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My research explores the interactions between humans and nature as they appear in Cuban writer José María Heredia’s prose poem “En el Teocalli de Cholula.” I argue that María Heredia engages with the sublime by presenting a simultaneous awe and fear of nature. This analysis centers around a close reading of the selected poem and draws from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s conceptualizations of the sublime and contemporary, eco-critical approaches of Allen Carlson and Noël Carroll. Burke distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, but Kant provides a more critical and complex definition of the sublime in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, a more acute definition I use in my reading of María Heredia’s poem. In “Appreciation and the Natural Environment” Carlson offers three, near-emotionless, ways of viewing the aesthetics of nature while Carroll adds the importance of emotion to Carlson’s preferred model of appreciation in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. From this paper, readers will come to recognize that if they were to stand and look onto el Teocalli de Cholula, they too would be in the presence of the sublime. This research is significant as it crosses temporal and geographical boundaries to better understand the unique human experience of the sublime. The interaction and relationships between humans and nature are timeless. Nature provides, sustains, and predicts how humans live. There are unexpected and certain times when nature is stunning – capturing and recounting these moments is nearly impossible, though some artists and writers can capture the sublime: an awe-inspiring excellence. The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich exposes sublime elements of nature in his landscape paintings, especially in the well-known work Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. José María Heredia is a poet who similarly attempts to recreate the indescribable experience of nature. In this paper, I will draw from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s conceptualizations of the sublime from their 18th century Enlightenment texts and pair these conceptualizations with the contemporary, ecoOregon Undergraduate Research Journal Jones Volume 10 Issue 1 Winter 2017 12 critical perspectives of Allen Carlson and Noël Carroll. I will apply these conceptualizations and arguments in my close reading of José María Heredia’s prose poem “En el Teocalli de Cholula.” In brief, I will argue that María Heredia engages with the sublime by invoking a simultaneous awe and fear of nature. Furthermore, readers of the poem will come to recognize that if they were to stand and look onto el Teocalli de Cholula, they too would be in the presence of the sublime. Cuban-born José María Heredia (1803-1839) died young and full of passion. After the Cuban government exiled José Maria Heredia from the country in 1823, accusing him of an alleged plot against Spain’s colonial government, he spent the rest of his short life living and working in Mexico and America (Glover 78). María Heredia’s works fall into the Romantic era of South American literature because of their distinctive tropes, which Glover articulates as: “the exaltation of passion over reason, a fascination with ruins, the importance of nature, [and] the preeminence of the individual ego” (78). María Heredia published “En el Teocalli de Cholula” in 1822. The Náhuatl definition of teocalli is “house of a god” and in Spanish, it is defined as a “templo de los antiguos nahuas de México.” Translated to English, teocalli is a temple for the Nahua people’s ancestors who settled in what is now modern-day Mexico and El Salvador. One town that these natives occupied was Cholula; it is surrounded by large volcanoes and sits in the modern-day state of Puebla, Mexico. Nature, in the form of volcanoes, encompasses both the temple and the town of Cholula; the temple, a manmade object, literally sits in nature. The accrued human history, especially the battles fought and rulers’ reigns, in the natural area surrounding the temple and the title “On the Teocalli of Cholula” draws attention to the interaction between nature and humankind, and presents the temple as the subject of the poem. In this paper, I will explore the continuous interplay between humans and nature through a reading of María Heredia’s poem. First, I will contextualize my approach through an in-depth investigation on what the sublime is and how we as humans experience it, with reference to 18th century philosophers Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Second, I will present a close reading of María Heredia’s poem to examine how the ebb and flow pattern of the magnificent (awe) and hostile (fear) descriptions of nature suggest a sublime encounter when a human views el Teocalli de Cholula. Third, I will explore and apply Allen Carlson and Noël Carroll’s contemporary works surrounding the appreciation of nature to demonstrate how María Heredia involves something larger than the sublime, that is, the idea that humans must appreciate the nature that surrounds us because our interaction with nature determines how we as a species will continue to live. Before delving into a possible sublime experience in a text, we must establish a clear definition of the sublime. For this definition, we turn to two 18th century philosophers, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant; Burke makes the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime and Kant expands Burke’s definition and explores different occurrences of the sublime. In his 1757 work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke defines the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. Burke argues that experiencing both the beautiful and the sublime come from the feelings of pain and pleasure. 1 Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal Jones Volume 10 Issue 1 Winter 2017 13 Throughout his work, Burke associates beauty with love “or some passion similar to it” and the sublime with danger (162). Burke discusses how pain and pleasure can both have positive effects: “pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence” (44). Of course, the sublime is not an experience of pure and extreme pain, but rather it is an encounter with something just near it (60). The sublime is different from the merely beautiful. Burke defines the sublime as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, that is it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (589). We see the pain and the pleasure of the sublime in “En el Teocalli de Cholula” as the narrator is experiencing it. Stanza five provides a source of the narrator’s familiarity with the sublime. María Heredia writes how “the shadow from Popcatépetl slowly/reached out and spread forth resembling/a colossal phantasm. The shaded arc/finally touched me, covering me,/its grandeur grew and grew until at last/it veiled the earth in its cosmic shade” (68-73).2 The narrator feels excitement when the black shadow of the volcano covers him, a kind of terror, as Burke would say, but the volcano is too sublime for him to look away. In his 1764 work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant works with the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the sublime; Kant argues that one must feel beauty to feel the sublime and must know the sublime to know beauty.3 Kant elaborates upon Burke’s definition of the sublime by articulating how the sublime and the beautiful need each other in order to exist. While Burke shows the beautiful and the sublime as distinct, for Kant, the beautiful and the sublime entail one another. Kant gives examples of what the sublime is and what the beautiful is, as shown here: The finer feeling that we will now consider is preeminently of two kinds: the feeling of the sublime and of the beautiful. Being touched by either is agreeable, but in very different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peaks arise about the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or the depiction of the kingdom of hell by Milton arouses satisfaction, but with dread; by contrast, the prospect of meadows strewn with flowers, of valleys with winding brooks, covered with grazing herds, the description of Elysium, or Homer’s depiction of the girdle of Venus also occasion an agreeable sentiment, but one that is joyful and smiling. (14-6) In short, “the night is sublime, the day is beautiful” (16). Kant even separates the sublime into three distinct categories: the terrifying – “accompanied with some dread or even melancholy,” the noble – “quiet admiration,” and the magnificent – “beauty spread over a sublime prospect” (16). “En el Teocalli de Cholula” thus also plays with Kant’s understanding of the sublime with the narrator’s continued description of Popocatépetl in stanza five. The narrator knows and expresses that he is in the presence of the sublime; as Kant describes, “the sublime must always be large” whereas the beautiful is usually small (17). María Heredia writes, “I turned my eyes to the sublime Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal Jones Volume 10 Issue 1 Winter 2017 14 volcano,/which, visible through a foggy curtain/in the western sky, was outlining/the contours of its immense design” (74-7).4 This concise application of the sublime in María Heredia’s work is only the beginning. In summary, in this prose poem, José María Heredia employs an ebb and flow pattern between magnificent and hostile descriptions, correlating to the awe and fear of nature; this pattern distinguishes the simply beautiful from the sublime. This characteristic factor showcases the interplay among the beautiful, the sublime, and the result

The Threshold of the Sublime: Standing in Awe and Fear in Jose Maria Heredia's "En el Teocalli de Cholula"