This is the second big paper I wrote for my Introduction to English Studies class. I think I finally got the organization right, even though the topic wasn't particularly compelling. It was fun to explore the notion of the sublime as it was something we'd discussed in class and that had caught my interest in Danielle's thesis last year. (The difficulty with posting these papers is their specificity: what may make for a compelling argument to my TA won't mean a thing to someone who didn't read the abstract novella we were assigned as reading material. C'est la problème.)
Jeanette Winterson’s novella The Passion displays aspects of poetic lyricism by implying the existence of the notion of “the sacred.” Longinus defines this notion, also referred to as “the sublime,” as man’s ability to transcend the human condition with emotions and language, a sense of “otherness” only able to be suggested (Patten). Lyric poetry encompasses the sublime because of its ability to invoke a heightened reality beyond the particulars of human experience. Central to this concept is its mystery; the sacred is necessarily veiled, leaving characters unsure of whether what it encompasses is wonderful or terrible. A sacred reality supersedes the human experience by inspiring awe and veneration. The Passion follows the interwoven tales of two characters, Henri and Villanelle, throughout the course of the French Revolution, dealing in great measure with the grittier aspects of humanity. But by intimating the concept of the sacred, Winterson elevates the narrative to the status of a lyric poem. The notion of the sacred draws attention away from the realities of the human condition presented in the story and thus arises as a central component of the lyricism in Winterson’s prose.
One suggestion of the sacred included in the novella is Henri’s acknowledgement of the overwhelming emotion he feels while watching snowflakes fall. His awe over this natural phenomenon removes him from his present experiences of a “zero winter” and gruesome war. In an aside following a recounting of a New Year’s Eve mass service, he marvels at something so indescribable as the uniqueness of snowflakes:
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember. (Winterson 43)
The sacred lies behind the falling snow in the emotion that it inspires, revealed by the disbelief of Henri’s rhetorical questions. Such an observation is too great to hold in mind and spurs Henri to find a way to function in spite of it. His nod to the existence of a sublime reality is his affirmative answer to rhetorical questions dealing with an emotion too great for human capacity.
While his questions of how to persist in the face of the sacred may be posed rhetorically, Henri implies an affirmative answer to the issue raised. In doing so he acknowledges the grandeur of the snowfall as a source of the sublime. He makes the proposition that every snowflake is different and offers a contingency with the clause “if that were true.” Following this contingency are the problems that would necessarily arise from its truth. The implied syllogism is that if every snowflake were different, then the world could not go on, one could never get up off his knees, and one could never recover from the wonder of such an incredible natural event. Up until this point, however, Henri has not affirmed or denied the accuracy of his initial proposition. If every snowflake were not different, he would have no need to offer a solution for the problem of the world ending and never being able to recover from wonder. But Henri does offer a solution, the process of forgetting, and that solution affirms his belief in the truth of his initial statement.
Forgetting, Henri believes, enables the world to continue and man to function in the face of an overwhelming wonderment, which in this case serves the function of the sacred. The claim that “there is only the present and nothing to remember” may seem to mitigate any comprehension of the sublime or an “other” reality, but instead it heightens such notions by acknowledging their impossibility. The wonder of innumerable, individually distinct snowflakes is too great to hold in mind. This wonder is the subliminal reality recognized and hinted at by Henri that draws him above his experience of the present and lends to the lyrical nature of the novella as a whole.
Villanelle likewise wonders at the sublime, but for her it is the emotion of passion that provides an elevated reality. Describing passion, she says, “Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between [G-d] and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse” (Winterson 68). This epistemological observation sets passion as its own source of the sacred by superseding traditional boundaries. The statement draws attention to life’s polarity by drawing out pairs of opposites. If on one hand is a swamp, the lowest point, on the far other are mountains, the highest peaks. Fear repels and drives away; sex is the closest expression of attraction and intimacy. G-d is divine goodness; the Devil is worldly evil. These are the clear opposing boundaries by which life is understood, but passion as the sacred exists at none of these extremes.
Passion, instead, is an in between emotion, and this removal from the boundaries of every day extremities serves to intimate the notion of the sacred yet again in lyrical fashion. Villanelle views passion as something that cannot quite be grasped, and for all her insight she fails to define it for herself. It is an emotion and a concept that she cannot understand alone, only in relation to other concepts that she can easily recognize and define. Villanelle can only speak about passion as something that is other than swamps, mountains, fear, sex, G-d, and the Devil. Passion is sublime in that it is comprehended by its “otherness,” its place apart from the normal extremes by which humans measure experience. The sublime is sublime because it is other than human, and the notion of the sacred as passion can only exist in a semiotic system of differences (Culler 57).
Perhaps the most common source of a sacred other in lyricism is the sense of the divine. Winterson’s pervasive references to Christian religiosity throughout the narrative call out a higher purpose for the events of the story. Repeated nods to religion by both Henri and Villanelle depict the traditional sacredness inherent to the concept of the divine. Henri says describing a New Year’s Eve church service,
From the church came the roar of the last hymn… This was no lukewarm appeal to an exacting [G-d] but love and confidence that hung in the rafters, pushed open the church door, forced the cold from the stone, forced the stones to cry out. The church vibrated. (Winterson 43)
Henri’s description of the church service sets it in contrast to his own “lukewarm people” (7) with strong and animated verbiage—roaring, hanging, pushing, forcing, crying out, vibrating. Henri’s people, on the other hand, are “a people of longing who are not easily touched,” who “will the darkness to part and show [them] a vision” (7). The sublimity of the divine associated with religion draws people out of themselves into a communal whole. It manifests itself in a congregational voice uttering a final hymn, full of a force that Henri feels keenly.
Henri goes on to question the source of this force, asking “what gave them this joy? What made cold and hungry people so sure that another year could only be better?” and wondering if it was “their little [L-RD]” (Winterson 43). While his questions reveal layers of doubt in Henri’s mind about the existence of G-d in a traditional sense, he achieves closure by acknowledging that what he saw in the church, no matter its source, was a real response to a sacred other. Its power was strong enough to warm winter and give hope to cold and hungry people, and Henri recognized that as something worthy of being sung. The sense of the sublime found by so many in religious notions of G-d and divinity revealed itself to Henri in the congregation’s response, and it provided an escape from the harshness of the cold winter and brutal war swirling about them outside the walls of the sanctuary.
The higher sublime reality manifests itself in the narrative’s instances of emotion that cannot be contained, passion that cannot be defined, and a pervasive sense of religiosity strung throughout, all of which serve to remove the text from the issues at hand and elevate it to the status of a lyric poem. As in poetry, which can likewise only make suggestions towards the sublime, the narrative acknowledges through the tools of exclusions, differences, and responses a force wholly other than the humanity of war, sex, and poverty. Both Henri and Villanelle gesture toward the sacred as they narrate their stories, and the novella thus projects an amplified resonance impossible to achieve if concerned only with the human condition and not the element of the sublime that calls to a reality outside of it.
