Attaining the Sublime

When Longinus describes the sublime as an "excellence of discourse," I couldn't help but be reminded about Bahktin's section on the purity of prose and poetry. He writes in his concluding paragraph, "if the art of poetry, as a utopian philosophy of genres, gives rise to the conception of a purely poetic, extrahistorical language, a language of the gods - then it must be said that the art of prose is close to a conception of languages as historically concrete and living things" (331).

The goal of attaining the sublime for Bahktin is a revelation of understanding, like a new world something he describes as "edenic." The "art of prose" is the act of embodying the sublime, communicating something beyond just the text. While reading Longinus, I had difficulty separating the idea of sublime from typical writing. Bahktin, discussing prose art, says, "prose art presumes a deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness of living discourse, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and in social struggle, it deals with discourse that is still warm from that struggle and hostility" (331).

To me this passage directly correlates to Longinus' sublime "excellence in discourse." I have not committed to a solid definition of what is sublime, but through the lens of Bahktin I can gather that it is a dimension of writing with a trajectory for becoming and consciousness. Could this be exactly what Bahktin references when he predicts the art of poetry to someday become "the language of the gods?"