ESSAY CEMETERY

Through the title character in his novel Elizabeth Costello , J.M. Coetzee explores the moral responsibilities of the writer. In Chapter Six of that novel, Elizabeth reads a book about the attempts of German soldiers on Hitler’s life. She is struck by a fictional passage in which a hangman taunts the plotters he is about to execute. Elizabeth finds the passage vivid and terrifying; she feels it is evil. Elizabeth feels some of the evil must have transferred to West through the mere act of imagining and writing the hangman’s words, and likewise to the novel’s readers. “I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had gone on reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on.” In The Sublime and the Beautiful , Edmund Burke defines the sublime. The sublime, he posits, is “the strongest emotion that the mind is capable of feeling” (Ch. 1.7). It is evoked by feelings of pain or danger. Most interestingly, pain that is far enough removed from danger elicits pleasure.

Part 1, Chapter 7: Of the Sublime Anything that evokes feelings of pain and danger produces the sublime- "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling". Pain is more powerful than pleasure. Furthermore, pain that is far enough from death can elicits pleasure. Part 2, Chapter 2: Terror Fear is the anticipation of pain or death, and as such it paralyzes. Thus, just as pain, fear too evokes the sublime. The common denominator of all of these is terror and it is terror which evokes the sublime. This is reflected in linguistics: in many languages similar words are used to describe wonder (the sublime) and terror. Part 3, Chapter 1: Of Beauty Beauty is distinct from but related to the sublime. Beauty is "those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it". Love, conversely, is defined by the perception of beauty. Love is distinct from lust and desire. Lust and desire are forces which drive to possess the object t

In his 1757 treatise, "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", Edmund Burke presents his views on the concept of the sublime. He theorizes that the sublime is a powerful feeling evoked by the apprehension of danger or death. As such, it is an element central to many narratives that explore human experience. The element of the sublime is inherent in stories spanning different genres and eras, from historically realistic portrayals of war to cyberpunk visions of technologically-dominated futures. The sublime according to Burke is "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling". This strongest emotion is not pleasant, but painful. Burke postulates that pain, danger and the prospect of death "are much more powerful than … pleasure". Death, he says, is more powerful than pain. Fear, "being an apprehension of pain or death", is an evoker of the sublime as well. The common thread to all these