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For anyone who knows Neil Hertz, a great raconteur with an ironic sense of humor, a man of the people, able to talk to anyone, he seems a most unlikely theorist of the sublime, in the line of Longinus, Burke, and Kant. Longinus and Burke display an unbounded admiration for moments of elevation, in expression and nature-not so Hertz. Neither they nor Kant is notable for a sense of humor, and they are all quite snooty about the low or the trivial. "The use of trivial words," writes Longinus, "terribly disfigures passages in the grand style" (154). But the moments of incongruity that provoke and dismay Longinus are precisely what capture Hertz's attention, and his best stories are likely to have as a punch line something incongruous that somebody said.
For Longinus sublimity comes from nobility of soul and manifests itself in elevated language. Hertz, au contraire, is suspicious of those moments when "the language rises," as he puts it in The End of the Line (62). He has a nose for precisely those moments of "tonal heightening," which attract his critical eye and reveal special investments, something suspicious going on-by contrast with moments of less inflated language.
It is not just Hertz the raconteur who savors the deflation produced by the vulgar or overly familiar but also Hertz the critic. In "Recognizing Casaubon," an essay whose centrality for his work is marked by the fact that it appears in George Eliot's Pulse as well as in The End of the Line, the opening page considers a passage where Eliot asks "Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self." This is an example of what critics particularly admire in Eliot, Hertz writes.
The intelligence at work extending a line of figurative language brings it back, with a nice appropriateness, to the ethical point. This is an instance of the sort of metaphorical control that teacher-critics have always admired in Middle-march, the sign of a humane moral consciousness elaborating patterns of action and imagery with great inventiveness and absolutely no horsing around. (Pulse 20)
This is an instance...