The Sublime in BotW.
Here’s a long rambling thing I wrote.
Link Above a Sea of Fog
Standing on the Great Plateau looking down at the swirling mess of fog and malice surrounding Hyrule Castle, our hero (and the player) is presented with a world of such scale, such magnitude, that it may very well, overwhelm us. How fitting, for an open-world Zelda game that feels massive to immediately draw parallels to the sublimity of Caspar Friedrich’s famous painting “Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog”.
Painted in 1818, Caspar Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog” is often used as a perfect example of the concept of the sublime, an utterly confounding idea that being awe-struck can have an effect on one’s ability to rationalize and cause one to be consumed entirely by the immense beauty/power of something. The box art for Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild pays homage to Friedrich’s painting almost perfectly. While this is nothing new, the ‘Wanderer’ is a common image used in all forms of media, it’s usage here for BotW feels deliberate, and meant to evoke direct comparisons to the original work.
First brought about by Longinus in the form of what he called hypsos, the sublime has had a long history of putting man up against the grandeur, splendor, and immensity of nature and thought, overwhelming the senses and often leading to an introspective battle with the subjective self. Longinus’ work on the sublime saw it as an effect of impeccable rhetoric, but even in the early days of the term ‘sublime’ there was always an element of a spiritual closeness to God. There is this idea that something is so powerful it’s as if you are staring into the face of God, an immanence that envelops the subject, leading potentially to feelings of ekstasis (feeling outside of oneself). In Longinus, scholar Robert Doran says “ekstasis is explicitly related to an experience of the divine as a momentary transcendence of the human condition. Indeed, the notion of sublimity as being identified with an exceptional or extraordinary state of mind – with intensity, as contrasted with its normal, everyday state from which it is displaced.” He then talks about how terror is considered the strongest emotion that would likely cause displacement from the mundane condition, which is why an element of terror and fear is associated with the sublime.
There is much more to be said about Longinus’ ideas on the sublime, but let’s fast forward to the 18th century, and Emmanuel Kant’s look at the sublime in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. It is from here that we can better see what Caspar Friedrich’s painting is all about, and as such, how the cover art of BotW is itself sublime.
In a well composed paper on the sublime, Laure Cahen-Maurel summarizes part of Kant’s thoughts in this way: “the sublime brings to light a limit that is both ‘mathematical’ and ‘dynamic,’ that is, theoretical and practical, concerning the capacity of the human being to directly access whatever surpasses the sensible world.” What is being teased here is the sublime is beyond what is rational, beyond judgment. Kant’s thoughts on the sublime are focused on the inner turmoil we feel when trying to make a judgment of something. The limits of our own subjectivity. We reach Kant’s ‘mathematical sublime’ when we encounter something that causes us to either suffer a failure of comparison or allow us to make an absolute comparison. Which makes some sense when he follows that up by saying that the ‘absolutely great’ can be expressed as either “that which is great beyond all comparison” or “in comparison with everything else which is small.”
Kant also explores a second form of the sublime, which he calls the “dynamically sublime,” which has much more to do with relations of power and dominion. Kant starts with an encounter with natural power “nature considered in aesthetic judgment as a power that has no dominion over us is dynamically sublime” which is somewhat paradoxical, in that he’s saying that this power is greater than our own, yet does not have dominion over us. Robert Doran says this about Kant’s somewhat awkward phrasing: “we fear nature only to the extent that we find that we are “no match for it,” and yet we resist it all the same. Thus if the power of nature must be perceived as threatening (“an object of fear”) to produce a feeling of aesthetic elevation, the elevation itself derives from the resistance to the all-powerfulness of nature, that is, a resistance to that which cannot be resisted, a resistance to a superior power that, despite its superior power, has no dominion over us. In this manner we are, paradoxically, exalted by a power that overwhelms us – the dual transcendence-structure of sublimity.”
It’s a situation where something is seen as so great, and having such overwhelming power, but at the same time can be judged as being impossible in its ability to actually act on us with this immense power. Nature exudes power, but the idea that nature will then crush us with this power seems unlikely or impossible. We’re not talking about a hurricane, or an earthquake, but more simply looking at a mountain and recognizing it as having a power over us, even though that mountain isn’t going to do anything to us. We are awe-struck, and fear the mountain, but it won’t actually do anything to us.
So… That’s the sublime… Now, back to the BotW cover art and Friedrich’s Wanderer.
The Wanderer stands on a rocky peak overlooking a sea of mountains and fog, just as Link looks over the Kingdom of Hyrule shrouded (at least somewhat) in fog as well, with mountains off in the distance, blending into a horizon that seems to have no clear beginning or end. Creating a sense of a vast, infinite nature.
The use of The Wanderer/Link is important as “we look to this human presence as a means of determining the general scale of the scene, and more specifically, of relating our physical bodies to the spatial parameters of the painted (game) world. It functions as a placeholder we can imaginatively occupy, allowing us a virtual existence in the landscape, and shaping our lines of sight within a spatial frame.” The figure acts as an avatar for us to import ourselves into the scene, fitting in Friedrich’s painting, and even more so when it comes to Breath of the Wild.
“Although the traveling figures provide a potential location within, and relationship to, these visions of the world, their presence at once encourages and denies our ability to (even imaginatively) embody such a position. The Rückenfigur stands as an embodiment of humanity’s abstraction from the world that paradoxically is encountered as if at a distance from behind this wandering subject: the figure functions as an intervening medium that separates us from a direct experience of the sublimity of the mountainous scene.”
What is interesting about Zelda then, is that because of the very nature of the medium of video games, that human abstraction and intervention only exists in the box art, but in fact, the player is encouraged to directly confront sublimity once they take up the mantle as the player. We can dive right into the mountainous scene and in fact revel in the dynamic sublime of it. However, this may not be a fair way to compare the two pieces, as we should look at them as only pieces of art. I suppose what I can say is that Friedrich’s painting shows us a scene we can never hope to be a part of, whereas BotW shows us a scene we can enter, by way of the digital, and the figure (Link) instead acts as a medium that connects us to a direct experience of sublimity with a mountainous scene (that is, assuming there is some kind of digital sublime…).
From here, an exploration of the notion of a digital sublime is possible, as ideas of the digital self and digital subjectivity enter the dialogue in media studies, certainly we must reach a point where the notion of the sublime can be experienced in a digital environment. The confrontation with something either beyond compare or with immense power. In the case of BotW, I would certainly say there have been countless moments where I have been awe-struck in a way that other games do not do. Final Fantasy XV has an amazing world to explore, but rarely were there points in the game where I felt myself in the presence of something that was sublime. That’s not to say that feeling didn’t exist, as I think it did, but BotW has an ineffable quality to it that continually creates that feeling for me. From the view at the top of the Dueling Peaks, looking out at the ocean from Hateno, the vastness of the Gerudo Desert… All of these have created in me a feeling that overwhelmed me.
There is also an effort in these kinds of works to depict, through abstraction, a supreme being, or God, that which defies representation. Friedrich would use voids of color without any apparent or logical end. Often, the edge of the canvas would not act as a narrating frame, but more like an arbitrary demarcation of our limited view of the limitless. This is definitely the case with the top part of the image for BotW. Beyond Hyrule Castle and Death Mountain is a horizon that bleeds upwards into the clouds, and from there runs off the edge of the frame. The color palette chosen for this section of the painting is indicative of sunshine, but as there is no discernible source, one might assume this is meant to be a representation of the divine, of The Goddess. The endless horizon, the rays of light, all signs seem to point to this.
“The possibility of religious encounters permeates his [Friedrich’s] entire conception and treatment of nature as a visual abyss, an approach that serves to remind us of the infinite difference separating human consciousness from a divine or sublime presence.”
So any time we encounter nature in this way in BotW, seeing it as a visual abyss of such depth we are overwhelmed by it, we are experiencing the limit of human consciousness and being made aware that there is more beyond that we will never be able to reach, the land where the Goddess resides.
“The meaning we are able to derive from Friedrich’s depictions of nature is in this way not disguised or hidden beneath the surface of the image, simply waiting for us to find it. Instead, it is in large part a reflection of our own interpretations of what we see. Emptiness is not a façade covering hidden meanings but a surface that reflects a hidden God whose invisibility we experience as a representation of the unknowable world.”
When thinking about BotW, what we are talking about is the world presented to us reflects the Goddess, whose presence is everywhere and always, her very invisibility is experienced as a representation of the unknown world, which could very well be the Spirit Realm. As this might be the case, Link is one who can break through this mirror-like sublime encounter and breach the Spirit Realm, taking his place as a hero beyond compare, a sublime subject himself.
There is some interesting speculation on who the Wanderer is in Friedrich’s painting, with some of the mind he was a certain colonel in the Saxon infantry, as he wears the traditional green uniform of the volunteer rangers of the time. As a counter argument, others believe the man is supposed to be unidentifiable, stating that if Friedrich wanted the man to be identified, he could have done so, but he chose to have his Wanderer turn his back to us. This has been done to universalize the Wanderer, “enabling us to imaginatively occupy his presence… …the Wanderer can be seen as standing in for and describing an absent or hidden subject in whose reflection we experience the modern relation of human to world.”
This plays well into the very essence of video games, in that our protagonist is supposed to be universalized. Although this is the first Zelda game where Link’s name cannot be changed (a knock against his value as fully universal), he still remains silent (HE BETTER AT LEAST), so he continues to act as an avatar by which we can experience the relation of human to world, even if the world is a digital one. We don’t merely get to imaginatively occupy his presence, we physically occupy his presence in the digital space.
Lastly, there is much scholarship with regard to the subject position of the person viewing Friedrich’s painting, and the Wanderer himself. It is thought that the Wanderer is considered a spectator (an inactive viewer), removed even from the mountain vista he is very much a part of. The fact that he can be ‘separate’ from the world is a “celebrated position of the Human” giving him a privileged position to make a judgment on nature.
Now, we the viewer of the painting are then situated even further outside of that, which in turn leads to more intensified internalization. We experience the subjectivity we project onto the subject of the painting who is already a spectator removed from the nature he seems to inhabit.
What might be interesting to posit from this is when it comes to the medium of video games, the modern subject position of being removed from experiencing the real because that real is being mediated by illusory subjectivity which we may be responsible for producing, can be destroyed as we are encouraged to play the game and experience that “real” world for ourselves. So long as one can accept a digital world as a real world, our navigation through it might allow us to experience in a way that is truly sublime, and not mediated to all hell. Does that mean video games represent a postmodern subjectivity? Maybe. But I think that’s enough for now. This has gone on long enough.
Sources:
Robert Doran’s book The Theory of the Sublime published in 2015.
Julian Jason Haladyn’s article Friedrich’s Wanderer: Paradox of a Modern Subject published in the Canadian Art Review in 2016.
Laure Cahen-Maurel’s paper The Simplicity of the Sublime found online at Academia.edu.
