Theater of Anxiety in Shelley's The Cenci and Musset's Lorenzaccio - Percy Shelley, Alfred de Musset

Criticism, Wntr, 2000 by Remy Roussetzki

In a sense, all figures of speech confront the ordinarily undetectable fact that language has limits. Aristotle's definition of metaphor--"the application to one thing of an alien name belonging to another thing"--was soon to become a classical definition of the trope in general. And why do we use "an alien name" to refer to something, if not because the "proper name" does not signify the quality we intend to manifest in that referent?(36) The characteristically sublime figure, however, does not require rhetoricians, linguists, and now psychoanalysts to make explicit that language has limits which it ceaselessly attempts to overcome; it wears the limit so to speak on its sleeve, explicitly inscribing the failure of language. Ever since Longinus launched the minor tradition that grew around the word, says Lacoue-Labarthe, "l'enjeu du sublime aura toujours ete la presentation du meta-physique comme tel" (the game of the sublime has always been to present the metaphysical as such).(37) However sporadic and obscure its thematic treatments, the sublime will always have constituted a meta-discourse on the finite nature of human discourse. In Shelley and Musset, as in De Quincey, the sublime works as a sign that there is a "beyond," an "after" to the metaphors that represent extreme situations and that "there" conformatio is no longer possible: no metaphor can "step over" the irrepresentable and give it adequate figure and stable form.

The sublime passage in a text relates (indirectly) to an inexpressible real, to das Ding an sich; and so does anxiety in the subject. Some sign, some thing sparks anxiety in us, though no thing and no sign can strictly speaking pass for the cause of anxiety In Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety, Freud marks a distinction between fear and anxiety: "Anxiety is undeniably related to expectation; one feels anxiety lest something occurs."(38) In a note, the translator Alden Bunker remarks: "The German usage is: Angst vor Etwas--literally, anxiety before something, rather than of something." In contradistinction to fear, which is fear of some-thing present in the front of the subject, anxiety does not have a proper object. The word "vor" suggests a contorted time-frame where the future comes from the past and where the cause awaits. Anxiety is the expectation (Erwartung) of no-thing lurking in the object of a definite fear. "Anxiety is endowed with a certain character of indefiniteness and objectlessness; correct usage even changes its name when it has found an object, and in that case speaks instead of fear." If it is now paralyzed by anxiety at the thought of the worst, the subject, Freud infers, has previously experienced the worst and is now trying to prevent it, which is the function of anxiety. The subject anticipates in this fearful situation the helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) characteristic of traumatic situations it has known in early childhood. The infant ego had no way to avoid the stimuli ceaselessly impinging from within and without (e.g., when no adult could help). Then, "anxiety was the original reaction to helplessness in the traumatic situation."(39) The child soon learns, however, to repeat actively, to master what had been suffered passively, feeling anxious before the worst happens again. Now, as soon as s/he perceives danger (say the imminent loss of a beloved object--toy, person, part of the body), the child releases "attenuated," one could say homeopathic, doses of the anxiety that once accompanied total loss: