Coteries, Landscape and the Sublime in Allen Ginsberg

The sublime is traditionally viewed as a moment that jettisons personality and history in favor of vision of a reality that remains obscure in everyday life. Emerson said of such moments that when experiencing them he ceases to recognize the name of friend or brother. The return to the social and political world is most frequently figured as a loss, however necessary, and sometimes as a betrayal of the revelation vouchsafed. And yet, as many critics have realized, the sublime has, paradoxically, a tradition of its own; it also, as Rob Wilson observes, becomes interwoven with the narrative of national fate, becomes "nationalized." He continues:

[. . .] to speak of any national sublime (British, French, Indian) is to reify an ideological oxymoron, here a trope mixing pragmatic idea and spiritual rapture (as appropriated in the 1840s and 1850s during the take-off of industrial capital in the States). This trope of national sublimity gets historically fitted to political purposes and social concerns that have much to do with the engendering, at once on a private and collective scale, of material power.¹

The decades he mentions remind us of Whitman, who more than any other nineteenth-century American poet did most to pinion the sublime within the narrative of national fate. A good deal of criticism of the last two decades has arraigned the American Romantic tradition for the ways in which it was put to use in the burgeoning commercial and political ideologies of the United States. For instance, in 1986 Donald Pease commented that "the sublime enabled the nineteenth-century American to create a second scene, a veritable world elsewhere where he could rewrite and reread national policies of commercialism and expansionism in quite ideal terms."² Eleven years later, John Carlos Rowe remarked that he views his own work as part of the recent move to reveal "the ideological function" of Transcendentalism through rehistoricization; that function is "the legitimation of those practices of intellectual abstraction required to rationalize the contradictions of the new industrial economy" in the nineteenth century.³ In this figuration, Emerson's sublime is naïve: it pretends to abscond from history, but in truth it ensures that one set of social formations is copperfastened. In its approvals and condemnations, Rowe's work is typical of the Foucauldian ambience of the 1980s and '90s. One of the casualties of this trend is the sublime as a category for thinking about literary texts. That is, recent criticism is willing to examine the historical consequences of the sublime in literature as long as those have the effect of bolstering state power and of marginalizing women, minority ethnic groups, and some sexual orientations. It has failed to register sublimes that are not naïve in the sense that Emerson's is, sublimes that might be quite knowledgeable about "ideological functions" and "legitimizations" of hegemony. Such a narrowly historicist position is debilitating as it denies us access to literature of "self-reflexive expansiveness sufficient for engaging or shaping potentially public passions," to use Charles Altieri's phrase.⁴ It also leaves us with scant resources to discuss some of the finest contemporary American poets, who know all about Foucault but remain very much within the tradition of American Romanticism.

A further development in the tradition of the American sublime occurred in the late 1950s and early '60s in the work of Allen Ginsberg. His negotiation between history and spiritual rapture is crucially different from that of the nineteenth century, and as a result reconfigures the relations between the literature of the sublime and its ideological function. It is no longer naïve in the Emersonian sense. Ginsberg socializes and "familiarizes" the sublime: friends, family, and even the larger patterns of national fate are no longer abandoned by the rhapsode, but are imbricated within the very texture of his transcendental experience. Thus, there is no grievous return to everyday reality after the vision on the mountain...