The term “Sublime” is understood as the highest excellence of artistic expression in literature. Longinus, the author of the treatise On the Sublime finds five important sources of sublimity: (1) the power of conceiving impressive thoughts, (2) capacity for strong emotion, (3) appropriate use of figures of thought and speech, (4) nobility of diction, and (5) dignity of composition.
In order to explain the ideas of Longinus’ On the Sublime, Emma Duffy-Comparone’s recent short story called Marvel Sands is the most applicable type of literary work that corresponds to the concept of the five sources of Sublimity.
The first source of sublime is concerned with the writer’s grandeur of thought. The use of imagery in this source is useful because it helps the readers to understand the concepts of the writer, that can be appealing to one or more of the five human senses. A number of parts in the passage of the Marvel Sands could be categorized as the way in which the writer shows the reader the intended image of the work, instead of telling them. And some of them are as follows: (1) using the first-person perspective in telling the story, the readers experience the main character’s foolishness of leaving sand on the floor and not putting the bills all the same way in the tray and (2) the backdrop of seagulls and silence reveals her maturing view and reflects her world that she’s still learning.
The second source of sublime is the genuine emotion. If some emotions, such as anger, require that the persona of the emotion be believed to exist, even though he/she actually doesn’t, the author made it possible for the readers to feel the fictional character’s intuitive feeling throughout the story.
The third source of sublime is the poetic use of language. There is a line in the story wherein the author used a particular figure of speech called metonymy– “When I got home, I could see the television flashing blue through the living-room window.”
The fourth source of sublime is the diction that includes the choice and arrangement of words. In the story of the Marvel Sands, the character said the following lines, “I felt a vague flutter of laughter in my chest and swallowed it”, “I was standing outside the booth, watching storm clouds gather in the west like large bruises.” And by actually observing them, it is too obvious that the use of ornaments of style (simile and hyperbole) is the author’s one way of expressing her ideas by means of a figurative language.
The last source of sublime is the dignified and elevated arrangement of the diction for the grandeur of composition. The descriptive type of tellling the story shows the author’s technique of letting the readers to participate in the characters’ experiences.
This analysis leads to the belief of Longinus that “Great writing does not persuade; it takes the reader out of himself.”
