1. For a brief discussion of the text's authorship and history see "Longinus" on Sublimity , trans. D. A. Russell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), x-xii. See also the introduction and notes accompanying Russell's edition of the Greek text "Longinus" on the Sublime (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964). Following Neil Hertz, I have also consulted another recent translation, G. M. A. Grube's Longinus on Great Writing (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). Unless otherwise noted all further references to Longinus are to Russell's translation and occur in the text.

2. Sappho's famous ode is preserved only through inclusion in Longinus' treatise. For a discussion of Longinus' and Boileau's treatment of the poem, see Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho: 1546-1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 84-87.

3. The reader may wish to read Sappho's ode in the original Greek and then compare Julia Dubnoff's literal translation of it with those provided by Russell and Grube:

That man to me seems equal to the gods,
the man who sits opposite you
and close by listens
to your sweet voice

and your enticing laughter—
that indeed has stirred up the heart in my breast.

For whenever I look at you even briefly
I can no longer say a single thing,
but my tongue is frozen in silence;
instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin;
with my eyes I see nothing;
my ears make a whirring noise.

A cold sweat covers me,
trembling seizes my body,
and I am greener than grass.
Lacking but little of death do I seem.

But all must be endured since . . .

I have relied upon the versions of Sappho that appear in Russell and Grube primarily because these are the translations Neil Hertz cites, and it is his particular reading of Sappho's lyric that is the object of this critique.

4. Peter De Bolla interestingly defines sublime discourse as discourse that produces the very excessiveness it purports to describe ( The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject [New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 12): "the discourse of the sublime . . . is a discourse which produces, from within itself, what is habitually termed the category of the sublime and in doing so it becomes a self-transforming discourse. The only way in which it is possible to identify this newly mutated discursive form is via its propensity to produce to excess. . . . Hence the discourse on the sublime, in its function as an analytic discourse or excessive experience, became increasingly preoccupied with the discursive production of the excess."

5. Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1-20. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

6. Kate Chopin, The Awakening , ed. Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), 15. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

7. Grube, Longinus on Great Writing , 4.

8. Suzanne Guerlac, The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 3. Guerlac emphasizes that the Longinian sublime is not "merely rhetorical" but "occurs as a force of enunciation determined neither by subjective intention nor by mimetic effect" (11). Thus, she argues, "the Longinian emphasis on the act of enunciation, and, in particular, the call for the dissimulation of figurative language, is incompatible with the mimetic structure of metaphor that is at the basis of the analyses of the romantic sublime" (194). Unlike Weiskel, for whom the sublime functions as a transcendent turn, Guerlac finds in the sublime "the site within the metaphysical tradition, and within the tradition of aesthetics, of resistance to mimesis, to metaphorical recuperation or 'resolution' and to aesthetics" (194-95); see 182-93 for Guerlac's discussion of Weiskel's Romantic Sublime (which I cite in note 12).

9. Ronald Paulson ("Versions of a Human Sublime," New Literary History 16, no. 2 [Winter 1985]: 427) points out that while "studies of the sublime, from Burke

to Monk and Hipple, used to focus on the enumeration of qualities in the sublime object or, more precisely, as they are reflected in the mind of the spectator . . . in the last decade, mediated by Nietzsche and Freud, by Harold Bloom and Thomas Weiskel, the focus has shifted to the agon between subject and object. The former is both/either a participant within a sublime confrontation and/or a spectator without."

10. Longinus' assumption that the sublime entails a transformation of conventional power relations anticipates Burke's famous dictum: "I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power" (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , ed. Adam Phillips [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 59).

11. See in particular Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). For Bloom the poet achieves sublimity only through overcoming the threat represented by the work of a "strong" precursor poet. In addition to Neil Hertz and Thomas Weiskel, recent proponents of this view include Marc W. Redfield who, in a provocative analysis of Fredric Jameson's notion of a postmodern sublime ("Pynchon's Postmodern Sublime," PMLA 104, no. 2 [March 1989]: 152), argues that the sublime moves "from a threatening diffusion of signs toward a more structured conflict, which enables a self to prop itself up, so to speak, on its own anxiety, reading the confirmation of its existence in the image of its threatened destruction." In the same issue of the PMLA , R. Jahan Ramazani reaffirms the view that the sublime entails confrontation and/or struggle between opposing forces ("Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime," PMLA 104, no. 2 [March 1989]: 164). Drawing upon the accounts of Hertz and Weiskel, he interprets the sublime "as a staged confrontation with death'' in which "the anticipation of death gives rise to a counterassertion of life." For Ramazani "death precipitates the emotional turning called the sublime, although theorists of the sublime often refer to death by other names, or by what Kenneth Burke terms 'deflections': nothingness, castration, physical destruction, semiotic collapse, defeat by a precursor, and annihilation of the ego. Death is the recurrent obsession for these theorists, from Longinus to Heidegger and Bloom."

12. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 5; Paul H. Fry, "The Possession of the Sublime," Studies in Romanticism 26, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 188.

13. Fry, "Possession of the Sublime," 189-90. See also Fry's discussion of Longinus' treatment of Sappho in "Longinus at Colonus," in The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 47-86.

14. A discussion regarding Longinus' commentary on Sappho occurs between Suzanne Guerlac and Frances Ferguson in New Literary History 16, no. 2 (Winter 1985), the issue entitled "The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations." Although their dispute does not directly engage Sappho's portrait of desire or Longinus' reaction to it, it does address a closely related topic: the status of the

subject and the kind of subjectivity at stake in the Longinian sublime. Does the sublime as represented by Longinus threaten or uphold the "unified self-identity of the subject" (275)? Guerlac and Ferguson propose very different answers, but both explore the question by examining Longinus' reading of Sappho.

In the article "Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime," Guerlac argues that theorists who emphasize pure "force of feeling" and who read Longinus from an exclusively phenomenological point of view "obscure a more radical force at work in the Longinian sublime, one which threatens the very notion of the subjectivity, or the unified self-identity of the subject" (275). Guerlac proposes to read On the Sublime "in terms of a 'rhetoric' of enunciation, instead of expression" in order to show that in the Longinian sublime "the subject of feeling, or the 'aesthetic' subject, is disrupted as well as the subject of certainty or the theoretical subject'' (275). The success of Guerlac's argument depends upon her discussion of Longinus' treatment of Sappho. She argues that what Longinus appreciates in the poem of Sappho "is clearly not a representation of unity, or of a unified body. The body is portrayed as broken, fragmented" (282). Rather, Longinus appreciates "the force of enunciation" through which Sappho is able to portray, and ultimately unify, the fragmented body. In Guerlac's view it is this "force of ennunciation which unifies these fragments, combin[ing] them into a single whole; embodying the text and the body—which now serves as a figure for the unity of composition of the text" (282). Although Guerlac appears to challenge the notion that the sublime implies (or helps construct) a unified subject, she does not question the prevailing view that the Longinian sublime entails the achievement of textual unity or dispute his reading of Sappho's lyric. Like Longinus', Guerlac's reading represses Sappho's emphasis on semiotic and erotic transport and reiterates the view that the sublime text functions as an antidote to division. Guerlac's "force of enunciation" repairs, not underscores, fragmentation and helps to maintain textual unity, if it is not indeed equivalent to it. For if the effect of figurative language is to give the semblance of unity, how can it follow that "there is no stable ground or truth or sincerity in the event of sublimity, which, through a force of enunciation, disrupts the stable identity of the subject" (285)? Unity remains the master trope whether the "force of enunciation" or the subject produces it; Guerlac now ascribes to it the unity and power previously ascribed to the subject.

Guerlac fails to notice precisely what Ferguson remarks in her elegant article, "A Commentary on Suzanne Guerlac's 'Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime'": "the capacity of rhetoric to produce what we might call 'a subjectivity effect'" (292). Ferguson argues that although Guerlac substitutes rhetoric for subjectivity and ascribes to the former the function previously reserved for the latter, nothing has really changed. What difference, Ferguson asks, does it make if the subject is divided when language is not? "Figurativity thus comes in aid of the notion of unity, in substituting for the shattered bodily unity a figurative wholeness. What is thus disconnected in one register is unified in another" (293). While it would be extremely interesting to know Guerlac's response to Ferguson's

remarks, particularly noteworthy in this context is that their debate centers on Longinus' reading of Sappho.

15. See Hertz, The End of the Line , 59.

16. For a study that explores the relation between gender, narrative, and a blocking agent or obstacle, see Theresa de Lauretis, "Desire in Narrative," in Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 103-57. De Lauretis not only argues that narrative structure depends upon a certain sadism but holds that the subject of narrative, or mythical hero, is invariably gendered as male, while the obstacle he encounters is female. According to de Lauretis, "the hero must be male regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female and indeed, simply, the woman" (118-19). By its very nature, then, "representation works to support the male status of the mythical subject'' (140).

17. Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (1935; rpt., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 6. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

18. According to Hertz, Weiskel locates in "the pre-Oedipal phases . . . the motivating power of the mathematical sublime, then sees them as rejoining a secondary system that is recognizably Oedipal and more clearly manifested in the dynamical sublime" ( The End of the Line , 52).

19. Writing seven years after "The Notion of Blockage," Hertz concludes The End of the Line with an essay entitled "Afterword: The End of the Line" in which he returns to the previously unexamined question of gender that haunted his discussion of Longinus. Here Hertz inquires: "What comes after the end of the line . . . at the end of the line, who pays? and why?" (223). His afterword, however, enacts the very pattern of scapegoating he has already described. A discussion of the relation between gender and scapegoating in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda prompts Hertz to ask "how her [the Princess'] gender, her being 'The Mother,' [is] linked to her serving as scapegoat?" (229). His response is that exorcism of the princess allows Daniel to put "a pre-Oedipal mother aside when he enters the symbolic order and takes his place under the sign of his Jewish grandfather" (230). Pursuing the discussion of the pre-Oedipal stage that he had raised all too briefly in connection with Weiskel, Hertz interprets Julia Kristeva's " L'abjet d'amour " in a way that parallels his readings of Longinus and Kant. Just as Hertz interprets Kant's mathematical sublime through a Wordsworthian grid of blockage and release, now he reads Kristeva's concept of the non-object or " abjet " in terms of the mechanism of scapegoating he finds at work in Daniel Deronda . Whereas Kristeva's formulation of the abjet might have been understood not only as abjection but as the more "radical flux and dispersion of the subject" that Hertz describes in the essay on "The Notion of Blockage," he interprets it as a triumphant staving off of chaos, an instant in which the infant links itself with the paternal function. The casting out of the vide , of "that which could have been a chaos and which now begins to become an abject " (232), enables the infant's first sense of selfhood, and the movement Kristeva traces becomes a corollary to that

at work in Daniel Deronda : "the casting out of the Princess, her abjection, is intended not to collapse the distance between author and surrogate, but to stabilize it as a chosen separation and thus to ground the multiple gestures of mimesis that make up the novel" (233). The Oedipal moment of casting out differences and achieving an identification with the father, previously described as identical to the structure of the sublime, Hertz now locates at the heart of Kristeva's description of the pre-Oedipal stage. In Hertz's reading of Kristeva, the mother comes to serve the name and law of the father, recreating the same "end of the line scenario" that characterizes Hertz's treatment of Sappho. Once again Hertz evokes the possibility of an excess that cannot "be brought back home to the Father" but does so only the better to return it to him.

20. The phrase "language of the unsayable" derives from the title of the book edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

21. "Selections from The World As Will and Idea ," Book 111, section 39, in Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger , ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (New York: The Modern Library, 1964), 464.

22. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment , section 29, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 130. Subsequent references are to this edition and will appear in the text, along with German terms from the original ( Kritik der Urteilkraft , ed. Wilhelm Weischedel [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974]) that I add to show that Kant talks about sacrifice and uses concepts of power and subordination to explain the function of the imagination. For an intriguing discussion of this passage, see Paul de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects , ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 132-35.

23. For an insightful discussion of the oceanic sublime, see Steven Z. Levine, "Seascapes of The Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling," New Literary History 16, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 377-400.

24. Gerald L. Bruns, "Disappeared: Heidegger and the Emancipation of Language," in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory , ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 127-28.

25. Theodore W. Adorno, cited in Bruns, "Disappeared," 144.

26. Edna's "flash of terror" of course recalls Burke's dictum that "terror is in all cases whatsoever either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime" ( Enquiry , 54). We focus upon Burke's sublime and his notion of terror in the following chapter.

27. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Sex Changes, vol. 2 of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 98. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

28. Some of the influential readings of The Awakening that do not discuss the ocean's role or "voice" include Margaret Culley, "Edna Pontellier: 'A Solitary Soul,'" in her edition of The Awakening , 224-28; Anne Goodwin Jones, "Kate Chopin: The Life Behind the Mask," in Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 135-82; Susan J. Rosowski, "The Novel of Awakening," Genre 12 (Fall 1979): 313-32; George M. Spangler, "Kate Chopin's The Awakening : A Partial Dissent,'' Novel 3 , no.3 (Spring 1970): 249-55; Margit Stange, "Personal Property: Exchange Value and the Female Self in The Awakening ," Genders , no. 5 (July 1989): 106-119: Ruth Sullivan and Stewart Smith, "Narrative Stances in Kate Chopin's The Awakening ," Studies in American Fiction 1, no. 1 (1973): 62-75; Lawrence Thornton, " The Awakening : A Political Romance," American Literature 52, no. 1 (March 1980): 50-66; Paula A. Treichler, "The Construction of Ambiguity in The Awakening : A Linguistic Analysis," in Women And Language in Literature and Society , ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), 239-57; Otis B. Wheeler, "The Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier," Southern Review 11, no. 1 (1975): 118-128; and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, "Thanatos and Eros," in Culley's edition of The Awakening , 206-18. For a reading that considers Chopin's treatment of Whitman, see Elizabeth Balken House, " The Awakening : Kate Chopin's 'Endlessly Rocking' Cycle," Ball State University Forum 20, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 53-58. For an overview of critical responses to The Awakening prior to 1977, see Priscilla Allen, "Old Critics and New: The Treatment of Chopin's The Awakening ," in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism , ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 224-38.

29. Dale Bauer, "Kate Chopin's The Awakening : Having and Hating the Tradition," in Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 148. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

30. Patricia Yaeger, "'A Language Which Nobody Understood': Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening, " Novel 20, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 204. Subsequent references will be in the text.

31. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute , trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 13. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1961), prop. 7, 151.

33. "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" in The Postmodern Condition , trans. Regis Durand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81. See also Lyotard's discussion of aesthetic pleasure and the sublime, "Complexity and the Sublime," in Postmodernism: ICA Documents , ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 19-26. Here Lyotard emphasizes that "with the idea of the sublime, the feeling when faced with a work of art is no longer the feeling of pleasure, or not simply one of pleasure. It is a

contradictory feeling, because it is a feeling of both pleasure and displeasure, together. . . . With the sublime, the question of death enters the aesthetic question" (22).

34. For Lyotard's discussion of the relation between an aesthetics of the sublime and questions of representation, see "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," in The Lyotard Reader , ed. Andrew Benjamin, trans. Lisa Liebmann (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 196-211. Lyotard's most comprehensive discussion of Kant's sublime occurs in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime , trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). On Lyotard's notions of representation and postmodernity, see Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991), 53-85; and David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (New York: Methuen, 1987), 155-84.

35. Walter Benn Michaels, "The Contracted Heart," New Literary History 21, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 498. Subsequent references will be in the text.

36. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , 81.

37. Gilbert and Gubar, No Man's Land , 97.

38. Jane P. Tompkins, "The Awakening: An Evaluation," Feminist Studies 3, nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1976): 24.