Reading the Sublime: Or, What can Rhetoric Mobilizations of the Sublime Do for Narrative (Identity) and Ecocriticism

In their introduction to a collection on “Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory”, Erin James and Eric Morel shed a light on perspectives in narrative theory which could significantly expand the scope of considerations — but have yet remained underexploited (if not unexploited) — in the field of ecocriticism. Among these leads, the critics mention feminist narrative theorist Robyn Warhol’s take on Gerald Prince’s concept of the “disnarrated” — “those passages in a narrative that consider what did not or does not take place” (Prince 1988, 1) — and her derivatives, the “unnarrated” and the “neonarrative”. Warhol describes the “unnarrated” as referring to “those passages that explicitly do not tell what is supposed to have happened, foregrounding the narrator’s refusal to narrate”, and the “neonarrative” as the successful attempt of these passages as “narratorial strategies” in “making narrative genres new” (Warhol 2005, 221). More interestingly, James and Morel relate these terms to answer the question of “why more contemporary narratives don’t give attention to toxic waste” (James and Morel 2018, 360). In this paper, I will address this question through a rhetorical analysis of applications of the sublime as means of representing toxicity (or, more largely, ecological disruption) in several passages from U.S. novels and nonfiction books. Adopting James Phelan’s view of “narrative as rhetoric”, in which the author has “the purpose of communicating knowledge, feelings, values, and beliefs [to the reader]” (Phelan 1996, 18), I will argue that rhetorical mobilizations of the sublime in narratives inform the reader about the “unnarrated” political forces which cause toxicity and, consequently, lead him/her to develop a more ecologically responsible sense of self or identity. For example, I will examine how Rachel Carson’s apocalyptic “Fable for Tomorrow” introduces, through the use of the “toxic sublime” (Peeples 2011) and the “poetic apocalyptic sublime” (Salmose 2018), a global framework of ecological urgency in which natural sublimity is pervaded with the “evil spell” (Carson 1962, 21) of “unnarrated” anthropogenic toxicity (e.g., pesticides and fuel oil). I will show that the sublime is an appropriate trope or rhetorical strategy for describing these forms of ecological disruption that generally “can’t”, “shouldn’t” or “wouldn’t be told” (Warhol 2005, 222) in narratives, while they actually shape humans’ understanding of self, and I will therefore present the texts analyzed as “neonarratives” which highlight humans’ new possible ways of relating to the nonhuman in an anthropogenic context.