The Liminal Sublime
in “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude
We are plain members and citizens of the land-community,
not the rulers of the earth
－Aldo Leopold’s A Sand county Almanac
Ecology is our recognition of being on the margins/borders and in the liminal (threshold) space of becoming. Traditionally, the process of becoming suggests that relations very often are constructed as being between separate and opposed entities. These binary thinking has been viewed as relations of “either/or.” However, the most important challenge to traditional hierarchies in ecology is the concept of biocentrism—the conviction that the relations between human being and nature may be constructed as “both/and,” which builds up a sense of Victor Turner’s mode of liminality/communitas, where humans and other creatures are equally coexisting in a symbiotic world through several liminal experiences. The mode invites a view of learning as participation by treating self and other as equally joined. It is this participative or ecological view that is explored here with reference to William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude, which provide us with an ecological meditation by perceiving a balance relationship with nature.
In the 1980s, a number of critics maintain that Wordsworth’s nature poetry is a flight from the political issues to the sublime areas of his mind and nature. For Marjorie Levinson, it is an “evasion,” for Alan Liu a “denial” of history. Those arguments are not wholly adequate as a formulation since they presume that the landscape functions only as a decorative circumstance to human being. Being a precursor of ecological poets, Wordsworth’s politics is neither right nor left but “green.” A green reading of Wordsworth makes claims, according to Jonathan Bate, “for the historical continuity of a tradition of environmental consciousness.” Since the publication of Bate’s Romantic Ecology, many scholars begin to realize the importance of Wordsworth’s influence on the “green” politics. Wordsworthian ecological vision, especially his treatment of the sublime of nature, has influenced many contemporary environmental writers and still remains dominant today.
In this study, I propose to apply with Turner’s mode of liminality/communitas, to explicate Wordsworth’s liminal sublime, occurring in some spots of time in The Prelude and “Tintern Abbey.” Both two poems are treated as an attempt to negotiate the liminal contemplation arisen from the remembered images. Turner’s communitas is a state of community that is situated in the midst of the ideal and the hierarchical social structures; in addition, he links liminality with the aspect of threshold, which offers us a sense of potential crisis that he finds characteristic of communitas. The liminal sublime, stretched between the two poles of the Kantian negative sublime and the Burke’s positive sublime, invokes a paradigm of Wordsworthian threshold, the environmental crisis that has precipitated a crisis of the imagination, and, hence, in the ultimate goal, the poet finds some transcendental ways of imaging the interfusing communion between nature and men.
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