: The layers of this suggestion are manifold and complex and to make sense of them we must focus on the deceiver and the information that is always inevitably found out. On the one hand, Odysseus deceives the Trojans. Their defeat is sealed when they cannot discern the artifice before their eyes. In the same way, Longinus’ treatise suggests that the artist must deceive his audience through figures, whose entire attitude and outlook can be changed if the sublime is affected in the “right” way. Like the affect of Demosthenes’ speech, the audience is convinced of something that was in fact not true (that losing the battle was not as bad as they thought). Which brings us, on the other hand, to Hertz, who asserts in his reading that he sees all the ways in which Longinus (through a resonating structure of his treatise) tries to deceive him. My reading of Odysseus’ ploys is linked to this duplicitous nature of the figurative assertion. [RETURN to text]

Endnote 3: It seems we could safely call this coerced sympathy, and perhaps even forced empathy; that is, the emotional involvement of the audience in the characters’ outcome brought on by deliberate and beautiful literary construction. [RETURN to text]

Course Packet. Available at Rhode Island Book Store

Longinus, On the Sublime. 1 A.D. Trans. W. H. Fyfe; Rev. D. A. Russell. Loeb Classical Library, 1996.
ISBN: 0674995635

 John Milton, Paradise Lost. 1674. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton, 2005.
ISBN: 0393924289

 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. A Bilingual Edition. Ed. George Heffernan. Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame P, 1990.
ISBN: 0268013810

The Book of Job. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. ISBN: 0060969598

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. Ed. James T. Boulton. Indiana: U of Notre Dame P, 1993.
ISBN: 0268000859

Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Judgement. 1790. Trans. James Creed Meredith. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. ISBN: 0198245890

Anne Radcliffe. The Italian. Ed. Frederick Garber. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
ISBN: 0198245890

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Ed. Marilyn Gaull. New York: Longman, 2004.
ISBN: 0321202082

Suggested Texts

Michael Greer. What Every Student Should Know About Citing Sources with MLA Documentation. New York: Longman, 2006.
ISBN: 0321447379

Joseph Gibaldi. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th Rev. Edition. MLA P, 2003
ISBN: 0873529863

Diana Hacker. A Writer’s Reference. 5th Sprl edition. Bedford/St. Martin's P, 2003.
ISBN: 0312412622

Course Requirements

Participation (25%)
2 Short Essays (25%)
Seminar Paper (50%)