Longinus and Bakhitn

In my reading of Bakhtin's "The Problem of Speech Genres", I understood that the role of the listener is to struggle toward or against identification with the speaker, and also that this relationship is the silent function that works through Longinus' understanding of sublimity. Longinus' failure to name this principle, however, causes unanswered gaps in his treatise.

Bakhtin claims that the speaker "does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his own idea in someone else's mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objections, execution, and so forth."  (Bakhitin 69)


Longinus understands sublimity through the active relationship--the speaker's communicated message and the listener's response--between the listener and speaker identified by Bakhtin in his discussion of emotion: "Some people often get carried away, like drunkards, into emotions unconnected with the subject, which are simply pedantic invention. The audiences feels nothing, so that they inevitably make an exhibition of themselves, parading their ecstatises before an audience which does not share them."  (Longinus 348)

Here, the "subject" acts simiraly to Bakhitkin's "speech genre." It tells the audience what kinds of emotions to expect from the author and what kind of attitude they should take toward those emotions. When a speaker fails to exemplify those emotions, he fails to illicit any kind of emotive response from the audience. Successful communication therefore relies on the author's awareness of the listener's potential response, and sublimity relies on that response "agreeing" with the speaker's utterances.

Longinus, however, mostly studies this relationship from the perspective of the author. I found this exemplified in his dicussion of "visualization:  “Had it not been up among those heavenly bodies and moved in their courses, he could never have visualized such things” (Longinus 356).

Originally, I had mistakenly thought that the "he" of the sentence was the audience, but reading it over again, I realize that the "he" is the author.  Longinus is explaining how the author visualizes his own internal realities through words. He claims visualization is "the situation in which enthusiasm and emotion make the speaker see what he is saying and bring it visually before his audience" (356). The audience's role in visualization is left unexplained in this discussion. Longinus never addresses the transfer of the author's visualization to the audience's responding visualization of the same idea. How the audience comes to accept or see this visualization for themselves is a relationship never explicitly identified by Longinus.