Wole Soyinka
the plays. The paradox of great theatrical and aesthetic resourcefulness
serving as a vehicle of world-weary pessimism as inscribed in these partic-
ular plays is perhaps best understood in the light of the radically opposed
views of the “sublime” as defined respectively by classical theorists of
European antiquity and nineteenth-century German idealist aesthetic
philosophy. For the former, the “sublime” happens when great, lofty
thoughts and feelings find perfect expression in form, style and rhetoric.
As Longinus put it, “sublimity is the echo of a great soul.”By this he
meant that sublimity is achievable only by a rare order of artists who
both have the capacity for great, lofty thoughts and feelings and are
gifted with the powers of expression to give these rarefied thoughts and
feelings perfect, unsurpassable formal expression:
There are, it may be said, five principal sources of elevated language...First
and most important is the power of forming great conception... Secondly,
there is vehement and inspired passion. These two components of the sublime
are for the most part innate. Those which remain are partly the product of
art. The due formation of figures deals with two sorts of figures, first those of
thought and secondly those of expression. Next there is noble diction, which
in turn comprises choice of words, and use of metaphors, and elaboration of
language. The fifth cause of elevation – one which is the fitting conclusion of all
that have preceded it – is dignified and elevated composition. (Dukore,)
This conception of the sublime as constituted by a correspondence be-
tween great feelings and thoughts and the rhetorical means of their ex-
pression that is so perfect as to approach the divine, is radically at odds
with the theorizations of the sublime by Hegel and other nineteenth-
century German idealist philosophers. For Hegel, the sublime indicates
our experience of great, unassuageable feelings of inadequacy before
that which in nature and life approaches the ineffable, the unbounded,
the chaotic. Examples of these are: a violently tempestuous sea and nat-
ural disaster on a colossal scale. Indeed, what Longinus describes as the
sublime approximates to what Hegel designates Beauty, which he then
opposed to the Sublime. In this latter conception, especially as reimag-
ined by many contemporary postmodernists, the “sublime” is the ulti-
mate marker of the inexpressible, the unrepresentable, especially in the
ways that it offers no satisfactory release, no catharsis for the powerfully
agitated emotions it stirs up.
Paul Gilroy’s deployment of the notion of a “slave sublime” in his book,
The Black Atlantic, derives from this Kantian-Hegelian notion of the sub-
lime, without making the slightest nod to the classical uses of the term.
Gilroy deploys this notion in order to write against what he calls “the fatal