Adorno as Interpreter of Bjørnson

The Negative ­Sublime in ‘The Eagles’ Nest'

Abstract

 In his posthumous work Aesthetic Theory (1970), ­Theodor W. Adorno argues that the concept of the sublime must be cleared of its positive connotations that were established by Kant in the German idealist tradition. According to Adorno, the sublime shudder is the experience of the negativity of pure presence that occurs when a subject recognizes itself as nature, not as an ideal entity lifted above it. “The Eagle’s Nest” (1859) by Norwegian ­author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson serves as an illustrative example of this particular dynamic. The main character of the short story is a young man, an outsider, who is rejected by a community of villagers as an eligible husband for local women his age. In an endeavour to free the community from the threat of eagles nesting on a steep cliff above the village, he climbs the wall of the cliff and ultimately falls to his death. The narrative interweaves the social motives of ex­clusion and recogniton and relates them to the oppositon between nature and culture. In this way, the story enacts the tension between a traditonal, idealist notion of the sublime and what we may call the modernist or the negative sublime as proposed by Adorno.