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MONT BLANC,” SILENCE, AND THE SUBLIME PAUL ENDO ^¡V hile travelling in Switzerland during the summer of 1816, Shelley de scribed his alpine scenery in language borrowed from the contemporary rhetoric of the sublime.1 In a July 22 letter to Thomas Love Peacock, for instance, he introduces rapid syntactical shifts, protests of inexpressibility, images of inundation — all familiar trappings of the sublime: “To exhaust epithets which express the astonishment & the admiration — the very ex cess of satisfied expectation, where expectation scarcely acknowledged any boundary — is this to impress upon your mind the images which fill mine now, even until it overflows?” (Letters 1: 495). In “Mont Blanc,” the ma jor product of this period, Shelley similarly engages the literary sublime: Coleridge’s “Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” (see Robin son; Bloom, Mythmaking 10-19) and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (see Hall 43-59; Blank 171-82) are especially prominent antecedents. In these lyrics, both Wordsworth and Coleridge convert a moment of ineffability into a statement of positive knowledge; but if the sublime can be read, following the model of Kant’s mathematical sublime, as a negative comprehension, as the indeterminate conceptualization of a magnitude, then Shelley will cor rect Wordsworth’s “sense sublime” and Coleridge’s religious orthodoxy by embracing the negativity of the sublime, by refraining — even if only tem porarily— from proclaiming the “meaning” of Mont Blanc. In a famous passage in “Speculations on Metaphysics,” Shelley describes a state in which the self, carried along by a torrent of stimuli, proves unable to leap from “passive perception to voluntary contemplation” : [Tjhought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards; — like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile, and dares not look behind. The caverns of the mind are ob scure, and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautifully bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals. If it were possible to be where we have been, vitally and indeed — if, at the moment of our presence there, we could define the results of our experience, — if the passage from sensation to reflection — from a state of passive perception to voluntary contempla tion, were not so dizzying and so tumultuous, this attempt would be less difficult. ( Complete Works 7: 64) 283 This sense of daemonic possession — of a self utterly helpless before the impulse of its own perceptions — is familiar from Alastor. In his account of the mathematical sublime, Kant describes an analogous intrasubjective structure: the imagination is flooded by a quantity it proves unable to get around, to “comprehend” : “For if the apprehension has reached a point be yond which the representations of sensuous intuition in the case of the parts first apprehended begin to disappear from the imagination as this advances to the apprehension of yet others, as much, then, is lost at one end as is gained at the other, and for comprehension we get a maximum which the imagination cannot exceed” (99). Because of the magnitude of this quan tum, the imagination is suspended in an indefinite act of apprehension. By exceeding the horizon of comprehension, this rush of “sensuous intuition” cannot be circumscribed. The imagination is unable to gain a purchase outside itself, indepéndent of that immediately engaging it. This sense of inundation, whose force paralyzes comprehension, is what Neil Hertz has called “blockage,” a kind of “cognitive exhaustion” or “mental overload” characteristic of the sublime affect (40). But this state of “blockage” does not constitute the sublime moment proper. In Kant’s mathematical sublime, the state of incomprehension is followed — and resolved — by the intervention of the reason; as a supersen sible faculty, the reason stands above the endless “representations of sensu ous intuition,” and can comprehend them under a single, albeit negative, thought of unity.2 The sublime affect requires the participation of both the imagination and reason; it consists of “the subjective play of the mental powers (imagination and reason) as harmonious by virtue of their very con trast” (107). If the reason comprehends the incomprehensible, this “compre hension” is only negative or “indeterminately indicated...
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