Subject
musing the sublime
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On May 4, 2010, at 9:50 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> [quoting Lipon:]
> Immediately after making his grand pronouncement, Shade loses his
> train of thought ... And speaking of this wonderful machine ... [a]
> sudden shift of affect, from grandiose resolve to a desultory
> questioning. This shift of tone tends to confirms that Shade is
> mentally not well. These abrupt affective shifts recur throughout
> the canto, especially during the shaving sequence.
>
> There are sudden shifts elsewhere in the poem, such as ...
> the shift in tone in 147-156 (from the sublime to the funnybone
> there are only ten lines).
And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.
For the record, thefreedictionary gives:
(actually, The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language,
Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.)
sub·lime
adj.
1. Characterized by nobility; majestic.
2.
a. Of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth.
b. Not to be excelled; supreme.
3. Inspiring awe; impressive.
4. Archaic Raised aloft; set high.
5. Obsolete Of lofty appearance or bearing; haughty:
"not terrible,/That I should fear . . . /But solemn and
sublime" (John Milton).
n.
1. Something sublime.
2. An ultimate example.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Again I find it difficult to find any significant, much less abrupt,
shift of tone(i.e. affect).
The stanza simply describes Shade's childhood fits, attacks, or
seizures as a kind of enjoyable hallucination.
Sublime, although carrying connotations of nobility or purpose, is to
be read mostly as a synonym for enjoyable, as in 2b & 3.
Shade isn't declining from something lofty in the first lines to
something distinctly vulgar in the end.
It's all just one amorphous state. The particular metaphors, if that's
right word to call them, also don't lead in that direction. Actually
there's a progress from space-geography to time, to funnybone via
tomorrow (future time).
And even if sublime connotes mystic oceanic feelings, there's no a
priori reason for excluding the funnybone from those feelings.
There's a twist of sexual humor in the last line, set up by the
previous line, but it just a slight comical stanza-ending flourish,
and nothing substantial.
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> [quoting Lipon:]
> Immediately after making his grand pronouncement, Shade loses his
> train of thought ... And speaking of this wonderful machine ... [a]
> sudden shift of affect, from grandiose resolve to a desultory
> questioning. This shift of tone tends to confirms that Shade is
> mentally not well. These abrupt affective shifts recur throughout
> the canto, especially during the shaving sequence.
>
> There are sudden shifts elsewhere in the poem, such as ...
> the shift in tone in 147-156 (from the sublime to the funnybone
> there are only ten lines).
And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.
For the record, thefreedictionary gives:
(actually, The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language,
Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.)
sub·lime
adj.
1. Characterized by nobility; majestic.
2.
a. Of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth.
b. Not to be excelled; supreme.
3. Inspiring awe; impressive.
4. Archaic Raised aloft; set high.
5. Obsolete Of lofty appearance or bearing; haughty:
"not terrible,/That I should fear . . . /But solemn and
sublime" (John Milton).
n.
1. Something sublime.
2. An ultimate example.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Again I find it difficult to find any significant, much less abrupt,
shift of tone(i.e. affect).
The stanza simply describes Shade's childhood fits, attacks, or
seizures as a kind of enjoyable hallucination.
Sublime, although carrying connotations of nobility or purpose, is to
be read mostly as a synonym for enjoyable, as in 2b & 3.
Shade isn't declining from something lofty in the first lines to
something distinctly vulgar in the end.
It's all just one amorphous state. The particular metaphors, if that's
right word to call them, also don't lead in that direction. Actually
there's a progress from space-geography to time, to funnybone via
tomorrow (future time).
And even if sublime connotes mystic oceanic feelings, there's no a
priori reason for excluding the funnybone from those feelings.
There's a twist of sexual humor in the last line, set up by the
previous line, but it just a slight comical stanza-ending flourish,
and nothing substantial.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/