The historical sublime is very good fun

Today I want to talk about the historical sublime - one of my absolute favourite concepts! I don’t think it’s as widely discussed as it should be. 

This post is compiled from my notes on the historical sublime, from digging around in some of my favourite theoretical books and relevant articles, and from messages I sent in discussions of the historical sublime when a couple of my friends asked me about it. 

Basically, the historical sublime is the element of chaos and uncertainty in history. 

It’s all fun stuff like incongruities and ambiguities, incomplete bits, disruptions, stuff that just doesn’t make sense, things that put the frighteners up most historians - “the idea that the past has neither rhyme nor reason to it; that it is grotesque, or absurd, or sublime” (p.137 of On “What is History?” by Keith Jenkins) and “… the anarchic, unfixed and unfixable nature of reality - the sublime …” (p.218 of The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies by Alun Munslow).

When you encounter something that you can’t get at - when a person of interest vanishes from the historical record, or things can’t be explained, or something seems uncertain, or if you can’t quite make out what that image is or what that word says, or you’ve got something you can’t communicate in words and it’s more of a vibe, or stuff just gets weird, or anything similar - that’s the historical sublime. It gives us an opening for more imaginative engagement with our case studies, our favourite historical people, our chosen events and situations. In my opinion, more imagination leads to more fun!

It’s hard to pin down exactly what the historical sublime is (which fits with the sublime nature of it) and it’s a big thing in my PhD, so I went through a few books where the authors discuss it and I borrowed some of their words. (If you ask, I can get you the citations for all of them, if you want!)

From what I’ve seen, some historians like to believe that they can find The (Most Likely) Story of What Really Happened - which isn’t necessarily the case! 

The historical sublime forces us to confront the fact that we can’t find that - there’s always going to be bits we’ll never know, and a lot of what we think we’ve ‘found’ can be reinterpreted - so, unfortunately, most traditional historians usually just ignore the sublime. (On a related note, a lot of traditional historians don’t like it when they have to acknowledge that they don’t find stories but create them, based on their interpretations of evidence - but I won’t get tangled up in that right now.)

The historical sublime can also be used by historians (and people from other disciplines who like to explore and experiment with history) in communicating their work.

From what I’ve seen, the discipline of history is set up to favour histories that are neat and tidy, have discernible narratives, and appear to show meaningful connections between things in the past. When the historical sublime pops up - if historians start doing narratives without any particular structure, or random bits of something else thrown in, or other postmodern fun - the disciplinary mainstream can start to get a bit upset.

Here’s Hayden White: “We require a history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption and chaos are our lot.” (p.50 of Tropics of Discourse by Hayden White) 

        I love the idea of the historical sublime as a method of empowerment! And, of course, anything that historians use can be taken into any other discipline or genre or way of working or anything else that you like! Interdisciplinarity is the future!

According to Alun Munslow, Hayden White uses the term “historical sublime” to mean 

“the celebration of the undiscoverable, possibly meaningless, and open-ended nature of the past. Such a meaninglessness is the only invitation that potentially oppositional and dissenting groups of historians may get to challenge certaintist (e.g. fascist) history. They, and we, empower ourselves when we can find no objective certainty in the past - in the sense of a factual correspondence of evidence with Truth - that can be used to validate the authority of those in power over us.”  

(p.12 of Deconstructing History by Alun Munslow)

        So what we’ve got here is a concept that can be used by less privileged people to challenge dominant historical narratives. It also encourages our attempts to reach/ imagine lost voices of the past - the people whose stories never survived. They’ve gone into the historical sublime. Dominant ideologies might want us to just forget about them.

Let’s have a brief poke at earlier ideas about the word “sublime”, before it started hanging out with the word “historical”. 

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sublime was contrasted against concepts such as the picturesque and the beautiful. Those two are like when you encounter something that makes you go “That’s fantastic, I might have to paint that” whereas the sublime renders you awestruck and possibly a bit afraid but, like, in a good way. 

Thinking about the time when these concepts were really hot, “[Hayden] White argues that … [when history was developing as a discipline in the 19th century] narrative history took on the form of the ordered, the measured and the beautiful, as opposed to a view of a past that lacked these aesthetic proportions, so that the aesthetic tamed the irregularities and grotesqueness of the sublime.” (p.141 of Jenkins, On “What is History?”) 

As far as I’m concerned, the past (and representations that we make about it) should be allowed to be wild and prolific in its sublimity, exuberant in its mysteries, while efforts to control it (such as attempting to insist on One True Story at the expense of others) should be scuppered. By not imposing a single narrative on the past, more people can be empowered to build their own past-based narratives! 

So there’s a kind of optimistic overview of the historical sublime. I need to do more research into it (I want to do a postdoctoral thing on it) but yeah! Enjoy!