Płuciennik, Jarosław - A Short History of the Sublime in Polish Literature from a Comparative Perspective (2015).pdf

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Department of Theory of Literature
University of Łódź
Jarosław Płuciennik
A Short History of the Sublime
in Polish Literature
from a Comparative Perspective
This chapter is based on an analytical survey of the  selected literary
works of 11 Major figures of the  Polish lyric such as
Jan Kochanowski,
Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Bolesław Leś-
mian, Aleksander Wat, Julian Przyboś, Tadeusz Różewicz, Miron Biało-
szewski, Zbigniew Herbert
and
Czesław Miłosz
(Płuciennik, 2002). Those
authors were chosen for analysis and interpretation because their works are
deeply rooted in a  “sublimicist” sensitivity and discourse of the  sublime
or opposed to this discourse. I characterise basic rhetoric devices found in
the literary works of art as representations of the experience of the sublime.
In the frame of the history of the sublime there has always been a particular
kind of dynamics that stems from the  tension between the  antimimetic
element of the sublime and
mimesis,
mainly the mimesis of emotion. In my
view, there is a  strong relationship between the  increasingly antimimetic
bias in modernist poetry and more universal tendencies in modernist art,
namely dehumanisation, intellectualisation and abstraction (Płuciennik,
2000). I would like to claim that the rhetoric of the sublime in the Polish
lyric has persisted because of the resistance to the radical dehumanisation
and intellectualisation (as in Ortega y Gasset and Hugo Friedrich), because
of the  opposition to its own antimimetic forces. This resistance follows
from the  social nature of language as the  main substance of the  literary
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Jarosław Płuciennik
work of art as well as from the generic feature of the lyric that has been
always tied to the mimesis of emotions. However the latest representations
of the experience of the sublime in the Polish lyric are, in a way, indirect.
The  main devices used there to make the  representations not direct are
intertextuality and quoting.
Is it possible to imagine and trace the first appearance of the unimagi-
nable in the history of humankind? Adam Smith, in “Essays on philosophi-
cal subjects” from 1758, printed in 1795, wrote that lack of simple account
for phenomena of nature, that is to say, lack of imagination, shaped the be-
ginning of philosophy. The marvellous and enchantment caused by natural
wonders. Lack of imagination to conceive of a mechanism causing natural
phenomena such as wind, moving of the sun, moon, stars and birth, and
death (Smith, 1996). But it is not this unimaginable which is at stake here.
There are people who would like to look at the  inconceivability of
the Old Testament’s God as an absolutely unique paradigm of imagination,
which stands as a  distinguishing mark not only for the  people of Israel
but also for Christianity, and, last but not least, for Islam. Such an imag-
ination was the main reference and assistance of many authentic religious
lives. This imagination makes the  soul wider, as Immanuel Kant puts it
(Kant 1958: §  29), and it makes vivid and stronger a  sense of being, it
awakes people to life. In the name of this imagination, through ages, one
negates and condemns pagan cultures that are dedicated to that, which is
visible and sensual and which is depicted on incalculable woodland altars.
In the name of this imagination as well, after the Reformation, many stat-
ues and paintings were thrown out from temples in Europe. In the name
of just this imagination Talibans in Afghanistan destroyed huge statues of
Buddah in March 2001. And then followed a terrorist attack on a contem-
porary statue of Western Civilisation: Twin Towers. Osama ben Laden was
talking about this in an iconoclastic manner before the attacks on America
in September. This imagination is based on enthusiasm, it evokes enthusi-
asm; it, one would like to say, is enthusiasm. As Eliane Escobas puts it, this
imagination is a faculty of creation of the unimaginable (Escoubas, 1993).
Moreover, from time to time, the enthusiasm turns into intolerance. It is
significant that Edmund Burke, one of the three main figures in the theory
A Short History of the Sublime in Polish Literature…
303
of the  sublime, in his early writings on the  sublime from 1759 (Burke,
1958), seems to accept enthusiastic and violent facets of the sublime. How-
ever, in later reflections on the revolution in France of 1790 (Burke, 1996),
revolution, which is regarded as a peak of a political sublime (Ashfield & de
Bolla, 1996), he observes with terror the actual escalation of the violence
during “advances” of the French revolution, which culminated in insulting
and decapitating the  king, the  archetypical figure of the  sublime. Excess
of such imagery in the arts and literature becomes much more easily ac-
cepted in the long 18
th
century in Europe (1688–1815). Then, there was
a significant change in accounting of genius, for example. “Genius” began
to mean a person with natural talents, which made possible extraordinary
achievements, earlier possible with assistance of supernatural and trans-hu-
man spirits. So genius bears connotations of transgression (Mason, 1993).
And representations of the sublime experience in literature at this time also
bear this factor evoking political and moral transgression.
Many theorists of the sublime, above all Kant and Hegel (Modiano,
1987) emphasise the role of the Decalogue in the building of foundations
for such an iconoclastic type of imagination. According to Kant (§ 29)
the Commandment I am talking here about, forbidding making a material
resemblance or image, is the most sublime passage of Torah. There are two
traditions in numbering this Commandment: the Catholic and Lutheran
churches make it a part of the First Commandment but the Orthodox and
Reformed churches treat it as a  separated second Commandment. Kant
assigns to this Commandment a huge role in evoking enthusiasm of Jews
for their own religion, when they compare themselves with other pagan
nations. He writes also about pride of Muslims in this context. However,
Kant accounts for an opposition to the sublime as well. And it is not a plain
style. The opposite of the sublime phenomenon consists of image worship-
ping. He considers also rhetorical and political dimension of this cult of
paintings and statues: governments employ the cult in order to constrain
imagination of their serfs, codify their imagery, and make impossible ex-
pansion of an individual soul. A serf becomes passive and it is easy to lead
her/him. One of recent slogans in Polish advertising was a sentence: “Imag-
ination is dynamite”. But the true dynamite is the unimaginable, that is to
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Jarosław Płuciennik
say, the sublime. For this reason, the prophet and pope of postmodernism,
Jean-François Lyotard, following Adorno, views the sublime as a main de-
vice of the iconoclastic avant-garde techniques (Lyotard 1982, 1982, 1984,
1993, 1994).
The result of my historical survey of 11 Polish poets is a thesis that we
should be aware of a strong literary tradition in Polish literature, which em-
ploys an iconoclastic, in an etymological sense, imagery. I use here the term
“sublimicism” invented by Paul Crowther in his 1993 book on aesthetics of
postmodernism. According to him, sublimicism is a movement in the con-
temporary arts, which is very close to the abstract expressionism. But I use
this term in a wider sense. I would like to talk here on sublimicist imagina-
tion. Thanks to it, we can describe many phenomena from different times
and different literary movements. Literary works included in this tradition
represent similar cultural and imaginative experience using iconoclastic de-
vices. There were theorists of the sublime who underlined a trans-generic
character of the sublime (Ramazani 1989). We cannot constraint ourselves
to epochs, to media, styles, to literary genres. Already Pseudo-Longinos
puts this problem in a different way.
In the 18
th
century in Britain, we can find an enthusiast and theorist
of the sublimicist literature: Robert Lowth who wrote his lectures
Praelec-
tiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum
published in 1753 and translated into
English as “Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews” in 1787 (Lowth,
1996). The lectures were famous in Poland at this time (Borowski, 1972)
and Lowth’s ideas were already in the cultural air of this period.
It is not easy to define the sublimicist imagination. In order to do it,
I catalogue gathered exemplification of sublimicist lyric images in 4 series.
Then, I try to account for an ideal model of lyric as an evoker of the expe-
rience of the sublime. This model can be described using an act of Annun-
ciation. God, using a word of an Angel, incarnates himself. Word becomes
flesh. Word becomes enthusiasm.
In the  first series, I  describe images linked to the  representations of
the  infinite and supernatural. In these images, antimimetic evocation pre-
vails as well as iconoclastic attitude towards reader’s imagination. The central
representation here is limitless God, and the Hidden God, the unpresentable
A Short History of the Sublime in Polish Literature…
305
and unconceivable. It is characteristic that motives of mental transgression
are strictly tied to those representations. This mental transgression means very
often transcendence of this world in catastrophic and apocalyptic imagery or
imagery connected to a before–death perspective. Representations of a con-
tact with the Transcendent God are included here as well as representations of
human dignity coming from his/her spirituality (universal priesthood of man
or even God in man). In the West, such an imagination had a religious outlet.
In Poland, significantly, such motives were an important part of the Polish
Church of Literature.
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In the second series, I consider representations of the natural order and
architectural representations in the lyric poetry. They are sometimes tied
to the social and political architecture. I describe inspirational huge open
spaces of the Polish lyric: images of the Far North in Russia; representations
of invaders’ space, particularly, the gothic imagery connected with an im-
age of Germans; also open spaces of Ukraine as a most inspiring for Polish
nationalism. I account also for images of Mediterranean Sea and images of
artificial infinity in Leśmian’s poetry where two mirrors confront each oth-
er. In an avant-garde lyric, we find an urban space connected with the ex-
perience of the  technological sublime. Recently, one can discover open
spaces of the World War II destruction, spaces of the Holocaust, and empty
axiological space of the  communist ruling. They all function as angelic,
inspiring spaces used to announce a sacred word to the reader.
In the third series, I deal with motives related to the experience of an
aura of the past: a mythological motive of “a song” as a church of national
memories, literary encounters with spirits of the  past, openness to reso-
nance with the past and pietistic relationship towards archetypical images
of the past. Here we can also find an idea of the National Sacred Book and
a model of literature as an eerie house of spiritualistic encounters.
The  fourth series is devoted to representations of transport associat-
ed with struggle against adversity and hardship. With those images we can
combine representations of absolute solitude and negligence, national mar-
tyrdom. But we can also find here the  imperial sublime and the  sublime
This is an idea present in the Polish Romanticism, an era of a nation without an
independent state.
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