The twin cities of Fantasy and Science Fiction are bordered in suburbs by horror, fairies, and spirituality.
L. Ron Hubbard made this clear, as did H.P. Lovecraft. I only suggest reading the latter if you enjoy mind-bending forays into darkness.
But these belie the twins of reality and unreality, or as the mind of James Joyce stated:
What is clear and concise can’t deal with reality, for to be real is to be surrounded by mystery.
-James Joyce
The following is a quote from “A Glossary of Literary Terms” describing the quality of sublimity. It is an aspiration of many writers, spokesmen, actors, authors and minds. From the Bible, to Tolkien’s prose, to Hugo Weaving’s or Kenneth Branagh’s film speeches, or scrawny2brawny’s Youtube artistry:
Sublime.
As defined by Longinus, the sublime is a quality that can occur in any type of discourse, whether poetry or prose. Whereas the effect of rhetoric on the hearer or reader of a discourse is persuasion, the effect of the sublime is “transport” (ekstasis)—it is that quality of a passage which “shatters the hearer’s composure,” exercises irresistible “domination” over him, and “scatters the subjects like a bolt of lightning.” The source of the sublime lies in the capabilities of the speaker or writer. Three of these –the use of figurative language, nobility of expression, and elevated composition–are matters of art that can be acquired by practice; but two other, and more important, capabilities, are largely innate: “loftiness of thought” and “strong and inspired passion.” The ability to achieve sublimity is in itself enough to prove the transcendent genius of a writer, and expresses the nobility of the writer’s character: “sublimity is the ring of greatness in the soul.”
A Glossary of Literary Terms; M.H. Abrams & Geoffrey Galt Harpham
As all forms of literature and other arts are subject to this potential quality and aspiration in the dramatic themes that populate the dominant depths of most human hearts; a need to understand the human life as sacred, for instance, or an answer for the meaning of life to add value and dignity beyond the atrocities of the age, where humor fails or is irrelevant…I then prescribe the study of books. The Bible is, after all, a book. There is something fundamentally scoring of weight and grace and extreme importance in the written word, and the ancient that survives exudes majesty, and the sublime. As Jesus said in response three times to Satan: “It is written.” Or, also with superlative sublimity: “Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will by no means pass away.”
Of course we should be aware he was speaking specifically of sacred texts, the scripture that makes up the Hebrew canon at first, and the Bible as a whole. In Ecclesiastes, penned by Solomon, there is said in the twelfth chapter: “to the making of many books there is no end, and much devotion to them is wearisome to the flesh.”
But all of us who love books have felt before the thrill of complex stories, of sublime prose(and poetry), epics or narratives, and that is something writers aspire to experience and also to create.
Returning to M.H. Abrams section on “Sublime.”
…the German philosopher Immanuel Kant divided the sublime objects into two kinds: (1) the “mathematical sublime” encompasses the sublime of magnitude–of vastness in size or seeming limitlessness or infinitude in number. (2) The “dynamic sublime” encompasses the objects conducive to terror at our seeming helplessness before the overwhelming power of nature, provided that the terror is rendered pleasurable by the safe situation of the observer. All of Kant’s examples of sublimity are scenes and events in the natural world: “the immeasurable host” of starry systems such as the Milky Way, “shapeless mountain masses towering one above the other in wild disorder,” “volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river.”
Kant maintains, however, that the sublimity resides “not in the Object of nature” itself, but “only in the mind of the judging Subject”…
M.H. Abrams, Geoffrey Galt Harpham
This last note on the defining quality of the sublime is where some of the highest peaks have been reached specifically in the twin literary genres of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It is the knowledge of the reader that experiences this definition of the sublime in story, and as long as the suspension of disbelief is strong enough by the hand of the author, we can experience Kant’s sublime as often as we open our eyes to treasured books and the advantages of SFX in film. As Subjects of the sublime who observe the Object of the scenery in literary fantastic prose, it is also the duty of safety (and sacredness) to separate true spiritual knowledge from melting into a stew of overwhelmed faculties that someone like Arthur C. Clarke or Dan Simmons might override(or worse yet, L. Ron Hubbard)…if only temporarily. Isn’t that why we read these forms
