Ashes and the Sublime
Mar. 25th, 2006 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI've been doing consuming amounts of reading--not only finishing Pride and Prejudice but crazy Inuyasha fic and some old-skool Snape/Hermione, one of my many guilty pleasures. Reading can sometimes feel like being burned, eaten away to ash by words. And that's when it's at its best.
On a rather unrelated note, some brilliance from my current classwork. There's this chap called Longinus, though no one really knows who he was or when he wrote. Sometime around the first century B.C.E. This is from Longinus' writing on the sublime in literature, specifically on the ways in which it can be made absent through being forced:
Altogether, tumidity seems particularly hard to avoid. The explanation is that all who aim at elevation are so anxious to escape the reproach of being weak and dry that they are carried, as by some strange law of nature, into the opposite extreme. They put their trust in the maxim that 'failure in a great attempt is at least a noble error'.
4. But evil are the swellings, both in the body and in diction, which are inflated and unreal, and threaten us with the reverse of our aim; for nothing, say they, is drier than a man who has the dropsy. While tumidity desires to transcend the limits of the sublime, the defect which is termed puerility is the direct antithesis of elevation, for it is utterly low and mean and in real truth the most ignoble vice of style. What, then, is this puerility? Clearly, a pedant's thoughts, which begin in learned trifling and end in frigidity. Men slip into this kind of error because, while they aim at the uncommon and elaborate and most of all at the attractive, they drift unawares into the tawdry and affected.
5. A third, and closely allied, kind of defect in matters of passion is that which Theodorus used to call parenthyrsus. By this is meant unseasonable and empty passion, where no passion is required, or immoderate, where moderation is needed. For men are often carried away, as if by intoxication, into displays of emotion which are not caused by the nature of the subject, but are purely personal and wearisome. In consequence they seem to hearers who are in no wise affected to act in an ungainly way. And no wonder; for they are beside themselves, while their hearers are not.
I see this not only in poety, but very much in modern fantasy. Stories are written not because their authors need to write them but because that's how they think Tolkien did it. Longinus talks about the percieved desirability of lofty language, and what people percieve was the driving force of Tolkien et alia's brilliance is that same loftiness, that difference from the ordinary and prosaic. And so that is what they imitate, but they haven't really understood it. Because Tolkien wasn't *trying* to be lofty, but rather expressing his soul. To try is to become swollen and to express nothing at all.
(Also, if you didn't pick up the fabulously snarky double entendres in the Longinus, look again.)
On a rather unrelated note, some brilliance from my current classwork. There's this chap called Longinus, though no one really knows who he was or when he wrote. Sometime around the first century B.C.E. This is from Longinus' writing on the sublime in literature, specifically on the ways in which it can be made absent through being forced:
Altogether, tumidity seems particularly hard to avoid. The explanation is that all who aim at elevation are so anxious to escape the reproach of being weak and dry that they are carried, as by some strange law of nature, into the opposite extreme. They put their trust in the maxim that 'failure in a great attempt is at least a noble error'.
4. But evil are the swellings, both in the body and in diction, which are inflated and unreal, and threaten us with the reverse of our aim; for nothing, say they, is drier than a man who has the dropsy. While tumidity desires to transcend the limits of the sublime, the defect which is termed puerility is the direct antithesis of elevation, for it is utterly low and mean and in real truth the most ignoble vice of style. What, then, is this puerility? Clearly, a pedant's thoughts, which begin in learned trifling and end in frigidity. Men slip into this kind of error because, while they aim at the uncommon and elaborate and most of all at the attractive, they drift unawares into the tawdry and affected.
5. A third, and closely allied, kind of defect in matters of passion is that which Theodorus used to call parenthyrsus. By this is meant unseasonable and empty passion, where no passion is required, or immoderate, where moderation is needed. For men are often carried away, as if by intoxication, into displays of emotion which are not caused by the nature of the subject, but are purely personal and wearisome. In consequence they seem to hearers who are in no wise affected to act in an ungainly way. And no wonder; for they are beside themselves, while their hearers are not.
I see this not only in poety, but very much in modern fantasy. Stories are written not because their authors need to write them but because that's how they think Tolkien did it. Longinus talks about the percieved desirability of lofty language, and what people percieve was the driving force of Tolkien et alia's brilliance is that same loftiness, that difference from the ordinary and prosaic. And so that is what they imitate, but they haven't really understood it. Because Tolkien wasn't *trying* to be lofty, but rather expressing his soul. To try is to become swollen and to express nothing at all.
(Also, if you didn't pick up the fabulously snarky double entendres in the Longinus, look again.)
Subject3
Date: 2008-08-23 12:12 am (UTC)G'night