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[1]           

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.

Many critics have maintained 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,”[2] for Alan Liu a “denial”[3] 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.”[4] 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 remained dominant today.

In this study, I propose to apply with Turner’s mode of liminality/communitas based on Kant’s sublimity, 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.

Turner’s Liminality/Communitas

The notion of “liminality,” could be traced back to the anthropologist and social critic Victor W. Turner who has been recognized as one of the most important social theorists. “Liminality” is a concept in the context of analysis of the sociological effect of ritual practices in various preindustrial societies. The term derives from limen, suggesting the meaning of the threshold and the margin. In other words, “liminality” is a state of being in in-between phases, Turner explains, “Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arranged by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (Ritual Process 95).[5] 

Contrary to “liminality,” Turner introduces the other seemingly antithetical concept as “communitas” to explain their symbiotic relationship. Yet, in the first place, we have to recognize that “communitas” does not represent the ideal state of community which is subjugated to the hierarchical social structures, rather it is something only persists in their midst. Put in Turner’s phrase: “communitas is made evident or accessible, so to speak, only through its juxtaposition to, or hybridization with, aspects of social structure” (Ritual Process 127). Its existential suggestion seems to embody some potentialities yet to be incorporated into hierarchical structures. Secondly, most important thing is that communitas is usually associated with the experiences of liminality, marginality, or structural inferiority which influence a temporary suspension of the hegemony of social structure.

Therefore, Turner links liminality with the aspect of creativity or potentiality he finds characteristic of communitas. Liminality acts as a mode of access to communitas but also has a character as a withdrawal or resistance to hierarchy; likewise, communitas is a liminal state itself in the sense that it does fulfill the requirement of the actual society. Productive and stable ecosystems, similar to the spontaneous communitas, minimize destructive aggression, encourage maximum diversity, and seek to establish equilibrium among all the participants on earth. An ecological view, diverse rather than homogenized, invites serious consideration of ways to relate the role of liminality/ communitas and their effectiveness to ritual passages reflected from Wordsworth’s The Prelude.

Treatises on the Sublime

Two major aesthetic thinkers, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, whose theories meditating on the sublime, provide us with a clear historical force to perceive the liminal experience of the sublime that has been influenced upon their followers in the mid eighteenth-century and the beginning of the nineteenth-century. Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) represents the eighteenth-century version of the sublime:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.[6]

For Burke, the sublime applies to large and grand parts of nature while the beautiful is evident in small parts. Furthermore, he associates the fear of death, dismemberment, terror, and darkness with feelings of sublime. Yet his “terrible sublime” is not a terror itself but a “positive” response to terror, which leads to his another passion for “pleasure.” Burke’s sublimity, thus, is “a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror” (136). Compared to Burke, Immanuel Kant’s account of sublime is markedly negative. Immanuel Kant’s Critical of Judgement (1790) identifies the sublime with an unlimited quantity and marks the shift from Burke’s positive model of the sublime in the eighteenth century to its romantic counterpart in the nineteenth century. His “Analytic of the Sublime” offers a model for a type of negative sublimity:

Thus, too, delight in the sublime in nature is only negative (whereas that in the beautiful is positive): that is to say it is a feeling of imagination by its own act depriving itself of its freedom by receiving a final determination in accordance with a law other than that of its empirical employment. In this way it gains an extension and a power greater than that which it sacrifices. But the ground of this is concealed from it, and in its place it feels the sacrificed or deprivation, as well as its cause, to which it is subjected.[7]

Though Kant builds on Burke’s idea of the sublime’s terror, yet his negative sublimity is more oriented to the characteristic of dejection. Kant compares the sublime and the beautiful in the following way, “We must seek a ground external to ourselves for the beautiful of nature, but seek it for the sublime merely in ourselves and in our attitude of thought, which introduces sublimity into the representation of nature” (Critique 84). Whereas the beautiful turns us outward, the sublime is a chance to see an inward. Thus, to get the sublime takes an extra effort, a kind of internal probing, and, inevitably, a confrontation for searching the self-knowledge, the truth about ourselves and our place in the universe.

Thomas Weiskel's groundbreaking study, The Romantic Sublime, helpfully generalizes two stages in the experience of Kant's negative sublime. The first stage is the state of equilibrium: the mind has more or less unconscious relationship to the object. The second moves to the terror in that the regular relation of mind and object suddenly breaks down; therefore, either mind or object is suddenly “in excess.” Apart from these two stages, Weiskeil adds a supplement to Kant’s negative sublime, the  third or "reactive" stage, the mind recovers the balance of outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and the object such that the very indeterminacy which erupted in phase two is taken as symbolizing the mind's relation to a transcendent order. He asserts that the "essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human. . . . Without some notion of the beyond, some credible discourse of the superhuman, the sublime founders."[8] Weiskel’s transcendental sublime, the transcendent order is missing in Kant’s theory of the sublime, ends with the mind’s reappropriation of equilibrium of mind and object on a higher level.

As Weiskel has pointed out, two visions of sublimity enter Wordsworth’s poetry: a Kantian negative sublime in which the outer natural world overmatches the inner imaginative world, leaving the mind or imagination perplexed and halted; on the contrary, a positive or “egoistic sublime,”[9] in which the mind recognizes its own part in nature and celebrates the reunion of the outer and inner world. I would argue that Kant’s negative sublime elaborates something very close to Turner’s liminality while Weiskel’s transcendental sublime depicts a similar notion of communitas, which makes up what has been missed in the Kantian context but finds its ultimate purpose in Wordsworthian nature poems . The mode of Liminality / Communitas constitutes on half of a dialectical relation defined as the liminal sublime, the metaphor for probing on “two-consciousnesses,” that being Wordsworth’s “prime and vital principle” in Prelude (14. 215).   

Spots of Time

The “Liminal sublime,” a term that combines a Kantian negative sublime and Weiskel’s transcendental sublime, is situated in the threshold of narcissistic wound, and, then to deliberate the possibility of crossing the boundaries to an ideal communion. In other words, it is the Wordsworthian “liminal sublime” that would subsume all otherness, all possibility of negation, and, finally, pave the way toward process of Turner’s notion of liminality/ communitas, where “the past is momentarily negated, suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (From Ritual to Theatre 44).[10] Wordsworth’s liminal sublime, thus, is based on such threshold experience which constructs multiple voices, including voices from nature. In his meditative poems, the presented scene serves to raise an emotional problem or personal crisis whose development and resolution constitute the organizing principle of the poem. In the contemplative and mirroring level, Wordsworth’s liminal sublime has been revealed between two consciousnesses:

A tranquilising spirit presses now

On my corporeal frame, so wide appears

The vacancy between me and those days

which yet have such self-presence in my mind,

that, musing on them, often do I seem

Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself

And of some other Being.

(The Prelude 2.27-33)[11]

In the time-space compression mode, both “myself-as-I-am-now” and the “some-other-Being” of the childhood past probably signify the dialogue between different states of the self or represent the correspondence to a metaphor of the mind/nature. For an ecological consideration, “the vacancy” addressed here in the poem could entail Wordsworth’s consciousness-raising for the crisis come to mind of the poet and nature.

The crisis invoked by the liminal is also demonstrated in a border poem “Tintern Abbey,” which constructs an imaginary landscape that could transcend the boundaries of geographical and historical changes. However, the poem’s tone is full of the predicament that annoys the nature poet. Michael Wiley explains the profound agony in the poem, “The quite crisis of the poem and the quiet crisis of the lyric is that shifting geographical configurations and changing history will overwhelm even the greatest efforts to construct a lasting eu-topos.”[12] In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth interprets the sublime landscape in two levels to reflect his “sad perplexity.” The first sublime emphasizes the liminal struggle to understand, the words “burden of mystery,” “unintelligible world,” “heavy and weary weight,” “suspend” show the qualities of the Kantian negative sublime:

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world

Is lighten’d:－that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspend, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.[13]

Whereas pondering the negative sublime, the second positive sublime brings in mind’s participation in the power of nature, where the situation is not like the negative sublime to aggrandize the other but a more harmonious situation of co-existence. Consequently, the poet is able to see thing with a “lighten’d” and quiet eye. To “see into the life of things” is to see the thing as what they are, the naturalness, the intrinsic value instead of the practical value. “From this serenity” Harold Bloom advises, “the affections lead us on to the highest kind of naturalistic contemplation.”[14] When the time we cease to have a possessive idea of owning our exterior body, then, we will move on to be the one in the body, and, consequently becomes “a living soul.” Likewise, the positive sublime is again stressed in the second-mentioned sublime as follows. In this quoted poem, Wordsworth uses the phrases such as the “deep interfused,” “purest thoughts,” “all thinking things,” “half-create” to manifest his denial to a disembodied sense of “I” outside of nature, the Cartesian construction of mind separated from external nature. Instead, he closely ties to an “ecological construction of mind”[15] which embraces the relational processes and considers minding the other in that the other is also part of the self. Wordsworth’s sublime, thus, is in a more sense of community with nature where nature and mind are not utterly distinct but interfused. Wordsworth says,  

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognize

In nature and the language of the sense,

The author of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

(Lyrical Ballad 112)

In “Tintern Abbey,” the two stages of the sublimes placed in the liminal domain can be effectively manifested through comparison with other spots of time in The Prelude, notably those concerning the experiences of liminal sublime in the episode of “The Dead Man” in Book V which reflects the poet’s unconscious hope of the death of his father mentioned in Book XXII, and scenes of the moon, dark abyss of the Mount Snowdon passage in Book XIV.

The episode of “The Dead Man,” embedded with the dark image lurking behind Wordsworth’s poem, is given the material form as agent of revolutionary vengeance and bridges the gap between the actual and the imaginary, producing a hybrid entry to the liminal sublime. “The Dead Man” inhabits the interstices of the recognizable past and is presented as the direct figure of the uncanny in Freudian sense in that a dead registers the meanings of the familiar and the unfamiliar at the same time.

In his essay “Uncanny,” Freud explains the double meaning of unheimliche (uncanny) and relates to the survival in the unconscious of a primitive “return of the repressed,” especially the repressed experiences in infancy. The unheimliche (uncanny) phenomena constituted by repressed infantile complexes is a haunted place where we wish to be remain uncovered, thus it becomes “a vision of terror.” Freud proceeds by hypothesizing that “many people experience the [uncanny] feeling in the highest degree in relation to. . . the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghost.”[16] In a rather parallel approach, In Book V, “The Dead Man” has a “ghastly face” that recalls the vision of horror:

At length, the dead Man, ’mid that beauteous scene

Of trees, and hills and water, bolt upright

Rose with his ghastly face, a spectre shape—

Of terror even.

(The Prelude 1805 5.470-72)

I would suggest that “a spectre shape” is an ultimate manifestation of the liminal experience between the live and the dead. The liminal space indicates the horror of being unable to distinguish between ‘me’ and ‘not me.’ The subject seeks to expel in order to achieve an independent identity but this is impossible since the body cannot cease both to take in and expel objects. Wordsworth uses a variety of the liminal images of the sublime, such as abyss, moon, and mist, to invoke a new otherness of the self bringing to mind the visionary power.

        The 1850 moon scene (14.40-61) suggests two different visionary powers, and it is the very type of liminal sublime moments: the first is as “a majestic intellect” (14.67), the perfect image of a mighty mind, the Kantian negative sublime, which broods over the “dark abyss” (14.72). Yet the second way is much more significant and depends upon the blurring of boundaries in the scene whose illustration presents a natural synaesthesia—“higher minds” (14.90). The positive “higher minds,” according to Wordsworth, “is the very spirit in which they deal / With the whole compass of the universe” (14.91-92).

        The dark abyss, a recurring signifier, depends precisely on the halting at a threshold, the liminality in which mind’s meditation has fallen away into a mist. The ambivalent fixation is what Geoffrey Hartman calls the spot syndrome[17] in the dark power:

I called upon the darkness—but before the word

Was uttered, midnight darkness seems to take

All objects from my sight; and lo! again

The Desert visible by dismal flames!

It is the sacrificial altar, fed

With living men—how deep the groans! the voice

Of those that crowd the giant wicker thrills

The monumental hillocks; and the pomp

Is for both worlds, the living and the dead.

(The Prelude 1850, 13.327-35)

The darkness suggested here invokes the assumption of the motif of repentance for the death of Wordsworth’s father[18] presented in Book XXII, where “sacrificial altar,” provides us with a sense of Wordsworth’s ritual of chastisement. On the crag, the poet has a premonition of his father’s death and in this retrospection implies of dissonance through the liminal metaphor of a “mist:” 

With all the sorrow that it brought, appeared

A chastisement; and when I called to mind

That day so lately past, when from the crag

I looked in such anxiety of hope;

With trite reflections of morality,

Yet in the deepest passion, I bowed low

To God, who thus corrected my desires;

And, afterwards, the wind and sleety rain,

And all the business of the elements,

The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,

And the bleak music from that old stone wall,

The noise of wood and water, and the mist

That on the line of each of those two roads

Advanced in such indisputable shapes;

All these were kindred spectacles and sounds

To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink,

As at a fountain.

(The Prelude 12.309-26)

The mist is, in the first place, an interposed barrier, yet when the memory is reshaped, the mist advances “indisputable shape,” itself a liminal metaphor. Most striking thing   worth mentioning is the theme of guilt, the unconscious hope of his father’s death whose silhouette turns out to be the “indisputable shape” of a mist. Like Hamlet’s confrontation with his ghost father, the thirteen young poet Wordsworth posits his Oedipal ambivalence in the form of a ghost-mist to show his “anxiety of hope.” Yet the most amazing themes about this spot of time are not only a demonstration of a commonplace Oedipal complex but also deeper lineaments of the Oedipal “correction.” Ironically, God corrects the poet’s filial wish to go home by fulfilling the unconscious desire signified in the premonitory “mist.”

        The liminal experience presented in the words “sacrificial altar,” “dark abyss,” “ghost-mist” produces a ritual of “chastisement” in the meditation of the ambivalent relationships of father/son and superego/ego. An ecological reading, through the ritual of passage, details that a superegoistic mind seems to offer the egoistic nature in the “sacrificial altar,” in the names of father and son. Corresponding to this, Weiskel explains the relationship between the negative sublime and the positive (egoistic) sublime:

The negative sublime apparently exhibits some features of a response to superego anxiety, for in the suddenness of the sublime moment the conscious ego rejects its attachment to sensible objects and turns rather fearfully toward an idea of totality and power which it participates or internalizes. The egotistical sublime, on the contrary, seems akin to narcissism, and in it the psychological role of the father or authority appears to be strangely vacant. It is time to ask whether these speculations can be consolidated, deepened, and tested. (The Romantic Sublime 83) 

In an over-productive society, the aggression and brutality imposed on nature is an often-mentioned and depressing story, like a history of cannibalism, where the authority and totality is always dominating the narcissistic ego. Considered as a commentator on cannibal concerns, Freud argues that the cannibal narrative is part of the development of over-exploited culture, and that cannibal narrative is not just of a universal story of psychic formation, but also of the beginning moment of the empire of industrialism. Freud expounds,

Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father has doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength the totem meal, which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion. (Totem and Taboo 141-42)[19]

More specifically, Freud’s narrative offers an encoding of the development of the otherness of nature in Wordsworth’s image of the dark abyss, in which the poet meditates the relationship between mind and nature. The liminality calls to mind from the “sacrifice alter,” where implies two ambivalent crossings for both the individual and his/her environment.

        The Snowdon passage associates the abyss with the mind itself: the mind of human being broods over the mind of nature. The image fits well with the episode, where imagination “rose from the minds’ abyss / Like an unfathered vapour (5.594-95). It would seem that Wordsworth brings the negative and positive sublime together in the liminal threshold: he imagines a mind in awe of itself as an unfathomable creative power invoking by the mind of nature. Another characteristically Romantic idea, that “the child is father to the man” is essentially richer in wisdom and insight than age, is developed into a subversion to rewrite the history of ecological Oedipal complex between mind and nature. Contrary to Kantian sublime to a response to superego anxiety, the egotistical sublime, in its liminal crossing, seems more akin to narcissism that indicates the psychological role of the father or authority appearing to be absent. Wordsworth’s text and Freud’s are linked by a remarkable correspondence.

        The climactic Mount Snowdon passage of Book XIV, firstly, is an emblem for what Freud calls the mind’s topography, and secondly as a demonstration by analogy of its power to transform its surrounding. In addition, it offers an emblem for the transdualistic mind that achieves a concord of mind and nature so that each respects the other in the equal stand. The liminal sublime, here, subverts the dualism by declining to polarize thought into a timeless cosmological view.

To hold fit converse with the spiritual world,

And with the generations of mankind

Spread over time, past, present, and to come,

Age after age, till Time shall be no more.

Such minds are truly from the Deity,

For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss

That flesh can know is theirs—the consciousness

Of whom they are, habitually infused

Through every image and through every thought,

And all affections by communion raised

From earth to heaven, from human to divine.

 (The Prelude 14.100-118)[20]  

By means of liminal sublime, Wordsworth opens up the social field to the possibility of manifold instantiations of communitas presented in his nature poems “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude, which effect a reconciliation between the negative and the positive sublime. The world of communitas opens the door to the ecological vision, just like John Alder’s remark, “Wordsworth’s ambition is for a fruitful reinhabitation of the landscape by human feelings, and a simultaneous possession of the feelings by the earth. . .”[21] A parallel to this is Goseph W Meeker’s “The Comic Mode,” which describes the relationship between men and nature is based on a union rather than a binary opposition:

Comic strategy, on the other hand, sees life as a game. Its basic metaphors are sporting events and the courtship of lovers, and its conclusion is generally a wedding rather than a funeral. When faced with polar opposites, the problem of comedy is always how to resolve conflict without destroying the participants. Comedy is the art of accommodation and reconciliation. (168)[22]

The Prelude is a poem endowed with the nature openness to liminal experiences, especially Wordsworth’s treatment of the sublime theme. The vital truth of Wordsworth’s green politics is based on such a comic and ideal mode of “accommodation and reconciliation,” even the price for the process could designate several liminal experiences of a tragic mode. Yet the terror of that defile practice has been answered by the poet whose visionary sensibility makes the positive and negative poles of the liminal sublime finally find its way dealing with the crisis within Wordsworth’s mind.

Works Cited

Alder, John. Imaging the earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. London: The U of Georgia P, 1996.

Barry, D. “Telling Changes: From Narrative Family Therapy to Organizational Change and Development.” Journal of Organizational Change Management (10.1): 30-46.

Bateson, G. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.

Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. London: Cornell UP, 1971.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 131-43.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998. 154-67.