The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists

by James Noggle

This book argues that philosophical skepticism helps define the aesthetic experience of the sublime in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, especially the poetry of Alexander Pope. Skeptical doubt appears in the period as an astonishing force in discourse that cannot be controlled--"doubt's boundless Sea," in Rochester's words--and as such is consistently seen as affiliated with the sublime, itself emerging as an important way to conceive of excessive power in rhetoric, nature, psychology, religion, and politics. This view of skepticism as a force affecting discourse beyond its practitioners' control links Noggle's discussion to other theoretical accounts of sublimity, especially psychoanalytic and ideological ones, that emphasize the sublime's activation of unconscious personal and cultural anxieties and contradictions. But because The Skeptical Sublime demonstrates the sublime's roots in the epistemological obsessions of Pope and his age, it also groundssuch theories in what is historically evident in the period's writing.The skeptical sublime is a concrete, primary instance of the transformation of modernity's main epistemological liability, its loss of certainty, into an aesthetic asset--retaining, however, much of the unsettling irony of its origins in radical doubt. By examining the cultural function of such persistent instability, this book seeks to clarify the aesthetic ideology of major writers like Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester, among others, who have been seen, sometimes confusingly, as both reactionary and supportive of the liberal-Whig model of taste and civil society increasingly dominant in the period. While they participate in the construction of proto-aesthetic categories like the sublime to stabilize British culture after decades of civil war and revolution, their appreciation of the skepticism maintained by these means of stabilization helps them express ambivalence about the emerging social order and distinguishes their views from the more providentially assured appeals to thesublime of their ideological opponents.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2001

Reviews

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Argues that a set of writers (Rochester, Dryden, Swift and especially Pope) employ radical skepticism to enhance their poetic vision and power. According to Noggle, certain key moments in their various satires tend to associate the sublime with skepticism. This means that when these writers use reason to understand the world they inevitably come up against the limits of reason--this encounter with boundaries is an instance of the sublime. In some ways this experience of the sublime is a powerful corrective to the enthusiasms these writers would repudiate. For Noggle, this solution seems to collapse by the time one gets to Pope's Dunciad, where the forces of dulness overwhelm even the skeptical poet aware of the limits of reason. Not sure this is a full or fair summary of an argument that is not written as clearly or engagingly as it could be. Nevertheless there is a much food for thought here in Noggle's bringing together the so-called Tory satirists with the traditions of skeptical thinking in late 17th and early 18th century Britain.