Jean Sibelius and His World by Grimley Daniel M

Author:Grimley, Daniel M.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781400840205
Publisher: Princeton University Press

The Representation of Nature and the Evocation of the Sublime

Adorno recognizes that representing “nature” in music has much to do with what is not expressed, with what is not defined—in effect, what is not actually presented, as Jean-François Lyotard was to put it later.22 Music is particularly good at this because of its lack of referentiality. At the same time, the “sound of nature” in art has to do with the silence of nature, even in the case of a “sounding art” like music. In the late Aesthetic Theory (1970) Adorno writes: “What in artworks is structured, gapless, resting in itself, is an after-image of the silence that is the single medium through which nature speaks.”23 As I have already suggested, Adorno is really referring not so much to the representation of nature in Sibelius as to the evocation of the sublime, even if his focus is almost exclusively on the concept of “nature.” Indeed, it is difficult not to think of the identification of techniques designed to achieve the effects of the sublime in the different arts in Edmund Burke’s 1757 compendium-like treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke refers, for instance, to the use of the color black, to darkness and obscurity, and above all to the need to create a sense of fear and terror through a use of indistinctness and vagueness. Obscurity, not clarity, is required if you want to create the effect of the sublime, insists Burke. Seen in such a context, Sibelius might appear to be a master of such effects in music. Yet strangely, though Adorno shows great awareness of the implications of the sublime in his Aesthetic Theory, particularly in relation to modernism, he does not emphasize the distinction between the representation of nature and the evocation of the sublime in the case of Sibelius in his two 1930s articles on the composer. Löwenthal, however, does just this in relation to Hamsun, and makes the point very clearly by contrasting Hamsun’s evocation of the sublime in his description of a violent storm in his novel The Last Joy (1912) to Kant’s famous description of the power of nature and the experience of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment.24 Löwenthal writes, in comparing the words of Hamsun and Kant:

At first sight there seems to be no essential difference between the two passages. For Kant, however, the sublimity of nature and the experience of man’s helplessness before it are counterbalanced by the concept of nature as subordinate in the face of humanity. It is man’s own knowledge and imagination which creates the conception of the grandiosity in nature that dwarfs him. In the end, the rational faculties of man are of a higher order than the elemental force of nature, and they allow him to see it as sublime, instead of simply terrifying. . . . For Kant, nature is not to console man for frustrations, but to stimulate his moral and intellectual development.25

Yet in Hamsun, Löwenthal argues, “the relation of man to nature takes on an entirely different cast.

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