On the Sublime/ McCloud

I had trouble understanding this piece, in part because I'm no great scholar in Grecian epic story-telling and also because a lot of the text was lost or based off unknown literature.

What was interesting to me though is that this article was remarkably concerned with audience reaction for when it was written. It reminded me of our discussions about who has agency, or if multiple people can have agency over the same text, or if the text itself wields some type of nonsentient agency, etc. There is no doubt that Longinus believes the author has superior agency over a text but the fact the text's effectiveness is derived from its level of sublimity confuses the matter of agency a lot. He defines sublimity as "a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse." It is partially a characteristic someone must be born with but the artistry (the fine-tuning of it) comes as a practiced skill. He believes that in order to speak this way you have to be experienced with high and weighty thoughts; you must visualize appropriately and imitate the greats (within reason). Where is the agency in that? It doesn't seem like it would be within the author because is is implied that practically everyone after Homer is just putting their own spin on Homer; the originality is ceaselessly in question. Even Homer becomes suspect with the Odyssey where he becomes to narrative and mannerly for Longinus. That leads me to believe agency is within each text.

The audience is never forgotten, though. A text is only as sublime as an audience allows it to be. If you are carried away in front of your audience but they do not share in your excitement, your emotions are wanton and excessive. It would be fine if that emotion was proportionate to the level you incited in your audience but if you couldn't move them, then your speech was basically crap. That's why being sublime mattered so much, it protected you from being erroneous and it moderated you. To use a modern expression, Longinus is basically telling authors that they're trying too hard, they're working too hard to pull off something that is partially comprised of natural ability. In the attempt to be original, these authors only succeeded at being novel. If the grandeur is posed, is strained just so the author will be admired, it will fall in upon itself easily and conspicuously.

Another great thing from such an early writer is his acute emphasis on the interplay of form and content. I think of that as being such a modern concept because I'm constantly being told to close-read in many of my classes. It stood out to me when he wrote "Homer has tortured the words to correspond with the emotion of the moment, and expressed the emotion magnificently by thus crushing words together. He has in effect stamped the special character of the danger on the diction..." (354). This emotional strength in writing is a huge indicator of sublimity to Longinus but only because it effects the audience.

This is where I see a lot of McCloud's "icon" in Longinus. It's the idea that if you paint a semi-specific picture (i.e., if you know the thing has a face) people will see themselves in it and it will become an effective piece of writing. The agency is within the audience it is delivered to: What we decide is relatable is what we decide to keep in the collective cultural consciousness.