Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature 9780823292653

Citation preview

S T RU C T U R E S O F A P P E A R I N G

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STRUCTURES OF APPEARING Allegory and the Work of Literature

e Brenda Machosky

Fordham University Press New York

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2013

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Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Machosky, Brenda. Structures of appearing : allegory and the work of literature / Brenda Machosky. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8232-4284-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Allegory. I. Title. pn56.a5m27 2013 809'.915—dc23 2012001143 Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach

1

1.

Face Off : The Allegorical Image and Aesthetics

28

2.

A Phenomenological Reduction: Allegory in the Psychomachia

64

The Changing Faces of Allegory: Dante and Spenser

95

3. 4.

The Allegorical Structure of Phenomenology of Spirit

128

5.

Reconsidering Allegory and Symbol: Benjamin and Goethe

155

6.

Allegory as Metonymy : The Figure without a Face

181

Notes Bibliography Index

213 237 247

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared in Exemplaria 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 1–38; available online at www.maney.co.uk/journasl/exm and www.ingenta connect.com/content/maeny/exm. This book has been many years in the making. For enduring the oscillations these years entailed, I thank my husband, Joseph Herzog. For their unqualified support, I thank my friend Diana Karamichael Crean and my family, especially my mother, Claire Machosky, whose vicarious joy in my work often has provided the inspiration for me to continue. In its nascent state and in its final form, this book has benefited from the coaching and cajoling of Nasrin Qader. Along the way I have received input and support from many people. I express my gratitude to my graduate advisors, including Próspero Saíz, and especially to Klaus Berghahn, mein Steifdoktorvater. Over the past few years, many others have contributed to my thinking on this topic and encouraged the completion of this book: Jonathan Culler, Robert Harrison, Davey Hubay, Fannie LeMoine, Michael Marrinan,Timothy J. Murray, Linda Nishigaya, James Paxson, Masha Raskolnikov, Patricia Rosenmeyer, Gordon Teskey, and Rose Zimbardo. I express special thanks to Philip E. Lewis and Timothy J. Reiss for their helpful suggestions on the manuscript at several stages. Although they did not advise me on this particular project, the late Martin Stevens and Scott McMillin were important mentors, colleagues, and friends whose encouragement certainly helped me through discouraging times in this book’s composition. My work also benefited from anonymous readers, the attentive production staff of Fordham University Press, and the sharp eye of Ann Miller, my copy editor. Lastly, I offer my deepest gratitude to Helen Tartar at the Press for her years of support (and patience) in bringing this volume to print.

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S T RU C T U R E S O F A P P E A R I N G

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Introduction A Phenomenological Approach to Allegory

There is general agreement that the term allegory refers to a way of saying or showing one thing and meaning another. This very definition reveals the particular phenomenology of allegory, an artistic or poetic structure in which some “other thing” appears in the “thing appearing” without being the same thing. Allegory can be defined more specifically as “the appearance of one thing in another thing which it is not.” Traditionally understood as a structure of meaning, allegory has a limited range, and critics of this mode are correct that it can be a facile, if at times fascinating, signifying structure. But is that what allegory is? Merely a signifying structure in which meaning trumps language? Or is there something more to allegory? Is allegory itself an allegory in which something other than “an allegory” appears? In the mode of these questions, I believe allegory needs to be examined in a more fundamental way. That is the task I have undertaken in this book. The task is a phenomenological one because it is a study of appearance, the way that phenomena appear by means of allegory. In allegory there is a phenomenologically simultaneous appearance of two things in the same image, in the same “space” at the same time. The structure of allegory supports a mode of appearance that defies the logical constraint prohibiting the occupation of the same space by two things at the same time. So what are these “things,” and where is this “space”? The obvious thing that appears is through the words or in the image of the work. But allegory evolved on the principle that something more appears there, something the words or images point to, something “other.” Traditionally this “other” thing has been called “meaning,” because allegory has long been understood as part of a system of representation with a metaphysical structure—based in the tangible real, but transcended by the meaningful ideal. I propose instead an understanding of allegory through its own structure, which is specifically not a metaphysical 1

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Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach

structure, not a structure of meaning. While I do not want to suggest that allegorical texts have no meaning, I do want to argue that allegorical works are not just about meaning. They go “beyond meaning” by staying within their own structure, not seeking a transcendent position outside of it. The space of allegory is the space of art, and in my study, particularly the space of literature. So it is not an empirical space per se. However, the imaginative space of literature must nonetheless be perceptible, it must appear, and that appearance is, by definition, phenomenological in the most basic sense. And yet, the phenomenology of literary or artistic space is a peculiar kind of appearance, and that peculiarity is the focus of my work. The images of literature (and of art) have a double ontology. There may be an image, say, of a cave in which a personified monster called Errour lies in wait, but it is also an image of a silence, of something unsaid and unsayable. The goal of literary interpretation has always been to listen to that silence, and most often, to make it speak, but the best interpretations provide a more keen listening to that silence. In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot describes the writing of literature as the “mak[ing] perceptible” of a nonlanguage, “a giant murmuring” or “an indistinct plenitude which is empty” (27). For Blanchot, the foundation of the space of literature is an “essential solitude,” in the writer and in the work. This essential solitude exists outside of time, and therefore, so does the work. “To write is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence” (30). And it is important to realize that the absence of time is not dialectic—this absence is not opposed to time’s presence. Rather than a purely negative mode, it is, on the contrary, a time without negation, without decision, when here is nowhere as well, and each thing withdraws into its image while the “I” that we are recognizes itself by sinking into the neutrality of a featureless third person. The Time of time’s absence has no present, no presence. This “no present” does not, however, refer back to a past. (30)

Even without the benefit of Blanchot’s nuanced reading, timelessness is one of the wonders of literature. Literature is always in its own time and space. Someone like Blanchot helps us to remember this fundamental characteristic of literary space and to appreciate the profound difference of the space of literature. I argue that we need allegory in order to be able to articulate this space. This recollection is necessary because literature has been pushed into and now even tends to put itself into a dialectical relationship

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Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach 3

between the imaginary and the real that yields a synthesis applicable in the actual world.1 There are many valuable insights to be gained from working with literature in this way, from considering the literary work as a cultural artifact. However, these “useful” approaches to literature have become so predominant that there are only a few philosophers and some philosophically inclined literary theorists who articulate ways of thinking about literature as such and its peculiar space. Blanchot describes this as the space of “fascination,” and no word could be more apt for Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The world of the poem is a fascinating world, one that does not exist in actuality—neither temporally nor spatially. Its presence is only on the page, “when here is nowhere” (Blanchot, Space of Literature, 30). The poem does not re-present the world, even though the personifications it employs and the adventures of its various protagonists do represent ideals and vices, trials and tribulations, and even historical persons. This mode of representation is what has been labeled allegory for a very long time: saying one thing (Una) and meaning another (the Anglican Church). But The Faerie Queene is not a dialectical poem. Its content does not occur in a historical past, and so the present cannot engage with it in a dialectic based in temporality, although it can engage in other forms of dialectic that do relate the poem to its historical moment. In creating the literary space of The Faerie Queene, Spenser followed a long allegorical tradition.Where does Prudentius’ Psychomachia take place? Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia? Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii? Dante’s Commedia? No place but a definite literary space. The space of most modern literature, aside from works classified as fantasy or science fiction, tends to represent an actual place: the Rouen of Madame Bovary, the banks of the Wye of “Tintern Abbey,” the Russia of The Brothers Karamazov, the English countryside of Pride and Prejudice. But the space is still literary, despite its appearances. In writing about the literary space of magical realism, Rawdon Wilson articulates the problem of “fictional space” generally: Space, understood in its most primitive sense (a distance to be crossed, an openness between points, one of which is occupied by a perceiving subject, filled by something, sunlight, moonlight, hot dust, cold mud or emptiness) seems omnipresent in literature, but rather hard to place. . . . [T]he units of measurement are lacking: literary space, in being conceptual, cannot be measured, but it can be experienced. . . . [S]pace is invariably present in fic-

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Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach tion though never precisely so. It is very much an aspect of the experience of reading, and without it a fictional world would be (I think) impossible to imagine. (“Metamorphoses of Fictional Space” 215–16)

This understanding of space operates in all literature, and most closely represents actual space in genres of realism. In works of magical realism, literary space is complicated by the more fantastical element of space. Wilson uses Spenser’s Faerie Queene to articulate this fantastical kind of space: In that fiction, space has several identifiable properties that consistently manifest themselves throughout the narrative. For instance, distance is both uncertain and extremely plastic. Characters traveling between two points will experience dissimilar journeys, long for one character, short for another, empty or full of obstacles, metamorphic in every feature. The plasticity of space in The Faerie Queene follows from a text-specific axiom. Distance reflects the moral requirements of individual characters. (218)

In fantastical works, like those of magical realism, space does not have to be consistent or harmonious. Again citing The Faerie Queene, Wilson notes a different, concurrent text-specific axiom, the way in which “interiors [can] be larger than exteriors” (218). The world of the poem is the world of The Faerie Queene of its title, and any connections to the actual world are interventions of interpretation. But The Faerie Queene is an allegory because things appear there that cannot appear in the “real world,” not just monsters like Errour or palaces like the Bower of Bliss, and not just the heavy-handed moral virtues clearly signified by the poem, but properties of language that are not subservient to meaning. The idea of a language that speaks without necessarily gesturing toward meaning is a Heideggerian notion (though one that belongs not only to him). In his recent book Rhapsody of Philosophy: Dialogues with Plato in Contemporary Thought, Max Statkiewicz works through this idea of language without meaning more tangibly. He proposes rhapsody (with a very specific etymological usage) as an alternative to traditional hermeneutics based on the principles of representation.2 Notions of representational realism are actually developed as part of the kind of idealism whose origins are usually attributed to Plato. Statkiewicz takes this on as a serious misconception of Plato’s playfulness. He suggests instead that we follow Gilles Deleuze’s assertion that overturning Platonism begins with Plato. What is required is a different way of reading of Plato, a way that Statkiewicz calls “rhapsodic.” An exemplar of such rhapsodic read-

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Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach 5

ing is Harry Berger Jr.’s work on Plato published in the early 1980s.3 “Berger’s reading is an exception to the general rule of accepting the authority of the ideal model, the author’s intention, and that of the authorial interpreter” (Rhapsody as Philosophy 15). Perhaps it should not be surprising that Berger is well known for his work on allegory (among other fields of literature and art). As Statkiewicz tacitly suggests in his polemical introduction, particularly in his re-reading of Plato’s “allegory of the cave,” rhapsodic reading shares with allegory a way of thinking other than through representation, through dialectics, or as Statkiewicz puts it, through a simple “duologue.” A more “authentic dialogue . . . would question, cut through (dia) the ‘Platonic,’ as well as its own logos, the logic of representation” (2). Literature has long been caught in this mode of representational thinking, and our understanding of allegory has been caught up in it as well. Thus Gordon Teskey calls allegory “the logocentric genre par excellence” because it seems essentially dependent on structures of meaning. I propose that allegory is not primarily a structure of meaning, but is rather a structure of appearance. In the first chapter I challenge the dominance of Aesthetics as the specifically philosophical systems that claim mastery over art, namely those of Hegel and his modern Doppelgänger, the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto. They are worthy adversaries, and Hegel in particular receives much attention in this book. Even though Hegel admits that the term is a misnomer, Aesthetics—that is, the philosophy or science of art—wields a hegemonic power over art that is now even more difficult to resist because “aesthetic appreciation,” the relatively judgment-free enjoyment of art, has come under much scrutiny, criticism, even disparagement by current trends towards ideologically focused criticism. Ironically, in countering the philosophy of art—Aesthetics with a capital A—I am defending an aesthetically based theory of literature. I am critiquing an ideologically dominant force within the culture of the academy—the force of philosophy—and privileging instead a sensible (sense-perceptible) reading of literature.The challenges to aesthetic appreciation as a primary (which is not to say simple or exclusive) consideration devalue the special quality of “artness” or “the literary” and ignore that indeterminate quality which really does distinguish objects of art from other cultural artifacts—the kind of indeterminate quality, like the unsayable in Blanchot, that the structure of allegory can bring to appearance. In “According to What: Art and the Philosophy of the End of Art,” an article reacting to but carefully working through Danto’s continued defense, in After the End of Art (1997), of the claims he had made in “The Death of

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Art,” (1984), Robert Kudielka returns to the general aesthetic experience and validates it precisely because it retains an instability that no ideological critique (philosophical or cultural) can master: In a work of art as opposed to a natural object, the aesthetic quality, at best, is not just surface but the embodiment of that which is uncertain: that which is dangerous, problematic, tempting—to use Nietzsche’s words. . . . One might even say that art of the highest order only begins where philosophical knowledge ends. (“According to What” 101; emphasis added)

While I am sympathetic to the aesthetic experience, I am really proposing that we seek an alternative to both types of aesthetic appropriation of literature, and I am suggesting a theory of allegory that reveals “the literary” appearing in a work of literature. It is in this way that allegory defies the logical prohibition (a philosophical law) against two things appearing in the same space at the same time. This illogical possibility is only possible in the space of literature (or art). By the time German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten first used the term aesthetics in 1750, poetry’s resistance to the demands of philosophy had been significantly worn down. Art had already been largely reduced to an object of judgment or taste, an object of understanding or an object of pleasure, in either case an object for a perceiving, knowing, and judging subject. Aesthetics is a philosophical response to a philosophical need. As Klaus Berghahn observes of its development in the eighteenth century (although he makes this observation in support of Aesthetics): “What was needed was a new theory of sensual knowledge, which would also philosophically ground the enjoyment of art. That is the moment that gave birth to modern aesthetics” (“From Classicist to Classical” 44).4 The perceived need to subsume art under the auspices of philosophy has determined the history of art ever since, although this complicity is not usually acknowledged. The Socratic method of excluding art from the realm of knowledge through reason has been replaced with the more effective method of subsuming or sublating art through reason. Art is no longer other than philosophy but has become its servant, at times quite willingly. Berghahn notes, “Aesthetic experience possesses its own laws, which are similar to those of reason” (45). But the laws of aesthetic experience are not similar to the laws of art. Under the sway of Aesthetics, art is prevented from following its own laws. Heidegger’s late work has been called “post-aesthetic” because he offers a philosophical engagement with art on terms other than those bestowed, even insisted upon,

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Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach 7

by philosophy, the terms of metaphysics. There is no way to escape from the philosophical context of Aesthetics without a new language with which to talk about art. It is not only that art needs to reestablish its absolution from the world, but also that the experience of art needs to find a language adequate to that art. Only then can Hegel’s edict that art is a “thing of the past” be defied rather than resisted or repeated. A strong and influential voice in contemporary art criticism, Arthur Danto has reinvigorated the infamous proclamation Hegel made in the introduction to his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art: In all these respects art, considered on the side of its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. (11) [In allen diesen Beziehungen ist und bleibt die Kunst nach der Seite ihrer höchsten Bestimmung für uns ein Vergangenes. (Einleitung in die Ästhetik 22)]

In the 1984 essay “The Death of Art,” Danto revisits what Hegel’s declaration means from a more advanced point in history, with history being the operative term. Hegel’s thought was that for a period of time the energies of history coincided with the energies of art, but now history and art must go in different directions, and though art may continue to exist in what I have termed a post-historical fashion, its existence carries no historical significance whatever. (7)

Danto clarifies that Hegel never denied that there would continue to be “great works” of art, but meant only that the historical moment in which art was something viable, despite being outside of subjective consciousness, is over. Art has been subsumed by philosophy. Perhaps inadvertently (but maybe not), Danto has simultaneously freed art from philosophy by admitting that “such a thesis can hardly be pondered outside the framework of a philosophy of history” (“Death of Art” 7). Nonetheless, the philosophical accounting of history retains a privileged status, and even if art has a being outside of philosophy and history, it doesn’t matter. Near the conclusion of the essay, Danto resolves “the end of art” in both senses, as a finality and as a purpose. The historical significance of art then lies in the fact that it makes philosophy of art possible and important. . . . The historical stage of art is done with

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Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach when it is known what art is and means. The artists have made the way open for philosophy, and the moment has arrived at which the task must be transferred finally into the hands of the philosophers. (31)

Like Hegel, and like most Western thinkers (and not just philosophers), Danto can only conceive of history as progressive, particularly in dialectic form, with a final resolution in Absolute Knowledge. However, there is a curious turn in Danto’s conclusion about art, perhaps a buried compliment: If anything comes closer to exemplifying such a conception of knowledge, art in our time does—for the object in which the artwork consists is so irradiated by theoretical consciousness that the division between object and subject is all but overcome, and it little matters whether art is philosophy in action or philosophy is art in thought. (33–34)

I believe it matters a great deal. The phenomenological study of allegory provides a means of thinking other than through the linear conception of history, the models of progression, and the goal of Absolute Knowledge. However, in order for allegory to open this path, the history of allegory itself needs to be subjected to a phenomenological reduction in the mode of Edmund Husserl’s epoché and Martin Heidegger’s destructive ontology. I propose to understand allegory as such by following the method of phenomenological reduction as proposed by Husserl and modified by Heidegger. From Husserl, I borrow the method of “bracketing” or “disconnecting” that he extracts from Descartes. Husserl proposes bracketing the natural world, using the “phenomenological epoché” as a way of working towards “pure consciousness.” That which is bracketed cannot be accepted simply as a truth defined by the “realities of the world” (Ideas §32, p. 111).The goal of the phenomenological reduction is to discern the most fundamental and distinctive features of the object under inquiry. Features that can be identified otherwise are bracketed off or “suspended” so that the reduction can continue until all of the accretions covering up the phenomenon (and being mis-taken for it) have been stripped away, revealing the phenomenon as it appears in itself. The purpose of the epoché is to achieve genuine speculation that is able to avoid that which is taken for granted. The philosopher “must have the insight that all the things he takes for granted are prejudices, that all prejudices are obscurities arising out of a sedimentation of tradition . . . and that this is true even of the great

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Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach 9

task and idea which is called ‘philosophy’” (Crisis of the European Sciences 72). Allegory, I believe, is also buried under a “sedimentation of tradition.” In Basic Problems in Phenomenology Heidegger explains the way that he adapts the term phenomenological reduction from Husserl’s Ideas, admitting that he imports this term “in its literal wording though not in its substantive intent.” For Husserl, the phenomenological reduction leads phenomenological perception from the world back to the “transcendental life of consciousness.” For Heidegger, the reduction is something quite different: [P]henomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, . . . to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed). (§5, p. 21)

Heidegger then adds that the reduction must be accompanied by a “phenomenological construction,” which is a “projecting of the antecedently given being upon this being and the structures of its being” (22), followed by a “reductive construction of being, a destruction” by which the traditional concepts are first employed and then “are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn” (22–23). Heidegger’s phenomenological method is to reduce, to construct, and to de-con-struct, and this, for Heidegger, is the scientific method appropriate to philosophy as fundamentally ontology, the study of being. This method leads Heidegger into a seemingly endless questioning of Being. With each question, he suspends one more mistaken notion about Being. In the realm of philosophy, Heidegger argues that this questioning is not a negation of the philosophical tradition but a “positive appropriation” of it (23). It is a cognition (or recognition) of the history and traditions of philosophy. In the first few pages of Being and Time, after presenting a similar (though less detailed) assessment of the scientific approach to Being (rather than beings), Heidegger admits that he is challenging the most basic concepts of philosophy, but this indicates the stage he perceives in relation to the history of philosophy. “The level which a science has reached is determined by how far it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts” (Being and Time 29, Sein und Zeit 9). For Heidegger, philosophy has reached this decisive moment. Likewise, I believe that allegory is ripe for a crisis in its basic concepts. But first, allegory as well as literature and art, must be separated from Aesthetics. The challenge to Aesthetics as the dominant (near-exclusive) mode of art criticism is an essential prelude to a phenomenology of allegory. Allegory

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must first be worked free of Aesthetic determinations. Then, allegory can (perhaps) be studied for what it is rather than what it has been presumed to be. Although allegory is not a “science,” the combined methods of phenomenological reduction are necessary for the study of allegory because we have not asked the most basic questions about it. However one defines or identifies the term, allegory as such has been buried under many layers of sedimentation that have each in turn claimed to be allegory. There are two notable traditions of allegory, and both of these prejudiced views must be suspended. In the medieval and early modern periods, allegory was often confused with typology and was conceived as a four-fold structure of meaning, with three increasingly idealized levels of meaning hovering above the literal level. This understanding developed into a flawed tradition of allegory that even Dante claimed to embrace but did not (or could not) practice. More recently and more significantly, beginning in the era of Romanticism, allegory was devalued against the idealized symbol. With a few notable and hearty exceptions, this dismissive view of allegory remains. I specifically contest this (de)valuation in chapter 5 by arguing that what the Romantics called “symbol” is possible only with the support of an allegorical structure. In The Veil of Allegory, a study of allegory as primarily rhetorical, Michael Murrin notes that, especially in creative and critical works of the Renaissance, the term allegory was often used without particular caution or restriction. Many things were and are called “allegorical,” and we could debate endlessly what qualifies as allegory and what has been mislabeled. Alternatively, and just as unproductively, we might consider the possibility that allegory really is as pervasive as the broadest definitions suggest. Murrin attempts to develop a theory of allegory that would account for its history, at least from antiquity through late antiquity and the Middle Ages to the Renaissance; to explain its apparent demise in the late Renaissance; and to suggest the ways in which, as a result, allegory is misunderstood in modernity.The upshot of this theory is the view that allegory was an “incomplete figure of speech” that generated intellectual and philosophical curiosity in a few of its auditors while most of its audience was simply entertained by its literal level or story.5 By inspiring curiosity in at least its more astute readers, allegory served a distinctly moral (but not necessarily moralizing) function within its society by requiring its initiates to think.6 Murrin privileges the allegorical poetry of the Renaissance as compared to the more popular Renaissance poetry that he calls “false,” in which poets

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Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach 11

took only an individual perspective. Such individual poetry did not reveal anything (or not much) beyond the witty language and versifying abilities of the poet. Actually, Murrin asserts that poetry should reveal something inexpressible and should provoke thought and should consider universal truths of human existence, but that during the Renaissance this sense of poetry was being replaced by the products of more mundane practitioners. He argues for a serious reconsideration of allegorical poetry in the Renaissance precisely because it offers a truly poetic alternative to the “false poetry” of the time.Within the Renaissance context, allegorical poetry challenges the critical privilege accorded to the “versified prose” in much Renaissance poetic theory and retains verse forms more true to poetry’s historical purpose.That historical purpose, according to Murrin, is tied to the oral tradition. Murrin blames the demise of allegory on the increased concern with oratorical features that emphasized audience response and a correlative decreased concern for rhetorical features that promoted the revelation of truth. The emphasis on audience response is consonant with the early modern tendencies of Renaissance humanism, an increasing privilege accorded to the human Subject as the center of critical and creative thought. The changing perceptions of the individual have much to do with the changing perceptions of allegory. The changing faces of allegory are due at least as much to changes in how we perceive allegory as in how allegory actually changes in the course of time. The relationship between allegory and subjectivity is a major theme of this book. I return to Murrin’s 1969 study because it is one of the few extensive treatments of allegory that brackets subjectivity, including, particularly, subjective concerns about meaning and interpretation. Maureen Quilligan’s 1979 The Language of Allegory is another, which I will discuss below. To get at what allegory is, we must discern what it is not. I use the general methods of phenomenological reduction to ascertain what allegory is not in the chapters that follow; however, the primary argument of this book is that allegory is not a structure of meaning but a structure of appearance.This means that allegory must be thought in a new way, that language itself must be conceived in unmetaphysical terms. In a rather loose way I have adapted some of Emmanuel Lévinas’ ideas about the face as an identity that manifests itself “without a concept . . . neither a sign allowing us to approach a signified, nor a mask hiding it” (“The I and the Totality” 33). As the image of the absolutely other, the face is indifferent to the I and the desire for totality. Lévinas describes the experience of facing the other as facing an “interlocutor,” but “without ‘facing’ meaning hostility or friendship,” and with “the

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face as de-sensibilization, as de-materialization of the sense datum” (33). I have tried to think of the faces of allegory in a similar way, with two applications of this thought of the “face.” Within allegorical works, the face is not simply a mask but an image, not a representative sign of a (hidden) meaning but a resemblance of “something” that cannot be represented. In relation to allegory itself, it is likewise the face of “something” that cannot appear, cannot manifest itself except as something absolutely other and therefore unrepresentable. If allegory is a structure of appearance and not a structure of meaning, then we must contend with allegory in a very different way. Lévinas’ thought of the face offers one model for an alternative mode of engagement with allegory as such, and with the relationship between literature and philosophy, although this latter point diverges from Lévinas’ views of art.7 I also borrow from Lévinas’ thoughts about language, about “the gap in which language stands” that is not reducible to a “relation between concepts . . . not reducible to the relation that obtains between thought and an object given to it” (32). This also describes the gap upon which allegory, upon which all language, depends. Although not a person (which is Lévinas’ interest), allegory (like the other person) should not, I believe, be invoked as a concept. Writing about allegory without a concept may be nigh impossible, but my final chapter attempts this with a reading of Franz Kafka’s “Der Bau” (“The Burrow”). Before attempting this new mode of allegorical reading, however, I first try to deconceptualize the term allegory. In chapter 2, I subject the first fully developed allegorical narrative, Prudentius’ Psychomachia, to a version of the phenomenological reduction, asking the question: What is “allegory” in this poem? Answering this question entails bracketing the other features of the work: poetry, narrative, theology, everything that can be classified as something other than allegory.What’s left is allegory, and through this process I conclude that allegory is a structure of appearance. From this point I begin to reconstruct the history of allegory based on the realization that allegory is primarily a formal structure of appearance and not a metaphysical or metaphorical structure of meaning. The representational concept of allegory has covered up what is really at stake in such allegorical texts as Prudentius’ Psychomachia, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, or Dante’s Commedia. These are the three canonical allegorical texts that receive extended consideration in this book. Between Prudentius and Dante lies a historical epoch in which allegory enjoyed its greatest appreciation among the public and its greatest glory in literary and artistic form—a

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time when allegory did not need an apology, as Spenser felt it did. I contend that allegory does much more than translate abstract ideals into the familiar images of the real. Yes, the great allegories of the Middle Ages can be read that way—and they are predominantly read that way. But there is something far more important about allegory that has been forgotten, covered up by centuries of literary criticism operating under the auspices of a philosophically determined aesthetic ideology. Chapter 3 offers a rereading and a comparison of Dante and Spenser, an attempt to focus on what allegory is in their seminal works, and how its appearance changes largely as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation. The Faerie Queene is not a dialectic of subjectivity, but it is a precursor; in it there are traces of the kind of subjectivity that will triumph in the works of the eighteenth century. Spenser strives to make his poem serve as a moral mirror for human behavior—wanting to bring his text into the world. Dante does not yet have this urge; he brings the world into his text, but is not concerned with bringing his literature into the world.8 Dante is nearer to Blanchot’s description of fascination: “In it blindness is vision still, vision which is no longer the possibility of seeing, but the impossibility of not seeing” (Space of Literature 32; emphasis added). At the culmination of the Commedia, Dante gives the reader the ultimate, impossible image of God: Non perchè più ch’un semplice sembiante fosse nel vivo lume ch’io mirava, che tal è sempre qual s’era davante; ma per la vista che s’avvalorava in me guardando, una sola parvenza, mutandom’io, a me si travalgiava. (Paradiso canto 33, lines 109–14) [Not that the living light at which I gazed had more than a single aspect— for it is ever the same as it was before—, but by my sight gaining strength as I looked, the one sole appearance, I myself changing, was, for me, transformed. (Sinclair trans., 484)]

Dante uses the image Blanchot describes exactly, or Blanchot is, perhaps (tacitly), inspired by Dante: This milieu of fascination . . . where the gaze coagulates into light, where light is the absolute gleam of an eye one doesn’t see but which one doesn’t

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Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach cease to see since it is the mirror image of one’s own look . . . It is the light which is also the abyss, a light one sinks into, both terrifying and tantalizing. (32–33)

As I will argue in chapter 3, it is the experience of reading Dante’s entire poem that brings us to this awesome image of God. Dante’s image of God is perhaps the quintessential example of the image as fascination, that which fascinates and thereby “robs us of our power to give sense”—both literally, to perceive sensibly (through sight, touch, sound, taste, or smell) and to make sense of, to understand. A phenomenological approach to allegory encourages a thinking of allegory that is not about allegory in the world, but about allegory other than the world—outside the world, not just different from but also indifferent to it, and thus not appropriable as “other.” To consider allegory in this way, the oft-invoked four-fold structure of allegory needs to be set aside. Littera gesta docet, quid creda allegoria, Moralis quid agas, quid spera anagogia.

In rough translation, “the literal teaches what has happened; the allegorical what you should believe, the moral what you should do, and the anagogical what you can hope for.” In 1966, Rosemond Tuve cautioned modern readers against “faithful dependence upon the four senses”9 memorialized in this pithy Latin rhyme (which dates only to the thirteenth century).10 Such “allegorized reading” is necessary for biblical texts so that God’s plan can be made manifest in the world—but it does not apply to literature, and Dante cannot even use his own poem to provide an example of its application. Perhaps in the attempt to do so in the letter to Can Grande (of disputed authenticity) there is already a hint of the drive towards worldly usefulness. But all of that is effaced in the Paradiso’s final image of God, which blows away any relationship to the world. The phenomenology of allegory suggests a transcendence that is not a reaching beyond or crossing between, but one that exists within what is said. It is not a gesture toward the outside of the text, but rather points deep within it, deep into language. However, that gesture is outside of subjective experience, and this sets the stage for the challenge to Aesthetics that I lay out in chapter 1. My use of the term phenomenology is admittedly peculiar. I

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am borrowing some of the methods developed by Husserl and then revised by Heidegger and those who, like Blanchot, continued on the path opened up by them. I am interested in the philosophy of phenomenology as a means by which to move beyond the focus on consciousness typically privileged, the focus on “for us” that has been constitutive of philosophy since the time of Hegel and is increasingly constitutive of literary studies. In many ways the phenomenological study of allegory also entails a continuation of the old quarrel between philosophy and literature in the West, a quarrel formally announced by Plato in The Republic and proceeding over many centuries, almost exclusively in the terms philosophy has set up for the debate. The dialogue between Socrates and the rhapsode in Ion presents the root of the quarrel between philosophers and poets:They speak different languages.11 The dialogue consists of Socrates’ ironic attempts to categorize poetic knowledge as empirical knowledge and of Ion’s blithe persistence in asserting poetic knowledge in its own right. On the issue of reciting Homer, Ion stands fast, more resilient and resistant than perhaps any other interlocutor facing Socrates. In Ion, the philosopher and the poet go head to head. Socrates does not win this match. At best, it’s a lopsided draw. Socrates finally judges the rhapsode’s art as either deception or divine possession. The philosopher can only categorize poetry as something false or something divine. Ion chooses and Socrates agrees that poetry is “something divine.” This is nothing more than a truce—but it is a truce drawn up by philosophy. In The Republic, book 3 (as I will argue more fully in chapter 1), the philosopher exiles the poet because the access to divinity cannot be shared, and in the Republic it is the provenance of the philosopher. Perhaps not without a heavy dose of irony, but also perhaps with a dram of veiled truth, in The Republic Socrates also accords the poet the respect due to a priest, “a holy and wondrous and delightful creature.” The poet is sent packing because the Republic prefers “to employ the more austere and less delightful poet and taleteller,” the philosopher himself (3.398a-b). As philosophy has long presumed to talk about literature and art in philosophical terms, I here dare to talk about philosophy in artistic terms. With the current work I have tried to shift the ground of the old quarrel to one of equal footing, or perhaps unequal to the advantage of poetry. I propose that allegory as such offers an alternative to Aesthetics, a different way of talking and thinking about literature, a way that is not (primarily) philosophical or logos-centric. I have set out to prove that allegory remains infinitely fascinating and always relevant because its structure supports the very being of art, of

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literature, and of language itself, including (and even especially) philosophical language. Chapter 4 offers a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a fundamentally poetic project to make Spirit (Geist) appear in a space, a textual space, with which it does not coincide. This appearance is only possible by virtue of an allegorical structure. Allegory, like literature generally, remains a tricky substance to work with because of its alogical constitution. If allegory offers an alternative language to Aesthetics, then that language cannot be the logos-centric language of philosophy. However, the language of analysis, including analysis based on this allegorical alternative, will always depend on logocentric structures of expression. Jacques Derrida realized that there is no way out of logocentric discourse, and that challenges to and attempts at overcoming metaphysics have been admirable in intent but ineluctably doomed to failure. Derrida argued that the challenge to metaphysics had to take place within its own logocentric (or phallologocentric) discourse. “Deconstruction” is not a method in itself, a systematic treatment applied to some object.12 Deconstruction is an allegorical mode of reading, a way of reading the gaps that naturally occur in language, gaps that cannot be avoided, no matter how carefully something is written (and this applies to all types of discourse, whether creative or interpretive). In fact, it seems that the greater the care taken in avoiding such gaps, the more open the work is to deconstructing itself under scrutiny. The capacity for deconstruction results from a text’s strength (not from its weakness). In contrast to most literary styles and modes of interpretation, allegory freely admits having this gap. By extension, anyone who writes about allegory begins with an admission of a gap (or gaps) in his or her ability to take on the topic. Every writer on allegory offers some caveat about the impossibility of being comprehensive. In the book still considered one of the fundamental texts in the field, Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964), Angus Fletcher began by calling allegory “a protean device,”13 and admits, No comprehensive historical treatment of it exists or would be possible in a single volume, nor is it my aim to fill even a part of this gap. Hoping instead to get at the essence of the mode, I have outlined a theoretical, mainly nonhistorical analysis of literary elements. (2)

In another thorough treatment, Allegory:The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique, Jon Whitman described allegory as “the most elusive of tech-

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niques,” and concluded that “a study of allegory should begin by acknowledging its own imperfections” (10). Theresa Kelley’s introduction to her Reinventing Allegory (1997) exemplifies a qualification typical of more specifically focused studies. “My approach to this topic is selective and textual, not encyclopedic” (3). Harry Berger Jr.’s influential The Allegorical Temper (1957) focused almost exclusively on Book 2 of The Faerie Queene. Rosemond Tuve limited herself to the sixteenth century and the medieval allegorical texts that were then ready-to-hand. Rescuing allegory from its own Dark Ages, in Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1972) Edwin Honig acknowledged, “No book of this sort can pretend to give the whole story about allegory. Too little is known, and almost nothing has been written about the subject which does not betray the parochialism of the specialist or the biases of the nineteenth-century criticism” (vii). Earlier still, in The Allegory of Love (1938), C. S. Lewis focused on the medieval version of allegory but admitted, “there is no question of finding and no possibility of imagining [its] ultimate origins.” And that is because “[a]llegory, in some sense, belongs not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind, in general” (44). Recognizing that allegory lacks the kind of classical precedent enjoyed by other narrative genres (satire, for example), in Allegories of Language (1979) Maureen Quilligan observes that the genre of allegory emerged from an “often unconscious evolution of the form,” seen not only in its earliest manifestations but throughout its long history. Quilligan limits her study to “selfannounced allegories” and insists upon “a distinction between that class of works which may be given allegorical readings and those works which must be read as allegory” (19–20), but she is less interested in what we can do with allegory than in what allegory does to us. This emphasis bespeaks another, perhaps unique, distinction of allegory: “Other genres appeal to readers as human beings; allegory appeals to readers as readers of a system of signs.” Quilligan astutely observes that the indifference to readers as human beings may, in fact, be an appeal “to readers in terms of their most distinguishing human characteristic, as readers of, and therefore as creatures finally shaped by, their language” (24). With an insistence upon language as the defining characteristic of the genre, Quilligan maintains the “new critical” stance of her predecessors. However, she does not exclude the reader’s experience, although she assigns the reader a very particular role. Typically in allegorical interpretation, the reader focuses on what exactly language means, on the “disjunction between saying and meaning.” Quilligan suspends such consid-

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erations from her study, which attempts to establish a definition of allegory as a distinct narrative genre. And that genre is defined neither in terms of its audience nor in terms of its meaning. The “other” named by the term allos in the word “allegory” is not some other hovering above the words of the text, but the possibility of an otherness, a polysemy, inherent in the very words on the page; allegory therefore names the fact that language can signify many things at once. (26)

Although Quilligan does not use the terms of phenomenology, she clearly identifies the phenomenological particularities of allegory. She realizes that “a sensitivity to the polysemy in words is the basic component of the genre of allegory,” and further, that the polysemy is not intentional but structural. As a result, she emphasizes the episodic and horizontal structure of allegory rather than the hierarchical and vertical structure by which it has long been understood. Actually, Quilligan forcefully asserts that “this vertical conceptualization of allegory and its emphasis upon disjunct ‘levels’ is absolutely wrong as a matter of practical fact.” Meaning accretes serially, interconnecting and criss-crossing the verbal surface long before one can accurately speak of moving to another level ‘beyond’ the literal. And that ‘level’ is not above the literal one in a vertically organized fictional space, but is located in the self-consciousness of the reader, who gradually becomes aware, as he reads, of the way he creates the meaning of a text. (28)

This reading experience of allegory (rather than through allegory) creates a scenario in which the reader develops an awareness of his relationship to a text, “a consciousness not only of how he is reading, but of his human response to the narrative” (29). This experience of one’s experience of reading opens the possibility of a relation to the sacred, that which is truly other to human being and simultaneously part of it. Quilligan’s work sets an important precedent for my own because of her focus on allegory as grounded in the concrete substance of words and in the equally concrete magic or sacred quality of words. One of the most provocative books on allegory in the last fifteen years is Gordon Teskey’s Allegory and Violence. Teskey identifies, as Murrin does, the significant relationship between allegory and philosophy. This relation also lies at the core of my work, and Teskey offers a particularly thoughtful

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articulation of the allegorical problem (and its gap) as it stands in contemporary scholarship: The various critical approaches to allegory reflect the division we have seen in the word between discourse and meaning. . . . No one forgets that there are two sides to the problem of allegory, as there are two parts to the word. Nor is it apparent that a correct approach would try to hold them in balance. They cannot be balanced. . . . Perhaps the most that can be asked . . . of any effort to understand allegory is that it acknowledge the terms within which it inclines to either extreme and that it recognize the inevitability of a confrontation with what it denies. For what is most deeply denied in the various approaches to allegory is not just the other side of the question but the rift at its center, the very rift that it is the purpose of an allegorical work to conceal. (10–12)

Teskey focuses on the gap that is allegorically constitutive of allegory: If the rift at the center of the various approaches to allegory is also at the center of allegory itself, it runs deeper than both. The rift reaches down through the foundations of an eidetic metaphysics the absurdities of which allegory tries to repair by imaginative means, logical ones being inadequate to the task. (11–12)

This deficiency within the logos, its inability to present without an allegorical gesture, grounds my ultimate argument in this book. Allegory is not merely an other language to the language of the logos. Allegory is itself the basis of the logos; allegory makes possible the possibility of logocentric language. Beyond observing the complex relationship between philosophy and poetry through the privileged mode of allegory, I propose that allegory challenges the hegemonic influence philosophy has wielded over art (especially over poetry, and particularly allegorical poetry) by means of Aesthetics. As Ion and Socrates clearly demonstrate, philosophy and poetry speak two different languages, but they are speaking, or attempting to speak, about the same thing. For a long time philosophical language, in the guise of aesthetic judgment, has been the predominant way to speak about art. My most ambitious effort in this book is to offer a different language for talking and writing about art, an allegorical language rather than an aesthetic one. Even as early as Aquinas (as argued by Umberto Eco), Aesthetics has been particularly unkind to allegory. I suspect that allegory’s potential challenge to

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philosophy’s dominance motivates this harshness. Hegel calls allegory “frosty and bare” (Lectures on Aesthetics 399, but my translation of frostig und kahl; Einleitung in die Ästhetik 387). Despite this harsh dismissal, Hegel’s concept of “symbolic art” looks suspiciously like allegory, and I will argue in chapter 4 that even his own philosophical work, Phenomenology of Spirit, has the form and structure of allegory. Generally, the aesthetic judgment against allegory presumes that because allegory self-identifies its form, it has also self-identified its meaning. The mistaken assumption is that allegory claims to have resolved the signifiedsignifier conundrum, when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In identifying itself as allegory, a work of art announces that it in fact cannot say what it means. Allegory posits itself as the type of artwork most challenging to its audience. This is Murrin’s argument, and he makes it specifically in terms of Renaissance allegory as the endpoint in an oral poetic tradition extending from antiquity. “Allegorical rhetoric was not a process of mere interpretation, such as we practice in our schools today; it was a revelation” (53). And revelation is impossible to interpret adequately. The Renaissance is a particularly important moment in allegory’s complicated life. However, in order to approach and to understand the long history of allegory, we need first to suspend our post–early modern expectations and presumptions about it. An allegorical text re-presents a poet’s experience with something inexpressible, and in that re-presentation of the poet’s experience, the auditor might also experience, in a present moment, the same revelation, or more accurately, a new (and thus different) revelation of the same thing. Because allegory always remains open-ended, it requires and inspires endless experiences. These experiences are articulated as interpretations. Interpretations are acts of judgment. In a logocentric understanding, such judgments are definitive, or relatively definitive. In allegorical terms, the reader’s (or auditor’s) experience becomes part of the work of art (art as a work and the work that art does).This experience is devalued or dismissed as a personal response when, in fact, this experience is the work of art and is art’s work. Because of its more stable appearance, the judgment of art easily upstages and conceals the experience of art. Aesthetic judgment conceals the work of art as such and replaces it with a value. This movement towards aesthetic concealment, and also a resisting move away from it, is the moral conundrum of every literary critic. Paul de Man articulated this internal conflict best: “most of us feel internally divided be-

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tween the compulsion to theorize about literature [that is, to interpret it] and a much more attractive, spontaneous encounter with literary works” (“Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics” 91). More recently, in his introduction to an essay collection attempting to negotiate a treaty between aesthetic and ideological approaches to literature, George Levine echoes de Man’s observation: Most of the readers of this book, probably starting early in their lives, will have had extraordinary moments reading a novel or a poem, listening to music, looking at a painting, gazing out at a landscape—moments when they have felt overwhelmed, perhaps on the verge of tears, the whole body thrillingly tensed. Such moments have led many to careers in the arts or in criticism, in which the almost mindless physicality of that engagement with what might be called the beautiful or the sublime has been displaced by professional strategies of unsentimental analysis, demystification and historical contextualization, and the discovery that the very “experience” was probably invented in the eighteenth century with the development of the idea of the aesthetic. But the initiating impulse for literary critics and analysts of culture was very often the feeling that those moments, and the “objects” that seemed to have produced them, were of such value that they merited the professional dedication of the rest of their lives. (Aesthetics and Ideology 4)

The best we can do is to be aware of this dilemma (de Man) or tension (Levine), to not forget that unmediated experience that requires mediation. De Man sharply identified and endlessly interrogated the ever-present tension between truth (literarily or philosophically expressed) and method (called theory, or interpretation, or analysis). Building on de Man’s suggestions in “The Resistance to Theory” (published in the book of the same title), I have written elsewhere about the extension of the fundamental challenge of literary scholarship within the confines of the institutions in which it is taught. In good scholarship, as in good literature, there is always an unavoidable difference between the experience of the work and the explanation of that experience. In “Fasting at the Feast of Literature,” I argued that “the scholarship, theory and teaching of literature is riddled with uncertainties because of an inherent and unavoidable discrepancy between its truth and our method, between literary expression (reading) and literary analysis (interpretation)” (303). De Man astutely notes that “these uncertainties are manifest in the hostilities directed at theory in the name of ethical

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and aesthetic values, as well as in the recuperative attempts of theoreticians to reassert their own subservience to these values” (Resistance 4). The interpreter of literature (the “theorist”) is caught in an inescapable double bind imposed by philosophy (Aesthetics). Aesthetics eschews any interpretation that tries to retain the ambivalence and inconclusiveness of the work of art, dismissing it as “theory” rather than “fact.” And in turn, the “theorist” takes up a defensive position, but in doing so privileges the aesthetic system of judgment over his or her own articulation of experience. Aesthetics prevents literature from being what it is as literature. Allegory’s advocates, many of whom I have already mentioned, loudly or tacitly assert that allegory is the literary form par excellence. I agree with this presumption, and thus I intend the case I make for allegory to be a synecdoche of the case to be made for literature, and even (with adaptations) for art generally. By this method, I hope to reveal literature more closely as what it is, although often by articulating what it is not. Many of the changes to allegory’s face that occurred during the Renaissance were theorized and codified only much later, particularly during what is now called the Romantic era, an era inspired and characterized by critical philosophy, idealist philosophy, and the philosophy of art, or Aesthetics. The Aesthetic system of judgment that emerged in the eighteenth century (but with roots in earlier periods) coincides with the devaluation of allegory as a form.14 This is not a mere coincidence. Aesthetics, or the Science of Art, turns art into a conceptual category, an object subject to rational judgment. It is under the auspices of Aesthetics that art becomes uninteresting—that is, art as such becomes uninteresting, replaced by the value of art and the science (Wissenschaft) or judgment of art. As Kant pointed out quite early in the modern Aesthetic project, the aesthetic experience has little to do with the art object as such, and everything to do with the subjective experience of it. The study of allegory as a phenomenon brings into question the presumptions that Aesthetics wields over art in general (and wields rather harshly, in the case of allegory). As evident in Umberto Eco’s The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, as early as the High Middle Ages some notion of Aesthetics had appropriated works of art and literature under its own ideological system of judgment. Allegory is not a particularly favored category in aesthetic evaluations. I contend that this is not because allegory isn’t beautiful; it is because allegory is not an aesthetic category. Allegory is closer to a rhetorical category. Both de Man and Murrin emphasize this point, for independent reasons and with distinctly differ-

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ent methods. Writing just as allegory was regaining some respectability in scholarly circles, in The Veil of Allegory (1969) Murrin sought to understand allegory’s place between the Middle Ages (as they evolved from antiquity) and the early modern period (as pointing towards modernity), and in doing so he hoped also to “alter the kinds of questions which we ask of a text,” as suggested in his subtitle, Some Notes toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance. Murrin identified himself as a theoretician of the “new order” in that he wanted “to stimulate controversy, to provoke thought,” and to do so by a return to philological concerns. Murrin considered his work a book on Spenser, but in the first lines of his introduction he distinguishes it from the numerous books on Spenser that had been recently published or were forthcoming in the late 1960s. “I have tried to step away from the poems and understand them generally as rhetoric” (ix), he explains.What he tries to understand specifically is allegory as rhetoric. Where other studies of Spenser focus on the meaning and understanding of his poetry, Murrin’s work focuses on its modes of production and the value accorded to the work in its reception.15 Such a project is an important model for my own work because of its step back from aesthetic considerations. De Man argued that after 1960, literary theory emerged (much as Murrin suggests) as a response to the aesthetic ideologies embedded in approaches that focused on meaning in and understanding of literary texts (Resistance 3–20). Such approaches are not necessarily reproachable, and are often quite fruitful. However, they tend to preclude the phenomenological question, “What is literature?” In my view, this should be the central question of all literary study, even as it goes off in myriad other directions. By way of the (slightly narrower) question, “What is allegory?” I hope to focus on this other type of question, the question of intrinsic phenomenological substance more than the question of external transcendent significance, ideological or otherwise. Because of its focus, this book does not offer certain things one might expect. While I acknowledge a historical movement from antiquity through modernity, this history is far from comprehensive. In fact, I have precluded treatment of several important historical moments in allegory’s history, acknowledging a few major figures with cursory reference and ignoring others altogether. I have not rehearsed the classical tradition.16 There is also a large body of medieval work that I have sorrowfully neglected, including the cosmographies of the twelfth century and such allegorical masterpieces as Piers Plowman and Le Roman de la Rose. Although I do include the broadly conceived Romantic era, I largely avoid the typical figures of this moment

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in allegory’s history in favor of the atypical figure of Goethe. The reasons for this will become clear in chapter 5. My textual choices in this book are based on my experiences with certain texts, some spontaneously, some more intentionally pursued. Some of these texts are unarguably literary, others are not. Some of them are obviously allegorical, more of them less obviously so, and some even arguably “not allegory.” Such categorizations have their basis in Aesthetics. (I have tried to use what might be called an “experiential” approach, which has more basis in aesthetic considerations than a purely “allegorical ideology” would admit.) My theory is based in modern phenomenology because I am more interested (though not exclusively interested) in what allegory is than in what it does or how it works. For precedent I cite the phenomenology of art undertaken in Martin Heidegger’s later work, and the phenomenology of theater implied by Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty.” In critiquing the modern conceptions of theater, Artaud insisted that art is not culture, that art (and theater in particular) has nothing to do with aesthetic value. Heidegger also argued vociferously against the economic treatment of artworks as aesthetic objects assembled in museums or auction houses. For Heidegger the art industry is an Aesthetic system that has nothing to do with the phenomenon of art. For Artaud, the theater industry has (almost) nothing to do with the phenomenon of theater. Continuing in this vein, I assert that the intentional use of allegory as a category or as a technique has little to do with allegory as a phenomenon. However, in the object that has been appropriated by the Aesthetic system there is still a phenomenon that can be “reduced” to its bare phenomenality. In that reduction it is possible to expose—or, in a more Heideggerian phrasing, to bring to appearance—the “thing” that is integral to the work of allegory but not identical to it. Heidegger put the question quite well when he simply asked, “What is art in the artwork?” We cannot grasp “art” by pointing to it or by conceptualizing it, but there is some “artness” that we acknowledge as constitutive of an artwork. The definition of a work of art might be something like,“anything that brings its essential being (its ‘artness’) to appearance.” Art appears in works of art. Although this seems tautological, it is an easily overlooked but fundamentally important phenomenological observation. Because of our Aesthetic consciousness, we tend to move very quickly from the artwork as such to the artwork as significant: What does it mean? This question takes a variety of forms, including the metaphysical (what does it signify?); the historical (how does it relate to other works?); and

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the cultural-anthropological (what does it reveal about its mode and moment of production?). These are all interesting questions, of course, but they are not questions about the work of art as such. This book ends with readings of Kafka’s stories “Josephine, The Singer of the Mousefolk” and “The Burrow.” Kafka resisted the Aesthetic conceptions of art, and because of this resistance, and because of his fundamental understanding of art’s allegorical structure, the allegorical analysis of his work in a phenomenology of allegory is essential. Kafka’s works resist Aesthetic considerations. He accepted that art cannot work in an Aesthetic mode, and that leaves art with very little other than itself. I privilege Kafka’s stories because they are often concerned with nothing other than themselves. As allegorical allegories they point only to themselves. Think of what happens to Gregor Samsa when he can no longer work. He degenerates in body and mind, and finally, he is swept out with the trash (although it is not entirely clear whether he is dead). A similar fate meets another of Kafka’s well-known figures, the hunger artist. What I find in the works of Kafka is, admittedly, something like an allegory of literature (or art) as such.17 But the allegory of art is something quite different from a conventional allegory such as Dante’s Commedia or Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, although even these works are also, in some sense, allegories of art, that is to say allegories of allegory. All allegory must be, to some extent, an allegory of allegory, because allegory cannot be what it itself is. The most self-conscious allegories (and I mean here the works themselves, rather than their creators) bring allegory as such to appearance. When we see a work that is called “An Allegory” or that has obvious, telltale signs of being an allegory, we presume to know what it is and to move on to its significance. Why is it an allegory? How does it reflect its historical moment? What are the correlations between the text and its context? These are all valid inquiries, but they are not the focus of this book. Instead, I have decided to remain with the first question begged by any allegorical text. What is allegory? My short answer: Allegory is a work of art that brings art (and allegory) to appearance. Allegory phenomenalizes art. Allegory achieves this by pointing to itself as allegory, as able to be art but also uniquely able to present art (without representing it). Heidegger juxtaposes the work of art as a thing (an object that gets hung on a wall, sold at auction, stored in a museum’s basement) to the actual work that happens in a work of art as a thing, an entity with a particular kind of being, what we might call art-ness. Every work of art is simultaneously two things, what it is and what it brings to ap-

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pearance. Allegory is always a work of art (howsoever it is judged) in that it bears this relation between what it is and what it brings to appearance. With this difference: Allegory is the very structure of that mode of appearance peculiar to art. Thus, allegorical art has the distinction of being singularly autoreferential.The intensity of this focus in “allegories” enables us to reconsider the allegorical structure implicit in all forms of language. Allegory is not an Aesthetic category. As the phenomenon that “says one thing and means another,” as the phenomenon in which two things (impossibly, illogically) occupy the same space at the same time, allegory is the work of art with which Aesthetics simply cannot contend. Like works of art in which “art” appears (as in Heidegger’s study of Van Gogh’s peasant shoes), or theatrical productions in which “theater” appears (as in Artaud’s theatrical “double”), allegory appears most like itself when it appears in allegory. In none of these cases, however, is the “thing,” the phenomenon of art, theater, or allegory (artness, theatricalness, or allegoricalness), substantially coincident with the phenomenon with which it appears. There is a gap. This disjunct simultaneity in space and time makes this relation itself allegorical. I am striving to articulate, to offer a way of talking and writing about art, literature, theater, even culture, without using predominantly aesthetic language or focusing on Aesthetic concerns (especially value and judgment). I believe that this is the project of Heidegger, of Artaud, and in relation to allegory specifically, the work of Walter Benjamin. A phenomenological understanding of allegory will lead us toward a discourse by which to talk about “art” and “theater” and “literature” and “poetry”—and even “philosophy”—with a new perspective and a different kind of clarity. The first chapter of the book sets the parameters of the argument by disentangling allegory from Aesthetics and re-examining the phenomenon of the art work as such. The middle chapters selectively revisit and revise the history of allegory. Chapter 2 offers a model phenomenological reading of the first sustained personification allegory, Prudentius’ Psychomachia. Chapter 3 focuses on the way that allegory changes its relationship to truth and knowledge in the course of the Renaissance.18 A comparison of Dante’s Catholic allegory and Spenser’s Protestant allegory illuminates not only the profound relationship between allegory and the sacred, but also the phenomenological changes in allegory’s ability to appear as religion receded and individual subjectivity came to the fore. In the fourth chapter, I turn to philosophy and the allegorical structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Philosophy depends on allegory, on poetry, in order to achieve its ends, and

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more stridently than ever, in Hegel philosophy overwrites its poetic structure. In the fifth chapter I counter the philosophical influence on literary studies. I critique the aesthetically valued symbol and undermine its hegemony by arguing that the symbol is intrinsically allegorical, especially in its poetic form. The final chapter suggests that the phenomenology of allegory reveals that metonymy, rather than metaphor, is a more appropriate trope toward allegory, and that the silence and indifference of allegory give voice to allegory’s most significant revelation.

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Face Off: The Allegorical Image and Aesthetics

We will say the thing is itself and its image. And that this relationship between the thing and its image is resemblance. . . . It is in this that all the power and originality of allegory lies. An allegory is not a simple auxiliary to thought, a way of rendering an abstraction concrete and popular for childlike minds, a poor man’s symbol. It is an ambiguous commerce with reality in which reality does not refer to itself but to its reflection, its shadow. An allegory thus represents what in the object itself doubles it up. An image, we can say, is an allegory of being. —Emmanuel Lévinas1 The investment in the aesthetic is considerable—the whole ability of philosophical discourse to develop as such depends entirely on its ability to develop an adequate aesthetics. This is why both Kant and Hegel, who had little interest in the arts, had to put it in, to make possible the link between real events and philosophical discourse. —Paul de Man2

The Image and Allegory Literary scholars have long been duped by the defensive posture initiated by the ironic Greek philosopher who dismissed poetry from the realm of thought and the ideal Republic. Between the philosopher-guardian and the poet, Plato presents a long list of craftsmen, each providing a specific product for the needs of the community. When he gets to the poet, however, “someone who has the skill to transform himself into all sorts of characters and to 28

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represent all sorts of things,” Plato declares that the community will politely send him packing, telling the poet that “he and his kind have no place in our city” (Republic 398a). There is no need for these alien poets because the community will employ its own “severe” storytellers, those who portray only noble actions and useful works. Who are these storytellers? The only citizens of the Republic who do not work, including the teller of this tale. It is the philosopher who turns the mimetic mirror in book 10 of The Republic, not the poet. It is not the poet who has installed “the sun and stars and earth, himself and all other animals and plants, and furniture and the other objects we mentioned just now” (596d). The philosopher has created the sun, the cave, the bed upon which one cannot sleep, the carpenter who cannot work, and so on, and the philosopher has even created The Republic itself. This has all come to pass in no other place than the imagination and by no other means than poetry thinly disguised as philosophical dialogue. Socrates relies constantly on figurative language to forge a union between the metaphysical ideal and the physical world which is its “mere shadow,” and Plato, of course, is utterly dependent on the figure of Socrates. Heidegger describes Socrates as a Gestalt, a German word for figure. Heidegger has a peculiar but consistent and well-supported understanding of Gestalt and the root verb stellen, from which many important aesthetic words derive, Darstellung (representation) and Vorstellung (presentation) among them. For Heidegger, stellen is not merely “to stand” (transitive), but more particularly refers to a “repose which is an inner concentration of motion [die eine innige Sammlung der Bewegung], hence a highest state of agitation” (“Origin of the Work of Art” 48, trans. modified; “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” 34–35). This agitation is so high that the object, the Gestalt, appears to be standing still. In Socrates Heidegger recognizes a figure that bears the concentrated agitation between philosophy and poetry. There are two types who do not produce (who do not work) in The Republic, the poets and the philosophers. In the figure of Socrates both types appear. The “raging discordance” between poetry and philosophy is held together in this figure who seems to embody the triumph of philosophy. In the figure of the philosopher, the image of the poet appears. Lévinas has suggested that the image of something has an independent (autonomous) ontology. An image appears whenever an object does not itself appear, but rather a resemblance of that object appears. This does not mean that the figure of the philosopher can be substituted for the poet. The object is not represented. Nor does the poet coincide with the philosopher.

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Rather they co-exist, not like alter egos of day and night but as a conflictual simultaneity in which each challenges the other forth. The ontology of the image is an ontology other than that of the figure.The image is a resemblance, something that cannot be conceptualized because it cannot be grasped. One need only recall the frustrated Narcissus who could neither grasp nor in any way possess the “object” of his desire—because it was not a figure or an object, but an image.The image is indifferent to Narcissus, and this indifference drives him to despair. The aesthetic element of the image is its sensibility, but the image does not have the sensibility of an object. As Lévinas points out, by becoming an image, “the represented object . . . is converted into a non-object.” This is not a privative process but an ontologically distinct dimension. The disincarnation of reality by an image is not equivalent to a simple diminution in degree. It belongs to an ontological dimension that does not extend between us and a reality to be captured, [but is] a dimension where commerce with reality is a rhythm. (“Reality and Its Shadow” 134)

Because it is a resemblance (not a representation), the image is not mimetic. It is not a sign, because a sign must be transparent, and the image is uniquely opaque; something remains inaccessible. The image cannot be compared to the original from which it emerges nor to the material in which it appears because it is essentially different. And yet they are connected in some way. With Lévinas, “We will say the thing is itself and is its image. And that this relationship between the thing and its image is resemblance” (135). Despite these astute observations about the image, Lévinas, like Plato, struggles with the necessary role that figuration plays in his own philosophy. As Diane Perpich remarks, “The strife between rhetoric and ethics in Lévinas’ work has obvious parallels with the strife between art and philosophy in Plato’s Republic” (“Figurative Language” 116). Perpich cites Michèle Le Doeuff ’s discussion, in The Philosophical Imaginary, of Plato’s arrogation of figures and images as unproblematic in the philosophy that needs them to make its system work (116–17). Perpich continues with her own analysis of Lévinas’ dependence on the figure of the face and (tacitly) its allegorical structure: [T]he central moment of Lévinas’ ethics depends upon a figure—the face of the other—that the reader is prohibited from interpreting literally . . . [t]he face that refers to the other’s noncoincidence with his or her own

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Face Off:The Allegorical Image and Aesthetics 31 image, and to the ego’s consequent inability to reduce the other to a selfidentical object, graspable by means of an image or concept. (117)

Allegory is the structure by which the face can simultaneously be the face of the other and not the face of the other. Perpich points out how hard Lévinas tries to avoid the kind of totalizing philosophical system he criticizes, and yet, “Lévinas’s discourse wants what it cannot have: a systematic (and thus unfailing) undermining of system.” This contradiction is manifested “through the necessary contradiction of a face that represents the impossibility of its own representation” (119–20). In “Reality and Its Shadow,” Lévinas articulates the structure of the image such that the face that is and is not the other makes sense. The image is “an allegory . . . in which reality does not refer to itself but to its reflection, its shadow. An allegory thus represents what in the object doubles itself up” (135).Thus, Lévinas appropriates the allegorical image, a work of art, for philosophy, but philosophy cannot escape its allegorical foundation, and Lévinas seems to acknowledge this. The image reveals things about the object it resembles that the object does not reveal about itself. Like Heidegger’s definition of the Gestalt, Lévinas’ definition of resemblance is grounded in movement, not stasis or permanence. Lévinas defines resemblance as “an ambiguous commerce with reality in which reality does not refer to itself but to its reflection, its shadow,” and he identifies this commerce with allegory, in all its “power and originality.” As the underlying structure of the image, “allegory is not a simple auxiliary to thought, a way of rendering an abstraction concrete and popular for childlike minds, a poor man’s symbol” (135). The image can only be understood allegorically, but still it cannot be grasped because allegory does not function conceptually. In the image, the object is detached from itself as its own other. Allegory holds together the object and the image, what it is and what it is not. This is not such a radically new idea. In The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene” (1961), A. C. Hamilton proposed a similar understanding of the image as a unity of a poem’s reference to external reality and equally to itself, particularly evident in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and in Dante’s Commedia. As a founding assumption Hamilton focuses “upon the image itself,” because in the image are the myriad possibilities for interpretation. To immediately look beyond the image is, to Hamilton, to do a grave disservice to Spenser’s poem and to the rigorous practice of allegory it exhibits.

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Face Off:The Allegorical Image and Aesthetics I assume that [Spenser] labours to reveal his meaning, not to conceal it: to reveal as clearly as the matter and form of his allegory will allow. Further, what he labours to express is an image rather than moral ideas. These may inform and sustain the image, but the image itself is primary. If it points beyond itself, as it certainly does, it first points insistently to itself. (12)

Hamilton, too, sees allegory as the necessary structure of the image, of that which appears. He asserts that the primary meaning does not lie behind the image but within it.The reader’s unfolding of the image is a revelation of inherent meaning, revealing “what it says rather than what it implies.The term ‘allegory’ suggests that one thing is said while another is meant; but it need not follow that the poem does not mean what it says” (12; emphasis added). For Hamilton, allegory as such is not a separation into levels of meaning but a unification of contrapuntal relationships: “the brazen world of fallen nature and the poem’s golden world, reality and the ideal, fact and fiction becomes united in our reality” (35). They are united by virtue of the image. And thus it is the image that challenges philosophy when it tries to deny its poetic structure.3 In the Timaeus, Plato admits the image into his universe because he cannot avoid it. He wants the image to serve the Logos, the unifying universal concept, but that requires quite a bit of philosophical contortion which is not, in the end, entirely successful. After thoroughly describing the universe according to Reason, Timaeus concedes that he must now start again, in order to include an exposition on necessity or causation, which leads him to introduce a third kind of form. Under the auspices of Reason, there are eidos and mimema, that which is, eternal and unchanging, and that which becomes, perishable and variable. Timaeus admits, “now the Logos seems to compel us to try to reveal by words a form [eidos] that is baffling [khalepon] and obscure [amedron].” Timaeus describes this form, usually translated as “receptacle,” as “the nurse of all becoming” (“geneseos tithenon,” 49a), which lies at the very heart of logos and also external to it. This “fleeting shadow” is constituted by an appearance which does not correspond to any concept of eidos or any object of mimesis. The eidos is phenomenal insofar as it shows itself to the intellect. Thus, when freed from its bondage in the cave of The Republic, the soul sees things “as they really are” instead of the shadows that constitute the material world. According to Plato, it is possible, though rare, for a mortal being to perceive the intelligible realm, but even so, the philosopher-kings who are thus privileged must translate this perception in

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order to bring it into the physical world. The philosopher-guardians are obligated to return to the cave of shadows and communicate their knowledge of the intelligible realm in order to foster a “common sense.” They can only do so by means of some tempering shape, just as Plato himself relies here on the figure of the cave. The logos, the force of reason, also compels Timaeus to show how these two things are yoked together, to show how they show themselves. Earlier, in the description of the Soul of the Universe,Timaeus had described a third element of Being that joined indivisible Being with transient Being, forcing the Other into the Union with the Same, despite the difficulty of effecting this union, which is in essence a conflict. Timaeus must manifest this third thing, which cannot itself be either an eidetic or a mimetic substance and yet must participate in both, or else it could not hold the two together. This third thing is given the name khora. This substance is peculiar in that it must “itself be devoid of all these forms which it is about to receive” (50c). In receiving these forms, the substance is “moved and marked by the entering figures,” but the substance changes only in appearance. Only by recourse to a metaphor can Timaeus explain the change in appearance that does not affect substance. A sculptor can mold and remold the same lump of gold into a variety of figures, but each figure is always gold.The figures in the gold are always becoming, so they are not stable forms, and yet there is something stable in the figure which does not manifest itself as phenomenal or ideal. Timaeus uses this metaphor as an analogy for the khora, which he defines as follows: And of the substance which receives all bodies the same account must be given. It must be called always by the same name; for from its own proper quality it never departs at all; for while it is always receiving all things, nowhere and in no wise does it assume any shape similar to any of the things that enter into it. (50b-c)

Because it is visible only by showing itself differently at different times (allote alloion), this substance is difficult to discern and it is virtually impossible to say how it is to be distinguished from that which appears in it. The khora “comes into existence in some other thing, clinging to existence as best it may, on pain of being nothing at all” (52c). The khora comes into existence as a phantom (phantasma), a perception that is neither noumenal (perceptible to the intellect) nor phenomenal (perceptible to the senses), and Plato admits something beyond the reach of even the highest intellect.

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The alternative view to the Platonic structure of mimesis between the real and the ideal is found in Aristotle’s description of the imagination, particularly regarding the anima or life principle of human being.The faculty of the imagination is distinct from the faculties of belief, perception, intellect, and knowledge.4 In De Anima, Aristotle calls this singular aspect of the intellect single “in the way that a boundary is [single]” (431a). Although not a single thing or an object, that is how the imagination itself must be imagined. The imagination for Aristotle is characterized by its ability to “recollect.” In the Parva Naturalia, Aristotle distinguishes recollection as an activity distinctive to human beings because it is an act of inference that is not only intellectual but also physical. Aristotle defines recollection as “a searching for an image in a corporeal substrate” (De Anima 428a). That corporeal substrate is not the materiality of the world, nor is it the intelligibility of the eidos. It is something other to and between them both. In Aristotle, the imagination, phantasia, becomes the faculty for the process that Plato concealed in metaphors. Indeed, Aristotle specifies that he does not use the word phantasma (image) in “some metaphorical sense” (De Anima 427b-430a).5 Although Aristotle distinguishes the imagination as a distinct faculty, it is still marked by a subservience to thought and a dependence on sense-perception. “Imagination cannot occur without perception, nor supposition without imagination” (427b). The imagination is a connective faculty, but it connects without moral judgment. Aristotle admits that “imaginings are for the most part false” (428a); nonetheless, the effect of imaginings can be actual. Truth-value is not a constitutive characteristic of the image. Unlike the other faculties (perception, belief, intellect, and knowledge), the imagination is indifferent to truth: consequently, the imagination is indifferent to meaning. The imagination is neither metaphysical nor transcendent, but in the Aristotelian system it makes metaphysics and transcendence possible. Indifference gives the imagination the power to be everything and nothing. The imagination seems to be the faculty that regulates that substance, “the nurse of all becoming,” the khora of Plato (Timaeus 50c). In Plato, the fleeting shadow characteristic of the khora is the phantasmenon, that which is made visible but does not show itself. The khora, like the faculty of the imagination, lies outside the auspices of reason, even though both Plato and Aristotle appropriate the image for reason.The image positions itself at the boundary between the knowable and the unknowable, between mortal finitude and the inestimable space and time from which the finite world has emerged. The image exists in the gap between things. The

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Aristotelian faculty of the imagination marks the limit of human being, of its finitude. At this limit is an image which is not an image of anything and which does not substitute itself for anything. The image is something singular: it is neither a phenomenal object nor an essent or ideal. The image inspires movement, without itself moving; therefore, it is originary. The image is not, however, original, because the imagination manufactures images from phenomena that appear to the senses. A well-known analogy refers to the impression a seal leaves in wax to express the image of the soul. This analogy is well worn because it perfectly articulates the relation between an image and the “reality” which it represents, a relationship that is not strictly metaphoric. Perhaps it is more like metonymy. The wax is and remains wax. The suprasensible reality, like the seal which is no longer present, remains imperceptible and distant, except for the impression that it leaves in the wax. The impression is a mirror image of the seal, but it does not share any substantiality with the seal itself. The image depends on the wax in which it is impressed in order to appear, and yet the image is not of the same substance as the wax, nor is it identical with the seal, or form (morphe) that made the impression. In Greek, the name for the impression, the form as it is given to the wax, is schema; in Latin it becomes figura. Inherent in the Latin term is the verb fingere, to shape or mold, although with a specific sense that something is created only insofar as it is created by the forming of an already existent substance.6 Figuration or fictioning brings together something other (the seal) with something made (in wax), but the resulting image is neither the seal nor the wax. We find this fictioning even in reason. Irony is so well known as the mode of Socrates’ speech that one forgets that his pronouncements are therefore never stable and always hint at an internal contradiction. In The Republic book 10, the irony is thick and meaning obscure as Plato pretends to address Homer on the value of poetry. Kenneth Dorter is equally suspicious: “The condemnation of imitation is ironic in a dialogue where Socrates himself imitates all the speakers in the course of his narration, replicating [their] speeches” (Transformation of Plato’s “Republic” 308). In an apostrophe, Socrates begins, My dear Homer, we shall say, if our definition of representation is wrong and you are not merely manufacturing copies at a third remove from reality, but are a stage nearer the truth about human excellence, and really capable of judging what kind of conduct will make the individual or the commu-

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Face Off:The Allegorical Image and Aesthetics nity better or worse, tell us any state whose constitution you have reformed. . . . What city attributes the benefit of its legal system to your skill? (Republic 599d-e)

Socrates continues, but one begins to suspect this criticism, for the judgment against the poet could just as well be levied, or rather could be even more effectively levied, against the figure of the philosopher-guardian in The Republic itself. . . . tell us any state whose constitution a philosopher has reformed. . . . What ingenious inventions for the arts and business of life can be attributed to the philosopher? . . . I suppose then, we must say, that the philosopher knows nothing but how to imitate, to lay on with words and phrases the colors of the several arts in such fashion that others equally ignorant, who see things only through words, will deem his words most excellent . . . so mighty is the spell that these adornments naturally exercise, though when they are stripped bare of their musical coloring and taken by themselves, I think you know what sort of a showing these sayings of the philosopher make. For you, I believe, have observed them.7

As an underhanded offensive, Socrates accuses Homer of making groundless judgments, without being capable of making judgments himself. But epic poetry does not even pretend to make judgments. Rather, interpretations, such as the ethically laden ones supplied by Socrates (especially in Ion), force the poem to make such judgments. Plato tacitly substitutes these “allegories of Homer” for the poems themselves. The stability of aesthetic judgment in Plato is no longer certain. Nonetheless, the trap has been set and sprung; the ruse is accomplished. By reacting to the philosopher and immediately leaping to the defense of poetry, one forgets that by defending poetry against philosophy on philosophical grounds, poetry has already left its own ground. This defensive and reactive stance accomplishes precisely the goal set by philosophy for poetry: to become an object of knowledge. Only that which is knowable can be dismissed or sublated by philosophy. Aesthetics is the subspecies of philosophy that enforces this law on art. In Plato, it was still a fight.8 It was again a fight in the Renaissance. In the essay “Marvelous Progression: The Paradoxical Defense of Women in Spenser’s ‘Mutabilitie Cantos,’” Angus Fletcher shows how Sir Philip Sidney struggled with the relationship between poetry and philosophy, even as he attempted to privilege poetry. Fletcher further argues that Edmund Spenser

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succeeded where Sidney had failed, by showing how poetry can appropriate the “methodical proceeding” of philosophy and incorporate both the wonder presumed constitutive of poetry and the reassuring affirmation believed to be the sole provenance of philosophy. By reading Spenser’s use of paradox, Fletcher cleverly shows how “the Mutabilitie Cantos . . . [exploit] the deep connection between wonder and philosophical affirmation to lead the reader through a sequence of thought that results in a moment of marvelous resolution” (7). Thus, the discord between poetry and philosophy remained unsettled into the seventeenth century.

Art Other than Aesthetics Hegel’s proclamation about art being a “thing of the past” was an astute if unsavory observation. As Heidegger points out in the Epilogue to “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”), Hegel never denied that there would still be great works of art, but he dared to suggest that art was no longer an “essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence” (80, 68). Whether that judgment holds is another question, but the judgment can only be challenged if a law other than Aesthetics, other than the logos of philosophy, can be found. Allegory may be this other law, if it is a “law” at all. At the very least, allegory challenges the metaphysical treatment of art, because the very structure of philosophical aesthetics is, in fact, allegorical. Allegory is the “origin” of aesthetics, the structure of the space from which it emerges into appearance. In the essay “Marvelous Progression,” Fletcher seems to suggest something similar. He does not present allegory as the source of aesthetics per se, but he does challenge the conventional belief that “philosophy begins in wonder,” which “tacitly subordinate[s] poetry to philosophy by implying that poetry left off where philosophy began” (6). By the end of the essay, Fletcher proves that some poetry, like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (including the “Mutabilitie Cantos”) proves the opposite: that poetry begins were philosophy leaves off (23). Gordon Teskey also suggests something similar in the concluding chapter of Allegory and Violence. Teskey counters the narrative of completion offered by C. S. Lewis (as one powerful example) that creates a “totalitarian vision” that results from a Hegelian perspective.Teskey notes Lewis’ conscious denial of a Hegelian influence but reveals the philosopher’s unavoidable presence (Allegory and Violence 187). In this totalizing system, Lewis reasserts “the fun-

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damental image of allegory,” according to Teskey, “Man enclosing the cosmos” (187). At the same time that Teskey asserts this “fundamental image of allegory,” he admits the violence that it conceals. Indeed that violence is his primary interest.Thus in the “Mutabilitie Cantos”Teskey finds that “allegory and violence are brought together at last” (176). In the Cantos one can sense the uncanniness that appears throughout The Faerie Queene, the sense “that something is being blocked out so that everything on the surface of the poem may shine,” and a simultaneous sense that “something alien is about to tear open that surface from within” (188). Teskey senses in The Faerie Queene the way in which allegory is two things in the same space at the same time, the image and the violence that threatens to destroy it. Thus Teskey yokes together the terms allegory and violence. The experience of the beautiful in a literary work of art, the aesthetic experience, is supposedly spontaneous and certainly attractive. The encounter, however, is hardly spontaneous. If the aesthetic experience is an experience of the beautiful, then the work of art encountered is not experienced spontaneously, but mediated by the idea of beauty. The aesthetic experience is always ideological because it in fact draws its authority from the ideal realm (“the beautiful”) while pretending to draw it from the material object, the work of art. Under the aesthetic ideology, the beautiful appears in the work of art because the work of art itself partakes of the beautiful. The artwork is believed to coincide with the beautiful, and therefore through the work of art we perceive the universal idea of the beautiful. The work of art, despite its symbolic pretensions, serves as a mediating term. It is not the work of art as such that has value, but rather its ability to mediate not only for the beautiful but also for our perception of the beautiful. The work of art brings together the ideal and the real, but without itself partaking in either realm. When it is judged under the law of Aesthetics, which is like the law of reason, the work of art is reduced to one term or the other: either it is an adequate representation of the real object, or it is an adequate representation of the ideal concept. But it is not judged in accordance with itself, as a thing that is rather than as a thing that represents. Under the law of Aesthetics, the work of art withdraws as a work of art. As a science, Aesthetics mediates the work of art, and the work of art is concealed in this mediation. In “The Analytic of the Beautiful” of the Third Critique, Kant insists repeatedly that the object itself is never beautiful. Beauty is only possible in the human mind, in a contemplation that feels the harmonious unity of conceptual understanding and empirical reality that can be communicated

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as ‘common sense’ but never grasped, either morally or empirically. Kant could not adequately complete his philosophical system precisely because the image of the beautiful, and even more radically, the image (or nonimage) of the sublime, did not bridge the distance between the conceptual and the empirical, but made that distance more manifest. The image is “commerce” itself, moving deftly between the ideal and the real, but there is nothing in the image itself to commodify. Judgment cannot stand up to critique. Instead of synthesizing the realms of pure and practical reason, the Critique of Judgment achieves precisely what the German word for judgment, Urteilskraft, etymologically signifies: it divides. The Third Critique begins not only to fracture its own thesis, but to bring the structures of pure and practical reason into question. Judgment does not join together but tears asunder, and in so doing the fundamental gap in reason appears. I am suggesting that the cohesiveness that philosophy has sought is not to be found in aesthetics but in art itself. Since Plato, art has been set up in opposition to philosophy. In his Aesthetics, Hegel simply repeated Plato’s substitution of the aesthetic judgment of poetry for poetry as such. Aesthetics is the means by which philosophy triumphs over art by substituting the metaphysical language of reason for the language of poetry, which neither answers to the law of knowledge nor proceeds by reason. In this substitution, “art” becomes more accessible, but only at great ontological cost. When art is for us, for our moral edification or even our enjoyment, it has lost its “art being.” Hegel’s declaration is really nothing more than an observation of a long-standing practice. As long as poetry is treated as useful and valuable, as aesthetically pleasing, pleasantly didactic, politically assertive, or socially uplifting, art will remain “in the past.” Literary criticism is also a philosophical practice. The first conscious attempt at a system of literary criticism was characterized, in the wake of Hegel, as a pursuit of the “literary absolute,” a counterpart in literature to the self-conscious subject in philosophy.9 Thus the far-reaching consequence of Plato’s attempt to substitute philosophy for art has been to make aesthetics inescapable in the modern Western world. To counter this situation, allegory must be divided from Aesthetics. Only this division will allow allegory to stand phenomenologically as what it is. When this division is allowed, allegory reveals its true relation to Aesthetics, neither as its corrective nor as its opponent, but as its other. Aesthetics studies the “sensory manifestation of the idea,” the appearance of the beautiful; allegory is the structure of this appearance. The conflict between aesthetics and art is the conflict that rages (or should rage) within every

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literary scholar, as de Man confided in one of his last essays: “most of us feel internally divided between the compulsion to theorize about literature and a much more attractive, spontaneous encounter with literary works” (“Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics” 91). De Man characterizes literary theory as “something bleakly abstract and ugly” in and of itself (and “that cannot be entirely blamed on the perversity of its practitioners”) and also comments on the relief afforded by any methodology that identifies a correspondence between theoretical rigor and aesthetic appreciation (91).The desire for such a correspondence is motivated by the defense of aesthetic values, and the deftness of this defensive posture should indeed arouse some suspicion. The alacrity with which one rushes, as by instinct, to the defense of aesthetic values indicates that the source of one’s suspicion should be the compatibility of the aesthetic dimensions of literature with whatever it is that its theoretical investigation discloses. (92)

The resistance to theory is the near-instinctual defense of aesthetics.10 Theory puts aesthetics on the defensive. De Man was not so much interested in this conflict or in its resolution as in the essential difficulty that it demonstrates. There is something in literature that resists aestheticization, and there is something in aesthetics that resists literature. As a system, Aesthetics has a zero tolerance for such resistance, and so the difference between aesthetics (or the literary critic who mounts its defense) and theory (or the literary critic who challenges aesthetic ideology) becomes an opposition. The problem, which it was de Man’s lifelong project to expose, is that aesthetics cannot resist the resistance of literature (and more generally of art). Aesthetics will always begin its own deconstruction. It needs the alacritous defense of critics (and even artists) who will uphold the aesthetic principle and insist upon the system. However, the system has what de Man calls a “defective” cornerstone, continually threatening the entire aesthetic edifice with collapse. This defective cornerstone soundly supports the entire structure, and the cornerstone is allegory (“Sign and Symbol” 104).The “limit” of Hegel’s Aesthetics is imposed by nothing other than the work of art. Hegel reaches an unsurpassable limit because he recognizes the antithesis that lies not only in works of fine art but in human consciousness. When art is transferred into the imagination (Vorstellung verlegt), the antithesis within the artwork is transferred along with it. Hegel recognizes this contradiction in the artwork, first in symbolic form, as a natural object invested with a universal significance; then in classic form, as a plastic material particularly suited to a

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universal; and finally, in Romantic form, as a universal no longer dependent on a form externally concrete, but concrete in thought alone. Romantic art prepares for the transfer of art entirely into the realm of the imagination, where it becomes an object not for sensuous perception but for thoughtful contemplation. That is why Hegel calls the name Ästhetik inappropriate (unpassenden) and superficial (oberflächlichen). And yet, he retains the word in his lecture course Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Einleitung in die Ästhetik), with the following caveat: We shall therefore let the name “Aesthetics” stand; as a mere name it is indifferent to us, and besides it has meanwhile passed over into common speech, [and thus] as a name it may be retained. The proper expression, however, for our science is Philosophy of Art, or more definitely, Philosophy of Fine Art [Philosophie der Schönen Kunst]. (Aesthetics 1, trans. modified; Einleitung 13)

Perhaps nothing has been as thoroughly forgotten in Hegel as this difference, the indifference of a name that does not refer to its meaning. Hegel is absolutely correct to differentiate his object of study from the name Ästhetik. In the lectures, Hegel offers a corrective to the inappropriate and superficial “science of sensation,” and perhaps that is why he permits the name to stand, indifferently. Hegel’s indifference to the name is worthy of some attention, however. An indifference to the name Ästhetik also signifies an indifference to its etymological definition, as something capable of perception. By retaining the name Ästhetik for his own “science of art,” Hegel has overwritten the Greek meaning. In Greek the focus is on the thing that appears to perception, that which is capable of being perceived. In German idealist philosophy, the focus becomes the knowledge of what appears. That which appears loses its “genuine truth and life,” to borrow Hegel’s phrase, and is moved (verlegt; or more literally, misplaced) into the imagination (Vorstellung). Hegel follows the pattern established in the Phenomenology of Spirit. He begins with sense perception, that which simply appears, because he must begin there, but he quickly moves into the imagination. Hegel as much as tacitly admits that “Aesthetics” is an allegory in which the word does not say what it means. The post-Hegelian indifference to this difference is not surprising, since Hegel himself seems to make light of it, except that he begins the entire series of lectures by making this distinction and routinely preferring the expression Science of Art—Wissenschaft der Kunst—to “Aesthetics.”11 Such “forgetting” figures prominently in Hegel’s philosophy,

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which advocates an interiorization of the dialectic to the point that it becomes a rote memory (Gedächtnis). Hegel’s focus in the lectures is the move from reality, the world of sense perception, to the imagination, or the world of ideas. However, as soon as he establishes the more pressing need for a Science of Art, he admits an inherent difficulty, in that art resists the systematization required by philosophy. According to Hegel, “Whatever ideas others may have about philosophy and philosophizing, my view is that philosophizing is throughout inseparable from scientific procedure [Wissenschaftlichkeit]” (11, 23). Even as an object of thought, however, as the science of art rather than art as such, the concept of art remains a conceptualized contradiction. And thus Hegel allows that art alone must be “exempt from absolute scientific rigour”; “von der wissenschaftlichen Strenge nachgelassen werden” (11, 23). Art and science alienate one another, and yet Hegel recognizes that this very alienation is what brings them together. This is none other than the dialectical structure of human consciousness that is established in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In the process of gaining self-consciousness, Geist (Spirit) exercises much freedom and caprice, but the product of Geist is always a measure of Geist itself. Hegel argues that as an object of thought, art springs from Geist. Regardless of their appearance, works of art are permeated (durchdringen) with it. Now art and its works, by springing from and being created by Spirit, are themselves of a spiritual kind [Art], even if their representation assumes an appearance of sensuousness [Darstellung den Schein der Sinnlichkeit], and pervades the sensuous with Spirit [das Sinnliche mit Geist durchdringt]. (12, 24)

The particular contribution of the work of art is as an object in which Geist is able to grasp itself in the shape of thought, but also to recognize itself again in its renunciation of the sentimental and the sensible form. Hegel therefore concludes, Thus the work of art too, in which the thought renounces itself [der Gedanke sich selbst entäußert], belongs to the realm of conceptual thinking [zum Bereich des begreifenden Denkens], and the Spirit, by subjecting it to scientific treatment [der wissenschaftlichen Betrachtung unterwirft], is thereby satisfying the need of Spirit’s inmost nature [das Bedürfnis seiner eignesten Natur]. (13, 24)12

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For Hegel, Geist is the origin of the work of art, and the “philosophy of fine art” (which is indifferently called Ästhetik) is the means by which this origin is revealed.When Hegel says Ästhetik, he does not mean what he says. Under this meaningless name, he has established a scientific field of study which is not a study of art as something which appears, but a study of art as something in which Geist or Spirit appears in something that it is not. The whole Ästhetik project is made possible by a structure quite like that of allegory— not allegory as typically conceived (saying one thing and meaning another), but allegory as a structure in which two things appear in the same space at the same time. The task remains, however, to determine the function of this allegorical structure. After rehearsing the various arguments for “The Aim of Art” (as this section is titled), Hegel concludes that “art’s vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration [die Kunst die Wahrheit in Form der sinnlichen Kunstgestatung zu enthüllen], to set forth the reconciled opposition just mentioned, and so to have its end and aim in itself, in this very setting forth and unveiling [Darstellung und Enthüllung]” (55, 64). Heidegger, true to his own observation in the Epilogue to “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”) that “the truth of Hegel’s judgment has not yet been decided,” (80, 68), builds on Hegel’s observations and approaches the problem from his own peculiar phenomenological perspective. However, Heidegger begins his investigations with a crucial observation about allegory. “The work makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other; it is an allegory” (20, 4). Heidegger re-admits concepts from the realm of art into the discussion of art. (He lets the poets back into the Republic of Philosophy.) Hegel admitted that art once had a privileged place, in the irretrievable past; Heidegger suggests that art might retain this privilege. Hegel reads art through philosophy; nonetheless, he accords art an equivalent status, at least to a historical point. In fact, Hegel’s philosophy needs art in order to itself be manifest, and so he must “vindicate this higher standpoint for art too” (Aesthetics 55, Einleitung 64), the same higher standpoint as that taken by philosophy. Hegel dispatches the views that the aim of art is mimetic, or that it is an “awakening and vivifying of our slumbering feelings,” and thus amounts to a purely formal conception, an empty form. As he addresses the argument that the aim of art is “moral betterment,” he suspends the analysis of art and digresses into an argument about the philosophical grounds for the possibility of moral

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betterment. For a human being to be moral requires reflection (Reflexion), and reflection requires an internal opposition. The duty chosen for duty’s sake as a guide out of free conviction and inner conscience, and then carried out, [the moral choice] is by itself the abstract universal of the will and this has its direct opposite in nature, in sensuous impulses, selfish interests, passions, and everything grouped together under the name of feeling and emotion (52–53, 62–63).

The subject chooses between these opposing forces such that one cancels the other. But in fact, these opposing forces cannot be completely reconciled or decided between: it is the very opposition between the universal and the particular. As Hegel admits, “these are oppositions which have not been invented at all by the subtlety of reflection or the pedantry of philosophy; . . . they have always preoccupied and troubled the human consciousness” (54, 63). The modern subject realizes this opposition in human being itself, and thus the human becomes “an amphibious animal, because he [or she] has to live in two worlds which contradict one another” (54, 63). Human consciousness wanders between these two worlds and only “resolves” them in a hypothetical way, as an “ought.” Thus the question then arises whether such a universal and thorough-going opposition, which cannot get beyond a mere ought and a postulated solution, is in general the absolute truth and supreme end [das an und für sich Wahre und der höchste Endzweck überhaupt sei].

Enter Philosophy: If general culture [Bildung] has run into such a contradiction, it becomes the task of philosophy to supersede [aufzuheben] the oppositions and to show . . . that truth lies only in the reconciliations and mediation of both, and that this mediation is no mere demand, but what is absolutely accomplished and is ever self-accomplishing. (54–55, emphasis added; 63–64)

This is what Heidegger describes as “an inner concentration of motion” or “a highest state of concentration” (“Origin” 48, “Der Ursprung” 34–35) According to Hegel, philosophy’s insight (made possible through its elevated position) is to show “that the opposition and its two sides do not exist at all, but that they exist reconciled”; “daß nicht etwa der Gegensatz und seine Seiten gar nicht, sondern daß sie in Versöhnung sind” (Aesthetics 55, Einleitung 64). Heidegger translates this view into the combined concepts of al-

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legory and symbol (“Origin” 20, “Der Ursprung” 4), which I discuss further below. Heidegger’s return to art’s own terms is actually indicated in Hegel. After the rather long articulation of how philosophy comes to terms with this inherently human and logically unresolvable contradiction between the universal and the particular, Hegel admits that “we will have to vindicate this higher standpoint for art too” (Aesthetics 55, Einleitung 64). One cannot articulate a better defense of art than the one Hegel offers here. Thereby the false position . . . is at once abandoned, that art has to serve as a means to moral purposes, . . . by instructing and improving, and thus has its substantial aim, not in itself, but in something else. . . . Against this we must maintain that art’s vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration [Kunstgestaltung], to set forth the reconciled opposition just mentioned, and so to have its end and aim in itself, in this very setting forth [Darstellung] and unveiling [Enthüllung]. (55, 64)

In light of this comment, Hegel’s seemingly bold statement, commonly misquoted as “art is a thing of the past,” is really an aesthetic sleight of hand. Hegel’s actual statement is that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (11, 22). That is only the case because Hegel has appropriated art, sublated it, for philosophy, and calls the philosophy that deals with art by a “mere name” that does not say what it means or mean what it says. Aesthetics is the allegory of art and philosophy, and the “state of highest agitation” with which they belong to each other. Not strictly opposed, art and philosophy actually exist reconciled. Allegory provides the structure for this reconciled existence.13 In the Hegelian world picture, art has become for us, an object of knowledge, and that is why there is no longer art which is an object of immediate sensuality, but only “Aesthetics.” Wissenschaft is the inverse of art, but art is the model for the Absolute. This art, however, is neither symbolic nor aesthetic. As explicated by de Man, the confusion and contradiction in Hegel’s own use of the terms sign and symbol discredit the privilege of the aesthetic as well as the symbolic. De Man identifies the privilege accorded in practice to that aesthetically “ugly and barren trope”—allegory: We would have to conclude that Hegel’s philosophy . . . is in fact an allegory of the disjunction between philosophy and history, or, in our more restricted concern, between literature and aesthetics. . . . The reasons for

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Face Off:The Allegorical Image and Aesthetics this disjunction, which it is equally vain to deplore or to praise, are not themselves historical or recoverable by means of history. To the extent that they are inherent in language, in the necessity, which is also an impossibility, to connect the subject with its predicates or the sign with its symbolic significations, the disjunction will always, as it did in Hegel, manifest itself as soon as experience shades into thought, history into theory. . . . [T]he emergence of thought and of theory is not something that our own thought can hope to prevent or to control. (“Sign and Symbol” 104; emphases added)14

Aesthetics, or the Science of Art, is grounded in Spirit, but Spirit itself depends on the structure of allegory, a point that will be argued fully in chapter 4. Spirit is an image that partakes of both the phenomenal and the universal realms. Allegory and aesthetics are not to be opposed but held in suspension, and what they are really supporting is art and philosophy themselves. Walter Benjamin recognized this fundamental connection and begins The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels)—which is ultimately a book about a literary form—with a lengthy treatise on philosophy. Within the first paragraphs of the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” Benjamin admonishes that philosophy should “remain true to the law of its own form as the representation of truth and not as a guide to the acquisition of knowledge” (28, 9–10). Benjamin then offers the form of the treatise as the structure proper to this form, and specifically counter to the purposeful structure of systematic and teleological thought which is always governed by meaning. Benjamin rightly disputes the misappropriation of Hegel as the father of the Systembegriffe (the concept of system). It is precisely the systematic tendency of philosophy that causes Hegel’s lament that “Spirit has not only lost its essential life; it is also conscious of this loss, of the finitude that is its own content” (Phenomenology 4, Phänomenologie 12). The Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit begins with a gesture toward the custom by which the scientific work begins with “an explanation of the author’s aim, why he wrote the book, and the relationship in which he believes it to stand to earlier or contemporary treatises on the same work.” In the next sentence Hegel dismisses this custom as “inappropriate and unsuitable,” unpassend und zweckwidrig, in a philosophical work, even though the custom is often followed to the letter in philosophy (1, 9). Certainly a philosopher begins by considering the tradition, but the work is doomed if it remains determined to accept or reject a given philosophical system and

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itself proceeds on the assumption that the “conflict and seeming incompatibility” of an old system can be resolved by a new one. Hegel attempts to direct philosophy away from “aims and results” and toward process as an equally essential aspect of the philosophical whole. He dismisses judgment as easy, comprehension as difficult, and a blend of judgment and comprehension as the most difficult of all (5, 13). Spirit is neither determined by judgment nor simply to be comprehended. Science, for Hegel, is constituted by the blend of the two that will be better articulated as mediation, and this blend appears in the figure of Geist. “The true shape [Gestalt] in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth” (3, 11). Not only has Spirit not been allowed to take this shape, but the misguided structure of philosophical study has virtually emptied Spirit of the universal that is its true content. The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished [arm] that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss. (5, 13)

Hegel positions himself as a lonely figure opposing a view “as prevalent as it is pretentious,” the “feeling and intuition of the Absolute,” that exempts the Absolute from scientific study. Not only does Hegel dispute this exemption, but he claims to be responding to the demand of Spirit, which has finally recognized its own destitution. In the Phenomenology, Hegel does not seek to determine what Spirit is, because such determination would only drive Spirit more deeply into oblivion. If Spirit is truly universal and infinite, as Hegel believes it is, then its substance never changes and can never be determined in finite terms. This also means that the Absolute Subject is not to be identified with the individual.15 As the merely mortal love of wisdom, philosophy must recognize its own finitude before it can respond to the demands of Spirit. Philosophy is to meet this need, not by opening up the fast-locked nature of substance [die Verschlossenheit der Substanz aufschliessen], and raising this to self-consciousness, not by bringing consciousness out of its chaos back to an order based on thought, nor to the simplicity of the Notion, but rather by running together what is put asunder, by suppressing the differentiations of the Notion and restoring the feeling of essential being: in short, by providing edification [Erbauung] rather than insight [Einsicht]. (4–5, 13)

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This edifice must be capable of sustaining the universal and the particular, of bridging the realms of the infinite and the finite, of sustaining a conceptualized contradiction that is entirely alien to reason. Spirit will appear in this edifice not because a philosopher has revealed its mystery with a keener vision, but to the contrary, because he has respected the Verschlossenheit der Substanz, the closedness of the substance. The Verschlossenheit is not to be aufschliessen. The closed is not to be disclosed because Spirit cannot be self-consciously brought to consciousness. Rather, philosophy’s task is propaedeutic, to prepare a structure (Erbauung) that will bring together what is essentially different, the universal and the particular. But such a gathering can only occur in the imagination. Hegel recognizes the irreconcilable difference between the two realms: Spirit appears in the finite world but remains infinite. The phenomenology of Spirit does not capture the substance of Spirit, but it allows Spirit to appear, and thus this structure is implicitly (and unavoidably) allegorical.16 If the symbol is defined as the coincidence of the ideal with the real, then only allegory is capable of being truly symbolic in the profane world, and allegory is not beautiful, but sublime. The sublime, however, defies mediation. The sublime, not the beautiful, is the “spontaneous experience” of the work of art, an immediate experience. Aesthetics has to recuperate this experience, and this is largely accomplished by treating the sublime (the immediate) like the beautiful (the mediated). Aesthetics is, in Hegel, the mediation of the sublime experience of the work of art by means of the conceptualization of the beautiful. Patrick Roney rehearses Lyotard’s response “to the enframing power of technoscience” as that of an exceeding of the beautiful, driving it “toward and beyond the limit of its own possibility.” At that limit, the beautiful “decomposes . . . into its elements.” In the place of the beautiful as form, the sublime emerges in the work of art and indicates “a point of resistance with the potential to unwork (désoeuvrer) the imperatives of image fabrication [or figuration]” (“The Approach of the Unpresentable”170). With Lyotard, Roney links the sublime to the possibility of a true presence that would be the “precondition for the [appearing] of beings.” He invokes Heidegger in order to define the sublime work of art as “both the happening of truth, and the setting into work of truth.” And yet, as Roney acutely observes, “the sublime work of art does not simply leave this process intact, but displaces its own significations and representations because it intends, i.e. transcends toward, the unpresentable even though it remains tied to the presentable” (171–72;

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emphasis added). The sublime has a necessarily allegorical structure, but it is not an allegory of anything. In the Aesthetics, Hegel attempts to conceal the aporia of the sublime.This aporia threatens to destabilize the entire structure of knowledge and the philosophy that takes this knowledge as its object. Hegel here replicates the method established in Phenomenology of Spirit, beginning with the admission that the immediate is meaningless. Imposing meaning by using this Nichtigkeit as the starting point for the process of Spirit coming to know itself, Hegel immediately overwrites the sublime with the powers of perception and the concept of beauty. For Hegel, Aesthetics ends in the sublime, which is really its starting point, the “spontaneous experience” of the work of art. For Hegel, this immediate experience is only possible through a process of mediation that is then forgotten, or rather released into rote memory, as if “learned by heart” (in German, Gedächtnis). Hegel presents this mediation in the guise or appearance of progress, but it is just as easily understood in the appearance of regression. Whether in the appearance of progression or regression, phenomenology begins and ends (or ends and begins) with the work of art, and as long as it remains philosophical, or aesthetic, the value of the work is unassailed. This value only comes into question when the phenomenological reduction proceeds further and tries to determine the phenomenology of the phenomena, to ask the question, “What is the work of art?” Heidegger dared to ask this question, and in the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” he shows that allegory, not the beautiful, is the essence of the work of art. For Hegel, the Zweck or telos of art (which is what Heidegger will call its Ursprung or origin) is Gegensatz, antithesis or contradiction. For Hegel, that which is “art” in the “work of art” is specifically the contradiction of the universal and the particular in a single object. Without direct reference to Hegel, this is the very definition of art with which Heidegger begins his essay: Presumably it becomes something superfluous [überflüssig] and confounding [verwirrend] to inquire about [the artwork] because the artwork is something else over and above thingness. This otherness which is in it constitutes its art-ness. The artwork is, indeed, a manufactured thing, but it says something other than the mere thing itself, allo agoreuei. The work makes public something other than itself; it manifests otherness; it is an al-

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Face Off:The Allegorical Image and Aesthetics legory. With the manufactured thing something other is brought together in the artwork. To bring together in Greek is called sumballein. The work is a symbol. Allegory and symbol provide the conceptual frame within whose channel of vision the artwork has for a long time been characterized. (“Origin” 19–20, trans. modified; “Der Ursprung” 4)

Heidegger critiques the conceptualizing of allegory and symbol; however, he also suggests the casting together of what has been divided between them. The artwork has long been characterized in terms of symbol and allegory because they describe the structure by which art appears in the work. In the work of art something appears. A phenomenology of the artwork will reveal the structure of this appearance but not its source. Since phenomenology is itself the study of phenomena, specifically that which appears, the phenomenology of the work of art proves crucial to the phenomenon of phenomenology itself. Whereas the phenomenology of phenomena would lead only to a tautological and circular reasoning, with the turn to art, and particularly poetry, Heidegger is able to step out of the hermeneutic circle and to strike through Being.17 In this image of a word that is written and then excised in such a way that it continues to appear, Being is and is not, it shows itself without disclosing itself, and it does not mean what it says because what it says has no meaning. In The History of the Concept of Time, the lecture course from which Being and Time ultimately emerged, Heidegger begins with the basic definition of a phenomenon as simply “that which shows itself,” but he sharpens this into a more general definition of phenomena as “a mode of encounter of entities in themselves such that they show themselves.” Heidegger offers the etymology of the Greek phainesthai as the middle voice of the verb phaino, which he defines (in his peculiar way) as “to bring something to light, to make it visible in itself.” The phenomenon is that which can come to light, but not all phenomena show themselves in the same way. Some phenomena do not show themselves, but instead appear as something else, as Schein in German, a pretext that Heidegger describes as “pretension to be manifest but not really being it” (81). Heidegger admits that Schein is merely a modification of an authentic phenomenon. Although the phenomenon does not show itself in itself, it still shows itself.The important distinction is not between Schein and Phänomenon but between semblance (Schein) and appearance (Erscheinung) or

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mere appearance (bloß Erscheinung). In fact, appearance also shows itself to be phenomenal, but first it must be extricated from its ontic use as a referent. In common usage, appearance is characterized by reference. In order to fix what appearance is, Heidegger rigorously analyzes the term appearance by submitting it to the phenomenological reduction. This assumes that appearance is something, and as something it can be grasped phenomenologically and not merely conceptually. In the usual conceptual understanding, appearance reflects the privilege of the essential or spiritual over the real or material in a metaphysical system. Heidegger defines it a bit differently: Appearances are themselves occurrences which refer back to other occurrences from which we can infer something else which does not make an appearance. Appearances are appearances of something which is not given as an appearance. Appearance has the distinguishing feature of reference. (82)

In the metaphysical structure, appearances refer as their primary function, and presumably the appearances indicate meaning without getting in its way. “The term appearance [Erscheinung] therefore means a kind of reference of something to something which does not show itself in itself.” Appearances indicate or announce something that is not itself present, and once this function is performed, the appearance disappears into the meaning, the physical yields to the metaphysical. In this mode of representation, the phenomenon “does not even pretend to show itself [as in Schein] but instead pretends to represent itself ” (82). Thus Erscheinung, the appearance which is like the image in the mirror, is entirely lacking in substance. That which shows itself is neither showing itself in itself nor showing itself in something it is not. And yet, something appears. It at first appears that appearance is not phenomenal, but Heidegger shows that it is. “The possibility of appearance as reference of something to something rests on having that something which does the referring show itself in itself. . . . The structure of appearance as reference already intrinsically presupposes the more original structure of self-showing” (82). In other words, something does show itself, and that something is more originary than what appears as a signifying reference. In appearance the phenomenon shows itself by concealing itself. Heidegger thus distinguishes between the ontic understanding of appearance as reference or representation, and the ontological understanding of appearance, which is far more complex and contradictory. “Appearance implies something which appears, and at the opposite pole,

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something which does not appear” (83). That which appears refers to that which does not appear but in some way “stands behind” the appearance.This ontic view supports the designation of what does appear as “mere appearance” and upholds the Platonic distinction between the world of shadows and the world of ideas. An ontological view, however, pays attention to the phenomenality of that which does appear and to how it appears. Heidegger clarifies that phenomenology is not the study of “mere appearances,” but the study of how things show themselves. Heidegger distinguishes phenomenology from all other sciences “in that it says nothing about the material content of the thematic object of this science,” and therefore phenomenology is a methodological term. Phenomenology is a way of “encountering something” that shows itself (85) and is not mere appearance. For Heidegger, there is nothing behind the phenomenon that gives it meaning or value. There is only what is, and “phenomenology is precisely the work of laying open and letting be seen” (86). This work is far more difficult than one might expect because although there is nothing behind the phenomenon, the phenomenon is easily covered over and concealed from view. Phenomenology’s greatest task is to peel away the coverings and let the phenomenon come to light. This is the method of “phenomenological reduction” or of “destructive phenomenology.”18 In Heidegger, the phenomenon is not defined as a static thing but as a structure of relation, “a mode of encounter.” This structure underpins his thought and largely accounts for his turn to poetry.19 In poetry, and more generally in art, Heidegger discovered phenomena in which this essential mode of encounter is not covered up. He does not find it in just any poetry or in every work of art, but only in a structure of relation in which something shows itself without referring to something outside of itself. For Heidegger, this mode of encounter is exquisitely pronounced in the work of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. There are features in Hölderlin’s poetry that lead to a concealment of this mode such that his poems have been appropriated, for example, as nationalist hymns for Germany. But there is also a continuous resistance to this concealment. The poems interrupt aesthetic appropriation. There is something else at work in the work of art, something that is not to be found in its material or in its ontical references to meaning, not in the artist and not in the spectator or reader, although all of these are borne by the work of art. Something vaguely referred to as “art” is also and primordially borne by the work.

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The Work of Art The work of art is both a work, ein Werk, in the sense of a thing that is, and a work, Eine Aufgabe, in the sense that it is a task, a working-out. In order to distinguish the work of art, in both senses, as its task and as a work, there must be a phenomenology of art. Although to a degree the artist is the origin of the work, and the work is the origin of the artist, Heidegger unequivocally states that “neither is the sole support of the other.” Both the artist and the artwork are “by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely that which gives the artist [Künstler] and artwork [Kunstwerk] their names—art [Kunst]” (“Origin” 17, “Der Ursprung” 1). Heidegger is after this third thing, which is not originary in the same way that the artist is the origin of a work and a work the origin of an artist, but the Ursprung-origin from which both the artist and the artwork emerge. Heidegger immediately puts into question whether “art” can be conceived as an origin at all, and there is a hint in the German word for origin used in the title: Ursprung. The root word is from the verb springen, still generally cognate with the English verb to spring, or to emerge suddenly. The prefix ur emphasizes the primordiality of the springing. An Ursprung is a sudden emerging that precedes any other happening, an origin. But, before the work springs from the artist and before the artist emerges from the work, there is art.20 Therefore, art is in the artwork and in the artist. Art is not identical with either, but can appear there. Heidegger’s essay is about the origin of the artwork, and therefore he pursues two related questions, “What is art?” and “How does art show itself?” The general question is not what makes something a work of art. Nor is it the task of the essay to establish how one goes about creating an artwork, or an artist. The framing of the question precludes any version of the genius or the inspired artist because that would find the artist at the origin of the artwork, or reduce art to a mystical experience, and not the third thing vaguely called “art.” One cannot start with art as such, but only with the phenomenon that is art. Heidegger begins, therefore, with the assumption that “art is present in the artwork.” In strict phenomenological terms the artwork is a thing like any other thing. This thing has empirical qualities and can (often) be moved from place to place without any obvious change in its sensual qualities. This thing can also accrue value in the currency of aesthetics, which has a clear economic correlation. As a thing, and even as a thing of value, the work of art is not unique, and so neither a material nor an aesthetic evaluation of the

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work provides a response to the question of what is present in the artwork that is distinctively “art.” Although art is not to be found in the material of the work (that thing that is an artwork), Heidegger continues to maintain that art itself is a thing, a phenomenon, and that this “something else in the work constitutes its artistic nature” (19, 3). The project of “The Origin of the Work of Art” is “to arrive at the immediate and full reality of the work of art,” because only in such an arrival will art be discovered in the work of art. Heidegger suggests that “the thingly element” in a work of art (that is, what “art” is in a work of art) is “like the substructure into and upon which the other, particular [Eigentliche] element is built” (20, trans. modified; 4). As noted above, Heidegger characterizes this substructure in the rather peculiar terms of symbol joined with allegory. This characterization is peculiar because it brings together concepts that have been held apart and even hierarchized as oppositional since the late eighteenth century, most particularly and strongly in the Literaturwissenschaft or literary criticism of the Romantic period, a view that is still largely in force. Heidegger offers this conceptual frame only in order to witness its self-destruction, acknowledging and promptly dismissing this tradition. He does not elaborate on the error of method evident in such characterization, but his critique can be inferred through his own characterization of allegory and symbol working—and indeed working only— together, and in the structure (or substructure) indicated here and elaborated throughout the essay. This structure is none other than that of the phenomenon, that which shows itself. It seems that the question of allegory is as essential to phenomenology as phenomenology is to the question of allegory. In the fundamental definition of phenomenology given by Heidegger in The History of the Concept of Time as “a mode of encounter of entities in themselves such that they show themselves,” the phenomenon does not depend on something standing “behind” it. Rather, something appears in the phenomenon that is at the same time not the phenomenon. This is a logical paradox but not a phenomenological one. When a phenomenon is understood logically, the phenomenon itself is lost or covered over by a mediation that connects the phenomenon that appears and an idea that does not appear, thus establishing a metaphysical reference between two distinct realms (the phenomenal and the real) that has been familiar ever since Plato told the story of the cave, in which the world of shadows is revealed as the mere appearance of the more substantial world of ideas. By means of the metaphysical reference, the phenomenon is mediated and comes to serve the function of indication. Heidegger ultimately acknowledges that the mode

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of indication indeed rests on the genuine definition of phenomenon that he has established,21 but he also cautions that the free-floating name of phenomenon is all too easily fixed and limited by a definition that grounds itself on the derivative phenomenological manifestation of appearance, and the entire phenomenological method is compromised when the structure of appearance is assumed to be metaphysical. Metaphysics has so dominated modern thought that it is nearly impossible to think outside of its laws. Like Heidegger, Benjamin identifies the problem of representation (Darstellung) at the core of a well-established error in thought. Within the first paragraph of the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” that opens The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, Benjamin cautions, “If philosophy is to remain true to the law of its own form, as the representation of truth and not as a guide to the acquisition of knowledge, then the exercise of this form—but not its anticipation in the system—must be accorded due importance” (28, Der Ursprung 9–10). In philosophy, Truth should resemble itself. When philosophy asserts itself as a guide to knowledge, it becomes systematic. When philosophy itself pretends to be a system, it becomes determinative of the essence of Truth and is no longer capable of representing it. In the system, philosophy proceeds on the assumption that truth can show itself, without acknowledging the fact that if truth were to show itself in the way of basic phenomena, truth would no longer be true to itself; it would simply be “the true,” an empirical fact, proven or disproven and subject to the law of the hypothesis, one thing among many things. That is not what truth is. Benjamin concisely critiques this problem: Inasmuch as it is determined by this concept of system, philosophy is in danger of accommodating itself to a syncretism which weaves a spider’s web between separate kinds of knowledge in an attempt to ensnare the truth as if it were something which came flying in from outside. (28, 9)

Benjamin also notes that while the concept of system requires a structure of proleptic universalism, “such philosophy falls far short of the didactic authority of doctrine.” Benjamin calls instead upon the “uncircumscribable essentiality of truth” and the “epochs” which have proceeded propadeutically rather than proleptically. Such epochs are not limited to a particular time period. The baroque is one such epoch. As used by Benjamin, the baroque refers to a historical period but is not limited to it. In contrast to the methodological and systematic writings, especially those typical of the nineteenth century, Benjamin offers the treatise,

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particularly in its medieval style, as an example of the baroque and as an ideal form for the representation of truth.22 The treatise is didactic “but lacks the conclusiveness of an instruction which could be asserted, like doctrine, by virtue of its own authority” (28, 10). The philosophical system is characterized by an uninterrupted purposeful structure governed by a universal totality. In contrast, the absence of this structure is the Kennzeichen (sign), the recognizable characteristic of the treatise. Benjamin calls this Darstellung als umweg, representation as digression. It is mosaic in quality, indicative of a whole that is interrupted, a representation in which something else manifests itself in the fissures. Truth does not show itself in the material (the ceramic pieces), nor does truth pretend to show itself in the completed image (the mosaic), but it pretends to represent itself in the assemblage of pieces that form an image. Benjamin’s preference for the mosaic and likewise for the constellation, or Sternbild (star-image), identifies the image as being at the center of philosophy.23 Because the image is a fragmented image, however, this center is decentered. It is impossible to locate the center, and Benjamin’s work bears witness to this impossibility. The Origin of the German Tragic Drama is a treatise on allegory, and true to Benjamin’s own observation, the work is propaedeutic and proceeds as a Darstellung als Umweg, allegory represented or staged in digression. Benjamin expressly counters neo-Platonic philosophy. “The being of ideas simply cannot be conceived as an object of vision, not even intellectual vision” (35, 17). The being of ideas is truth, but truth is entirely intentionless, and that is why it cannot be an object of vision. Truth has the same relation to ideas as ideas have to phenomena. Therefore, the relationship of truth to phenomena is mediated, always and unavoidably, by the idea. The idea functions as the image of truth but is not identical with it. Even though “truth is the death of intention,” and can therefore never be subject to the law of phenomena (which under the hypothesis is always intentional), in order to appear at all truth must have a resemblance in the phenomenal world. The mode of being in the world of appearances is quite different from the being of truth, which is something ideal. The structure of truth, then, demands a mode of being which in its lack of intentionality resembles the simple existence of things, but which is superior in its permanence. (36, 18)

Truth does not realize itself in the empirical world but is its “origin” in the qualified sense that it is the unknowable antinomy of the empirical world. Benjamin identifies truth in the proper name, a word “unimpaired by cogni-

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tive meaning,” a word that has its power not in signification or meaning but solely in its being as word. Only in the name can a word be truly symbolic. Benjamin sees the task of the philosopher as the restoration of the name to its “primordial form of indiscernability” (urspringlich Unvernehmen). Philosophy has the ability to hear the primordial name, the idea that is without intention, and thus to follow the law of the idea, which Benjamin articulates as follows: All essences exist in complete and immaculate independence, not only from phenomena, but, especially, from each other. (37, 19)

Benjamin makes recourse to the analogy of the constellation, not to clarify this law by an image, but because only an image can express this law. The metaphysical distinction between two entities that privileges one (as essence or truth) over the other (as material) is an ontic distinction—not an ontological one. The ontic distinction is a degraded view of appearance. Ontologically, the phenomenon as semblance or even as mere appearance is no less a phenomenon and has no less of an ontological value.The important distinction is that the semblance is not a representation, but a simultaneous presentation of what shows itself in itself and of what shows itself in what it is not.The consequences for allegory are that we can no longer safely assume that the “meaning” to which an “allegory” refers is more significant than the language or “phenomenon” that makes that “meaning” manifest (if indeed it can still be called “meaning”). In the conventional model of allegory, the distinction between the literal and allegorical levels is ontic, not ontological. My work is concerned with the ontological difference, and as such, there is no value accorded to either entity, the work (that which shows itself as itself) or that which the work indicates (that which shows itself in that which it is not). The structure of appearance is not referential or representative, and this problematizes the generally understood structure of allegory as the most blatant representation of meaning. Heidegger and Benjamin redirect our attention to the work of art, not as an object of the aesthetic gaze, but as something other to the subject that is not an object of its own reflection but some kind of resemblance. In a work of art, we are faced with two things: the work, which stands as an object before us (with value, mobility, and mass) and art, which has no such object qualities. After much questioning and probing, midway through the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger provisionally concludes, “Thus art is: the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then

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is the becoming and happening of truth” (71, “Der Ursprung” 59). On the very last page of the essay, Heidegger notes that this becoming and happening of truth is the art of the artwork. “When truth sets itself into the work, it appears” (81, 69). Appearance, for Heidegger, is the being of truth, and the being of truth is always an advent, a coming into appearance. Truth-asappearance is the origin of the work of art, but as Heidegger points out, this says that truth arises out of nothing, because appearance is no-thing. “It does indeed [say this] if by nothing is meant the mere not of that which is . . . as an object present in the ordinary way. . . . Truth is never gathered from objects that are present and ordinary” (71, 59). Truth is not an object, but a gathering, a bringing together of “things” (that are not objects). In the work of art, truth is the gathering that gathers something other (which cannot itself appear) together with something made (the work which does appear); however, this is not a peaceful gathering. Heidegger chooses the German word Gefüge, meaning texture, or structure, but he again specifies (as with Gestalt) that this gathering of truth is not that of a unity but that of a conflict. “The conflict is not a rift [Riß] as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other” (63, 51). The opponents do not conform to each other but remain steadfast in their autonomy, and “Figure is the structure [Gefüge] in whose shape the rift composes and submits itself ” (64, 51). The conflict between work and thing in the artwork, a conflict that draws work and thing together so that they appear as art, is the same type of conflict Prudentius faces in the poem Apotheosis (as discussed in chapter 2). Divinity and mortality share no-thing, but they do share this unresolvable conflict that draws them together. What appears in Christ-Jesus is the intimate Riß of divinity and mortality. What appears in mortals is an intimate Riß of body and soul. The nothing shared by divinity and mortals is appearance, and this appearance is not an object but a structure that Heidegger here calls Gefüge, but that is not altogether different from his definition of the “schema-image” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Because it is an image, the schema-image has the appearance of a particular, and schematism adds to the image the possibility of a “general rule governing all possible representations” (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 97–106, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik 92– 102). Heidegger does not call either the structure (Gefüge) or the schemaimage allegory, but indeed they are allegorical. To bring a general rule—that is, a universal—into a possible intuition—that is, a particular—requires an allegorical structure in which the universal shows itself in the particular

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which it is not. Not only is the universal not the particular, but in essence they are mutually opposed. Insofar as it holds the universal together with the particular, allegory is the structure that supports this Riß. In its primordiality, allegory has the structure of phusis, not “nature” or “essence” in a banal sense, but the bringing forth that Heidegger finds in the work of art. As phusis, the work of art sets up a world.The Psychomachia, for instance, sets up a world in bringing the soul, something that cannot otherwise appear, together with a world that is conceived in language, without depending on a concept. For Heidegger, the simultaneity of time and space, in the phenomenon that shows itself in itself and in which some other phenomenon also shows itself, is not figural, but phenomenal. There is not representation, but presentation. Heidegger articulates the dimensions of presentation in terms of the Greek word phusis as the “emerging and rising in itself and in all things” (“Origin” 42, “Der Ursprung” 28). For Heidegger, phusis is not at all the translation of the Latinate word nature. In order to arrive at phusis with Heidegger, it is first necessary to comprehend the Greek word for truth aletheia, as Heidegger comprehends it. In Being and Time, Heidegger takes up aletheia insofar as “from time immemorial, philosophy has associated truth with being,” from Parmenides and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel (256, Sein und Zeit 212). Heidegger puts this association into question, not in order to deny its validity but to bring truth to its phenomenal appearance in the analytic of Dasein.“[I]f, however, truth rightfully has a primordial connection with Being, then the phenomenon of truth [Wahrheitsphänomen] comes within the range of the problematic of fundamental ontology [fundamentalontologischen Problematik]” (Being 256, Sein 213). As a phenomenon within the analytic of Dasein, truth must be taken up with precision. Notably, this discussion concludes the section devoted to the “Care Structure” that closes the first division of Being and Time. Heidegger recognizes that Dasein is “constituted by disclosedness,” that is, by aletheia, and further, that the truthas-disclosedness that constitutes Dasein is always relative to the being of Dasein. This truth as disclosedness, aletheia, is intrinsic to Dasein. Heidegger separates it in order to phenomenalize it, but this is not its essential nature, nor is it the phenomenon of aletheia, but its resemblance. The truth which has been presupposed, or the “there is,” by which its Being is to be defined, has that kind of Being—or meaning of Being—which belongs to Dasein itself. We must “make” the presupposition of truth because it is one that has been “made” already with the Being of the “we.” (271, 228)

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By recollecting Dasein in its disclosedness, Heidegger resists but does not overcome the entire metaphysical tradition since Plato. Mocking the privilege of the “merely” sense-perceptible in describing the prisoners in the cave who believed the perceptible shadows on the wall to be reality, Socrates explains how the story works by analogy, “likening the region revealed through sight to the habitation of the prison” (Republic 517b). The senses perceive only the limited perspective allowed by the constraints of the body. However, by turning the body away from its sense perceptions, including the sense-perception of itself as body, the soul (or spirit) which was limited by these phenomenal constraints is able to ascend to the “intelligible region.” Thus Socrates surmises; and yet, he tells Glaucon (in the modernized translation), “But God knows whether it is true” (517b). Socrates then simply assumes that it is true, and without another doubtful word, continues with the interpretation of this dream as it appears to him. In fact, Plato constructs the edifice of the intelligible realm on this doubt, substituting the concrete narrative of the cave for the abstract simile of the divided line by which Socrates first tries to explain the separation between the ideal realm and that of mere belief and illusion in book 6 of The Republic. In his own argument Socrates proceeds from the more abstract to the more physical. As Socrates begins to describe the cave, Glaucon responds, “All that I see.” As Socrates moves to his interpretation of the cave narrative, he laments “that in the region of the known the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the idea of the good.”To see this good is to witness the cause for all things beautiful and the source of the visible world. “Anyone who is to act wisely in private or public must have caught sight of this” (517c). The very sense that limits mortal perception is the sense that enables divine transcendence. From this vision, the sight does not want to turn away. “Do not be surprised that those who have attained this height [of the intelligible realm] are not willing to occupy themselves with the affairs of men, but their souls ever feel the upward urge and the yearning for that sojourn above” (517c-d). But Socrates will deny them this permanent transcendence. The law requires that the souls who have turned their bodies and minds to the intelligible realm must return to the “bondsmen” below, the slaves of mere phenomenal vision (519d-e).24 The figure of the philosopher-king enters the mimetic cave. “Down you must go then, each in his turn, to the habitation of the others and accustom yourselves to the observation of the obscure things there. For once habituated you will discern them infinitely better than the dwellers there, and you will know what each of the ‘idols’ is and whereof it is a semblance” (520c).

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There is a sense in this return, which goes unremarked by Plato, that perhaps it is not necessarily a better vision of the intelligible realm that one achieves, but a willingness to see when one returns to the darkness of the phenomenal world, to see what is hardly seen in the region of the known. This dark vision is a willingness to see by the light of that which shows itself in itself, that which illuminates itself, rather than by the light of the fire in the back of the cave or even by the light of reason. Plato effectively obscures our vision of the two realms as equally phenomenal, as equally dependent on sight, by putting these two realms in a hierarchical relation that privileges the metaphysical perspective. He does not merely present the possibility of these realms, he interprets and judges them for us. The philosopher’s desire is to know completely and thereby to become absolute. Hegel simply fulfills the ultimate claim of philosophy, but only by overwriting the enigma, the “quarrel” between philosophy and poetry, that has presented itself since Plato and Aristotle.25 Perhaps the only way to avoid this enigma that threatens to open an aporia at the heart of philosophy is to grant it full presence, as Heidegger attempts to do. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik) Heidegger poses the question of this impossible presence by two distinct methods. The first is philosophical: How can finite human Dasein in advance pass beyond (transcend) the essent when not only has it not created this essent but also is dependent on it in order to exist as Dasein? (47) [Wie kann endliches menschliches Dasein im vorhinein das Seiende überschreiten (transzendieren), welches Seiende es nicht nur nicht selbst geschaffen hat, auf das es sogar, um selbst als Dasein existieren zu Können, angewiesen ist? (42)]

This articulates the most fundamental metaphysical problem as it is understood by philosophy. Every philosopher has responded to this question in a similar way, by gathering the existential essent into the realm of knowledge and making it knowable by logical approximation. The second method (if indeed it is a method) is the way of the poet: How must the finite essent that we call man be in his inmost essence in order that in general he can be open [offen] to the essent that he himself is not, which essent therefore must be able to reveal itself by itself? (47)

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Face Off:The Allegorical Image and Aesthetics [Wie muß das endliche Seiende, das wir Mensch nennen, seinem innersten Wesen nach sein, damit es überhaupt offen sein kann zu Seiendem, das es nicht selbst ist, das sich daher von sich aus muß zeigen können?] (43)

Heidegger proposes this question in the face of philosophy in one of its most rigorous manifestations, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.26 In The Republic, especially in the sections on poetry and particularly in the narrative of the cave, Plato responds to the philosophical question in the way of the poet. The questioning of the philosophical in these terms, terms that will eventually reveal themselves as poetic in Heidegger’s thought, lays the foundation for Heidegger’s architectonic of Dasein. The structure that Heidegger proposes, how the essent appears in that which it is not, is the “basic concept” of allegory. The assumption no longer holds that allegory is a facile and arbitrary signifying structure that self-destructs once a particular correspondence has been revealed. This is to mistake allegory for metaphor,27 and to mistake the image for a figure. Only Reason, the auspices of Philosophy, stands in the way of allegory, and the forces of Reason are valiantly led by the general Aesthetic. Only by slipping barely detected beneath this powerful radar can the allegorical image, the phantasmenon, like the barely discernible khora in the Platonic cosmography, manifest its impossible presence at the very limit beyond which wisdom does not reign. Allegory reveals itself as the enigma of the image in Plato. “True and exact reason” defends the autonomy of two different things that “the nature of true being” maintains are the same. Allegory, that which brings together the different in the space of the same, meeting the requirements of reason and of reality, is itself utterly other than both. Allegory’s rigorous “simultaneity” in space reveals an equivalent suspension of time. Allegory is the structure in which identity and difference are present simultaneously, and this simultaneity is coincident with a true atemporality, an out-of-timeness that is completely independent of any concept of time. Allegory appears in the image as a pure language, a language that speaks itself without reference, a language that is not transcendental or metaphysical in the sense of referring to something exterior to itself. The image communicates silently, and it is the dream of every poet (including those poets who claim to be philosophers) to speak this silence.28 The perfect poem would be the poem that only sounds, that defies any appropriation by aesthetics or hermeneutics. Such a poem is an impossibility, of course, but the asymptotic limit has drawn more than one poet (and a few philosophers) into madness

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or despair. Allegory is the means by which a poet can approach this limit, and allegory itself constitutes this limit. Poetry as such cannot be aestheticized or interpreted. It depends on the aesthetic and the hermeneutic in order to appear, but it also hides in the aesthetic judgments and interpretive meanings imposed on the work. Aesthetic judgments bestow value on a work. They determine a work’s life and livelihood.The task of aesthetics is to preserve art, but the link that aesthetics wants to make between actuality and art is allegorical. “Philosophical discourse” depends on this link. The language of critique functions on the assumption that judgment is possible, and no philosophy is complete without the promise and possibility of judgment. Paul Ricoeur has remarked that “allegory has been a modality of hermeneutics much more than a spontaneous creation of signs. It would be better to speak of allegorizing interpretation rather than of allegory” (Symbolism of Evil 16).29 The definition of allegory proposed in this book moves allegory away from the modality of hermeneutics by redirecting attention to the image, which Lévinas calls “an allegory of being.” By resembling the thing without being it, the image is and is not what it appears to be. The image can be only by virtue of an allegory that supports the relation between what is and is not there. This allegory is not “a simple auxiliary to thought” but is the very commerce between reality (what Plato calls the world of shadows) and its shadow (the Platonic ideal). The exchangeability of the Platonic terms demonstrates the “ambiguous commerce” by which Lévinas identifies allegory. Only allegory, not aesthetics, can complete philosophy. Allegory is a technique, a mode, and a method. It is a way of saying and a way of keeping silent. It brings forth and it hides. Allegory is always a work of art, and the work of art, its task, is to unwork.

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2

A Phenomenological Reduction: Allegory in Prudentius’ Psychomachia

For an image, since the reality after which it is modeled does not belong to it, and it exists ever as the fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be in another [that is, in space], grasping existence in some way or other, or it could not be at all. But true and exact reason, vindicating the nature of true being, maintains that while two things [that is, the image and space] are different, they cannot exist one of them in the other and so be one and also two at the same time. —Plato1

As a trope, allegoria seems to have appeared either at the beginning of the Common Era or a few centuries prior to that time.2 The first known use of allegorical interpretation was also near the beginning of the Common Era, although the technique had been applied to the Homeric poems at least as early as the sixth century BCE, under the rubric hyponoia (Whitman, Allegory 265). At the end of the fourth century CE, allegory became particularly Christian, both as a trope and as an interpretive device. Augustine developed the Christian allegorical form of typology, and the poet Prudentius composed a continuous narrative, the Psychomachia, that perhaps built on allegorical ways of reading. Because of this originary status and the poem’s indisputable influence on later medieval forms of allegorical composition, an examination of Prudentius’ Psychomachia is essential for the phenomenological study of allegory. The phenomenology of allegory needs to begin at the most originary thing one can identify, and from that point to reduce that thing to its most irreducible parts. Allegory is the convergence of personified figures, epic characteristics, fantastic visions, and interpretive agendas. But allegory is not these things, each of which has its own autonomous phe64

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nomenality. At stake in the current inquiry, however, is the question: What is allegory? In a brief but important treatment of the Psychomachia, Jon Whitman considers the work in terms of its formal structure. For Whitman, the phenomenon of the allegorical poem consists in “the convergence of such diverse compositional tendencies” as the dramatization of rhetorical figures as theatrical characters, the martial and heroic features of classical epic, and a continuous story rather than intermittent visions. Whitman points out the way in which Prudentius capitalizes on the transcendent power of the spiritual in the Christian flesh; “The spiritual fulfillment of the New Dispensation allows the personification to emerge from the literal person, and take over the narrative foreground” (84). Whitman’s criticism of Prudentius is consistent with his approach to allegory as a means of striving toward a coalescence of form and meaning. In the Psychomachia he finds that form and meaning do not quite match up; “Prudentius never truly made the second half of his poem fulfill the figura of the first part” (85–86). According to Whitman, the second part of the poem (the battle of personified vices and virtues) “does not so much fulfill the historical figure of part one, as add a literary figure onto it” (87). According to Whitman, the Psychomachia is not yet a fully developed allegorical form. For him, this development occurs only in the twelfth century, when the composed narrative coalesces with an interpretive intention—in other words, when the constructed form coincides with an intended meaning. In the privileged example of Bernard Sylvetris’ Cosmographia, Whitman highlights the successful combination of explication and creation. “That is, [Bernard] acts out his exegesis by the composition of allegorical agents” (220–21). This late medieval moment is, for Whitman, “a crucial turning point in the development of allegory” (221; emphasis added). From a phenomenological perspective such a turning point indicates a level of sediment that covers over what the “thing” really is. Phenomenology moves against “progression,” even as it might seek to explain it. Already from Whitman’s description of early allegory as a convergence, we gain the sense that allegory as such will be a difficult thing to identify. I would even suggest that allegory is as difficult to describe as the Platonic khora or the notion of space in book 4 of Aristotle’s Physics. Allegory is a substance requiring special consideration, and similarly, allegory must be allowed its aporia. A determinative characteristic of allegory is its logical impossibility. I have already discussed the allegorical structure that supports

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the logical impossibility of the khora. The phenomenon of allegory is itself a logical impossibility in which form and meaning will never correspond. Whitman notices this very feature at allegory’s “origin.”3 For Whitman this noncorrespondence typifies allegory’s embryonic forms and points to deficiencies in both interpretive and compositional projects. What Whitman seems to be observing is that allegory, in the early fifth century at least, does not yet conform to a metaphysical structure.This nonconformity is precisely why it is not only important within the history of allegory, but also important for the larger argument of this book, that allegory is not a metaphysical structure (or an aesthetic category). The Psychomachia is a battle of the soul, the psyche. The Greek compound title is difficult to translate.4 Although it is perhaps simply an instance of the “fourth century vogue for Greek titles” (Smith, Prudentius’ “Psychomachia” 113 n. 5), the consequent ambiguity of the Greek compound is sustained throughout the poem.5 Such ambiguity grounds the poem as a work of art rather than as a work of philosophy. Psychomachia is a battle somehow involving the human soul. It has generally been assumed that this soul is represented by personified figures of virtue and vice engaged in an epic battle for the soul’s salvation. A more textually grounded reading shows, however, that the poem is strangely divided against itself, such that the desired object—the soul that is at stake—is the very site of the contest. The battle is for the soul and yet occurs in the soul. Further, as Martha Malamud has shown in her reading of the scene in which Discordia draws a virtue’s blood only to be dismembered by the “virtuous army,” the relationship between virtue and vice is ambiguous. In this scene, the dividing line between them is virtually erased. Malamud comments, “The Virtues, imbued with their opponent’s divisive nature, become agents of dismemberment and dissolution” (Poetics of Transformation 66). Malamud argues that virtue and vice are not opposing moral categories so much as opposing forces, and the fight for the soul is a civil war. The virtues as well as the vices occupy this field, which is no high moral ground but what Malamud rightly calls “a middle ground of ambiguity” (67).6 With the title in Greek and the poem itself written in Latin, the semiotic ambiguity is enhanced in the actual language of the work. In the poem, psyche seems to be translated as both animus, a masculine noun referring to the principle of the intellect and sensation, and as the quite distinct anima, a feminine noun referring to the principle of life. The use of the word psyche achieves a semantically onomatopoetic use of language as language

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in which the paradox of the soul appears. The title holds together what the poem splits apart. Macklin Smith also notices this unifying division. “Since psyche means both ‘soul’ and ‘life,’ a psychomachia can be a soul’s struggle for eternal life as well as a soul’s struggle in this world for the clarity of Christian self-perfection” (Prudentius’ “Psychomachia” 114). This division within language corresponds to Malamud’s argument that speech itself is a form of discord, and it is the figure Discordia who points this out: Discordia is able to identify herself in a series of soundplays on her name, linking the concept of discordia with language and the shifting world of false appearances. . . . The punning echoes . . . suggest . . . that the act of speech itself (dicor) is a form of discordia. . . . The use of the adjective discolor, “of variable color,” appears motivated by its sound, allowing Prudentius, through the similarity of words, to establish a connection with the world of shifting appearances on etymological grounds. (Poetics 63)

This wordplay demonstrates the consistent deftness in the poetic language of Prudentius. Malamud examines many such instances, which demonstrate the singular quality of what, by borrowing Malamud’s description of “the impossibility of finding stable signs to represent true meaning” (63), I shall call poetic language. Poetic language is not in the service of an ideology, not even a theology (although these are also at play in the poem). Poetic words are words as things. Malamud takes this quite literally, finding extraordinary and convincing examples of language play that are not ornamental but in fact “control the action and shape of the poem.”7 The lack of a definite time and space in the poem, and the lack indeed of characters in the traditional epic sense, allow “the words themselves to do battle in the poem” (57).8 Malamud links the new genre of poetry created by Prudentius, the form of psychomachian allegory, to the power of language as such, and not to language as something that merely signifies something it is not. The Psychomachia has very little plot, and what there is is entirely predictable. . . . [Prudentius’] choice of the sustained personification allegory directs the reader’s attention to his treatment of characters not as people or as symbols whose meaning is always fixed, but as signs whose meaning is variable and inconstant. (57)

This literal language is not the “literal level” of the metaphysical structure upon which the common scheme of allegory has been constructed. Ac-

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cording to the familiar four-tiered scheme, the literal level of allegory is the least significant, falling away as the successively higher levels of meaning are revealed, from the metaphorical (often called “allegorical”) to the moral to the anagogical. In the poem that launched the genre of allegory, however the literal is the most significant level. And the literal level is written in poetic form. The fact that Prudentius wrote poetry is often overlooked.9 As a poet, Prudentius revealed an acute understanding of the limits of his own finite existence. In the Psychomachia, he struggled to make the imago Dei in man appear, an image of the human soul. The Psychomachia is about the fundamental and foundational problem of being in the world and the correlative problem of the finite existence of human beings. As a poem the Psychomachia gives an image of the soul. By following the path opened by the poem, the reader comes to a vision, cloudy and gray, but also at the very limit of finite being.10 To follow the path of the poem is not to interpret it, but to experience it, not logically but poetically. To follow the path of this poem is to experience the limit marked by the image of the soul, and at that limit, if it is indeed reachable, to see through watery glance the unknowable.11 To follow this path attentively requires a gaze that penetrates to what is poetic in this poetry, the image of what cannot otherwise appear: the immortal soul of the mortal being. The Psychomachia is not a metaphysical poem. There is no movement between sensible and intelligible, or between mortal and divine.The poem not only lacks the movement within a spatial hierarchy necessary for metaphysics, but it ends more or less where it begins. Time is not particularly marked in the poem. The narrative is a vision, the extension in time and space of what is actually simultaneous. At its conclusion, the poet turns his gaze from the vision, and returns to the figure of Christ, the Christian muse, and gives thanks, and he also returns to his mortal condition. In spite of the didactic vision, the mortal soul remains “roaring in frightful war” (line 903) and waits again “until Christ God comes to be in charge” (line 910). We are in no better place at the conclusion of the poem than we were when it began. Nothing really happens in the poem’s main diegesis or action. The events of the Psychomachia do not occur within history or time, but outside of it and indifferent to it. Time is the central paradox of Christianity, and typology is the structure that manifests God’s sense of time. One of Christianity’s most fundamental precepts holds that there is no differentia temporis, no difference of time, for God (Auerbach, “Figura” 42). In a typological worldview, the sequence of

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events that constitute history are an image. In this image, the unknowable becomes phenomenal, not by appearing in itself but by appearing in a way that can be grasped by the limited sensibility and experience of a temporal being. This is always a “false appearance,” and necessarily so. The mortal intellect can be developed to ever-greater capacities for perceiving the divine in the phenomenal, but there is always a limit to this capacity, and that limit is imposed by the finitude of being human. Whether in the realm of the ideal or the real, the human mind requires sequence and narrative in order to understand, and especially in order to communicate understanding. The philosophical tractatus is beholden to the communication of knowledge. In Christian philosophy or theology, the treatise strains under the restrictions imposed by the law of knowledge. The theological treatise narrativizes that which simply appears in scripture, making it knowable by making it meaningful, and it achieves this by presenting a temporal sequence, a logical narrative. Even Erich Auerbach, who clearly recognizes the atemporality of the typological figure, succumbs to the limitation of time when he employs the term phenomenal prophecy to describe the structure of typology as a relation between past history (figura) and its prophetic fulfillment in the New Testament and in the yet-unknown but promised future events of Judgment Day (“Figura” 42). In the Psychomachia, however, the phenomenological structure of Prudentian typological action seeks to escape temporality. Poetry works differently from philosophy and from theology—in a phenomenologically unique way. The poet does not seek knowledge. Poetry is not about teaching but about seeing or experiencing. In the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”) Heidegger offers an alternative explanation of the techne or “skill” that distinguishes art, including poetry, from other types of work: Techne, as knowledge experienced in the Greek manner, is a bringing forth of beings in that it brings forth present beings as such beings out of concealedness [der Verborgenheit] and specifically into the unconcealedness [die Unverborgenheit] of their appearance [Aussehen]; techne never signifies the action of making. (“Origin” 59, “Der Ursprung” 47)

Heidegger turns to the techne of art because this mode of knowing that brings forth beings into appearance has been neglected by philosophy. Heidegger finds that “the art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings” (39, 25). For Heidegger, techne is the skill of letting things appear, of a bringing forth that is not intentional but a “presenting that causes beings in the first

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place to come forward and be present in assuming an appearance.” Phusis itself appears when the being, or the thing, “grows out of its own accord.” For Heidegger, and for the pre-Socratic Greeks whom he idolizes, “techne never signifies the action of making [Machen]” (59, 47). Heidegger thus redefines artistic creation as “to cause something to emerge as a thing that has been brought forth” (60, 48). This skill of allowing phusis to happen also allows truth to happen, which explains Heidegger’s interest in the work of art. However, the philosophical problem about the appearance of truth remains. “Truth” cannot in itself appear. It must appear in something that it is not. One way to make truth appear would be to personify it, to give it qualities and characteristics which are familiar, but that would be to confine truth in a particular figure. Truth would be limited, and therefore no longer “Truth,” which is universal. Indeed, because truth is universal, truth must also be untruth. Heidegger explains that the nature of truth is both to show itself and to withhold itself. “Truth is the primal conflict in which . . . the Open is won” (60, 48). What Heidegger calls “the Open” (das Offene) is the holding open of the space between appearance or that which shows itself and that which remains concealed.That which remains concealed is not the “essence” or “meaning” of a particular appearance. Heidegger is not as much interested in finding meaning as in the openness of a conflict that allows truth to happen, to allow the concealed to be unconcealed in its very concealment. The work of art itself conceals this conflict and brings it forth. The work of art exposes a Riß or “rift,” “the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other” (63, 51). The Riß is allegorical, although Heidegger never says this explicitly.12 Within the first few pages of the “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger describes the work of art as constituted by an allegorical structure. The artwork is, to be sure, a thing that is made [zwar ein angefertigtes Ding], but it says something other than the mere thing itself is, allo agoreuei. The work makes openly known something other [Anderem öffentlich bekannt], it manifests something other [es offenbart Anderes]; it is allegory. (19–20, trans. modified; 4)

In German, to make publicly known is machen offentlich bekannt—literally,“to make openly known.” Similarly, to manifest, offenbaren, is literally “to be in (pure) openness.” In the work of art, something other is made openly known and something other is brought into openness. These phrases are not repeti-

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tive. Two things are opened. One is the appearance of something otherwise concealed. That is not to say that it is itself revealed, but rather that its concealment is brought into the open. The second is the appearance of something, an appearance within something made or produced (angefertigten).The emphasis on the open-ness of the allegorical structure only becomes clear much later in the essay, in the concept of the Riß that “carries the opponents into the source of their unity by virtue of their common ground.” Distinctive about Heidegger’s definition of allegory is the focus on holding together rather than disjunction. “This Riß does not let the opponents break apart” (63, 51). By virtue of the same allegorical structure, the Riß must be set into some “made thing,” angefertigtes Ding. Heidegger calls that thing Gestalt, or figure: the work of art.This artwork is no longer merely a thing that is made but also the happening of openness, the event of truth. Prudentius did not choose to write an allegory. The genre of which the Psychomachia became the founding model did not yet exist. Prudentius had to write allegorically because he needed to bring something into appearance that could not otherwise appear. The first erroneous assumption about the Psychomachia is that the personifications are what make the poem an allegory. In The Poetics of Personification, James Paxson has already demonstrated that “personification is a self-reflexively developed property of the poem” rather than the product of a formulaic application of a pre-existent form (63–65). More radically, Paxson argues that the trope of personification is reversed in the narrative. The faces are dismantled such that they are no longer faces as such. Prudentius’ focus upon the imagery of the destruction of the face, therefore, is a literalized reverse of prosopopoeia. It is the symbolic dismantling of the trope by which the text invents the figural characters who inhabit its actantial narrative. Prosopopoeia is self-reflexively thematized as a central topical ground in the Psychomachia. (69)13

Paxson’s work forces a more careful and critical thinking of the trope of personification, and as a consequence, it causes one to think differently about the relationship between personification and allegory. Paxson attempts to mediate between “canonically received allegorical texts” and poststructural theories of allegory and personification. For this attempt to be successful, allegory must show itself to be the same phenomenon in both its canonical and poststructural manifestations. This requires that a concept of allegory not be imposed on a text but revealed in it. The success of this at-

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tempt is demonstrated in Paxson’s discovery of the self-reflexiveness of personification in the language of the poem. As such, he has offered a refreshing alternative to the often dismissive readings of the Psychomachia. The use of the word personification to describe Prudentius’ poem is anachronistic at best, and at worst has obscured the reading of the poem in its proper historical, theological, and cultural context. This can be traced to the misleading Latinate term personification. To the naïve reader, the verbal adjective personification leads to the view that allegory makes persons out of nonpersons. The root of personification, however, is persona, a Latin translation of the Greek prosopon. These words mean primarily “mask” or “face” and originated as terms within the genre of drama. Persona or prosopon also referred to “the character, part or personage which a man plays or represents in the world” (Leverett, Lexicon, entry for persona), indicating a distance within a single being. By extension, the “person” of the Son is the face (or mask) by which divinity appears to mortals. As in the drama, the prosopon or persona marks a limit between the tangible and the intangible. Rather than assuming that the mask is a dramatic prop in the service of mimesis, one can think inversely that the mask or “face” is a projection of a more fundamental structure that is intrinsic but does not show itself. The way in which Nietzsche articulates the appearance of Dionysus is remarkably similar to the presentation of immortal soul in the Psychomachia. Nietzsche’s unique understanding of early Greek drama in The Birth of Tragedy is that every tragic hero is a “face” for the god Dionysus: The one truly real Dionysus appears in a variety of forms, in the mask of a fighting hero, and entangled, as it were, in the net of the individual will. The god who appears talks and acts so as to resemble an erring, striving, suffering individual. . . . In truth, the hero is the suffering Dionysus of the Mysteries. (73)

Dionysus appears on the stage under the guise of a prosopon that holds together the agonized individual and the divine. Nietzsche constructs this argument through readings of Greek myths and plays. For Nietzsche, tragedy is born when the tragic Dionysus no longer appears behind the mask, and the individual struggles as a mere mortal. Nietzsche laments the loss of a divine/ mortal conjoining. Prudentius sought to promise its return. Nonetheless, the persona is a “face” that requires the imagination and resists reflection. The personified face is not a reflected face but an image.

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In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot rereads the figure of Narcissus in terms of the image. Blanchot first unreads the psychoanalytic appropriation of this classical figure.This modern tradition assumes that Ovid’s expansion of the myth makes it “more accessible”—“as though his narrative developments indeed contained psychoanalytic knowledge.” Instead, Blanchot questions the “primal scene” of Narcissus gazing into the pool by reading it closely and revealing what Ovid “forgets.” Narcissus, bending over the spring, does not recognize himself in the fluid image that the water sends back to him. It is thus not himself, not his perhaps nonexistent “I” that he loves or—even in his mystification—desires. And if he does not recognize himself, it is because what he sees is an image, and because the similitude of an image is not likeness to anyone or anything: the image characteristically resembles nothing. (125; emphasis added)

The pool is obviously reflective. Narcissus sees a face there, a beautiful face, but he does not recognize it as his own. By divine decree, Narcissus will live as long as he does not know himself. Narcissus lacks self-identity. Everything is other to him, even his own image. By entwining the fate of Echo in the narrative, Ovid gives Narcissus a voice (126). Thus the unintentional rebuff of Echo’s advances attributes to Narcissus a self-consciousness that he does not have. And yet, the addition of Echo restates the problem of the visual image. The conversation between Echo and Narcissus is “a sort of nondialogue.” There is no communication. The echo is “not the language whence the Other would have approached him, but only the mimetic, rhyming alliteration of a semblance [or image] of language” (127). With Echo, Ovid translated the image in the spring into language. The language that comes back to Narcissus is not his own language, just like the “face” that he sees is not his own face. It is not a face at all, but the semblance of a face in which something other than a self appears. The problem of the image and the groundwork for the Psychomachia is laid in Prudentius’ more didactic long poem Apotheosis, in which the poet works through the theological difficulties of the soul’s appearance. In Apotheosis, Prudentius calls the soul (anima) the semblance or shadow (umbra) of God: “Haec similis velut umbra Dei est” (line 797); “This [soul] is just the semblance in the likeness of God.”14 Umbra, often translated as shadow, is a thing that is neither identical nor coincidental with the thing it is like. The umbra does not have the corpus solidum, the solidity of matter, but the sub-

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stance of an imitation (imitatio) or a reflection, “sed non habet umbra quod corpus solidum, cuius imitatio in umbra est” (799–800), which is to say, not much like a substance at all. What is the substance of a shadow? Prudentius then emphasizes the absolute distinction between reality and simulation: “that which is true is one thing, that which is the simulation of what is true is another thing [atque aliud verum est, aliud simulatio veri]” (801).The soul is of this shadowy substance that is not identical with the truth it simulates, and yet is in itself true. While the soul is a thing, it is a “shadowy thing”; it is not of a substance that can appear as an object perceptible to the senses, nor is the soul of an intelligible substance and therefore perceptible by the intellect. The soul appears only as an image, and as such it requires a unique structure in order to appear, a structure that inspires both the intellectual and sensible modes of knowing without being appropriable by either one. There are two points that Prudentius must clarify. One is the specificity of the relation between mortals and God (what it is to be made “in God’s image”), and the other is the paradox of Christ’s divine mortality. In order to establish Christ’s divinity, Prudentius distinguishes between the creation of the soul and the begetting (generatio) of the Son: solus de corde Parentis Filius emicuit; verus, verus Deus ille. conlatum est animae, subito ut, quae non erat, esset. ille coaeternus Patris est et semper in ipso, nec factus sed natus habet quodcumque paternum est, haec similis velut umbra Dei est. (Apotheosis 792–97) [Alone out of the heart of the Ancestor the Son flashed forth; truly, truly, that is God. To the life-soul is given a conjoining, suddenly, such that what was not, could be; That one [the Son] is co-eternal with the Father and always in the selfsame; not created but born, He has all that belongs to his Father; whereas the soul is a semblance in the likeness of God.]

For Christ the verb is emicare, which means to dart out or to flash, and figuratively, to flash as a shining. The Son shines forth out of the heart of the “Singular Ancestor.” The “Deus ille” (“that is God”) who is emphatically true, verus, verus, ambiguously and simultaneously refers to both the Ancestor and the Son. Turning to the soul, Prudentius indicates its passivity. The soul does not come forth under its own power but in passive voice; it is

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conjoined (conlatum est). Although this event is also sudden, subito, it is constituted temporally and conditionally: what was not, could be. The subjunctive indicates that it is only by the will of God that the soul can be, whereas there is no distinction between the Son and the Ancestor, no difference of time and nothing conditional. This distinction is an important theological point. In the unfinished but much-revised work The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine clarified that “the breath of God is not the soul of man but that God by breathing forth made the soul of man.” That is, the human soul is “not God’s nature and substance” (7.3). The mortal soul is but a semblance of God, haunted by the image of a divinity with which it does not coincide.The substance of Christ must be absolutely different from the substance of any mortal being, and therefore, the enigma of Genesis, that God created humankind “in His image,” is one of the most difficult exegetical challenges. For Prudentius Christ is God, having all that belongs to the Father. As the Word (Verbum), Christ mediates between God and mortals. Not by nature visible, Christ is the aspect of God that can take on a likeness perceptible to mortal senses. In describing Christ’s divinity, Prudentius clarifies that before the actual incarnation through the Virgin, Christ appeared as a figure, as when he appeared to Moses as an angel and as fire within the thorns, and when he appeared to Abraham divided into three persons—a figure that Prudentius calls up in the Praefatio to the Psychomachia. In the Old Testament appearances, this figure is but an external form.15 The figure is a metaphoric substitution of something sensible for a thing that cannot be grasped by the senses in and of itself. The figure is the outward and changeable aspect of a substance that remains itself unchanged. The figurations of Christ have no effect on the divine substance, but in the Old Testament figurations, Prudentius sees that the figure is not made in the material of flesh. inde figura hominis nondum sub carne Moysi obiecta effigiem nostri signaverat oris, quod quandoque Deus Verbi virtute coactum sumpturus corpus faciem referebat eandem. (Apotheosis 51–54) [The figure of a man that was presented to Moses not yet in the flesh bore the likeness of our countenance because God, intending one day to assume a body formed by the power of the Word, was producing the same features.]

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Prudentius carefully ensures that Christ is only incarnate once, as Jesus, even though it is always Christ, the Word, who appears to mortals throughout history. Such is the Word, that aspect of absolute divinity which can elect to appear to mortals by figuration, and uniquely by incarnation. Mortals can see God through Christ as mediator. But Christianity also promises an immediate experience of God in body and in soul.This promise is finally contingent on the purification of death and the end of time. Body and soul are promised this experience, and it is the soul, as the image of God, that makes it possible. For Augustine, only the soul is capable of raising itself up to “the vision of the mind,” which is not a sensible vision. Augustine’s Platonism is transparent here in his insistence that this is the way in which the soul understands the divine, either in God or in itself. “[The soul] turns away from this light of the [sensual] eyes in order to have true and certain knowledge” (Literal Meaning 7.14). The unity of body and soul, and even the ability to turn toward divine knowledge, has been sundered by the Fall. Prudentius shows us that it is not only the intellect but also the sensibly grounded imagination that is necessary for the soul to see the image of God that the soul itself is. As the image of God, the soul is the immortal limit between divinity and mortality. In the Apotheosis, Prudentius cautiously allows for the impossible possibility of experiencing the divine during mortal life. sed tamen et Patris est specimen quod cernere fas sit, humanis aliquando oculis concurrere promptum, quod quamvis hebes intuitus speculamine glauco umentique acie potuit nebulosus adire. (18–21) [Nevertheless there is an ideal of the Father lawful to discern, ready at times to run to human eyes, [an ideal] upon which an intuitus (gazing) although dull was able cloudily to approach with its gray mirroring and watery glance.]

The Father is the ideal, and here Prudentius says that it is lawful (fas sit) for human eyes to come into contact with it. There is perhaps an echo and a revision of Origen, who believed human beings did retain an affinity with God and that “even the rational mind can, by progressing from small things to greater and from visible to invisible (cf. Col. 1:16), arrive at a more perfect understanding” (Exhortation to Matyrdom 1.216). This seeing is peculiarly qualified in that the ideal (specimen) of God runs to the eyes. This vision is

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not anything that the eyes can will, and the gazing itself, a contemplation that is intuitive rather than perceptive, is dull and cloudy in its approach, for its ability, in comparison to that which runs at it, is merely a gray mirroring. In the Apotheosis, Prudentius quickly retreats from this “watery glance,” this barely possible discernment. However, he holds in reserve the divine law by which a mortal being can gaze upon divinity, however faintly it might be seen. Prudentius will draw on this reserve in the Psychomachia when he attempts to provide a phenomenology of the soul, which has the substance of a shadow, but is nonetheless the shadow of God.The soul is the specimen that can be intuited by a mortal gaze. In order to make an image appear im-mediately, Prudentius needs to provide a material mediation. The battle in epic form provides this materiality. In order to see the soul, one must simultaneously read the poem and discern the image that appears in it without being contained by it. Prudentius wrote an “allegory” because of a need to present something that could not otherwise appear, the image of God. Almost a millennium later, Dante will do the same. The image demands an allegorical structure, and the figures of virtue and vice provide the material for it. Prudentius responded to this demand in a sustained narrative. After Prudentius, allegory is no longer merely the exegetical method of theologians or the tropological flourish of rhetoricians. In Prudentius allegory has revealed itself as the bringing together of something said with something unsayable. The image (whether of the Christian soul or the pagan Narcissus) demands allegory. By resembling the thing without being it, the image is and is not what it appears to be. The image can only appear by virtue of an allegorical structure that supports the relation between what is and is not there. As discussed in chapter 1, for Lévinas, allegory is a relationship between reality and the shadow that it does not recognize as its own. The shadow is meant to figure the ambiguity of the hither side of a phenomenal appearance. The artist or the poet who has been able to represent reality and its shadow has assembled an allegory. This allegory does not transport the reader or audience to a place “beyond reality” (it is not transcendent). In the allegory, the artist has revealed (but not created) the universe that precedes the world of creation. This is the “origin” that Heidegger also sought. What Heidegger circled around, Lévinas declares unequivocally: The whole of reality bears on its face its own allegory, outside of its revelation and its truth. In utilizing images art not only reflects, but brings about

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A Phenomenological Reduction: Allegory in Prudentius’ Psychomachia this allegory. In art allegory is introduced into the world, as truth is accomplished in cognition. These are two contemporary possibilities of being. (“Reality and Its Shadow” 136; emphasis added)

To a contemporary audience, Lévinas must make the following reprimand: “The discussion over the primacy of art or of nature . . . fails to recognize the simultaneity of truth and image” (136). Prudentius recognized this simultaneity. His problem was how to represent it. Prudentius was directly or indirectly influenced by Aristotle’s De Anima [On the Soul] and tacitly offers the theory that the singular aspect of the human spirit, that which is the “image of God,” can only be known through the faculty of the imagination. Aristotle philosophically distinguished between the aspects of the soul that are inseparable (save one) and yet conceptually distinguishable.The singular aspect of the soul, which is not only conceptually but physically separable from the human form, can only be known through the faculty of the imagination. Aristotle divides the soul into three potential parts: the intelligible, the sensible, and the imaginative that joins them together (427b–430a). The intelligible part, nous, is unknowable because in it, “actual knowledge is identical with its object.” The finite being is absolved from this simultaneity, except insofar as it can imagine this possibility. “When isolated it [nous] is its true self and nothing more, and this alone is immortal and everlasting” (430a ). It is necessary for Aristotle to qualify this observation because, as infinite, the nous exceeds the capacity of a finite being to know, and thus he admits “we do not remember” this infinite activity, but there is a possibility of recollecting it. The imagination makes recollection possible. The primary thoughts constitutive of the nous are not themselves images, but they cannot be perceived without images. In the Psychomachia, Prudentius expresses this necessarily allegorical structure of the nous or immortal part of human being poetically, in the play of three words: psyche, animus, and anima. Psyche, the Greek interruption, is the singular aspect of the soul that needs the faculty of the imagination to appear. Prudentius marks the division of the soul between anima, which is its phenomenal form, and animus, which is its noumenal form. Together, these forms constitute the psyche, and Prudentius brings them together not by the power of Logos or reason, but by the power of the imagination.16 The anima is itself tangible, phenomenal. It can appear as itself. In Aristostle’s treatise the anima corresponds to the passive division of the soul, that which responds to objects that assault the senses of perception; aspects or images of an object

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appear to it and motivate it. The active part or intellect (nous) is unknowable in itself but creates appearances for itself. In Aristotle, the “immortal and eternal intellect,” which is called animus in Latin, can use images that are not connected to objects of perception: the intellect can think without perceiving anything external to itself, but the thinking subject cannot know this thought except through its own manipulation of the material of the imagination.The mind cannot think without the image. Although the intellect remains the privileged aspect of the human being, Aristotle admits that thought depends on the imagination, and the imagination depends on the perceptions of the senses. In thought, the image pretends to be phenomenal: it appears.This appearance, which is merely an appearance, actually provokes the intellect into actualizing itself. Primary thoughts (prota noemata) are not images; however, primary thoughts cannot occur without images (phantasmata). “The soul [psyche] never thinks itself without a mental image [phantasmata]” (431a). In order to think itself, the psyche needs an image of itself; the psyche must see a semblance of itself. This implies that the psyche itself is something material but also something that cannot appear as itself. For Prudentius, there is much more at stake in the Psychomachia than the anthropomorphizing of abstract vices and virtues. However, the appearance of personifications in such an overwhelming quantity reveals a profound need of the intrinsic possibilities of this rhetorical device. Initially, persona specifically referred to the figure of Jesus Christ, as the name of unity between divine and mortal, a topic of much discussion and dissension in the early Church.17 At one extreme in the fourth-century Church were certain Gnostic sects following the doctrine of Docetism in believing that Christ’s human form was nothing more than a mask for a divinity unchanged in substance, and that the crucified Christ was an insubstantial figure that only Gnostics (those who know) could truly see, while everyone else thought the figure was real, that it had substance (Chadwick, Early Church 37–38). At the other extreme, and the position that became standard doctrine, the paradox of a Jesus who was fully human and fully divine remained the mystery of a divine “person” having the singular unity of a mortal body and a divine substance.18 In the Psychomachia, the virtue Concordia articulates this relation: “Jesus mediates between man and God, uniting mortality with the Father so that the fleshly shall not be separated from the eternal Spirit and that one God shall be both” (764–66). Prudentius seems to be following Origen’s understanding of Jesus Christ, as described by J. N. D. Kelly: “But since this soul while thus cleaving to the Logos, properly belonged to a body, it formed the

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meeting point between the infinite Word and finite human nature” (Early Christian Doctrines 155). Prudentius understands that the Son and the Father are of the same substance. However, he agrees with Augustine that “it is sacrilegious to suppose that the soul and God are of one substance. For this amounts to believing that God is changeable” (Literal Meaning 7.2). In its original usage persona is neither a metaphor that translates one substance into another nor a figure that is merely sensible, but an image, like the Aristotelian phantasma, holding the divine and mortal together in a suspension. The ultimate personification of the Psychomachia is the persona of the human soul. In the poem the soul’s struggle appears real by the power of the imagination because the imagination is the only locus adequate to it. The proto noemata is called spiritus. For Prudentius, spiritus is the inmost essence of human being, a universal found within each individual being. Spiritus can perhaps be identified as a “pure appearance” in that it does not correspond to any object of sense, and yet it is something. Poetry tries to manifest the intuition of this “thing” in an image that is neither representative nor mimetic. Spiritus appears in the image of psyche, which is not to say they are identical. The poetic image should not be mistaken for a figure. A figure indicates by pointing away from the object it is and towards a thing that it is not, and has a generally metaphorical structure that is not entirely foreign to allegory. However, the image communicates through the figure of allegory, and it communicates the impossible simultaneity of that which it is and that which it is not. While figures can indicate aspects of spiritus, spiritus itself cannot be figured. Prudentius uses the word spiritus sparingly. In three occurrences it refers specifically to the Holy Spirit of the Trinity (at lines 64, 766, and 840); otherwise the word spiritus occurs only twice, once in the Praefatio and again, more significantly, in Concordia’s victory speech near the end of the poem. In both cases, spiritus designates the conjoinment of the body and soul. In the Praefatio, Abraham is said to illustrate how to “beget a child of wedlock pleasing to God” when the “spiritus, battling with valor, has overcome with great slaughter the monsters in the enslaved heart” (13–14).Typologically completing this figure, spiritus appears when victorious Concordia articulates the way mortal beings overcome adversity: “Let one spiritus shape in single structure all that we do by action of mind [mentis] and body [corporis]” (767–68). If Jesus is the persona of the Trinity, the mask by which the divine can appear in the world, it would seem that the persona in the poem is the hu-

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man spiritus, which also conjoins the immortal soul (mentis) with the mortal body (corporis). “Personification” in the poem, the personification that is the poem, is not that of individual virtues and vices, but that of the human spirit (spiritus), the immortal soul of the mortal being. The persona or mask of spiritus is psychomachia, the image of a soul in the figures of conflict. The spiritus appears as something linked to the soul, which animates humans (anima) and distinguishes their intellectual capacity (animus). Spiritus joins these functions, and yet also appears as something other than the manifest aspects of soul. As that which stands closest to God in the realm of human being, spiritus designates the image of God in human beings. The imitatio Christi suggested by the poem is that spiritus is, like Jesus himself, a persona, a “face” that unites the divine with the mortal. There is a struggle with the tragedy of individuation, the separation of body (the mortal) from soul (the divine), as indicated in the title with the Greek word machia. The battles between the virtues and the vices are stagings of mind (mentis) over body (corporis): Faith over Sacrifice; Chastity over Lust; Patience over Anger; Lowliness and Hope over Pride; Reason over Luxury; Good Works over Greed; and finally, Peace and Concord over Discord and Heresy. The valorous battle waged by spiritus is not simply the conquering of the “monsters in the enslaved heart” but the maintaining of harmony between body and soul, between the mortal and divine parts, in general, between opposing forces. Concordia begins her final speech with the theme of unification. Using the figure of the nation (publica), she emphasizes the union of different substances, the city and the countryside, because “where there is separation there is no strength” (763).19 The driving force of the poem is this unity, and the image of this unity is spiritus which says the same and appears in its difference as the Greek psyche. If the image, in Blanchot’s phrase, “is not a likeness to anyone or anything,” the material in which it appears must also not be like to anything but be only what it is. Language itself is invisible and insensible, but it can appear, and it appears most clearly in words not in the service of signification. Language is not poetry, but it appears there. Language as such can only appear in an image, the phantasmenon that is neither thing nor essent. The appearance of the image is not limited to words but also includes such language systems as rhetoric, grammar, and philology. Malamud reveals this very argument in the poetry of Prudentius, and particularly in the speech and figure of Discordia, the only vice who draws blood from a virtue and who exerts an enduring influence not only over the virtuous army, but over the

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poem itself.The virtues become themselves discordant in dismembering the vice Discordia. Further, the poem does not resolve harmoniously, but with agitation and unrest. The figure and speech of Discordia lead to what Malamud identifies as an underlying dynamic of the poem: ambiguity. One would expect Discordia’s defense to be as deceptive as the disguise with which she infiltrates the virtuous army, but to the contrary, she gives a straightforward self-assessment.This apparent contradiction in the abstraction personified nonetheless remains true to the nature of the vice. Like heresy itself, Discordia tries to “undermine language by revealing its arbitrary nature” (Poetics of Transformation 64). The virtue most upset by Discordia’s revelation is not Concordia but Fides (Faith), the virtue “most concerned with the language of truth” (65). The “language of truth” is, of course, the Logos of the Father. It is metaphysical. By walking the line between language as such and the language of truth, Discordia’s punning and playing with language reveals not only the instability of words, but also the unavoidably false appearance of truth, which cannot itself appear. Fides helps Discordia to make her case. She silences the vice by driving a javelin through her tongue. This act incites the virtuous army to behave viciously: they are “imbued with their opponent’s divisive nature, [and] become agents of dismemberment and dissolution” (66). Malamud argues that the poetry of late antiquity, and of Prudentius as a singular example, is particularly characterized by a liminal space that simultaneously occupies two dimensions. If this poetry is “grounded” in ambiguity and in the substance of language itself (and not in meaning or other metaphysical signification), then the usual assumptions about allegory are necessarily brought into question. If the Psychomachia is still rightfully to be called an allegory (which Malamud never disputes), then allegory can no longer be assumed to be a hierarchy of signification in which the literal is the least significant. In proceeding phenomenologically, established definitions of allegory are necessarily suspended, or else we would be judging the poem against a concept (the concept of allegory). Such conceptual judgments are founded on a poetics of allegory established by a logical method within a specified field of examples. A phenomenological reading resists this logic by working as exclusively as possible with the poem or work of art under consideration, not only examining its structure and hearing what it says but discerning the image that appears there.20 A phenomenological reading of the Psychomachia not only reveals the image of the soul that appears by means of the poem, but also reveals something new about allegory.

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The Psychomachia is introduced by a Praefatio that surveys the story of Abraham, focusing not on the sacrifice of Isaac as one might reasonably expect, but on the battle to free Lot from his captors, and culminating with Sara’s conceiving of Isaac.With this Praefatio, Prudentius tells us how to read the poem, and he tells us that he is telling us: Senex fidelis prima credendi via Abram, . . . .................................... pugnare nosmet cum profanis gentibus suasit suumque suasor exemplum dedit, nec ante prolem coniugalem gignere Deo placentem, matre Virtute editam, quam strage multa bellicosus spiritus portenta cordis servientis vicerit. (1–14) [The faithful patriarch who first showed the way of believing, Abram, . . . has counseled us to war against the profane peoples, himself giving an example of his own counsel, showing that to beget a conjugal child pleasing to God, whose mother is Virtue, then the spirit, against the chaos of many battles, will vanquish the monsters in the enslaved heart.]

Abraham’s counsel is to battle against the ungodly in order to beget a child pleasing to God. The ensuing synopsis highlights events in the battle of Sodom and Gomorrah (which will be elaborated in the fictional battle of the poem) and ends with Sara’s amazement to find herself fertile. In its Praefatio, Prudentius tells us to read the poem as the bringing forth of wisdom and that the path to wisdom is freedom from discord. He tells us to read the poem in the mode of what Heidegger calls phusis, “what happens in the midst of being that grows out of its own accord” (“Origin of the Work of Art” 59, “Der Ursprung” 47). The virtuous army in the Psychomachia has to do little more than march a straight line to the narrow gate, but nothing seems less likely as the narrative winds through the various conflicts. Keeping a clear line of sight seems to be the only defense in this war. This requires a particular kind of vision that must look past the figure and gaze into the image. The way to victory is through discernment, which is the “artibus ingenium” by which the soul can gain the concord and stability necessary for the divine vision, and con-

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cord and stability are the figures of virtue, Concordia and Pax, who end the war. And yet victory remains vulnerable to Culparum and Discordia, the vices that disjoin and dismember.Vigilance is a theme of the poem, and it is a vigilant vision that proves almost impossible to maintain, given the continual oscillations of the battle and the final threat of Discordia. The troops cannot discern the vice’s presence as they near the camp gate. Eyes and the skill of discernment figure this theme not merely metaphorically but literally. In the very first battle, Fides quickly dispatches Fides Veterum Cultura Deorum (Faithfulness to the Cultivation of the Old Gods) by trampling her eyes: “at the border of murder, when the beast was brought into close contact and ensnared, [Fides] forces out its eyes in death”; “et ora cruore / de pecudum satiata solo adplicat et pede calcat / elisos in morte oculos” (31–33). The defeat of Fides Veterum Cultura Deorum is followed by the crowning of a thousand martyrs.The early Christian martyrs refused to sacrifice to the “old gods,” ostensibly because they could discern the evil behind the “filleted brows” of the figure. Repeatedly the vices are associated with poor vision. Ira darts her eyes, indicating her impatience. Luxuria has “oculis vaga,” wandering eyes consistent with her nonchalant (and yet amazingly effective) participation in the war. Avaritia deprives some men of vision, captures others by tempting sights, and even changes her own appearance to fool men into following her while disguised as Frugi (Frugality). Midway through the war, Sobrietas chastizes the mortal troops for lacking this power of discernment when faced with Luxuria: “quis furor insanas agitat caligine mentes?, quo ruitis? cui colla datis? quae vincula tandem— pro pudor, armigeris amor est perferre lacertis, lilia luteolis interlucentia sertis et ferrugineo vernantes flore coronas?” (351–55) [“What insane fury agitates your obscured minds, to what do you rush, to whom do you give your neck, what bonds are these—for shame—that you love to bear on muscles that were to wield armor, these yellowish lilies interlacing wreaths and red crowns with blooming flowers?”]

As soon as Sobrietas describes their appearance, the troops look ridiculous. The path to victory requires sharp eyes and wary discernment, as displayed

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early on by the virtue Pudicitia (Chastity) with her modest eyes (pudibunda lumina) that easily withstand the flaming assault of Sodomita Libido (Lust the Sodomite). Luxuria proves the most threatening of the vices because her modus operandi resembles the retiring mode necessary for the divine vision. In a shabby but effective imitation of Greek phusis (as explicated by Heidegger), Luxuria emerges from an other place to join the battle, “venerat occiduis mundi de finibus hostis / Luxuria” (310–11). She comes from the western boundary of the world, and she comes drunk from an all-night party, “ac tunc pervigilem ructabat marcida cenam” (316). Luxuria does nothing aggressive. She simply plods along in her blossoming chariot, tossing flowers, and the virtuous army drops en masse. et iam cuncta acies in deditionis amorem sponte sua versis transibat perfida signis Luxuriae servire volens dominaeque fluentis iura pati et laxa ganearum lege teneri. (340–43) [And then altogether on the battlefield in surrender to love, its standards turned about, (the army) voluntarily turned itself to the treacherous banner of Luxuria and willingly to serve this loose mistress and to swear to suffer under the effeminate laxity of the brothel’s law.]

Luxuria is a figure, a figure of nothingness, but she is not an image. The troops are tempted by this figure, mistaking the appearance for something essential, but they fall by their will, “servire volens.”This is hardly an original idea, but Prudentius follows through by writing a poem that depends on the vision and illustrates the image that is adequate to divinity. The soul can appear as an image, but the vision must be adequately prepared to perceive it and to distinguish it from figures that may be deceptive. Not even the virtues themselves are fully vested with this power of discernment. When Concordia is pricked by Discordia, she is completely surprised. The graphic battle between the virtues and vices prepares the poem’s reader for the vision of Wisdom, Sapientia, but there is something much greater at stake. The poem teaches us how to see with the modest eyes appropriate to the human condition.This is a phenomenal as well as a phantasmenal vision. Against the vacuous and silent image of Luxuria’s jewels and flowers, Sobrietas offers the material of Hebrew history and Christian doctrine. Sobrietas

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is a fine rhetorician and in her language, Luxuria becomes the parody of Christ, wallowing in the dirt rather than rising toward the heavens. Smashed with a rock, the cursed body and blood of Luxuria are revealed in despicable detail: dentibus introrsum resolutis lingua resectam dilaniata gulam frustis cum sanguinis inplet. insolitis dapibus crudescit guttur. .............................................. “ebibe iam proprium post pocula multa cruorem,” . . . “sint haec tibi fercula tandem tristia praeteriti nimiis pro dulcibus aevi.” (423–29) [The teeth inside unloosed, the tongue curtailed, the throat torn apart, filled with bloody scraps unaccustomed to this feast her throat grows violent. . . . “Drink the blood which is your own after the many cups (of others’ blood),” . . . “this is the final dish of the bitter past of excess for a lifetime of pleasantries.”]

At Luxuria’s death, her disciples scatter in all directions, leaving behind an abundance of material goods but escaping with their lives. This victory, like most of the battles in the second part of the war, is neither tidy nor complete. This ambiguous victory is characteristic of the poem, and the ambiguity directs attention to the ultimate revelation of the poem’s events. Christ is not a deus ex machina in the Psychomachia. The poet asks Christ only to dissertate, “to set out in words for us our king, with what fighting force the soul is furnished and enabled to expel the sins from within our breast”; “dissere, rex noster, quo milite pellere culpas / mens armata queat nostri de pectoris antro” (5–6).The governing teleological image of the Psychomachia is not victory or wisdom but conception, the meeting of divine and mortal beings in the soul. All of the biblical events recounted about Abraham lead directly to Sara’s conception of Isaac. Analogously, the successive events of the struggle between vice and virtue lead to the conception of Sapientia, a figure of Christ. Conception is also the figure for the experience of the poet, who does not create so much as receive this vision. The poem brings forth a world that commands attention. The world is brought forth not by the poet and not by God alone, but by the commingling of the mortal and the divine.

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The poem is not primarily about an epic struggle, nor even about wisdom, and certainly not about the possibility of resurrection, which is nowhere mentioned.The Psychomachia is a poem in which the phantasmenon of the soul appears, and this is no unremarkable feat. Prudentius has given us a conception that is without concept. Poetry and truth are simultaneous but not identical. Truth depends on the concept; poetry depends on the image; and the image depends on allegory. And yet, Prudentius’ most famous work has not been read as a remarkable poem that achieves something otherwise impossible, and something unreachable by the conventions of philosophy or theology. Considering Apotheosis in conjunction with the Psychomachia, it seems that Prudentius was faced with the possibility that God could be figured as Christ, but that there was no figure adequate to the human soul, and this perhaps explains a certain mark of hopelessness in the Psychomachia. In the midst of the battle, Spes (Hope) simply ascends to heaven, leaving the remaining virtues gazing after her longingly. While one could argue that hope remains as a metaphysical goal in the poem, only this virtue, Spes, actually and dramatically leaves the field of battle. Hope becomes what might be called Longing-for-Hope, that is, the Want of Hope.21 Only in this section of the poem does Prudentius use the masculine animus, the Latin word for the intellect, perhaps suggesting that hope is an abstract virtue, one not directly relevant to the war that must be waged by the soul. Hope’s absence perhaps comments on the work the poet has set out to do. Although the figure of the virtuous army comes to dwell in the New Jerusalem foretold in the Apocalypse of John, the final sentiment of the poem is not the fulfillment of hope but its absence. Hope remains distant as the soul continuously and repeatedly struggles with the opposing spirits of light and darkness. Following the decapitation of Superbia (Pride) by Mens Humilis (Lowly of Mind), whom Spes (Hope) has encouraged to act, Spes refers to the soul (animos) of David, which blossomed on the day he defeated Goliath and which he lifted up towards hope’s kingdom at the very feet of God. Spes explains that a place is kept in her home for victors who have cut down sin and reached after her; and then she departs. The flight of Spes is a dramatic moment in which the action comes to a halt, causing a semantic caesura. Fides (Faith) begins and ends the war against sin, but it is Faith without Hope who is ultimately victorious. The virtues mark this loss not in their existence (animas) but in the faculty of perception, animus.

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A Phenomenological Reduction: Allegory in Prudentius’ Psychomachia mirantur euntem Virtutes tolluntque animos in vota volentes ire simul, ni bella duces terrena retardent. (306–08) [The virtues are amazed by her and lift their souls in a willful vow to be together with her, did not earthly war delay their conduct.]

As with the aspect of David capable of following Hope to her home, it is the animus of the virtues that desires Hope. A few lines later, in the description of the vice Luxuria, the “other” animus announces itself: “vitae cui causa voluptas elumbem mollire animum”; “a life with grounds in pleasure, to her ‘soul’ bland and impressionable” (313–14). The verb mollire in this context is particularly revealing. The substance of Luxuria’s soul is “bland” and “unimpressionable,” which recalls and parodies the metaphoric figure of the wax into which the divine seal, the image of God, is impressed. Luxuria is the figure of hopelessness, and against Luxuria, the virtues suffer their first setback: “inde eblanditis virtutibus halitus inlex”; “the hidden lure of her breathing flattering the virtues.” In a matter of lines, the entire army wills itself to serve Luxuria (“Luxuriae servire volens”) rather than desiring to vow allegiance to Hope, the vota volentes of just 30 lines prior. The army is the figure of a mortal being that succumbs to the assault on the senses, and repeatedly in this second stage of the conflict, the mortal forces let their limbs fall slack, and repeatedly they are revived by a call to look up, to reach toward hope even though hope can no longer be perceived.The body and the mind must strive with only the hope of Hope (Spes), while it is the anima, the life-soul, that will sustain the mortal being. The Psychomachia is not primarily a moral poem but a mortal one, not abstract and ideal but material and carnal. The remainder of the poem is marked by the absence of Hope even in the presence of Faith. Not only does the figural body struggle, but the poet begins to falter. The flight of Spes is an apex, after which the poem declines, not in the tidy resolution of a denouement but in bewilderment. Although “the poem ends in apparent harmony,” Malamud challenges this appearance with her reading of the ambiguity integral to the poem’s structure and narrative: There is a middle ground of ambiguity where Vices and Virtues meet and are difficult to distinguish, expressed in the text by such puzzling events as

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the Vices claiming to possess virtus and Mens Humilis propelled into violent action by the lust for fame. (Poetics of Transformation 67)

The final battle between Concordia and Discordia is best characterized as ending in a Pyrrhic victory, because, Malamud notes, “the stage is set for the battle in the soul to continue at a new level of intensity” (69). The narrative continues for another 200 lines and reaches a logical conclusion and reasonable resolution with the enthroning of Sapientia, the figure of Christ come into the mortal being, and with the building of the New Jerusalem promised in John’s apocalyptic vision. In the second century, Justin Martyr interpreted this vision of Christ quite literally. As much as Christ suffered materially in a human body, the immortal soul is likewise not delivered from the body but resurrected together with the body (Chadwick, Early Church 77).The New Jerusalem comes down from heaven as a new earth, which will be inhabited by mortals together with God. “See the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them [as their God]” (Rev 2.3). John sees the city in spirit, and Prudentius repeats this vision as a vision in spirit. The poem has prepared us for this vision. Only the image of the New Jerusalem appears, and it takes its place between the divine promise and mortal calamity. Prudentius draws out the ambiguity of the apocalpytic vision by linking the construction of the temple with Solomon. From the lofty heights of poetry, there is a return to the terra firma of sense perception and the metaphysical promise of the figure. The restoration of limits, the confinement of Sapientia, corresponds to the Stoic belief in a cosmic harmony that holds the universe together. Malamud refers to this Stoic tradition in order to support her reading of Concordia and Discordia.22 The Stoic metaphor of a chain is not without ambiguity, at least not in Prudentius. Concordia ultimately instills harmony with the creation of the temple, but not without violence and repression. In contrast, although Discordia’s power is a force of destruction and dismemberment, Malamud points out that it is also potentially liberating (78). She notes that weaving is another common metaphor for the creation of this bond, and one that is obviously known to Prudentius, who imports it to describe God’s creative powers.23 This metaphor establishes a correlation between the poet and God as creators, but also a conflict. The bond woven by God confines the poet in a mortal body ensnared in the warp of space and the woof of time. Weaving is creative but also confining, and at the conclusion of the poem “Praefatio,”24 which introduced a collection of

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his work, Prudentius rebels against this confinement with a wish, the wish of all poets, perhaps: haec dum scribo vel eloquor, vinclis o utinam corporis emicem liber, quo tulerit lingua sono mobilis ultimo! (43–45) [As I write and speak these things, I wish I could flash forth, free of the chains of the flesh, to where my mobile tongue would guide me with its final note. (trans. by Malamud, Poetics of Transformation 77)]

Malamud interprets this wish: “the poetic book, liber, which this Preface introduces, will make him liber, free” (77). The paradoxical force of the binding and weaving imagery that Malamud identifies in the final battle scene becomes more paradoxical as the virtues complete their work. After the defeat of the last vice, members of the virtuous army are not left in peace, allowed neither to lurk in idleness (“nulla latet pars Mentis iners,”741), nor to hide feeble and snoring in secret obscurity (“marceat obscuro stertens habitator operto,” 745). All must gather in the place of assembly and attend Concordia’s speech to hear “what new law Faith will bestow” (“quam velit atque Fides Virtutibus addere legem,” 748). Concordia’s speech is full of the Stoic cosmography of the desmos (the bond) and its dismemberment: scissura domestica turbat rem populi, titubatque foris quod dissidet intus. ........................................... . . . quia fissa voluntas confundit variis arcana biformia fibris. ........................................... . . . nil dissociabile firmum est. (757–63) [A domestic division disturbs the common interest, and (the community) divided within itself trembles in public. . . . For a split will mix the twofold mysteries with unstable fibers. . . . Where there is separation there is no strength.]

The antidote to such caesuras, fissures, and dissociations is submission to peace, to “let a singularly measured [unimodus] Spirit weave [texat] into a

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single structure [conpagibus unus] the actions of all that grows out of and is conducted by the body and the soul”; “quidquid gerimus mentisque et corporis actu, spiritus unimodis texat conpagibus unus” (767–68).The peace that Concordia describes corresponds precisely to the Stoic cosmography. “By peace the heavens flourish, by peace the earth endures”; “Sidera pace vigent, consistunt terrea pace” (771) .25 Despite Concordia’s rhetoric, Fides again hits the chink in her sister’s armor (as Discordia had done). “Concordia laesa est,/ sed defensa Fides”; “Concordia has been wounded but Faith defended” (800–01). Fides even laughs at her sister’s wounds, supposedly because they are slight, but laughter is never entirely without derision. As promised, Fides also adds a new rule. There is one more task for the heirs of virtue to perform. She invokes the figure of King Solomon, not as the embodiment of wisdom, but as an icon of civil war: “regni quod tandem pacifer heres / belligeri, armatae successor inermus et aulae,” the ruler who finally brought peace to the heirs of war, the unarmed successor in an armed palace (805–06). Like Solomon, the virtues are commanded to construct a temple that the “all powerful one” may visit (811), but also implied is that this temple, like the kingdom of Solomon, will again be divided. The virtues do not build this structure: it simply appears. The last scene of the narrative describes Fides drawing in the dirt with her golden wand. The inner chamber is called a “compita,” and is the “meeting place” of the conflicting ages of humanity: the brisk dawn of childhood and the burning heat of youth, the broad day of maturity and the chill of old age (845–48). The temple gathers the discord into concord, and this is achieved by measured confinement. The inmost chamber contains Sapientia, and she reigns over this measured realm but not outside of it. The poem itself is outside, unruly and threatening chaos. In the epilogue, the poet complains that the war continues and despairs that he has been unable to quell the uproar of rebellion. “Fervent bella horrida, fervent / ossibus inclusa, fremit et discordibus armis / non simplex natura hominis”; “Roaring in frightful war, roaring in the bones, and the natural essence of humankind grumbles in discordant war” (l902–04). Prudentius admits that the Psychomachia is a civil war, and as in all such wars, the wounds run deep and never completely heal. The soul remains in its oppositional state. Prudentius’ poem makes its own argument for the image. Indeed, the entire project of the Psychomachia depends on the poet’s ability to give appearance to something that cannot appear in itself and cannot be represented

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metaphorically by something else in an act of substitution.This work “makes openly known something other” and “it manifests something other.” It is allegory. In desiring to make the soul appear, Prudentius faces an extraordinarily difficult task. According to the developing doctrine of the Church in the fourth century, there is no divine substance in human beings, and yet, in the very first chapters of Genesis, it is indisputable that God made humankind in “his own image.” The soul is something divine, but not quite divine, mortal but also immortal. The soul is in fact liminal, and therefore only the faculty of the imagination is adequate to it. The problem can be stated through an analogy but remains the beginning of a difficult thought that can be thought only through poetry, and not through theology. As man is only the image of God, and an appearance in no way divine, so the image of the soul is not the soul but its appearance. In the Psychomachia the soul does not appear because it cannot appear, but it can show itself, and it shows itself by resembling itself. This resemblance marks a limit at which the soul absolves itself from both the mortal body in which it appears and the divine object that it resembles. As a paradigm of the image, Blanchot offers the corpse as a thing that resembles itself, which is substantial and yet no-thing, nothing that it was and nothing to come. The corpse is without life, without anima. What remains is the image of life that appears in the materiality of death. Thus Blanchot can say that in the corpse, the person comes to resemble himself for the first time.26 If, in the Psychomachia, the soul resembles itself, it is not the soul that appears but its image. Prudentius tries to bear the soul in his poem, despite its unfathomable distance and inestimable weight. In Apotheosis the soul is not yet an image, but it manifests itself to the poet, and the poet feels compelled to make it appear. If God, including the Son who becomes mortal, is utterly unlike his creation, how is it possible for a human being to understand or to know (in some way) God? In Apotheosis, Prudentius prefigured the fundamental ontological question as articulated by Heidegger many centuries later: How must the finite essent that we call man be in his inmost essence in order that in general he can be open [offen] to the essent that he himself is not, which essent therefore must be able to reveal itself by itself? (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 47)

In Apotheosis, Prudentius described the processes by which divinity can be imagined as physical form. He did not try to make the divine appear. In the

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Psychomachia, Prudentius responded to the question of how to know that which it is impossible to know. He had to find an image adequate to the soul, and this brought him to the very limit of human being, its finitude.The soul marks the limit at which the mortal touches the divine. The image is what they share. To succeed in manifesting this image is to see God, unmediated by the figure of the Word, and to see God is tantamount to death. In the Psychomachia, Prudentius does not transcend his finitude but he comes face-to-face with it. The remnants of Prudentius’ experience at this limit are ensouled in his last poem. As the “pure breath of God is hot within the dark prison of the heart,”27 the soul burns in the constricting hexameters of the poem. The Psychomachia is an invitation to war, to allow the forces of light and obscurity to draw one to the limit of the possible at which one can intuit the impossible vision with the most imperceptible mediation that dulls but does not deflect the vision. This vision “cloudy and gray” remains the appropriate mode in which finite beings can be open to that which is infinite. Poetry and allegory are intimately related, and the Psychomachia may be not only the earliest but perhaps also one of the most illuminating examples of this intimacy. Under the auspices of deconstruction, and especially in the work of Paul de Man, allegory serves as the tropological structure of unreadability. For de Man, there can only be allegories of reading, for reading can only resemble itself: reading, too, has a necessarily allegorical structure. Allegories of reading, or better, allegories of unreadability, can, however, direct attention to the work of art, what art is and what it does, as art (and not as an ideological tool). Art is not temporal. Allegory is a response to the demand requiring that the artwork be inscribed within the confines of temporality. Art is not there but appears there. The real reason for allegory is Reason, the imposing figure that philosophy shares with Christianity, the Logos, which forces the phantasmenon to become an impossible presence. Only slipping barely detected can the phantasmenon become manifest at the very limit beyond which Reason cannot reign, in the language not dominated by the Logos, that is, in poetry, in language that is “allegorical.” Allegory is the structure of the image: it communicates the image, that which cannot be communicated or presented in any other way (least of all through mimesis or representation). In its primordiality, allegory has the structure of phusis, not “nature” or “essence” in a banal sense, but “the emerging and rising in itself and in all things” and the setting up of a world. The Psychomachia sets up a world in bringing the soul, something that cannot

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otherwise appear, together with language, not created but born, not merely conjoined but flashing forth. Prudentius’ poem is an allegory not because of its connected stream of personified figures, but because it is a poem. The poem is not an object of knowledge, and consequently not subject to the law of Reason. The poem is, and the image that is the poem can open our eyes to an “other” vision, cloudy and gray, but gazing into the heart of being.

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The Changing Faces of Allegory: Dante and Spenser

Just as human reason fails to grasp the import of poetical utterance on account of its deficiency in truth, neither can it grasp divine things perfectly on account of their superabundance of truth; and therefore in both cases there is need of representation by sensible figures. —St. Thomas Aquinas1

In book 10 of The Republic, the philosopher accuses the poet of simply turning a mirror that reflects the empirical world, which is itself a mere reflection of an ideal world. In chapter 1 I argued that it is the philosopher who should stand accused of “knowing nothing but how to imitate, to lay on with words and phrases . . . in such fashion that others, equally ignorant, who see things only through words, will deem his words most excellent” (Republic 599e). The phrase equally ignorant ironically suggests Socrates’ position. Over and over again in the dialogues, Socrates claims his own ignorance, admitting his lack of knowledge rather than his expert wisdom. In The Symposium, Socrates takes up both the position of the ignorant lover of truth and as the object of an ignorant pursuit of beauty. In Alcibiades’ final speech, Socrates is revealed as the figure for truth appearing as a beauty that is not beautiful. As a constant pursuit that leads through infinite digressions, love is, according to Socrates’ source Diotima, “how the body and all else that is temporal partakes of the eternal” (Symposium 208b). As Diotima had explained to Socrates, although only the erotic lover is called by the name Lover, the name should apply to all those who pursue happiness and the good. Just before this passage, as an introductory analogy Diotima offered the example of poets and provided a particular definition of poetry: 95

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Changing Faces: Dante and Spenser You’ll agree that there is more than one kind of poetry in the true sense of the word—that is to say, calling something into existence that was not there before, so that every kind of artistic creation is poetry and every artist is a poet. (205c)

Socrates simply agrees with this statement. However, here we have been given a very different definition of poetry than the one suggested in The Republic.2 Poetry is the calling into existence of what was not there before: it is the description of a world that comes to exist in the (poetic) description. Poetry is the phenomenalizing of ideas. Diotima continues by having Socrates admit that although every artist is a poet, “we don’t call them all poets, do we?” Diotima connects these observations about poetry with love. She seems to be suggesting that the philosopher is concealed not only in the name Lover, but by analogy, the philosopher is also concealed in the name Poet. As a lover of truth, and as one who seeks to make truth manifest, the philosopher is a poet. In Plato’s own stridently philosophical work, the particular relation of poetry to truth appears. Many centuries later, in An Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney defended poetry on the basis of its relationship to truth. He argued that poetry provided the noblest occupation, even above that of philosophy and history (the next highest), because it has the power both to delight and to teach, and thereby to promote virtue, specifically defined not just as well-knowing but as welldoing.3 Sidney’s entire argument over and against the philosophers and the historians is based on the point that each has only one necessary element for this “ending end,” philosophy only the abstractions of thought (theory), and history only the examples of action (practice). “The philosopher, therefore, and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example. But both, not having both, do both halt” (Apology 90). The poet, however, has both, by giving a “perfect picture” to accompany any theoretical notion. This picture functions like the examples of history but represents the universality of a precept in its image. According to Sidney, and perhaps according to Plato, poetry makes possible the manifestation of Truth, and also a sensation of Beauty beyond what even the natural world can accomplish. Nature has “never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done. . . . Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden” (85). Sidney explains that the skill of the poet lies in the ability to manifest the idea of the “fore-conceit” of the work in the work (85). In this ability the poet lives up to his divine likeness.

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Changing Faces: Dante and Spenser 97 Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in Poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings. (85–86)

Sidney’s stated objective is to persuade English poets to strive for this degree of excellence. Perhaps the most prominent example of the manifestation of a fore-conceit is Dante’s Commedia. Although Sidney qualifies all of his specific references to poets as merely examples, Dante’s name appears regularly in his treatise.4 Sidney’s argument is (in my words) that all poetry should aspire to the sensory manifestation of the idea.The best poetry creates a world more perfect for its true fiction than imperfect for its fictional truth. Sidney describes three types of mimesis, according to his reading of Aristotle: “a representing, [a] counterfeiting, or [a] figuring forth.”This last form is particular to poetry. Philosophers are cast as far inferior, like painters “who counterfeit only such faces as are set before them” (87). The poet’s mode of imitation is specifically not to counterfeit (as Socrates accused in The Republic). Rather, “to imitate [the poets] borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be” (87). Thus Sidney prefers the term vates for poets (the poetic version of the philosophical “something divine” that concludes Plato’s Ion). It is on Sidney’s articulation of the proper task of the “right poet” that A. C. Hamilton bases his theory of allegory in The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene.” An interesting test of the consistency of allegory as a phenomenon lies in the comparison of Dante’s Commedia with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Surprisingly, the two poets have rarely been compared, even though Hamilton made this very observation fifty years ago and initiated the comparison. In fact, Hamilton rightly argues that “[u]nless these poets write a common language of allegory, there is little we may ever understand about the genre” (Structure 31).5 The one is a Catholic text that connects the theological methods to the poetical means of allegory. The other is a Protestant text that insists on allegory’s “dark conceite” in an environment deeply mistrustful of poetry’s imaginative means. And yet, despite these differences, both create a “golden world” (according to Sidney’s definition) constituted by “an imaginative leap from anything that comes before” (Structure 30). Dante is spe-

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cifically cited by Sidney, and Spenser’s promise is noted in the introductory section of Sidney’s Apology. Hamilton sees Dante’s claim for a polysemous poem as similar to Spenser’s claim of “a continued Allegory, or darke conceite,” especially in the way Spenser characterizes allegory as fiction existing in its own right as feigning, not as a representation of reality in either a realist or neo-Platonic way. “The work of the right poet may not properly be regarded as an imitiation ‘of ’ anything, but only as an imitation. Thus Sidney speaks of ‘that imitation, whereof Poetry is.’” Thus, the golden world of the poet is compared to the “merely brazen” world of Nature. “The poet’s art of imitation is the art of feigning” (Structure 24; emphasis added). In comparing the two works, Hamilton focuses on each poem’s opening episode in a dark wood as an initiation into the world of the poem (in the case of Spenser the initiation is limited to the world of the first canto specifically, but refers to the poem’s world generally). The beginnings initiate the protagonist, the poet, and the reader into the allegory. Important to note (although it gets but a brief mention), Hamilton clearly distinguishes allegory as such from poetry that is allegorical: I believe that only this emphasis upon fiction could support allegory; for it is the primacy of the literal level which distinguishes allegory from merely allegorical poetry. (29)

Because of this emphasis on the truth of fiction qua feigning (not representing), Hamilton can focus on the rich literal level of the poem, and it is there that the poem can manifest a golden world.6 “Whatever the differences of their critical traditions, both poets clearly demand that the reader focus upon this literal level” (33). Hamilton points out the shortcomings of “the usual medieval or Renaissance theories of allegory: these, with their stress upon levels of allegorical meaning, only distract.” The only way to read the poems as allegory is to read according to the demands the poem makes on the reader. “The opening episode of each poem defines the art of reading the allegory.” This leads to a double reading—not of levels, but rather of directions. [T]here are two ways of understanding [the poem]. The first is outward, that extrinsic meaning which relates the episode (and the poem) to our world; the second is intrinsic, that inner coherence which binds all parts of the poem. (34)

These two readings do not stand in a hierarchical relation, but have an equal share in the full experience of the poem. Hamilton notes how the “romantic

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indulgence in the poem’s sensuous surface” and the quest “to seek the hidden allegorical significance” each provide only an incomplete reading of the poem (1–6). Hamilton seeks to unite the “fatal dichotomy between poet and thinker” that these approaches perpetuate. Spenser is both a poet, creating a golden world absolved in the poem, and a thinker, making connections to the world in which that poem exists. While I agree with Hamilton that The Faerie Queene creates a golden world, comparable in scope to that of Dante’s Commedia, the differences of historical moment figure significantly into the image and the possibilities of a golden world. At the end of the Commedia, we receive a divine vision that makes possible a symbolic experience of immediacy, face to face with God. At the end of The Faerie Queene, we are faced with the limitations and excesses of our own mortality: an immediate experience of the mortal self rather than a divine presence. In both poems, however, the immediate experience appears by means of the allegorical edifice. The face changes but the phenomenon of allegory remains the same. The phenomenon of allegory must be the thing that appears in both poems. Hamilton’s insistence on the primacy and profundity of the literal level and his valiant resistance and challenge to the interpretive (allegorizing) approaches to The Faerie Queene set important precedents. Hamilton disputes even the most obvious traditional interpretation of the literal battle between knight and monster in which the knight represents Holiness, Una equals Truth, and Error personifies error. And thus, “the episode means that Holiness defeats Error with the aid of Truth.” He gives also the historicalpolitical example in which “the episode means that England [the knight] passed successfully through the dangers of Reformation” in which Una represents the Anglican Church and Error the Roman Catholic Church (32). Hamilton rightly notes that Spenser, the poet, never says these things, and therefore these are really “translations,” and imply the truth of the adage that precisely what is best is what is lost in translation. What is lost in these allegorical translations is the literal level, “an image presented in realistic and visual detail,” the fiction that the poet “labours to render . . . in its own right” (32)—the golden world of the poem. In Dante’s case the fiction is of personal history, and in Spenser’s, of historical romance. Any allegorizing must come after and as a result of the fictional “groundplot” (Sidney’s term, adopted by Hamilton) and an acceptance of its truth. For Hamilton, attempting to apply anything like the four-fold levels of meaning to the Commedia or The Faerie Queene can only distract from the works. “We must begin with the poems themselves, with the fact that each

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within its tradition is a separate kind of allegory which demands its own kind of reading” (34). The only way to learn how to read an allegory is to read it, to actually read its literal image and not to jump to a translation of it, to its metaliteral (metaphysical) meaning. Which is not to say that there are not other meanings in the poems. As much as allegory cannot exist without the literal image, it cannot exist without multiple references, the “other” of the allos. However, it is the relation between the logos (or legein) and the allos that should be rethought, as Hamilton starts to do with a “simple yet radical re-orientation . . . [a] focus upon the image itself, rather than . . . the idea hidden behind the image” (12). Rather than through levels of meaning, [a]llegory’s unique power is achieved through the contrapuntal relationship between the poem’s world and our world, and by the centripetal relationship of its parts. More comprehensively and significantly than other genres, it points beyond itself and also to itself. The brazen world of fallen nature and the poem’s golden world, reality and the idea, fact and fiction become united in our reading. (35; emphasis added)

Sidney’s emphasis on the particular skill of poets prompts a rethinking of the allegorical structure upon which much poetry depends.7 He asserts the phenomenological uniqueness of poetry to make things appear that cannot appear in any other way or by any other means. Sidney argues that moral philosophers are limited to the abstractness of thought and that historians are limited to the events of the world while the poet serves as a moderator between these two approaches, and in practice, exceeds them (Apology 87–90). Poetry provides both the particularity of history and the abstraction of thought, and with this combination leads humankind on a path not only of “well knowing,” but more importantly, of well being (by “well doing”). Historians must often report “the truth of a foolish world” (94) and cannot always explain the causes of worldly events (93). However, the poet can imitate historical actions and beautify them for further teaching and greater delight. And here Sidney cites Dante as a self-evident example (93). Sidney’s nod leads to a different perspective on Dante’s conception of poetry and of allegory. For centuries, Dante’s use of allegory has largely been caught up in a debate concerning the “allegory of theologians” versus the “allegory of poets.” The former is based on allegoresis, or the act of interpretation that presumes that a hidden meaning is embedded in the literal text or historical event. The latter is based on a metaphoric construction that

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presumes that figurative creation provides cover for a more primary meaning, resulting in what Charles Singleton has called a “disembodied fiction” (“Dante’s Allegory” 82). The “poetic” focuses on the creation of a figure to express a preconceived meaning, while the theological presumes to read a second meaning in what already exists. The allegory of theologians is clearly an interpretive method, and the four levels of allegory derive from this approach. But several scholars (in addition to Hamilton) have argued that the four levels have exercised more effect in hindsight than in actuality. In The Language of Allegory Maureen Quilligan points out the power of this tradition, “passed down to the Renaissance with all the authority of classical precedent.” And she attributes this precedent, the preference for the allegorical significance over the literal sense, to the allegorizations of Homer and the Jewish exegesis of Philo. Under this influence, allegory became the catch-all term for textual interpretation and a preference was established for metaphoric language that gives more weight to the signified than to the signifier (29). Quilligan challenges this precedent by privileging a simultaneous polysemy in words over the interpretive levels of allegoresis. Aquinas inherited the four-fold system and contributed to its codification, and it is from Aquinas that Dante takes his cue. In keeping with the method of phenomenological reduction, I want to give this critical moment in allegory’s history another look. Dante seems to have gone directly to the Summa Theologiae and constructed his secular allegory on the principles to be found there. Umberto Eco reminds us of the obvious: Aquinas’ primary and predominant concern in the Summa Theologiae is scripture, not poetry.8 Most of Aquinas’ comparisons between sacred and profane writing favor the scriptural, and this has been misconstrued into an antagonism. Aquinas never claims that poetry is incapable of approaching the figural capacity of scripture, and it is quite probable that the thought of a poem like the Commedia never crossed his mind. However, when Dante presumed to write a secular poem that strove to achieve a communicative power analogous to that of scripture, he turned to Aquinas for guidance, just as he turns to the figure of Aquinas for guidance in the heavenly spheres of the Paradiso. Dante’s theoretical explications of allegory and his poetic practice, especially in the Commedia, closely follow Aquinas’ commentaries on allegory and metaphor in the Summa. Dante learned how to write a divine secular poem by following Aquinas’ theological teachings.9 And perhaps Dante goes Aquinas one better. This is Marjorie

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O’Rourke Boyle’s argument in “Closure in Paradise: Dante Outsings Aquinas.” Pointing out that Aquinas never finished the Summa, Boyle details the significance of the book that appears in Dante’s final vision. Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna, Legato con amore in un volume, Ciò che per l’universo si squaderna. (Paradiso 33:85–87) [In its depths I saw that it contained, bound by love in one volume, that which is scattered in leaves throughout the universe. (Paradiso, trans. Sinclair, p. 483)]

Boyle concludes that by literally reading the image of a bound book— that is, a completed one—at the conclusion of the complete tour-de-force poem he has written, “Dante repudiates Aquinas by his election of poetry as the successful method for articulating the ascent to the divine contemplation” (5). Nor is Aquinas as disparaging of poetry as is usually assumed. In his response to the much-maligned objection that poetry is an infima doctrina, Aquinas used the example of poetry to explain the use of metaphor in scripture. He set up an analogy. As the poet constructs a reality in order to convey something unknown, so scripture presents a reality that conveys something unknown.10 Because it is impossible to present this unknown thing except by recourse to analogy and through the structure of allegory, which has the capacity of bringing two unlike things into the same space, poetry serves as a literal demonstration for the understanding of how scripture works. Aquinas used the “allegory of poets” as a figure to explain the “allegory of theologians.” An image of something known and recognizable (poetic allegory) becomes an image of something unknown or beyond our comprehension (divine truth). These things are not identical, but the experience of the object invokes the subjective (what Aquinas calls “spiritual”) experience of the allegorical referent.11 In the next part of his response, Aquinas cites Dionysius, and notes that “the beam of divine revelation is not extinguished by the sense of imagery that veils it, and its truth does not flicker out, since the minds of those given the revelation are not allowed to remain arrested with the images but are lifted up to their meaning” (Summa 9.1.ad2). This model is the one that Dante follows in the Commedia. The pilgrim is never allowed to dwell

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too long on any one image; he is forced to continue his forward and upward motion, until he receives the ultimate vision. The commentator of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa offers an insightful perspective on Aquinas’ point here: The content of divine revelation is expressed in the mind of the believer less by the images and ideas than by the judgments that are formed. Faith is a special judgment, not a special idea.Yet revelation comes to us as a historical fact, not merely as a formal meaning set out in a dogmatic system; it is addressed to the whole man, not merely to his abstract reason. The reply touches on the importance of imagination for catechetics. (2a2ae; emphasis added)12

It is perhaps in this way that Dante believes and judges the Commedia as true. The key evidence for this argument lies in the final image of the poem. The entire poem is the “historical fact” of this revelation. The phenomenon of the poem becomes the ground of a noumenal experience.13 In an article contending that allegorical interpretation ends in Dante’s paradise, Magnus Ullén argues that the allegorical merges with the symbolic in this final moment: In Divina Commedia, symbol and allegory merge and become one, because the origin and the end of this remarkable narrative is ultimately the same: God. It is this circumstance that enables Dante to make a case for the historical truth of his great work. In the end, the Comedy is not something which he has written, but rather something which he has read in the reflection of God: the reader and the writer are one. (“Dante in Paradise” 196)

This then becomes the parallel experience of the reader of the poem, who experiences the poem by reading it. Ullén offers an extended argument that the distinction between allegoresis and allegory (or allegorical writing) is not as fundamental as is often presumed.14 Ullén juxtaposes the metaphoric desire to achieve a symbolic moment, as at the end of the Commedia, and the metonymic progression of change that we are forced to endure, not simply as readers of the poem but as readers of life. Reading the poem is the historical experience. The basic truth of the poetic fiction is essential for the revelation and validity of any additional layers of meaning.This structure is precisely what it

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means to write allegorically, and in his letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante expressed an acute understanding of this principle:15 It should be understood that there is not just a single sense in this work; it might be called polysemous, that is, having several senses. For the first sense is that which is contained in the letter, while there is another which is contained in what is signified by the letter. The first is called literal, while the second is called allegorical, or moral or anagogical. (“Letter,” p. 99, paragraph 7)

To clarify the requirements of polysemous reading, Dante proffers a passage from Psalm 113 and the interpretive method used by theologians. After giving an etymology of allegory as deriving from the Greek alleon, which in Latin means both alienus (“belonging to another”) and diversus (“different”), Dante points to the literal level and the allegorical level in his own poem, suggesting that the reader apply the theological method by analogy. Dante did not provide specific interpretations of the allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels of his own poem. To provide the interpretation might imply that he, as a mere human author, had the same capacity as God, to simultaneously create every level of meaning. In the long-standing tradition of poetic inspiration, Dante presumed only that he was divinely guided in the writing of the poem. Only by virtue of this divine sanction of the poem as such (at the literal level) could Dante claim that the poem reveals truths allegorically expressed. The subject of the whole work, then, taken literally, is the state of souls after death. . . . If on the other hand the work is taken allegorically, the subject is man, in the exercise of his free will, earning or becoming liable to the rewards or punishments of justice. (“Letter,” p. 99, paragraph 8)

This “allegorical” sense is more properly called “parabolical,” in that the figurative meaning lies “side by side” with the literal fiction. In article 10 of question 1 of the Summa, Aquinas addresses the “parabolical sense” and categorizes it with the literal. In explaining the parabolical, however, Aquinas opens another door for secular poetry: The parabolical sense is contained in the literal sense [sensus parabolicus sub literrali continetur], for words can signify something properly and something figuratively; in the last case the literal sense is not the figure of speech itself, but the object it figures. (I.1.10.ad3)

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Aquinas then gives the example of the arm of God as not signifying a literal limb but the power implied by that image, such that the rhetorically figured meaning is also a literal meaning. This scriptural example demonstrates quite clearly that the metaphoric object (the arm) has no intrinsic moral value. The moral value comes from the believer’s comprehension of the literal words, the figure they manifest, and the transcendental signification that she discerns. In this example, the allegory is “merely poetic” because it doesn’t have the theological truth at all levels. The allegory used by theologians is sometimes poetic. Although Dante creates the allegory as a poet, as the earliest commentators agreed, he also advocates a figurative reading like the one used for allegorical readings of scripture. As noted by Richard Hamilton Green, the early commentator Benvenuto da Imola certainly read Dante’s work as an “allegory of poets,” but at the same time recognized that as a Christian poet, Dante believed in a common bond between poetry and theology (“Dante’s ‘Allegory of Poets’”123). Green further argues that Dante’s great poem shares its figurative method with a mode of allegory usually applied to scripture, as shown by Auerbach, Singleton, and Ferguson, among others. Dante’s alta fantasi—the journey there, the description of souls in their life after death—are wonderfully real and immediate; and the truth of that vision is rooted in the truth of theology, its figures are fraught with the truths of divine revelation. (123)

Ultimately Dante’s Commedia cannot easily be categorized as either an allegory of poets or an allegory of theologians. It’s a bit of both. Or, perhaps to attempt to categorize the Commedia in these terms is to misread allegory as such in Dante’s work. There are two key sources, other than the poetry, for understanding Dante’s approach to allegory.The first is the letter to Can Grande della Scala (already mentioned), and the second is Dante’s earlier text Il Convivio. Much seems to depend on the authenticity of the letter to Can Grande. But, as Albert Russell Ascoli argues, “paradoxically, it becomes relatively less important whether or not Dante himself wrote all or part of the Epistle, while it becomes all important that such a document could not conceivably have been written without Dante as an ‘efficient,’ if not its ‘instrumental’ cause” (“Access to Authority” 310). Dante himself set the precedent for commentaries on his own work by commenting on it himself in Vita Nuova, Il Convivio, and De Vulgari Eloquentia. I agree with Ascoli that “this precedent was very

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much in the mind of whoever wrote the epistle” (310), even if it was not Dante himself. The content of the letter is consistent with Dante’s views as expressed elsewhere.16 More importantly, the obsession with this issue has forestalled other considerations. Charles Singleton assumes the authenticity of the letter, and by comparing it to Il Convivio, declares on the side of the theological: I, for one, have no difficulty in making the choice. The allegory of the Divine Comedy is, for me, so clearly the “allegory of theologians” . . . that I can only wonder at the efforts made to see it as the “allegory of poets.” (“Dante’s Allegory” 81)

However, he ultimately asserts that the Commedia is both “an allegory of poets and an allegory of theologians” because “the Letter to Can Grande does not make the distinction.” The letter clearly establishes “that the first and literal sense is to be taken as the first and literal sense of Holy Scripture is taken, namely as an historical sense” (80). To Singleton this is fundamental to comprehending Dante’s use of allegory. Singleton provides an important assessment of the relationship between these so-called levels: [W]ith this poem it is not a question of one meaning but of two meanings; and the nature of the first meaning will necessarily determine the nature of the second—will say how we shall look for the second. (80; emphasis added)

The relationship between these two meanings, or the relationship between the literal level and all other levels of meaning—metaphorical (allegorical), moral, anagogical, for example—depends on the way in which one takes the literal level. In a strict allegory of poets, the literal level is a fiction, and the interpretation of the entire poem depends on “an outer and an inner meaning.” The second meaning is concealed in the veil of the fiction. Singleton describes this as an “allegory of ‘this for that’” (80). The allegory of poets has the conventional structure of metaphor, one thing substituting itself for another thing.The allegory of theologians, however, has a different structure, “not an allegory of ‘this for that’ but an allegory of ‘this and that,’ of this sense plus that sense” (80). The structure of this kind of allegory is that of metonymy (although Singleton does not use the term). In Singleton’s description of the “allegory of theologians,” the two meanings are ontologically simultaneous, even as they are interpretively hierarchical. However, one need not decide between this and that meaning, but

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rather one can dwell in the reality of two true meanings. In scripture (and in the scriptural example Dante uses in the letter to Can Grande), “the words have a real meaning in pointing to a real event; the event, in its turn, has meaning because events wrought by God are themselves as words yielding a meaning, a higher and spiritual sense” (80). For Singleton, the key feature of theological allegory is that it does not need another sense beyond the literal. Theological allegory may demonstrate a metaphorical connection of “this for that,” but it doesn’t have to. However, a strictly poetic allegory must have a consistent and continuous process of substitution. Singleton argues that Dante’s Commedia does not: If we take the allegory of the Divine Comedy to be the allegory of theologians, we shall expect to find in the poem a first literal meaning presented as a meaning which is not fictive but true, because the words which give that meaning point to events which are seen as historically true. And we shall see these events themselves reflecting a second meaning because their author, who is God, can use events as men use words. But, we shall not demand at every moment that the event signified by the words be [significant] in its turn as a word, because this is not the case in Holy Scripture. (81)

Without referring to Sir Philip Sidney, Singleton subscribes to the idea that poets can and do serve a vatic function. In practical terms, Singleton makes his argument negatively, noting that the presumption of a poetic allegory forces meanings into the text “that it cannot possibly bear as a poem.” Singleton gives the example of Virgil, who is clearly a historical being and simultaneously takes on a meaningful role in the poem. But Virgil remains who he is as a historical fact throughout. He has a historical ontological status, not a figurative one, like that of Lady Philosophy in Il Convivio (81). Thus Singleton concludes: The main allegory of the Divine Comedy is thus an allegory of action, of event, an event given by words which in its turn reflects (in facto) another event. Both are journeys to God. (82)

Richard Hamilton Green broaches the dichotomy from the side of the poets, but he comes to the same general conclusion as Singleton, who approaches it from the side of the theologians. For Green, to take Dante’s poem strictly as an allegory of theologians is to ignore (or “[do] violence to”) the “medieval theory of poetic fiction” (“Dante’s ‘Allegory of Poets’”119). Dante, or his proxy, certainly seems to presume that his fiction is true (in

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some unspecified way), and that explains the tendency to categorize the Commedia as an “allegory of theologians.” However, in order to claim that Dante’s poem is, or is similar to, the “allegory of theologians,” one must overwrite the imaginative vision that constitutes the literal level of Dante’s work. Green rehearses the various means by which this fiction has been avoided, especially that the figures of the Commedia are exemplary and therefore true, and that the fiction is like “the figurative mode of scripture because so many of the [figures] are given as real, concrete, historical” (119). As an alternative, Green argues that Dante relies on a broader sense of allegory than that implied by Aquinas. By employing an example of scriptural allegory in reference to his poem, Dante is not opposing the allegory of theologians and the allegory of poets, but combining them. “In both cases Dante is illustrating the discovery of figurative meanings in poetry in a way which would be easily understood by contemporaries aware of the subtle analogies and radical differences between poetic fiction and divine revelation” (122). Like Singleton, Green advocates a simultaneity of allegory’s creative and interpretive strains. Both scholars work against a metaphysics of dichotomy, and this yields a fruitful approach to allegory, one that should be pursued in order to better comprehend the phenomenology of allegory as such, a definition that includes all of allegory’s myriad forms. To read Dante’s poem and his commentaries with a primary focus on whether he is writing an allegory of theologians or an allegory of poets is to miss the real contribution Dante makes to the tradition of allegory in particular and to literature in general. Dante creates his own true world, and as the creator of that world he realizes the power and the potential of double signification, of polysemy. In Dante, Poet of the Desert, Giuseppe Mazzotta argues that Dante not only “applies to the esthetic dimension the very techniques of figural interpretation adopted by the patristic exegetes of biblical history” (196), he also explodes them. Dante insinuates the oblique and shadowy path of metaphoric language in which truth and fiction have a simultaneous existence and the presumed unity of sign and meaning is shattered. He decidedly obliterates, in other words, the distinction between allegory of poets and allegory of theologians conventionally based on the fictive or nonfictive status of the literal sense, and in effect, he absorbs what is radically new in Aquinas’ hermeneutics. (252)

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The Commedia represents a new approach, neither a conventional allegory of poets nor an interpretive allegory of theologians. Dante’s allegory is something quite different. Mazzotta’s reading is founded on a literary typology in which the Commedia is analogous to Exodus and to the Incarnation, creating a typological correspondence that connects all three. Patristic typology (or the allegory of theologians) situates the events of history in a progressive sequence that is simultaneously atemporal. The events of the Old Testament prefigure the events of the New Testament, which will then be fulfilled at the end of historical time. This is only possible because there is no difference of time with God. Dante carefully works poetry into this scheme. Mazotta notes that Dante maintains a humble, occasionally wavering stance in relation to his bold claim to write a new kind of poetry, and it reflects “the radical predicament of a Christian poet who seeks more than an esthetic humanistic redemption and less than to perform the supreme transgression of writing an appendix to the Bible” (Dante, Poet of the Desert 208). Dante grapples with the same problem as Aquinas: the insufficiency of language. For Aquinas, “biblical language is invested with a substantial, proper sense which truly, albeit inadequately, expresses the reality of the divine itself ” (206; emphasis added). For Dante, the challenge is greater, but he relies on Aquinas’ guidance. “Dante transposes this theory of signification into the context of his own poetic inspiration in the attempt to charge his own language with a theological sense and to imply that the poetic signs are commensurate and proper to the desire which generates them” (206). It is this belief in a theological foundation for his poetry that “allows Dante to claim the singularity for his own poetic activity” (207). Dante’s poetic allegory does not challenge the allegory of theologians— it fulfills it, both in theory and in practice. In scripture, the truth is so great that it cannot be expressed in ordinary language. In poetry, the language is so great that it can reveal a truth beyond its ordinary capacity. Dante’s project fulfilled the fundamental criterion that Sidney eventually set for poetry in his Apology. Sidney reserved for poetry the highest position in the secular ethical order of knowledge. Sidney positions poetry above philosophy and history with an argument strikingly similar to Aquinas’ defense in the Summa Theologiae. According to Sidney, the poet has the distinctive ability to give the “perfect picture” of any theoretical notion. The poetic picture provides the specific examples characteristic of historical knowledge and manifests the uni-

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versal principles that determine our being. Dante appropriated the particular allegorical structure of biblical typology for secular poetry, effecting a profound change in the way that literary history is perceived. The confusion stemming from the four-fold scheme of allegorical interpretation is well founded, given Dante’s own “explanations” of how allegory works in his own texts. And it may be that, to a degree, Dante himself believed that his poem fit into that schema, although he never shared a full application of it. However, what is most significant about Dante’s project is its ability to incarnate in words themselves the human experience of redemption and revelation. The Commedia culminates and concludes in Paradiso, canto 33, with a vision of God. Dante does not create this vision. Rather, he and we receive a vision that transcends comprehension while being absolutely understood. The allegory of the poem makes this divine, truly symbolic moment possible, for Dante as for us. Angus Fletcher calls this a moment of “wondrous inscrutability,” expressed in the geometric paradox of squaring the circle (“Marvelous Progression” 20–21).17 As a pilgrim, Dante had been prepared to bear this vision. In “The Final Image: Paradiso XXXIII, 144,” John Freccero addresses Dante’s adequacy to the vision as a pilgrim and as a poet. According to the final four lines of the poem, Dante’s “high fantasy” failed, “A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa” (Paradiso 33.142). However, as a poet Dante supplies his reader with an image that is “totally coherent” and concrete, that of a wheel, rota (“Final Image”14, 16). Until Freccero pointed out this word in 1964, readers presumed Dante’s final vision was of a circle. No one had “bothered to consider the difference between the circle, a geometric abstraction, and the concrete object that embodies it” (16). Freccero returns to the literal level of the poem and the literal image of a wheel (not a circle) and from this solid ground he not only clearly explicates the two simultaneous motions of a wheel, around a center and forward in direction (18), but he also connects the “twin powers” to Dante’s overall objective for the poem— the full knowledge of the intellect and the perfection of the will, which, as two distinct objects, require two different kinds of movement. The image is awesome because both objects are present in the same image. Therefore, the will, whose object is the Good, always tends toward what is external to it and is contented only when it encircles its object in eternal fruition, while the Intellect, whose object is the True, is contented only when it possesses the Truth at the very Center of its being, by a connaturality which is a mirror image of what it sees. (“Final Image” 24–25)

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In this way, the reader, too, experiences what cannot be communicated in any way other than in and through an image. As a poet Dante cannot translate into words or adequately convey the experience of God to his reader, except in the allegorical experience of the entire poem, and finally, through an elaborate, rigorously constructed image (as A. C. Hamilton would put it) by which our image appears in God’s image, an image of which our image is an image. As Freccero concludes, “the final image maintains its coherence only by the grace of the vision that precedes it” (27).The coincidence of the image of God and the image of humankind is the symbolic moment made possible by the allegorical structure of the poem.18 Non perchè più ch’un semplice sembiante fosse nel vivo lume ch’io mirava, che tal è sempre qual s’era davante; ma per la vista che s’avvalorava in me guardando, una sola parvenza, mutandom’ io, a me si travalgiava. Nella profonda e chiara sussistenza dell’alto lume parvermi tre giri di tre colori e d’una contenenza; e l’un dall’altro come iri da iri parea reflesso, e ’l terzo parea foco che quinci e quindi igualmente si spiri ............................... Quella circulazion che sì concetta pareva in te come lume reflesso, dalli occhi miei alquanto circunspetta, dentro da sè, del suo colore stesso, mi parve pinta della nostra effige; per che ’l mio viso in lei tutto era messo. (Paradiso 33.109–20; 127–132) [Not that the living light at which I gazed had more than a single aspect— for it is ever the same as it was before—, but by my sight gaining strength as I looked, the one sole appearance, I myself changing, was, for me, transformed. In the profound and clear ground of the lofty light appeared to me three circles of three colours and of the same extent, and the one seemed reflected by the other as rainbow by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed forth equally from the one and the other. . . .

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112 Changing Faces: Dante and Spenser That circling which, thus begotten, appeared in Thee as reflected light, when my eyes dwelt on it for a time, seemed to me, within it and in its own colour, painted with our likeness, for which my sight was wholly given to it. (Paradiso, trans. Sinclair, pp. 484–85)]

In this particular image of the “face” of God, Dante achieves the logically impossible and imaginatively transcendent unity of divine and human. But it is important to note that the structure of this reflection is backwards, taken from the finite perspective of a mortal gaze. The human being is the image in the mirror, gazing at the true face (the imago Dei) in the reflection.19 The Commedia makes possible this nonsensical sentence. This nonallegorical face dissolves from the historical world as it resolves into the faces of God in the last strains of the poem. An elaborate allegorical fiction makes possible the appearance of something true that cannot be presented directly in language, or even through a particular image. The allegory brings to appearance not only the image of God, but also the image of God in humanity (by its appearance in the image of God). Dante’s pilgrim is a finite being learning about the divine order of things and earning the just reward of divine vision, face to face. As readers, we potentially share in this experience. The terms of divine reflection have changed radically by the time of Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queene. Spenser also sought to present an image of that which could not appear in a direct, straightforward way, as “good discipline deliuered plainly in the way of precepts, or sermoned at large,” as he wrote in his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh. Admittedly the devices of allegory are “delightfull and pleasing to commune sence,” but they serve more than a merely didactic function. In Spenser’s work there is no single figure to follow, the order of things seems hopelessly confusing, and most tellingly, the poem culminates not in a blessed (and actively passive) experience of the infinite divine, but in an attempt by Mutability, the personification of human existence (finite and changeable), to posit herself as divine and to disrupt the order of the universe. In the letter to Raleigh, which was appended to the first installment of the poem to be published, Books 1 through 3, Spenser admits right off that he had chosen to write an allegory despite knowing “how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed,” and that the resulting book would be a “darke conceit.” He addresses this again in the Proem to Book 2. Expanding on the image of the queen reflected in the poem, he explains the need for an allegory:

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Changing Faces: Dante and Spenser 113 O pardon me thus to enfold In couert vele, and wrap in shadowes light, That feeble eyes your glory may behold, Which else could not endure those beames bright, But would be dazzled with exceeding light. (2, Proem, stanza 5)

Spenser claims to conceal this queen with allegorical veils, or else the brilliance of the image would be unbearable. Despite this tacit, perhaps even unintended reference to Dante’s final vision, in The Faerie Queene Spenser does not quite aspire to the lofty heights of Dante. He strives to reveal the divine aspect of his mortal queen, but in the end he fails to grant his readers this vision. However, in failing to achieve what he set out to do, Spenser reveals the truth of his historical moment. He reveals the epoch of modernity in which the subjective self, and not God, is the revealed image. Spenser insisted on writing an allegorical epic replete with memorable personifications and richly invested images. The Faerie Queene indisputably looks and acts like an allegory. And by this time, allegory was quite recognizable. Spenser had many models to follow, and he also had some ideas of his own. The resulting poem is a tour de force of the genre. The poem also forces us, however, to think about allegory differently. After his death, what was believed to constitute his last effort on the poem was published in the folio edition as Book 7 and given the name “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie.” These last efforts are comprised of two extended cantos (labeled cantos vi and vii) recounting the Titaness Mutability’s ascent to the heavens and challenge to the gods, followed by a two-stanza canto (viii) that is called “vnperfite.”20 This very last “canto” is arguably quite perfect in concluding The Faerie Queene as it stands.These fragments of a Book acknowledge that the work of poetry, especially of allegorical poetry, had become impossible, at least in its epic form; and it had become impossible because of the intervention of time. In the first stanza of Book 7’s canto viii, the poet agrees with Mutability’s argument: When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare, Of Mutability, and well it way: Me seemes, that though she all vnworthy were Of the Heav’ns Rule; yet very sooth to say, In all things else she bears the greatest sway.

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And he realizes that Mutability does hold sway on the earth, and that her force is inescapable. Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle, And loue of things so vaine to cast away; Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle, Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle. (7.8.1)

In the second stanza he dwells on Nature’s promise: Then gin I think on that which Nature sayd, Of that same time when no more Change shall be, But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd Vpon the pillours of Eternity,

He compares the mortal delight in change, but seeks an eternal stasis. But thence-forth all shall rest eternally With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight. (7.8.2)

He ends the poem with only a hope for divine vision, and not a divine vision itself. He does not get to see even Dame Nature, “For, with a veile that wimpled euery where,/ Her head and face was hid” (7.7.5). But the vision that we do get at the end of The Faerie Queene is important in its own right. Mutability’s petition confronts us (the poem’s readers) and the divine order itself with the irreparable disjunction between temporality and eternity (human time and divine “time”). This is a fundamental theological problem, exacerbated by a Protestant morality that gave the individual more responsibility for his or her own fate than under Catholicism.The free will of human beings and the omniscient foreknowledge of God have long constituted a knotty doctrinal dilemma. Catholics have the patristic tradition and the Vatican to navigate this dilemma for them. But Protestants must figure it out for themselves.21 In The Faerie Queene Mutability seeks to supersede divine time with mortal time. The judgment, bestowed by Nature, acknowledges that divine time no longer seems superior to mortal temporality, but this

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consequence results not in the inferiority of the gods to humans but the severance of the gods from humanity. And this is the final sentiment of the poem. Someday, we hope to see that “Saboaths sight.” But for now, we are left to delight in change, and to follow the lead of Mutability, even though by that desire we seek our own decay (7.7.59). Without the moral structure of divinity, humankind becomes responsible for its own moral code. This is an implicit yet profound consequence of the Protestant Reformation. Human beings must now determine for themselves what is right and wrong. Of course, God is still credited with this distinction, but in practice, each individual must not only define good and evil for him- or herself, but must also determine his or her own proper place in the here and now as well as in the hereafter. Unfortunately the only guide for these decisions lies in the mutable soul of each finite being. Mutability herself points this out: And men themselues doe change continually, From youth to eld, from wealth to pouerty, From good to bad, from bad to worst of all. Ne doe their bodies only flit and fly: But eek their minds (which they immortall call) Still change and vary thoughts, as new occasions fall. (7.7.19)

This is quite a condemnation of the human mind, particularly significant at the moment of the renaissance of knowledge that accompanied the reformation of faith. Spenser’s poem is especially important as an early modern attempt of a culture to give knowledge of itself to itself. It is no accident that this attempt manifests itself in an allegory. This knowledge cannot appear in any other way. In the book Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in “The Faerie Queene,” Jane Grogan gives Spenser’s images a thorough rereading, connecting the ekphrasis so typical of the poem to the poetics Spenser developed, closely aligned with the poetics proposed by Sidney in the Apology. Grogan begins her study by drawing attention to the paradoxical centrality of images in Protestant England. One astonishing feature of sixteenth-century English culture is that despite the major theological and cultural concerns that accrued around the idea of

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116 Changing Faces: Dante and Spenser images and vision, the extensive remit of visual paradigms within Renaissance culture and the ways in which they grounded Renaissance epistemology and poetics went largely unnoticed. (6)

Grogan does much to draw notice to it now. Within and against the restrictions imposed by iconoclasts and “poet-haters,” she finds that Spenser and Sidney offer “a cautious but substantive advocacy of images in Protestant poetics, one based on visual powers of affect and the poet’s didactic ends” (7).22 However, at the same time that Spenser employs a “visually potent didactic poetics,” he also “interrogates the vagaries of the very method” (68).23 Although Spenser’s explanatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh was no longer appended when Books 4 through 6 were published,24 Spenser had actually grown more bold in his use of allegorical form. In what is probably a tacit address to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer, the Proem to Book 4 of The Faerie Queene addresses the same anticipated criticism as that addressed in the letter to Raleigh.25 In the letter Spenser had confessed, “To some I know this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather haue good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they vse, then thus clowdily enwrapped in allegoricall deuises” (Fairie Queene, ed. Hamilton, pp. 715–16). In the absence of the rather diplomatic (albeit firmly argued) letter, Spenser again addresses contemporaries who fear that such verses on love as he has written are those By which fraile youth is oft to follie led, Through false allurement of that pleasing baite, That better were in virtues discipled, Then with vaine poemes weeds to haue their fancies fed. (4 Proem 1)

He offers the following judgment against such critics: Such ones ill iudge of loue, that cannot loue, Ne in their frosen hearts feele kindly flame: For thy they ought not thing vnknowne reproue, Ne naturall affection faultlesse blame, For fault of few that haue abusd the same. For it of honor and all vertue is

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Changing Faces: Dante and Spenser 117 The roote, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame, That crowne true louers with immortall blis, The need of them that loue, and do not liue amisse. (4 Proem 2)

Although this argument specifically addresses the representations of love offered in the previous Book, the argument against such love poetry is akin to the charges against allegory. To read about love is not necessarily to be corrupted by love. Spenser reiterates the message of Dante’s Francesca. It is when she and Paolo stop reading and start “living amiss” that trouble ensues. To read allegory is not to live allegorically. In the Proem to Book 5, Spenser further explains (rather than defends) his need to write under the cloudy cover of a “historicall fiction.” It is no longer “for variety of matter,” nor to protect the poet from “the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time,” as he had argued to Raleigh. In the second installment Spenser claims that he must go back to “the golden age” because the present age “growes daily wourse and wourse” (5 Proem 1–2). Let none then blame me, if in discipline Of vertue and of ciuill vses lore, I doe not forme them to the common line Of present dayes, which are corrupted sore, Bot to the antique vse, which was of yore, When good was onely for it selfe desired, And all men sought their owne, and none no more; When Iustice was not for most meed outhyred, But simple Truth did rayne, and was of all admired. (5 Proem 3)

Allegory is not a choice—it is a necessity. For that which all men then did vertue call, Is now cald vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight vertue, and so vs’d of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right, As with all things else in time are changed quight. Ne wonder; for the heauens reuolution Is wandred farre from, where it first was pight,

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118 Changing Faces: Dante and Spenser And so doe make contrarie constitution Of all this lower world, toward his dissolution. (5 Proem 4)

An allegorical fiction that is true becomes the necessary antidote to a false world. The Hamilton edition of The Faerie Queene notes that the first five lines of this Proem’s fourth stanza constitute “Spenser’s most powerful statement on why he needed to fashion the virtues, and why his poem counters traditional morality”(p. 508 n.). Truth no longer reigns, and thus to write a “true poem” requires that one not write the way the contemporary world would advocate. This corresponds to Hamilton’s reading of Spenser’s knight (and Dante’s pilgrim) as a being specifically extricating himself from “our world” and beginning a new way of life (“Introduction,” Faerie Queene, pp. 36–37). Spenser, like his contemporary Sidney, celebrates poetry’s artificiality, its fantastical fiction and its consequent ability to reveal the truth. In Book 6, he personifies the virtue Courtesy, the fairest flower in the “sacred noursery” of antiquity, and yet so far from its original purity that it is now a forgery (6 Proem 3–5). By a parallel logic, and implied here as a continued defense of his choice to write an allegorical epic, the greatest of fictions is now far from its original falsity and has become true. However, in lamenting the loss of courtesy in its true form, the poet describes the forgery as the subject who identifies truth with himself. Fashion’d to please the eies of them, that pas, Which see not perfect things but in a glas; (6 Proem 5)

In Book 2, at the gates to the Bower of Bliss, Spenser had already come upon this fearsome foe in the figure of Genius, “the foe of life, that good enuyes to all,/ that secretly doth vs procure to fall” (2.12.48), That is oure Selfe, whome though we doe not see, Yet each doth in him selfe it well perceiue to bee. (2.12.47; emphasis added)

Our self is our greatest enemy, and our true self is what we need to see. The modern version of a golden world is not one ruled by God but by ourselves.

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With the image of Mutability in the last cantos, human beings are forced to see their own—our own—reflection. The nexus of interrelated perceptual, epistemological, and practical changes of the early modern period develop from the emergence of an autonomous subject. The changes in the face of allegory reveal fundamental changes in the perceived order of things, while the structure of allegory remains essentially unchanged.The predominant and particular features of allegory are its structure (in which two things appear in the same space at the same time) and its ability to present what cannot be presented (or represented) in any other way. In these features, allegory does not change.What changes is what appears, and particularly what needs to appear allegorically because it cannot (or can no longer) appear in any other way. This is, I think, Spenser’s claim in the final complete books of The Faerie Queene (Books 4 through 6). The world has become so false, so mired in forgeries and deceptions (in “arch images”) that only a poet can save it, only a poet can provide the inverse of the inversion—the fiction that is true for the world that is false. The poet holds up the truth-telling mirror, which is not the one people want to look into. Spenser holds that very mirror up to Elizabeth. Framed with platitudes of praise for the object of its reflection, the mirror is also implied in its more literary sense, as in a “mirror for princes.” Despite its appearance, the “mirror for princes” does not reflect identity, but difference. As Spenser describes in the last Proem (to Book 6), Elizabeth is the “pure minde” that is like a mirror, in that it shows but also inflames the eyes of those who gaze into it. He begs her pardon for his presumption to take this virtue from her and return it to her in the poem, “so from the Ocean all riuers spring,/ And tribute backe repay as to their King” (6 Proem 6). The sovereign is also to learn from her reflection as it is cast in the poem. It is not her self that she sees reflected there, but an idealized version of her self—an identity with a difference. But the trend, as Spenser well recognized, was moving toward a recognition that effaced difference in favor of identity. We see ourselves in the poem, but only as we would like to see ourselves. The “moral man” Spenser claims (or strives) to embody in his epic is a new moral being who is proper to the English nation, and even more broadly, proper to human existence in the early modern age. It is not only the queen’s invisible body that appears in the The Faerie Queene, it is the body of every English man, woman, and child. It is a self-defined and self-referential entity. Turning to England’s mythical past and gesturing toward its prophetic future,

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The Faerie Queene is entirely self-referential. It is absolutely English, ideologically severed from any other notions of Christian behavior or human history. Allegory should and would be the means of successfully manifesting this morally constituted English person, but only if the ethical order for such a being already enjoyed a secure existence. It did not. Although allegory can provide a structure capable of expressing a particular ethical system and enabling the appearance of knowledge, allegorical poetry, in itself, cannot be moral or ethical. Poetry can express or figure moral values through its fictions (and thus be true), but it cannot in and of itself determine those values. Poetry possesses no rational knowledge. That is why Dante could presume to write a secular poetry adequate to divine things. The Commedia did not produce any knowledge of its own making. Dante created specific images based on existing historical fact and established doctrine and their authorized interpretation (although personalized at times). Dante offered an image of the afterlife (and a particularly unprecedented image of Purgatory), but he did not create these ideas. He simply made them appear. Dante’s poem is not only an allegory of divine revelation but also an epic appropriate to his age. Spenser also wrote an epic appropriate to his age, and the project of re-forming came with a particular set of consequences. Linda Gregerson investigates the particularities of English Protestant epic with a focus on the iconoclasm controversy, in which verbal images as well as visual ones became highly suspect. Gregerson examines the ways in which Protestant epic poems (namely, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost) avoid the charge of iconography while retaining iconographic features, and how, despite success, these constraints “left the English epic in something of a bind” (Reformation of the Subject 3–4). After all, the predominant function of an epic is to construct an image of a nation (even if a simultaneously idealized yet subtly critical image) and to provide a moral model for that nation’s subjects or citizens.26 Gregerson identifies three primary strategies by which Protestant epic avoids iconoclasm: the poem’s undermining of its own fiction through “technical retraction”; similarly, a self-reflexivity in the narrative that admits (and highlights) the poem’s imperfect illusion; and “the formal and thematic cultivation of a subject-in-exile” (long a standard feature of epic). This creates an epic grounded not in a preconceived stability but in “a generative instability” (3–4). The Protestant epic is the story of a reformed subject trying to find him- or herself. The poem begins in a dark wood,

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but it does not end with transcendence. The reformed subject is a creature bound to this world. The mythical world of Faery is never more than a selfconscious construction of the poet, his very own Bower of Bliss. The impossibility of Spenser’s (purportedly) intended project of twelve (or even twenty-four) books is already evident in Book 2 of the The Faerie Queene. In the end, the “Mutabilitie Cantos” serve not only as an appropriate coda to the entire work,27 but also as a reflection of the realizations presented in Book 2. As Harry Berger Jr. thoroughly argued in The Allegorical Temper, his study of Book 2, the figure of Guyon triumphs over temptation and yet also yields to the knowledge of his own frailty. Offering a carefully nuanced reading of Guyon’s progress through the Bower of Bliss, noting crucial though subtle differences in his interactions with the porter Genius, “quickly and easily settled” at the gate, and with Excess, “with a feeling that does not seem to be unmixed disdain,” Berger suggests that Guyon sees in Verdant, Acrasia’s last victim, “a ruined apparition of himself ” (217). Berger attributes the violent (but not disdainful) smashing of the second cup of wine to “Guyon unconsciously express[ing] his anger at his own impulses” (214–15). This reaction is even clearer in the scene with the two maids in the fountain in which Guyon actually comes to “slacke his pace” and “those wandring eyes of his” are firmly “rebukt” by the Palmer (2.12.68–69). The Palmer perhaps prevents an overt fall from virtue, but he cannot foil the inherent fallenness of each and every human being, including the indisputably excellent Sir Guyon. Thus, Berger suggests, the destruction of the Bower is as much an act of self-conscious (perhaps repressed) anger as an act of temperance. Indeed, there is a certain intemperateness in this final act, “a Puritan frenzy,” in Berger’s words, which was described by W. B. C.Watkins in Shakespeare and Spenser as a “growing moral uneasiness which finally, intensified by self-distrust, smashes beauty like a looking glass” (178; quoted by Berger, Allegorical Temper 218). After the intense build-up throughout Book 2, the quick demolition of the Bower of Bliss comes as a surprise. A single stanza eliminates one of the most memorable icons of The Faerie Queene. The quick dispatch of such an impassioned challenge will be repeated in Nature’s judgment of Mutabilitie, also achieved in the short space of a mere two stanzas (7.7.58–59). Implicit in the experience of the Bower is the weakness not only of Guyon but of every modern subjective self who strives to construct itself on its own moral principles. Spenser notes that in the gatekeeper figure of Genius we should

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see a reflection of our inner selves, a self Guyon quickly dispatches (but only apparently so). This “foe of life” resurfaces in the violent anger revealed in the Bower’s destruction. As readers we enter the Bower and we are warned about the “Selfe . . . we do not see” (2.12.47.8). One cannot help but be taken with the spectacle of the Bower. Even though we know better, we desire it. The Bower is attractive because of its literal perfection. Therewith the Heauens always Iouiall, Lookte on them louely, still in stedfast state, Ne suffred storme nor frost on them to fall, Their tender buds or leaues to violate, Nor scorching heat, nor cold intemperate T’afflict the creatures, which therein did dwell, But the milde ayre with season moderate Gently attempred, and disposd so well, That still it breathed forth sweet spirit and holesom smell. (2.12.51, lines 1–9).

This perfection is not an illusion. Rather it is an impossibility, something we are not privileged to see. There are no seasons within the Bower’s walls. It is an immutable place—it is no place.28 Guyon successfully resists “the fayre aspect / Of that sweet place” (2.12.53.1–2). In terms consistent with Gregerson’s helpful model of the Protestant epic, Guyon recognizes the garden within the Bower as an idol, a sign without substance. “The idol solicited attention or pleasure or belief on its own behalf, contriving to exist for its own sake” (Reformation of the Subject 2). One might say, then, that the idol is not at all allegorical because it points to nothing other than itself. It is not polysemous. The Bower of Bliss is, perhaps, the most unallegorical image in The Faerie Queene. However, “The Legend of Sir Guyon” is arguably the most important allegorical narrative in the poem. Guyon easily sees that the garden is all sign and no substance. He wonders at the sight (as we do), but it affects neither his mind nor his mission—until he comes upon the maids cavorting in the fountain. Here his keen discernment falters. As Berger points out, it is not Guyon’s perception of the maids that discombobulates him. Rather it is a “genuine and important experience, that the impulse of lust is connected to the principle of the generation of beauty” (Allegorical Temper 218–19). There

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is substance in this scene, not in the maids but within Guyon’s self. At this point our attention is drawn away from the Bower and redirected toward Guyon (and perhaps a bit toward ourselves as we, too, are titillated by this suggestive scene). Beauty is in the beholder, as philosophy has long argued, and it is a mistake to attribute beauty to the external object. Just as he/we are about to respond to their beckoning, the Palmer (and poet) rebukes our wandering eyes, and they are sharply refocused on Acrasia. The poetry becomes rather clinical at this point, a mechanical reproduction of love and desire, and the poet breaks up the image with pointed critique: Upon a bed of roses she was layd, As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin, And was arayd, or rather disarayd, All in a vele of silk and siluer thin, (2.12.77.1–4; emphasis mine)

An equal pair of stanzas describe her lover,Verdant, but they are stanzas with more pathos, evoking the self-reflective Guyon that Berger identified. Two more stanzas capture Acrasia, and in one swift stanza, Guyon destroys the Bower. Three stanzas release the enchanted man-beasts. And finally Guyon offers a moralizing conclusion. See the mind of beastly man, That hath so soone forgot the excellence Of his creation, when he life began (2.12.87.1–3)

Guyon is as much this “beastly man” as the despicable Gryll (who “repined greatly” at his loss of hoggish form). And the reader is too. This truth had been announced at the entryway. The Porter, Genius, is compared to the classical figure Agdistes: “Therefore a god him sage Antiquity / Did wisely make” (2.12.48.1–2). But note the juxtaposition of this apotheosis with the concluding lines of the previous stanza: That is our Selfe, whom though we doe not see, Yet each doth in him selfe it well perceiue to be (2.12.47.8–9)

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The danger within the virtue of temperance is a will to power. The greatest temptation is to make of one’s self a god. This is a particularly appropriate concern in the context of the Protestant Reformation. By denying the hegemonic authority of an institution that claimed access to an unimpeachable moral law, a Protestant believer had to give the moral law to him- or herself. Spenser’s protagonists personify isolated virtues, each following a specific moral law in a demonstration of its trials and its rewards. Guyon is Temperance, and he pledges himself to this ideal. At the Bower of Bliss we learn that there is no place in this world for an ideal. “The art, which all that wrought, appeared in no place” (2.12.58.9). The unchanging perfection of the Bower and its environs is its illusion. Before Guyon can destroy the image of perfection presented to him (and to us), he must first destroy it in himself. He must accept his mutability. Within the Bower of Bliss, Spenser perhaps realized the hubris of his own project and the fallacy of his plan as outlined in the letter to Raleigh. Perhaps in his desire to become poet laureate Spenser recognized his own daemonic self, the beast he might become. Perhaps—or perhaps he comes to realize the truth of imperfection and change.Within the context of the poem, the experience of Guyon is revisited in the “Mutabilitie Cantos.” The end of Book 2 and the conclusion of the work in Book 7 (the end of the poem as it stands) mirror each other as well as mirroring the reader who gazes into the images of the poem. The Bower of Bliss is the image of the very world that Mutabilitie seeks to overthrow. Guyon destroys a perfect image. That world no longer exists. It is desirable because of a nostalgic value, but it comes down as quickly as, say, an image in a pool can vanish with the drop of a pebble. Mutability attacks the “real thing”—the world of the gods, immutable, eternal, but also no longer connected to the human world. As Jove himself laments, Will neuer mortall thoughts ceasse to aspire, In this bold sort, to Heauen claime to make, And touch celestiall seates with earthly mire? (7.6.29.2–4)

Mutability mistakes this absence for impotence and her presence for power. Now it is the protagonist (Mutability herself) who is revealed as illusion—or almost. This illusion (unlike the Bower) is qualified at the end. In the “unperfite” eighth canto, the poet admits that Mutability’s pretensions cannot be summarily dismissed.

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Changing Faces: Dante and Spenser 125 Me seemes that she all vnworthy were Of the Heav’ns Rule; yet very sooth to say, In all things else she beares the greatest sway. (7.8.1.3–5)

She retains this influence precisely because of her pretensions to transcendence, to an infinite existence, to a self-effected apotheosis. Nature actually admits that Mutability is, in fact, part of the eternal world: I well consider all that ye haue sayd, And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate And changed be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselues at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate: The oeur them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne ouer change, and doe their state maintaine. (7.7.58.1–9)

Mutability is the closest humankind can get to eternity, infinite in our finite and changeable existence. Mutability is the intemperate counterpart to Guyon, but it is important to note their similarities. She undertakes her quest with a heady passion and argues her case with an impressive rhetoric—an allegory of the old ways: a medieval allegorical progression of temporal elements, the seasons, the months, day and night, life and death (7.7.28–46). That allegory no longer works, despite its visual appeal. That allegory is as lost to us as the world of the gods. Allegory now is (or seems) “broken.” We are suspended between—or better, torn between—this hopeful nostalgia and our own hopelessly finite condition. Thus the poet comments on Mutability’s vain promise, Which makes me loath this state of life so fickle, And love of all things so vaine to cast away; Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle, Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle. (7.8.1.6–9)

The poem ends by confronting us with our own finitude, our own image, not reflected in a symbolic transcendence but only in our own vain mirror.

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The Elizabethan Age was caught between a medieval and a modern ethics, and Spenser’s allegory embodies the very nature of this transition. After three decades of relative stability under Elizabeth, the need for an appropriate ethical system began to assert itself. The ideological underpinning of absolute monarchy is the decidedly medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies.29 The monarch is presumed to have two bodies, a natural one that is mortal and a political one that transcends the mortal state. Quite literarily, the doctrine holds that two bodies exist in the same person at the same time. This ideology was used both against and by Elizabeth in attempts to override or justify her powers. In capturing this betwixt world and this doublebodied queen in his poetry, Spenser provides us with the allegorical emblem of the age. In this poem the struggle of the in-between manifests itself. So much of the poem is medieval; so much of it is modern. Elizabeth was an absolute monarch, and an effective one, but also one of the last.The ideology of the monarch’s two bodies gave philosophical rigor to the belief in the divine right of rulers, a reflection of the shift from a religious to a secular world. Spenser provides a means of “seeing” the unseeable mystical body politic of the monarch, and in doing so, he reveals its truth, hitherto unknown. Even the monarch is subject to death, and it is this that the queen has in common with her subjects. Once this commonality is revealed, the mystical (divine) authority of the monarch is shattered. In the person of Dame Nature, the invisible body of the queen promises stability, but this promise is as mythic as the “historicall fiction” that constitutes Spenser’s poem. That is not to say that the myth is not true. At the threshold of modernity, Spenser is prophetic. The queen’s invisible body will become the intangible but self-certain subject with a moral mind supposed to transcend the sensible body. The relation that establishes the superiority of the moral over the material will be appropriated by Hegel. By the second published installment of The Faerie Queene, Books 4 through 6, Spenser’s master plan had been destroyed by the work itself. The master strategy outlined in the letter to Raleigh has disappeared from the appended materials. Ultimately the entire edifice collapses into itself, and Spenser is unable to complete the poem as planned. But that is why it is such a masterpiece—not in its success but in its “failure.” As Benjamin argues in The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, the ruin or the fragment is the most telling aspect of allegory. “The false appearance of totality is extinguished. . . . [W]hat allegory proclaims with unprecedented emphasis [is] a deep-rooted intuition of the problematic character of art.” Benjamin locates the historical

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moment when this aspect of allegory emerges, “as a reaction to [the selfconfidence of art] at the time of the Renaissance” (176, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels 154), at precisely the time in which Spenser wrote. As the Renaissance drew to a close, the virtual body departed from the visible monarch, but it would soon find a new home in the self-certain and absolute Subject. The self-doubt expressed in art leads to the triumph of the mind, of Geist. In Spenser, allegory emerges to counter the self-confident narrative of a subject who is deluded in assuming that there is a divine coincidence between the self and the world.30 In Dante, allegory provided the structure by which a divine presence could manifest itself in an unmediated appearance within the finite realm. In Spenser, allegory becomes a structure for mediation and for the first appearance of the Subject absolute unto itself. In trying to defend poetry as the pinnacle of intellectual achievement, Sidney relied on a conception of poetry analogous to Aquinas’ conception of scripture and to Dante’s notion of poetry as something divine. And yet, in Elizabethan England, there was no longer a secure concept of divinity to set the moral standard, and the ethical structure had broken apart. As Umberto Eco observes in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, “This world view collapsed . . . under the influence of Aquinas and of the new Aristotelian secularization of the natural world.” Already in the thirteenth century the seeds of the modern crisis of poetry had been sown. Eco remarks: What was to happen to poets, after the world was emptied of its mystical significance, and when it became uncertain under whose inspiration—God? Love? Something else?—the poet unconsciously spoke? It can be seen that when Aquinas implemented a theological secularization of the natural world, he set free the mystic drives within poetic activity. (162)

This “freedom” is equivocal. Without divine authority, what are poets for? The poets of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were already confronting this question. Long before Hölderlin articulated this poetic-existential crisis in the simple question, “Wozu Dichter?” Spenser realized it was perhaps already “too late,” but also high time for poets.

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4

The Allegorical Structure of Phenomenology of Spirit

All philosophy is condemned, to the extent that it is dependent on figuration, to be literary and, as the depository of this very problem, all literature is to some extent philosophical. —Paul de Man1 This Becoming [re]presents a slow movement and succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, in which each is endowed with all the riches of Spirit, and moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. —Georg F. W. Hegel2

The name of Hegel is a mighty invocation for philosophy. A model of rigor, and from start to finish grounded in Wissenschaft (science), Hegel’s philosophy has infiltrated far corners of the globe. Although often disputed, Hegel’s judgments are not easily dismissed. Nonetheless, as Paul de Man astutely observed about Hegel’s influence, “Few thinkers have so many disciples who never read a word of their master’s writings” (“Sign and Symbol” 93).3 Early in his career, Karl Marx expressed a similar sentiment with regard to the Young Hegelians of his time. Hegelians have used Hegel with great effect, often, as Marx observed in The German Ideology, by using a part of Hegel against the whole of Hegel (41). In the essays “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics” and “Hegel and the Sublime,” de Man carefully reads Hegel’s language on both sign (the arbitrary signification of allegory) and symbol (the belief in a coincidence of the metaphysical with the physical). He finds confusion and contradiction in Hegel’s use of the terms in the Introductory Lec128

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tures on Aesthetics and also in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.4 De Man finally discredits the privilege of the aesthetic as well as the symbolic in Hegel’s work, and he identifies the allegorical: We would have to conclude that Hegel’s philosophy . . . is in fact an allegory of the disjunction between philosophy and history, or, in our more restricted concern, between literature and aesthetics. . . . The reasons for this disjunction, which it is equally vain to deplore or praise, are not themselves historical or recoverable by means of history. To the extent that they are inherent in language, in the necessity which is also an impossibility to connect the subject with its predicates or the sign with its symbolic significations, the disjunction will always, as it did in Hegel, manifest itself as soon as experience shades into thought, history into theory. (“Sign and Symbol” 104; emphasis added)5

The conclusion of this essay may constitute de Man’s most important contribution to the understanding of allegory, and his most enigmatic. The allegorical and its inherent gap (or disjunction) are unavoidable if one wants to bring together the sensible with the intelligible. He suggests, I think, that any system of metaphysics depends on a structure of allegory.6 As the structure of “the necessity which is also an impossibility” most clearly evident in philosophy, allegory needs to be re-introduced to the literary field, or, as is more apropos of Hegel, it needs to be recollected there.7 Ironically, the route to this reintroduction follows a philosophical path.The foundational work of Hegel’s philosophy, Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes), supports the thesis that allegory lies at the heart of literary experience and that the literary experience lies at the heart of philosophy. There can be no experience of the immediate infinite for a finite being; or, as Hegel would say, it is an experience of nothingness, Nichtigkeit. The finite being must become infinite and must do so without recourse to anything beyond its finite capabilities.The particular must become universal, but the two are mutually exclusive, or at least they appear to be. This is indeed only an appearance, and Hegel has set out not only to reveal the identity of the particular and the universal in the appearance, but also thereby to transcend the finite limit of human being (Dasein). The Phenomenology of Spirit depends entirely on such words as Darstellung (representation), Bild (image), and especially Gestalt (figure), because the absolute (or universal) Subject cannot possibly appear as it is. It can only appear in the form of a figure that

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appears not immediately but eventually, through a long process of mediation, a fiction. In order to phenomenalize Spirit, Hegel needs the devices of art and literature, and he particularly needs allegory. In the Preface, Hegel describes Spirit as “the most sublime Notion [Begriff] and the one which belongs to the modern age and its religion” (Phenomenology 14, Phänomenologie 24). That religion is Wissenschaft, or science. In Hegel’s philosophy it is revealed that science is not only religion but myth, founded on belief and represented through figuration. That is not to discredit science, but to reveal its highest destiny. That destiny reveals itself as nothing other than art, the apparently longstanding antagonist of science. Geist (Spirit) represents the Absolute, and it appears in the figures and images of the phenomenal world, because it must appear there. The immediate must be translated into time and space because these mark the limits of finite human understanding. And yet, as absolute, Spirit is infinite and not constrained by time or place. And yet, Spirit can appear temporally and spatially. Conversely, in the appearance of the Absolute as Spirit, finitude comes upon its limit, and only by so doing can the finite being transcend the constraints of time and space. The finite being becomes infinite in the process of mediation by which it opposes itself, as Subject, to an object that it is not, but finally comes to this limit and recognizes the object as its own reflection. In the process of mediation, the Spirit, or the Absolute Subject, brings itself to itself, to its own limit, and it does this through representation. The Phenomenology is constructed by assembling fictions, revealed one by one to be “false,” while Hegel himself cautions against the common understanding of truth and falsity as value-laden terms (22f, 33f).8 The Phenomenology is complete, that is, Spirit appears in its Substance, when the antithesis is resolved with the thesis. For Hegel, this occurs when Being is “absolutely mediated,” when the immediate is mediated and can appear in its immediacy in the appearance of mediation. Nothing could be more antithetical than the immediate and mediation, and yet, mediation is finally revealed as a “mere appearance” of the immediate, and is absolved into it(self). With this, the Phenomenology of Spirit is concluded. What Spirit prepares for itself in it, is the element of knowing. In this element the moments of Spirit now spread themselves out in that form of simplicity which knows its object as its own self [die ihren Gegenstand als sich selbst weiß]. They no longer fall apart into the antithesis of being and knowing, but remain in the simple oneness of knowing; they are the True in the form of the True, and

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their difference is only the difference of content [und ihre Verschiedenheit ist nur Verschiedenheit des Inhalts]. (21–22, 33)

The “oneness” of knowing is not a unity but a sharing. At the conclusion of the Phenomenology, Spirit knows the limit of its knowledge, and it knows that it shares this limit with the unknowable; that is, it shares the limit with something divine. The perceived antithesis between art and science must also be considered as a moment that only appears antithetical but actually remains “in the simple oneness of knowing.” There is no aesthetics without art, but also, in the course of history, art once existed without the need for science (or philosophy) in the form of Aesthetics.9 For many philosophers and poets, this historical time was particularly (and nostalgically) “Greek,” and it was marked by the manifest presence of divinity.The temple, for example, brings a world into being. As Heidegger writes in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “the temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air.” This quality is the way in which the temple “first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.”10 However, this view is only possible as long as “the work is a work,” as long as the work is experienced in its immediacy, and that is only possible “as long as the god has not fled from it” (“Origin” 42–43, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” 29).11 Hegel’s own corpus of writing will show that indeed science (in the form of Aesthetics) and art do not fall into antithetical categories but really say the same. In so far as Aesthetics is the science of art, it is one of the shapes or figures of science. It is likewise one of the figures of art. Science is composed of figures. In fact, at the end of the Phenomenology, Hegel will describe the becoming of Spirit as “ein Gallerie von Bildern,” a gallery of images, itself the image of a museum we slowly pass through in order to “penetrate and digest this entire wealth of substance” (492, 563). Not only aesthetics but science itself is a form of art. In Hegel’s system, the highest form is highest by its ability to recollect the experience that has been internalized as each figure (Gestalt) emerges and then passes into Absolute Spirit. By forgetting the experience of becoming, the ultimate recollection does nothing less than return to the originary point, the experience of the immediate. This is not an origin, since it cannot be morally intuited or empirically experienced without the shapes of mediation, the “gallery of images” that are all images of the same Spirit. A close reading of the Phenomenology, buttressed by an early poem of Hegel’s and the late lectures on aesthetics, will show that for

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Hegel (as much as “for us”), science is Spirit, and Spirit is art, and that allegory makes this identity-in-difference possible. In 1796, Hegel dedicated a poem titled “Eleusis” to his friend and schoolmate, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Some twenty-five years later, in his lectures on aesthetics Hegel declared, as a philosopher, leaving little room for dispute, that art “had lost its genuine truth and liveliness [die echte Wahrheit und Lebendigkeit verloren]” and consequently, “the science of art is a much more pressing need in our day than in times when art, simply as art, was enough to furnish a full satisfaction”; “Die Wissenschaft der Kunst ist darum in unserer Zeit noch viel mehr Bedürfnis als zu den Zeiten, in welchen die Kunst für sich als Kunst schon volle Befriedigung gewährte” (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art 11, translation modified; Einleitung in die Ästhetik 22). The tone of this well-known and much-contested pronouncement about art is not triumphant but mournful. In another time, art was equal to its highest calling, höchsten Bestimmung. Bestimmung generally means determination, but its etymological root, stimmen, means “to tune,” that is, to bring into harmony. In the past, art was in tune with itself. Hegel compares this past, in which art voiced its own perfect harmony (perhaps with a gesture toward the perfect music of the spheres), to “our time,” which has a greater need or a greater poverty, Bedürfnis, which according to Hegel only science, Wissenschaft, can address. As Giorgio Agamben points out, by the age of twenty-six, when he writes the poem “Eleusis” and dedicates it to his schoolmate and friend Hölderlin, Hegel had “already read the texts that would most decisively come to influence him” (Language and Death 9). Within ten years, Hegel would publish Phenomenology of Spirit, his first major work. Agamben studies the reappearance of the Eleusinian mystery in Phenomenology of Spirit,12 and submits that it is “the same mystery . . . but now language has captured in itself the power of silence, and that which appeared earlier as an unspeakable ‘profundity’ can be guarded (in its negative capacity) in the very heart of the word” (13–14). At the precise moment when Hegel seems to privilege science over art, there is the faint but distinct echo of a poet. Agamben argues that in philosophy it is not silence that guards the mystery, but loquacity. Hegel compares the “universal experience” of the subject to the sense-certainty of animals who devour the sensuous things, “completely assured of their nothingness” (13). By this analogy and by reference to the “Eleusinian Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus,” which not only cause the initiate to despair of the being of sensuous things but also to see them reduced to nothingness, Agamben finds in

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Hegel a theory of language that subsumes the “sacred law” of the goddess of Eleusis, which prohibits speech. Language itself becomes “the ‘divine nature’ that prevents Meinung from being put into words. . . . [In the Phenomenology] language has captured in itself the power of silence” (13). Agamben gives the poem “Eleusis” its proper Hegelian reading, absorbing the poetry into the philosophy by means of a negative dialectic. Using Hegel’s own terms, Agamben argues that language, which Hegel remarks can never reach the sensuous thing, shares with the sensuous an intrinsic negativity that is preserved by being consumed. In the Phenomenology the consumption of the sense-perceptible preserves the “open mysteries [offenbare Mysterien] which teach that which is the truth about sensible things”—that is, that they are nothing, which is not to say that they do not exist, but insofar as they are, they are no-thing. In Hegel’s words, “In the actual attempt to say it, [the sensuous This] would therefore rot away” (Phenomenology 66, trans. modified; Phänomenologie 88). Agamben points out that language, like the object of immediate sense-certainty, would “crumble” or decay if it were taken as truth. According to Hegel, language must be helped by the mode of indication, the mode proper to perception, if it is to say what it means. Using Hegel to read Hegel, Agamben suggests that if Hegel is to say what he means, then his language, which shares with the “This” of sensecertainty an intrinsic Nichtigkeit (nothingness), must be helped in the same way that the “This” of sense-certainty is helped. Hegel describes language as that which “has the divine nature to invert the unmediated meaning [die Meinung unmittelbar], and to make it into something else, and thus not to let what is meant get into words at all” (66, trans. modified; 89). Because of the “divine nature” of language, the universal does not appear in the particularity of the object of immediate sense-certainty but in the mediation of the particular. Language as such can also only be indicated. There is no longer a direct experience of the sacred or of language, not in either poetry or philosophy, but there is a memory of this experience. In “Eleusis” the poet remembers the initiate and the poorest of souls, who are prohibited to make known what was seen, heard, felt during the sacred night (line 38). But those he remembers are very distant. They protect the sacred from the sophists. The initiates, like the Mysteries in which they partake, are gone. As Hegel will repeat in the lectures on aesthetics: “The beautiful days of Greek art . . . are over”; “Die schönen Tage der griechischen Kunst . . . sind vorüber” (Lectures 22, trans. modified; Einleitung 10).The experience of the initiate has been entrusted to memory, and the gates will open only when

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this memory is recollected. Then, only then, will the poet be able to understand and to interpret the utterly other that is preserved there. The Phenomenology is intended to represent this act of recollection and thereby an experience of other being. It is important not to forget how the Phenomenology ends. Spirit empties itself out in time as the “conscious, self-mediating process” of History, but, Hegel warns, “the negative is the negative of itself.” Spirit is always and already; it does not become, not if it is absolute. “This Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits,” and it takes time to know the “substance” of each image; and each image becomes known not by an external object that is adequate to it, but by an inwardizing, “a withdrawal into itself.” Spirit appears to itself only as it recedes into the past. “Thus absorbed in itself, [Spirit] is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness” (Phenomenology 492, Phänomenologie 563).13 Spirit needs to be brought out of this night. It is a destitute time for Spirit, and the philosopher-poet recognizes this plight. Initially distancing his work from the static and fixed philosophies, which have not grasped the Absolute at all, when Hegel begins to talk directly about Spirit the echo of the poet grows stronger. Hegel gives the name “Aether, as such” to “das reine Selbsterkennen im absoluten Andersseyn” (“the pure self-recognition in absolute otherness”), and describes this Aether as “the ground and earth of science or knowledge in general” (14, trans. modified; 24). In the elegy “Brot und Wein,” Hölderlin had said, “wir sind herzlos, Schatten, bis unser / Vater Aether erkannt jeden und allen gehört”; “we are heartless, shadows, until our Father Aether is recognized [as] suitable to each and all” (lines 153–54). Recalling the Hölderlinian Vater who is the source or ground of existence, Hegel uses the metaphor of ground and soil, that in which Spirit can come to know itself by driving its roots downward and its leaves upward. The ground is no longer divine. Hegel acknowledges that “what was hitherto the thing itself, is now only a trace [eine Spur]; its figure [Gestalt ] is unveiled [eingehüllt] and becomes a mere shadow” (16, trans. modified; 26). It is like “die Spur der entflohenen Götter,” the trace of the gods now departed in Hölderlin’s poem. The gods show themselves not entirely gone, not entirely absent from Hegel’s lamentation of this absence in the elegy with a philosophical face, Phenomenology of Spirit. The Subject, for Hegel, is the representation of the Absolute that cannot present itself in itself. The Absolute cannot be experienced in its immediacy but only in the mediating image of the Subject. As such, the “I” is not the representation of an individual (the psychological subject), but performs an empty grammatical function. Although it is the fester Gepunkt (fixed point),

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the Subject does not become meaningful until it becomes actual knowledge in the predicate.14 The grammatical function of the Subject is indispensable because “this word that indicates that what is posited is not a Being [i.e., something that merely is], or essence, or a universal in general, but rather, something that is reflected into itself, a Subject” (Phenomenology 13, Phänomenologie 23).The Subject is a fixed point, itself devoid of meaning, but also the anchor to which predicates are affixed. Implicit in this construction is a perspective that stands outside of the subject-predicate relation. This is the perspective of knowledge in which it is assumed that the movement from Subject to Predicate belongs to the Knower (Wissenden) and that it does not belong to the fixed Subject. This Knower of the movement does belong to the fixed point, but it does not yet recognize itself. This Knower is the Subject itself, even though it does not recognize itself in the alienated other of the “fixed point” until it has come to fully recollect itself. At that point, the individual subject will sacrifice itself to the Absolute, immersed in knowledge.15 Spirit posits the Subject as a figure, Gestalt, which becomes the site of Spirit’s Bildung, its cultivation and construction of itself. In the figure of the Subject, the image of Spirit appears in an immediacy that is mediated. What is concealed in the Gestalt, in its very positing as other and as figure, is the immediate experience of the immediate (which cannot yet be recognized as such). For Hegel, such immediacy is “nonspiritual.” It is the first step toward knowledge, but the first step on a very long path. Knowledge, as it is at first, or unmediated Spirit, is the nonspiritual [das Geistlose], or is the sensible consciousness [das sinnliche Bewußtsein]. In order to become genuine knowledge, or to generate the element of science which is itself the pure concept [reiner Begriff], it must work itself through a long way. . . . For one thing, the length of this way is endured because each moment is necessary; and for another thing, because each [moment] must be lingered over, because each is itself an individual complete figure [eine individuelle ganze Gestalt], and only becomes viewed as absolute insofar as its attunement [Bestimmheit] is seen as wholeness or concretion, or the whole is seen in which the singularity of this attunement becomes perceptible. (my trans., but see Phenomenology 15–17; Phänomenologie 26)

The Gestalt, or figure, is whole, and if it is whole, it too is absolved. This is indeed the case because it is a shape of Absolute Knowing, or Spirit. This seems to be contradictory: Absolute Spirit is and is not the figure.The figure is and is not Spirit because it is the site of mediation, and that site is an image.

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Neither the phenomenal nor “existential shape” of Spirit, nor the noumenal substance of the Absolute, the image, is pure appearance. Hegel defines appearance (Erscheinung) in terms of movement, very similar to his description of the Absolute as unmoved and yet self-moving.16 The Absolute appears in figures that arise, or are posited, and that pass away, are negated by sublation or appropriation, and the Absolute recollects itself in the sequence of its appearances. The Absolute appears in the figures that it is not, and it appears in the image of the Subject. As an empty grammatical function the Subject has the substance of the Platonic khora, that which receives all things without being equal to what appears in it.17 The image is an insubstantial substance, and if this philosophical work is to fulfill its promise as a phenomenology, then Spirit must appear not only as an image but as a phenomenon. In other words, Hegel faced the same difficulty in the Phenomenology that Prudentius faced in the Psychomachia: how to make the immortal, the infinite, appear; how to make Spirit or Soul appear. More precisely, the task is how to construct a figure that can sustain and support a divine image. In Hegel as in Prudentius, Spirit is the image of God in mortals, and it is of an utterly other substance that cannot be known or shown in itself. The only rhetorical structure that allows for these contradictions and contraindications is an allegorical one in which “I is not I,” but also, “I is I.” The relation between the Gestalt and the Absolute is an allegory, because allegory is the only structure by which a finite being can simultaneously be infinite, two different things in the same space at the same time. As I have shown in previous chapters, allegory is the structure of the image, the image that Plato described in Timaeus as “the fleeting shadow of some other” (52c-d). The finite and infinite are unlike, and therefore they cannot be made manifest by the theory of symbolic coincidence. Allegory supports the infinite in the finite world of time and space, but unlike the ideal of the Romantic symbol, which professes an impossible coincidence of divine and mortal, allegory holds the infinite within the finite in difference. This identity and difference of the infinite and the finite is what Hegel means by appearance. Appearance [Die Erscheinung] is the arising [Enstehen] and passing away [Vergehen] that itself does not arise and pass away; on the contrary it is in itself, and makes up the actuality and the movement of the life of truth. (27, trans. modified; 39)

This movement of appearance is what Hegel calls science, or “the True,” but he describes the True, by analogy, as “the Bacchanalian frenzy in which no

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member [or limb] is not intoxicated”—“Das Wahre ist so der bachantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied nicht trunken ist.” The True is the essential movement from “a positive necessary moment [positive nothwendige Momente]” to a moment “negative and vanishing [negativ und verschwindend” (27–28, 39) This moment is an ecstasy, a standing outside of oneself, that is also absolute. The Phenomenology is Hegel’s response to a world deprived of divinity, and its goal is to translate divinity into something perceptible by the senses, while maintaining its divine nature. In Hegel’s worldview, Spirit has itself become “so poor that, like a wanderer in the desert after a simple drink of water, it appears to see for its enlivening [Erquickung] only the destitute feeling of the divine [dürftigen Gefühle des Göttlichen] in general” (5, trans. modified; 14). Unfortunately, appearance has been mistaken for something ready-to-hand, as if it were a thing that could be grasped. Hegel cannot caution enough against taking the sensible as the essence of Spirit, and yet Spirit cannot appear without a sensory manifestation. Even in his youth, as a poet faced with the mystery before which one “feels the poverty of words [fühlt’ der Worte Armut],” Hegel wanted to transcend the mystery and to speak it. There is already in the poem “Eleusis” the privilege of mediation, the cornerstone of the Phenomenology, in which sense-certainty reveals its essential negativity and its inability to signify. In the poem the priests are silent; “[K]ein Ton der heil’gen Weihn / Hat sich zu uns gerettet”; “No note of the sacred rites has been saved for us” (lines 56–57).18 Now there are only scholars, “die ewigtodten” (line 65), “the eternally dead” who are easily satisfied when in truth not even a trace of an image remains (“es bleib . . . keines Bildes Spur”; 65–66). For he who would be initiated, “the lofty doctrine was too full,” the “unspeakable feeling of mystery much too sacred,” and “the signs desiccated of their worth.” Schon der Gedanke faßt die Seele nicht, die ausser Zeit und Raum in Ahndung der Unendlichkeit versunken, sich vergißt, und wieder zum Bewustseyn nun erwacht. (70–73) [Already thought does not grasp the soul, which is sunken outside of time and space in the presentiment of infinity, forgets itself, and now again wakes to consciousness.]

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In this absolute lack, the mortal being experiences the fullness of his finitude, which becomes real only at the limit of infinity, in the face of nothingness, “sunken outside of time and space.”The initiate experiences the divine, and his consciousness is aroused. However, it is not the divine but its lack, the Nichtigkeit or nothingness, that inspires. Like Hölderlin, Hegel longs for the experience of the divine, and with greater despair. When he found it in Nichtigkeit, “he shuddered to have thought the sacred so insignificant”; “ihm graut das heilige so klein gedacht” (line 75). In the Phenomenology Hegel refuses to speak, like the initiate of the ancient rites of Eleusis. Like “the poorest of souls” (“den ärmern Geistern”), he entrusts the experience to memory. Divinity is learned by heart, “preserved in the inner sanctuary of the breast,” “verwahrten sie / Im innern Heiligthum der Brust” (94–95), and not on the lips. And yet divinity can be heard, because the goddess alone is “the elevated meaning, the true belief, which, a divinity, when all else succumbs, does not waver”; “der hohe Sinn, der treue Glauben,/ der, eine Gottheit, wenn auch alles untergeht, nich wankt” (100–01). As a poet, and certainly under the influence of Hölderlin, the young Hegel experienced the immediacy of divinity, what he will call in the Phenomenology of Spirit the universal experience of the Subject, which is not only and not primarily the experience of the totality, but the primordial experience of Nichtigkeit. Poetry, for Hegel, is limited to this “universal experience” that is, in fact, tantamount to nothingness. The poet might be able to express this nothingness in its immediacy (and in such destitute times that is no small feat), but that is only the “beginning” of Spirit, the first tiny step on its path to being equal to its own Substance and to recognizing itself in the face of nothingness. The poet can only say what is. The poet announces. In “Eleusis,” Hegel uses this very trope to mark the experience of the divine, with an attentiongetting “Ha!” (line 15). And yet Hegel seems to share Plato’s criticism of the rhapsode or poet who has no verifiable skill and cannot even describe his own experience, except to perform it, to give it immediately. But one must always beware of “seeming” in both Hegel and Plato. In the dialogue Ion, Socrates begins by revealing the vacuity of Ion’s art, and ends by declaring him something divine (rather than mad). Socrates attempts to force Ion to reflect on his object of knowledge and to gradually come to a realization of the true shape of his techne. The only way for Socrates to make his case is to allow poetry to interrupt reason. Ion, however, barely speaks a word of Homer, while Socrates recites quite a bit of the poetry “by heart.” At the conclusion of the dialogue it is not entirely clear whether Socrates has

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“won” (as usual) or “lost,” and in either case, Ion remains oblivious, and undaunted. The rhapsode has not changed, but the philosopher has undergone quite an ordeal. At the end of the dialogue, the philosopher and the rhapsode find themselves in the same place. The poet speaks what is, the universal experience, but he knows nothing of it.The philosopher deals with what becomes, and so he has to bring himself to the universal experience by a series of negations. That which is immediate for the poet, becomes immediate for the philosopher. Hegel follows a similar path in the Phenomenology, and it is a path, like that of Socrates, riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. The path is like a Holzweg—not insignificantly, the title Heidegger gives to a collection of essays on poetry and art. Heidegger brought the poetry of Hölderlin out of relative obscurity because he found in this work the essence of poetry. Heidegger’s conclusions provide a structure for questioning the essence of poetry in Hegel. In “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Heidegger outlines five points on “the subject of poetry” and attempts to explain how “poetically man dwells on this earth”: 1) Poetry is the most innocent of all occupations. Poetry does not do anything; it does not act. As “mere saying and speaking,” poetry is harmless. 2) And yet, the realm of poetry is language, and language creates the possibility of danger. Heidegger defines danger as “the threat to existence from what is existent.” 3) The speaking of language in poetry presupposes a hearing; this speaking and hearing presupposes a unity, a single conversation (language) that supports human existence. 4) What is spoken by the poet provides the foundation for human existence. “Poetry is the act of establishing by the word and in the word.” 5) “Poetry is the establishment of Being by means of the word” (293).These observations on the subject of poetry are, in fact, a phenomenology. Heidegger concludes, with the words of Hölderlin, that poetically man dwells on the earth because poetry is the foundation (the Aether) that supports history. In the essay “Language” (“Die Sprache”), Heidegger defends the thesis that we do not master language by speaking it, but that in its essence, language itself speaks. Consequently, Heidegger argues that poetry is not elevated language, but that our everyday language is a worn-out and forgotten poem. Poetry is the pure speaking of language (194). In poetry (in particular, but also in some particular philosophy), language speaks. In philosophy, usually, language is silenced, as it is in the first section of the first part of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hegel must silence language in order to proceed, and that in itself is telling. Nonetheless, Heidegger sees that Hegel dwells poetically,

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that language speaks in this imposed silence. Although he does not state this explicitly, Heidegger reads the Phenomenology as poetry, and marks the significance of this poetic step in the history of metaphysics. In Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” Heidegger briefly holds together in thought the most influential Continental philosophers since the Renaissance in the absoluteness of Absolute Spirit, and thereby shows how poetically philosophers dwell on the earth (77).19 Philosophy, as poetry, is the foundation that supports history. The difference between the appearance of philosophy and of poetry is found in the relationship to language. At the very least philosophy distances itself from language, and yet, philosophy is established in language, in the dialogue, and in the dialectic. Poetry is language in its most primordial state, and so the philosopher who attempts to speak the “origin” (or the limit) is a poet who does not recognize himself as one. There is in Hegel’s philosophy a conversation that supports human existence, and what is spoken there provides a foundation for human existence, and it establishes Being by means of the word. Three of Heidegger’s five points on the essence of poetry are thereby evident in the Phenomenology. But is there in the Phenomenology a danger that threatens existence from what is existent? Is philosophy, like poetry, a “most innocent occupation,” harmless and incapable of action? It is precisely because philosophy is perceived as harmless and without force that it is so dangerous. Despite the awe that a philosopher like Heidegger accords to Hegel, in actuality Hegel does not have much force. He is often cited but not often read. Hegel is misread and misappropriated because of the danger he poses to metaphysics, and consequently to the Western way of thinking and being. As Heidegger reads Hegel, he illuminates the profound threat faced by metaphysics in facing this philosopher. Like the Bible in the period before the Enlightenment, the self-certain, self-positing Subject has determined our very existence. Hegelian philosophy threatens that determination, as Luther’s theses threatened the Catholic Church. The faith in the absolute being of human beings has replaced faith in the absolute creator. With Nietzsche, Heidegger calls this onto-theo-logy, for good reason. The locus of faith has shifted but not the structure of belief, and not the dependence of humankind on belief. The metaphysics of ontotheology is dangerous precisely because of its absolution. It is a self-closing path. The absolute closes the circle behind itself, and at the limit of the absolute is an absolute void, an abyss. Metaphysics has reached a new plateau in Hegel, on a road that had been paved most recently by Kant. Hegel is the logical and the subjective conclusion to the

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history of metaphysics, and he is largely right about art. It is a thing of the past for us, because we cannot appropriate it, except as an object of value, as an aesthetic object, or an economic one. An objet d’art is no longer art. In order to appreciate Hegel’s keen insight about art, the work of art itself must be phenomenalized. The question must be asked and answered, with great rigor, “What is art?”20 The shape that Spirit gives the truth is the shape of science, Wissenschaft, but this science is a figure, a Gestalt. The French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe confuses the art object with the artwork, but in a way that illuminates this difference despite his efforts to make them identical. The essay “Typography” interrogates Heidegger’s distinction between the artwork and the work of art.21 In a polemic against Heidegger’s “understanding” of Darstellung (mimesis or representation), Lacoue-Labarthe plays the part of a Hegelian. He believes that the Subject is self-sufficient and secure in language, and so he turns mimesis from a problematic of the lie (fiction), which is Plato’s position, into a problematic of the psychological subject. LacoueLabarthe transforms the universal Subject into an individual subject. He argues that mimesis is the staging of the indecision of the subject, the inability of the subject to mime or to coincide with itself.22 In Lacoue-Labarthe’s scenario, the subject creates a figure that is capable of mimesis, and it substitutes this figure for itself. This would be Hegel’s (and Fichte’s) empty grammatical “I.”The method is recognizable as the negative dialectic in which the object that appears opposed to the subject reveals itself to be identical with it. Lacoue-Labarthe tries to hold up the difference in this act of substitution. He argues instead that only philosophy can harmonize the psychological subject with itself. This sounds very Hegelian, except that Hegel’s Subject is not individual but universal. Hegel makes very clear that “the share in the total work of Spirit which falls to the individual can only be very small” (Phenomenology 45, Phänomenologie 75). In the truly Hegelian dialectic, the individual comes to know not only himself (his particularity) but also his limit (the universal). Hegel writes, “The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit: to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself ” (492, 563). Thus Hegel says, in concluding the Preface to the Phenomenology, that the individual is always incomplete Spirit. The Phenomenology itself ends with the image par excellence of this sacrifice, on Mount Calvary, with the god sacrificing himself and simultaneously a man sacrificing himself. Only in the sacrifice of what is not, the infinite that is finite (the immortal in the mortal body), is infinitude revealed. The death of

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the god is entirely apt as the final image of the Phenomenology, the singular event that marks the advent of Spirit. For Hegel there is not just one act of substitution but many, and this creates a “gallery of images” (“Gallerie von Bildern”). Not only does Hegel freely use the words Bild (image) and Gestalt (figure) to describe the appearance of Spirit, he places these images in a gallery, as if they were works of art. Bild and Gestalt are very different words, however, and an understanding of their difference and relation is critical to a proper understanding of the Phenomenology. Geist uses the image, Bild, to produce itself, but the image can only appear in something truly phenomenal, that is the Gestalt, a term that one translator translates as “existential shape” but that is commonly translated as “figure.” Thus, the “Gallerie von Bildern” is the appearance of a gallery of figures. For Lacoue-Labarthe, the Gestalt is merely a statue, fixed and static. In an attempt to think contra Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe claims to bring Idea and Gestalt together, not as a challenging forth of one another, but as a logical positing: The essence of the idea is static. The idea is always posited (gesetzt); or at least each time he evokes it, Heidegger never fails to recall that “idea” designates the aei on, the “perduring,” stability itself. (“Typology” 69)

In a gross misreading of Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe assumes that the idea is static and perduring, that it is stable (neither of which is accurate, and both of which are important concepts that Heidegger devotes much energy to articulating). Lacoue-Labarthe will ultimately empty the stellen constellation in Heidegger, including the alpha star Gestell and its close relative Gestalt, of all the richness that Heidegger reveals in the “stellen” Wortschatz. In regard to the Gestalt, Heidegger is in many ways rehearsing Hegel. Heidegger’s understanding of the stele (stasis) or rest and Beständigkeit (perduring) is the “unmoved which is self-moving.” This is Hegel’s phrase, not Heidegger’s; and borrowing from Aristotle’s definition of Nature as purposive activity, Hegel defines purpose as “what is immediate and at rest.” He also defines the self in these terms. In this way, “the self is like that immediacy and simplicity of the beginning because it is the result, that which has returned into itself, the latter being similarly just the self ” (Phenomenology 12, Phänomenologie 20). It was Karl Marx who pinpointed “the mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands.” Nonetheless, far from declaring Hegel a “dead dog,” Marx declares himself “the pupil of that mighty thinker” and does not discredit Hegel’s achievement in “being the first to present [the dialectic’s] gen-

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eral form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner” (Capital 29). However, Marx also argues that the Hegelian dialectic is “standing on its head” because of the very mystification that made the dialectic so attractive. In its “mystified form” the dialectic “seemed to transfigure and glorify the existing state of things” that were, in actuality, troubled and on the verge of crisis. In this early polemic against German Idealism, Marx was more directly disputing the abuses to which the Hegelian dialectic had been subjected by Hegel’s followers. As Hegel’s “pupil” Marx recognized the “rational kernel within the mystical shell,” as any true Hegelian would. In other words, whether upside-down or right-side up, it is still the Hegelian system; and as Marx had argued “when it was still the fashion to criticize Hegel,” at the time of writing The German Ideology, the critics’ “polemics against Hegel and against one another” consisted of “extract[ing] one side of the Hegelian system and turn[ing] this against the whole system” (German Ideology 40). In the midst of Old and Young Hegelians, Marx recognized that if Hegel was not read as a system, Hegel was not being read. (Marx reveals in Capital that indeed he had always been a pupil of the mighty thinker.) Marx makes a point that must be heeded. In the social applications to which Hegel’s work was indiscriminately applied, Marx was quite right. Hegel’s world is a “moral” one in which the subject is the demiurge of the real world, and this “real world” is only the externalized and phenomenal form of “the Idea.” Giorgio Agamben notes that the sensuous world is devoured in Hegel’s philosophy like an animal’s prey. However, this is not an entirely apt analogy. In Hegel, that which is negated and sublated is also retained. Marx understood this, and he recognized that as much as the rational kernel can be revealed within the mystical shell, the mystical shell continues to conceal something that can in turn overcome the rational. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, the corrective Marx offers to Hegel is starkly literary: Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. (15)

Marx here admits that the “actual world” is a stage, a fictive space, however that may be defined. There is an inescapable “mystification,” even in Marx. In Hegel, this mystification can be traced back to the poem “Eleusis,” the kernel in the philosophical shell. In the history of metaphysics, it can be followed back to the dialogues of Plato. I, too, say that Hegel is “standing on his head,” not as a sociologist (a version of Hegel that is really an unjustified

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adaptation, better called “Social Hegelianism”), but as a philosopher who is really a poet. To bring philosophy to the limit at which it is no longer love of knowledge but “actual knowing,” that is, knowing that needs no mediation (no “love”), is for philosophy to reach its highest destiny. Philosophy’s highest destiny reveals itself to be art—neither the world of shadows nor the world of ideas, but the limit that gathers them together in a mediation that is immediate. No philosophy, not even Hegel’s philosophy (which declares that immediate knowledge is its object) can ever begin immediately. To begin with immediate knowledge is always already to mediate it, because if knowledge (even absolute knowledge) is an object, it is already an object for something, for our understanding. Hegel would be the first to agree, and yet he must ground his entire philosophical system on the immediate.The aesthetic must also be grounded on the immediate, on precisely that which cannot be mediated, the work of art (the Gestalt) in which “Art” (as such) shows itself (as an image, Bild). It is easy to overlook this in Hegel. The system is constructed that way, nor can it be otherwise constructed. As de Man observes, Hegel’s philosophy is an allegory of disjunction. In his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology, Heidegger also draws attention to Hegel’s linguistic sleight of hand between the first and second parts of section A of the Phenomenology. Heidegger locates the moment in Hegel’s text that destabilizes the entire edifice of Absolute Spirit and points to the internal contradiction lying at the structural core of Hegel’s system of absolute knowledge. In the opening paragraph of the first part of the Phenomenology (A.I., “Sense-certainty: Or, the ‘This’ and ‘Meaning’”), Hegel describes the first object of knowledge (first because “our object cannot be anything else”) as “a knowledge of the immediate or of a being.” Further, in approaching this object, the knowing subject (already assumed as the absolute knowing subject by the project itself) must be equally immediate. Hegel warns, “We must alter nothing in the object as it presents itself ” (58, 64). Despite the imperative tone of this first paragraph, which asserts the necessity of the unmediated knowledge of the object as it is given, in the first paragraph of the second part of the work (A.II., “Perception: Or the Thing and Deception”), Hegel declares, as quoted and annotated by Heidegger: “‘The way we take in perception’ (as object of absolute knowledge) ‘is no longer a taking in which just appears, as in sense certainty, but is a necessary one’” (Hegel’s “Phenomenology” 52).The necessity of sense-certainty has been concealed by

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the apparently necessary suppression of perception. Heidegger comments on this concealment as follows: Sense certainty, in its character as an object for absolute knowledge, is necessary and yet not necessary! Or is the non-necessity which pertains to sense certainty only a non-necessity in distinction from the specific necessity of perception? Sense certainty would not then be necessary in the manner of perception but would be necessary in its own way. In that case we would have a two-fold necessity. That is indeed the way it is. (52)

Hegel elides sense-certainty’s “own way” of being necessary into the way that perception is necessary. In doing so, Hegel does not begin with the immediate, but with mediation. Consequently, Hegel never gives an immediate description of what is given, but only a mediated description of what is given as it is perceived by consciousness.This, according to Heidegger, is not a shortcoming in Hegel, but is unavoidable “because there is generally nothing like pure immediate description in philosophy” (Hegel’s “Phenomenology” 53). In the “two-fold necessity” identified by Heidegger, the immediacy of sense-certainty is held together with the mediation of perception. Both sense-certainty and perception are necessary.They are each necessary in their own way, but these ways contradict each other. There is a two-fold necessity, or what might be more accurately called an “impossible possibility.” Heidegger retains the possibility that although philosophy cannot describe the object immediately, it is “quite possible” for philosophy to see “the matter itself.” In other words, philosophy can see immediately what it cannot describe immediately. Heidegger reminds us of Hegel’s instruction that “we should only ‘look on’ [the phenomenology of Spirit], not adding anything, but only taking and receiving what we find there” (53). Quite explicitly, then, Hegel wants “us” to experience Spirit in its immediacy, the very experience he seems to overwrite with part 2 of section A, on Perception. If philosophy can never begin immediately, perhaps it can end so. The end of the Phenomenology is its beginning. Heidegger interprets that this “looking on” is not indeterminate, but “a looking on within the attitude of undergoing an experience, the way this experience sees. This looking on is a looking with the eyes of absolute knowledge.” Heidegger reminds us that Hegel “offers an interpretation of sensibility which is unequaled in the history of philosophy” (53–54). However, it is precisely this difference in Hegel’s thought that lets the immediate appear not in itself as such, but in the phenomenon of mediation,

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and particularly in the mediation of sense-certainty, the essence of which is immediacy (57). The immediate object of knowledge cannot show itself in itself, but it can show itself in mediation. In section A.I of the Phenomenology, Hegel writes that sense-certainty “appears as the richest kind of knowledge” and “appears to be the truest knowledge.” But then he declares that in fact, sense-certainty is the poorest and most abstract (empty) kind of knowledge. “All that [certainty] says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing”; “Sie sagt von dem, was sie weiß, nur dies aus: es ist; und ihre Wahrheit enthält allein das sein der Sache” (Phenomenology 58, Phänomenologie 79). In the immediacy of sense-certainty there is “no complex process of mediation” until there is a reflection on what merely is in sensecertainty—that is, the “this” that is nothing but this and a “this I” that is only I, which reveals that “neither one nor the other is only immediately present in sense-certainty, but each is at the same time mediated.” Hegel determines that the universal is the true content of sense-certainty. In other words, whenever we say “this and nothing but this” or “I and only I,” we say, “Being in general . . . We utter the universal.” Hegel further demonstrates (because he assumes the position of the absolute knowing subject from the very inception of the work that will prove its existence) that the pure being that shows itself as the truth-content of the object of sense-certainty is not immediate, but “something to which negation and mediation are essential.” They are essential if consciousness is to take up knowledge into itself. For Hegel, an object is only known when it becomes an object for an “I” who knows. For Hegel, sensecertainty must always become “a dialectic acting upon itself ” (60–61, 82–83). Hegel explains that the announcement of the Absolute is “only the universal.” Anything that is beyond this mere word is a mediation. Once the word is put into a proposition it becomes other to itself: it is a mediation (11, 21). Hegel rejects the horror with which this “becoming other” is usually met because it is perceived as violating the Absolute. Hegel clarifies that “mediation is nothing other than self-moving sameness” (“anders als die sich bewegende Sichselbstgleichheit”) and thus does not contradict the Absolute, which by definition should need nothing outside of itself and certainly no explanation or interpretation, but “is just immediacy in the process of becoming and is the immediate itself ”—“die Werdende Unmittelbarkeit und das Unmittelbare selbst” (11, 21). Because of our finitude we are incapable of experiencing unmediated immediacy. We cannot transcend this finitude in the way of Aeneas or Orpheus. We have neither golden bough nor lyre, nor

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would they do us any good. In antiquity, mortals came to the limit of the sacred because divinity granted it: the divine came to us. The gods still lived among mortals, and they appeared in art: in statues, in temples, in epic poetry. The immediate experience of art is now closed. The gods are not there anymore, and they have not been there for a long time. We come too late. As even Hegel admits, there will always be great art, but it is not for us. Art is also absolute, and for us it requires mediation in order to appear. The problem of art is the problem of Spirit, the comprehension of the “self-moving selfsameness” that is immediacy. In “our time” there can be no Absolute outside of ourselves; now is the era of the Subject. There can be nothing outside of us. Art is what had gathered before. Art qua art was absolute, but it was absolved precisely from this Subject. Art was not made by the artist, but by the gods. Epic poetry always begins, quite literally, with the incantation and invocation, “Sing in me, O Muse.” The sculpted icon did not come to life except by the presence of the god. The temple was not holy unless the gods chose to dwell there. The gathering force of art was a divine mystery; all art was sacred. Hegel understands this. In the poem “Eleusis” he wrote of the silence of the priests of the sacred in times when “in vain strive the scholars, their curiosity greater than their love of wisdom”; “und vergebens sucht / des Forschers Neugier— mehr, als Liebe / zur wiesheit” (lines 29–31, trans. by Agamben, Language and Death 8). The silence protects the sacred from becoming “a plaything or the ware of sophists, who would have sold it like an obolus, or the mantle of an eloquent hypocrite or even the rod of a joyful youth” (lines 86–89, Language and Death 9). The sacred has become an object of knowledge, and the gods will not be known.The gods have fled in the face of knowledge, faced by the Subject who wants to know himself. Perhaps Narcissus was the first subject or the first stage of subjectivity, condemned by the gods not to know himself; and yet the resulting desire for this knowledge would be precisely what caused the gods to flee. If, as Heidegger asserts, poetry is the act of establishing by the word and in the word, there may be no more influential poem in modernity than Hegel’s Phenomenology. And this poem, like all great poetry, calls human beings to it, with a call that is most challenging to meet.The Phenomenology of Spirit is difficult not only because it begins absolutely but because, in Heidegger’s words, “the work confronts us with the demand that we continuously comport ourselves absolutely” (Hegel’s “Phenomenology” 79). The work asks us as finite beings to be infinite. And the way in which it does this is to require

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movement, to insist that its readers enter into its transitions, and not merely its content. The content is difficult enough to ascertain, but the content always falls short. Heidegger says, “The work always stays mute if we do not contribute anything to it” (79). According to Heidegger, what we must bring to the work is the question of Being. In this way, the Phenomenology can be read as “the establishment of Being by means of the word.” The necessity of our contribution to the work brings us into a conversation with the work. The speaking which is the Phenomenology presupposes our hearing. As Heidegger will eventually articulate more directly in relation to the subject of poetry, the “being of humankind is founded in language and actualized in conversation” (“Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” 277). In regard to the Phenomenology, Heidegger points out that our interaction with the text cannot be a mere talking back and forth, but we must enter the rhythm of its transitions. “Transitions have to be entered into; and as long as we stay on one or the other shore and talk back and forth, transitions can never be achieved” (Hegel’s “Phenomenology” 79). If we read Hegel’s philosophy as poetry, we find the very art that is gone by in the very philosophy that waves farewell. Poetically, Hegel responds to the question of Being, showing how he is appropriated by language (and not its master). It is well known that Heidegger believes that Being has always been the central question of philosophy, although that central question has been often covered up or ignored. Hegel’s response to this question, “What is being?” is, according to Heidegger, “the fundamental thesis that the essence of beings is infinity” (Hegel’s “Phenomenology” 80). Heidegger locates both the “logical” and the “subjective” grounding of infinity in the propositional “is,” the “is” that determines something as something. Heidegger makes a startling observation about this relationship between the finite and the infinite by way of the “is” in Hegel’s dialectic: This infinity does not mean a continuous alignment of determinations, endlessly going forward from one to another, but the contrary; it means the return of something into itself, the reflection of the determinate back into itself, so that the determinate (as the other) returns to the one, and the other (as what is differentiated from the determinate) receives it; it means that the other (in unison with the determinate) becomes undifferentiated and remains preserved in sameness with it. (80)

The relationship between the finite and the infinite is not a system of reference and representation. Even in Hegel it is a system of recollection, a

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retrieval from a corporeal substrate. As in Prudentius, the psyche is to be found in the anima more than in the animus, in the sensible material rather than the ideal material, so in Hegel, Spirit, Geist is to be found not in the intelligible realm, not in the infinite or the Absolute, but in the material of sense-perception in the image, the phantasmenon of the Subject, and this image appears in language. In Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel responds to—or rather with— Hölderlin, to the plaintive question in “Brot und Wein,” “Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?”What are poets for in destitute times? Hölderlin’s time is the same as Hegel’s. Indeed, they were classmates at Tübingen, but the “dürftige Zeit” they shared was not merely historical. Hegel, too, understands that the gods have fled. The divine desertion is a common theme in Hölderlin’s work, and the madness resulting from this understanding is well known.The poet’s melancholy is expressed in the clear statements of the seventh stanza of the elegy to the deceased poet Wilhelm Heinze: Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter, Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt. Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten, Ob wir leben, so sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns. (“Brot und Wein,” lines 109–12) [But friend! we come too late. Indeed the gods live, but over our heads, up there in another world, without end they work there and appear little to care, whether we live, so much do the heavenly ones spare us. (my trans.)]

Hölderlin seems to be anticipating Hegel. This is no longer a time for poets. The gods have fled, and they have taken the essence of art and poetry with them. They might mock the poet’s feeble efforts, if they cared enough to notice them. And yet, in another poem Hölderlin insists that “poetically man dwells on this earth,”23 and even in “Brot und Wein,” he acknowledges that the “frail vessel” (schwaches Gefäß) of a mortal being can bear the full impact of the gods, even if ever so rarely. This very experience, however, leads not to power but to impotence. One is forever changed, seeking only to bear the divine once again, and condemned to a wandering solitude.24 The gods return, thundering they come (“Donnernd kommen sie,” 119), but for the most part, the poet waits, ohne Genossen, friendless, merely waiting, with nothing to do or to say. The poet wonders if it would be better to sleep and not to wander in the night. He does not know, and asks, “Wozu Dichter in

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dürftiger Zeit?” What are poets for in a destitute time? A voice outside the poem, the voice of the dead poet and friend, Heinze, is heard and reported: Aber sie sind, sagst du, wie des Weingotts heilige Priester, Welche von Lande zu Land zogen in heiliger Nacht. (123–24) [But they are, you say, like the wine god’s sacred priests, which moved from land to land in the sacred night.]

Poets are the priests of the sacred. The etymology of priest, or presbyter, is Greek, meaning an elder, or simply an old man. (The poet is old, but not by virtue of age counted in years.) The likely root of presbys is the combination of the prefix pro, before, and the verb bainein, to go. The presbys is the one who goes before. In ancient rites as in Christianity, the priest is a mediator. In the Catholic mass, when the bread becomes the body and the wine becomes the blood of Christ, at that moment of sacrifice, the priest is mediation itself, neither mortal nor divine but the image adequate to both.25 The priest goes before the gods as he goes before those who would follow him. Speaking in his own elegy, Heinze suggests this image to Hölderlin. The poet then recognizes the gifts of the gods, the “few gifts” (“einige Gaaben”) they have left behind, bread and wine. These are not the bread and wine of the Catholic sacrifice. They are neither symbolic nor representative, but the site of a sacred mediation, and it is to these things that Hölderlin compares the poet. Like the bread, “a fruit of the earth yet touched by the blessing of light,” the poet “reconciles the day with the night.” Darum denken wir auch dabei der Himmlischen, die sonst Da gewesen und die Kehren in richtiger Zeit. (139–40) [Thereby we think also therefore of the heavenly ones, who once had been there and of their return in the right time.]

Likewise the poet “mit Ernst die Sänger,” with the seriousness of hymns, “tönet den Alten das Lob,” sounds the praise of the ancient ones. In following the path of the departed gods (“entflohenen Götter”) the poet brings the trace (“Spur”) of the gods into the gloom of the godless who sleep but do not dream. For Hölderlin, this is what poets are for: they are not for us.

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Despite the dominance of this phrase in Hegel’s writings, Spirit only appears to be for us, but it is not for us at all: we are for Spirit. The poet does not make divinity appear, but he sacrifices himself to its promise, its trace. The poet still dwells, as do all mortals, in the land of shadows where we do not recognize ourselves as the “children of the gods” foretold in the ancient songs. “Siehe, wir sind es, wir!” cries the poet Hölderlin. But we cannot see it, not until “Vater Aether” is recognized as the father of us all. Again, it must be emphasized that this is not a Christian Father, any more than Spirit is a Christian concept. The Aether is where the gods dwell, and it is the material we share with them. In his willingness to wander this path in the blindness of the night, and to sustain on occasion the full impact of the gods, the poet reveals that mortals can match heavenly strength as before, but still there echoes the lament, “Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät.” For the poet, there is at most a moment, a sharing in the gifts of bread and wine, and the artwork, the poem, is never anything more than a remainder, something left over that resembles but does not equal this moment. The work of art is always already too late. As a poet, the young Hegel also happens to find himself drunk with the spirit of the gods, and he writes a poem about the ancient rites of Ceres. He poses as a priest but is really more like a Protestant minister. There is no sacrifice in Hegel’s poem, and perhaps this lack of sacrifice lends it the tone of despair, which requires the conditional tense. Ha! sprängen jetzt die Pforten deines Heiligtums von selbst O Ceres, die du in Eleusis throntest! Begeistrung trunken fühlt’ich jetzt Die Schauer deiner Nähe. (“Eleusis,” lines 43–46) [Oh! now the doors of your sanctuary should spring open of themselves, O Ceres, you who are enthroned in Eleusis! Having drunk spiritedness (enthusiasm), I would now feel a shiver in your nearness.]

The philosopher-cum-poet expresses a greater distance from the ancient divinity. If he were to shiver in nearness to Ceres, Verstände deine Offenbarungen, Ich deutete der Bilder hohen Sinn, vernähme

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Die Hymnen bei der Götter Mahlen, Die hohen Sprüche ihres Rats.— (47–50) [(I would) understand your revelations, I would interpret the lofty senses of the images, would hear the hymns at the feast of the gods, the lofty maxims of their counsel.]

Hegel, like Hölderlin, understands that the gods live up high in a different world, and little they seem to care whether we live or what we do.To Hegel, these doors are already shut. He listens in vain. The greater part of Hegel’s poem, the lines that follow this first brief hopeful ascension, are neither conditional nor confident: Doch deine Hallen sind verstummt, o Göttin! Geflohen ist der Götter Kreis zurück in den Olymp Von den geheiligten Altären, Geflohn von der entweihten Menschheit Grab Der Unschuld Genius, der her sie zauberte!— (51–55) [Even your halls are silenced, oh Goddess! Fled is the circle of gods back to Olympus from the consecrated altars; fled from the tomb of profaned humanity, the innocent genius who here enchanted them!]

The gods are gone.There is no purpose for a priest, or a poet.There is nothing to mediate, no sacrifice in which to lose oneself, no Bacchanalian revel to intoxicate every limb. Hegel’s response to Hölderlin cannot be heard in the poem “Eleusis,” or can be heard only faintly. The reply appears in the Phenomenology. The poet has been replaced by the “Spirit” that does not merely love knowledge but is “actual knowing,” and Spirit is that which gives the true shape to the truth. The Phenomenology is nothing other than an initiation into the Mystery of Absolute Spirit. We are asked to memorize it, like the poet memorized the initiations of the Eleusinian Mysteries: we are to remember it in its distance. We are to learn it by heart such that we no longer know (or care) what it “means.” The Phenomenology is only a memory. The appearances of Spirit must be recollected. History has only ended insofar as Hegel has succeeded in recollecting the divine mystery. He has thrown open the doors and spoken

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its truth. He has brought back the gods, and so the work ends with an adaptation of the final lines of Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Die Freundschaft”: [T]he two together [the form of contingency, and the scientific organization of the sphere of appearance], comprehended History, construct alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless oneness. Only— from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude. (Phenomenology 493, trans. modified) [(B)eide zusammen, die begriffne Geschichte, bilden die Erinnerung und die Schädelstätte des absoluten Geistes, die Wirklichkeit, Wahrheit und Gewißheit seines Throns, ohne den er das leblose Einsame wäre; nur— aus dem Kelche dieses Geisterreiches schäumt ihm seine Unendlichkeit. (Phänomenologie 564)]

The Phenomenology of Spirit is Hegel’s great poem. He has achieved what all poets seek, to bring the divine to presence. But at the very moment that he does so, it escapes. Hegel sustains his effort with incredible rigor to the very last words of the Phenomenology, but then he does not know how to end, except to give us a figure, the god-man, dead. Like Orpheus, Hegel has charmed the gods into giving of their immortality, and he has also violated this gift by mortalizing it. Hegel is no more to blame than Orpheus; it is the human condition. In philosophy, in the Science of Knowing, Hegel has achieved the impossible; he has made Spirit appear. To dwell poetically is to believe in this possibility even while knowing that it is impossible. Hegel knows this as well as Hölderlin. What are poets for in destitute times? They are for this impossible possibility.The Phenomenology speaks this im-possibility, and it is spoken by the mouth of the philosopher. The philosopher is a poet. Hegel found the language of the soul, but few have actually heard it. In Hegel’s wake, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud continued to seek this language. . . . Trouver une langue; . . . toute parole étant idée, le temps d’un langage universel viendra! . . .

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Cette langue sera de l’âme pour l’âme, résumant tout, parfums, sons, couleurs, de la pensée accrochant la penseé et tirant. Le poète définirait la quantité d’inconnu s’eveillant en son temps, dans l’âme universelle: il donnerait plus—que la formule de sa pensée, que la notation de sa marche au Progrès!26 [ . . . A language (langue) must be found; besides, all speech being idea, a time of universal language (langage) will come! . . . This language will be of the soul [de l’âme], for the soul, and will include everything: perfumes, sounds, colors, thought grappling with thought. The poet would make precise the quantity of the unknown arising in his time in the universal soul: he would provide more than the formula of his thought, the record of his path to Progress! (my trans.)]

Rimbaud’s description of Hegel’s life’s work is uncanny. Hegel had already done all of this, and more, but he had failed. As swiftly and immediately as for Hölderlin, the gods had fled. Instead of going mad, Hegel continued to philosophize. As Socrates always took great pains to remember, the philosopher loves wisdom, but his greatest wisdom is to know that wisdom cannot be possessed. The philosopher knows only that he wants to know. Hegel is a poet, and a philosopher. As a poet he has seen, and as a philosopher he has tried to make it manifest, and this effort is nothing other than poetic.

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5

Reconsidering Allegory and Symbol: Benjamin and Goethe

The art work is, to be sure, a thing that is made, but it says something other than the mere thing itself is allo agoreuei. The work makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other; it is an allegory. In the work of art something other is brought together with the thing that is made. To bring together is, in Greek, sumballein. The work is a symbol. —Martin Heidegger1

In the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, Benjamin establishes allegory in a realm out of the reach of aesthetics and idealism. Allegory is characterized by violence and is not at all beautiful, admittedly lacking “all ‘symbolic’ freedom of expression, all classical proportion, all humanity” (166; Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels 145). Any time allegory is subjected to the critical palate of philosophical taste, it will seem a bitter alternative to beauty. However, by discrediting the presumed authority of aesthetics (the beautiful) and idealism (the symbolic determination of the object as a reflection of the subject), Benjamin reveals allegory as the only way to express the relation between ideas and phenomena. It is with this thought that Benjamin begins his work on allegory. For phenomena are not incorporated in ideas [einverleibt]. They are not contained in them. Ideas are rather their objective virtual arrangement, their objective interpretation. If ideas are not the incorporation of phenomena, and if they do not become functions of the law of phenomena, [which is] the ‘hypothesis,’ then the question of how they are related to phenomena arises. The answer to this is: in the representation of the phenomena [in deren Repräsen-

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tation]. The idea thus belongs to a fundamentally different world from that which it apprehends [Erfaßte]. The question of whether it comprehends what it apprehends [as the concept “genus” includes “species”] . . . cannot be regarded as a criterion of its existence. (34, 16; emphasis added)

There is no determinate relation between the phenomenal world and the ideal world.The phenomenal world is the known world, and knowledge is a product of history, of convention. The law of the idea is fundamentally different precisely because it cannot be known. One cannot hypothesize about the idea. The idea is always experienced mediately. Benjamin addresses how this mediation works, pointing out that ideas are not embodied in phenomena. Because allegory can both show what it is and show what it is not, it can link these two realms that are essentially incompatible. Ideas appear phenomenally by virtue of a structure that is allegorical. In modernity, the natural world is held in a tenuous and conflictual relation to the historical one with which it has nothing in common. The narrative coherence imposed on the events of the world as history is always a fiction. In the medieval world this was not as much of an issue. The transitoriness and meaninglessness of earthly events was indisputable. As Benjamin rightly asserts, medieval allegory was “Christian and didactic,” always with an eye to the ideal world of an eternal and predetermined heaven. In the Middle Ages, allegory provided a connection between the transitory and incomplete events of the historical world and the eternal and complete divine plan, without translating one into the other.2 And yet, the “divine” plan could be nothing other than a contingent form of transcendence in which the profane world served as an analogy for the divine, such that the divine withdrew from view. The Church Fathers were acutely aware of this difficulty. Allegory was a crucial technique, one that allowed the analogy to be made while maintaining the distance and difference of its terms. Because it provided a way for the obscurity of the Bible to be made plain, allegory became a dominant feature in interpretive (hermeneutic) literature as well as in narrative compositions that addressed sacred themes.3 With the rise of Protestantism, the historical world became part of the divine plan, not merely explained by it. The allegorical disjunction was replaced by a narrative of continuity between this world and the next. In literature of the baroque, allegory re-emerged to disrupt this illusion of continuity. However, this development also necessitated a functional change in the appearance of allegory. Rather than making the obscure plain, allegory

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now tended to make the plain obscure. Allegory remained a “convention of expression,” a method of writing (or representing) with a foundation in rhetoric, a qualified creative process that pronounces meaning rather than logically determining it. This feature has contributed to the disparagement of allegory as dogmatic. However, in its announcement of meaning, allegory also shows itself to be an “expression of convention.” In these terms (from Benjamin), the convention of expression and the expression of convention, allegory expresses the conventional antinomy between convention (a codified but arbitrary relation between an object and its meaning) and expression (explanatory discourse). Benjamin notes that the shift in allegorical expression that begins in the sixteenth century is a response to the unbridgeable distance between the secular and the divine. Allegorical works in the historical period of the baroque constitute the literary response to a religious suppression of transcendence in both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Benjamin traces the particularly German baroque form Trauerspiel and “brings us to the antinomies of the allegorical” that are essential “if the image of the Trauerspiel is to be conjured”—“wenn anders das Bild der Trauerspiele beschworen sein will” (174, trans. modified; 152). This phrasing is curious and revealing. Implicit in this phrasing is that only in the dialectic discussion of these antinomies will the image (Bild) of the Trauerspiel appear through conjuration (beschworen). For Benjamin “Trauerspiel” is itself something magical or divine. It cannot itself appear in the world, but can only resemble itself in something like a ghost. The book that strives to illuminate the source of the Trauerspiel must be a Trauerspiel—a play of mourning: the book about allegory must be an allegory. And there is a fundamental instability in this form. Benjamin admits the arbitrary nature of allegorical signification and extends this arbitrariness to the phenomenal world itself. Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance. (175, 152)

At the same time, allegorical exegesis invests the things of the profane world with “a power which makes them no longer commensurable with profane things . . . and which can, indeed, sanctify them.” The antinomy of allegory is the simultaneity in which “the profane world is both elevated and devalued [erhoben und entwertet]” (175, 153).

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The antinomies that allegory manifests are found in the essence of writing (Schrift), in script itself. Benjamin characterizes the baroque as the movement of written words, of script, towards the visual and away from meaning. Sacred script tends towards the visual in order to resist the profanity of its comprehensibility.4 Such script directly opposes the concept of the symbol in its presumed organic totality. In this allegorical script, the baroque shows itself “the sovereign opposite of classicism.” Benjamin argues for the thinking together of romanticism and the baroque. Romanticism opposed classicism in theory, “in critical terms,” but Benjamin argues that the baroque offers a better corrective, not just to classicism but to art itself. “At one stroke the profound vision of allegory transforms things and works into stirring writing [erregende Schrift].” This “stirring writing” is a fragment or a ruin with the power to disrupt the appearance of totality. The baroque reveals what classicism could not allow: imperfection and decay. As such, baroque allegory reveals “a deep-rooted intuition [eine gründliche Ahnung] of the problematic character of art”—its essential and unavoidable ambivalence (176f, 154f). When metaphysics triumphs over art, that is, when art is no longer connected to its own “methodological uniqueness,” the symbol is transposed from the religious sphere to the aesthetic. However, there is always a necessary disjunction between the ideal and its appearance, and it is only over this gap that “meaningful unity” can be obtained.The unity of the symbol appears by the grace of the allegorical structure that can sustain the suspension over this gap. The baroque intuition about art has been historically overwritten by aesthetics, or the science of art. The eighteenth-century conflict between “taste” and “judgment” was determined, finally, in favor of judgment. Taste became an a priori that could only be determined ex post facto by the application of critique. Kant’s philosophy addressed the need for an immanent judgment, the moral imperative that demands a “sense of the common.” Tracing this history in Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer observes that the a priori of taste upon which Kant insisted dramatically affected the “self-understanding of the human sciences” (33). By limiting the phenomenon of judgment to the beautiful and the sublime, Kant shifted the “activity of aesthetic judgment in law and morality out of the center of philosophy” (40). As a result, the human sciences lost the uniqueness of their methodological ground. In Gadamer’s words, the very “element in which philological and historical studies lived” was “surrendered” (41).5 The rise of modern aesthetics is directly attributable to this loss.

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Klaus Berghahn traces the development of modern aesthetics in German classicism (without necessarily accounting it a “loss”) through the tastejudgment debates that began in earnest with Johann Ulrich König’s 1737 essay “Examination of Good Taste.” Berghahn distinguishes taste and judgment in this period in the philosophical terms characteristic of aesthetics: “Taste is the immediate emotional reaction to ‘sensual works,’ while judgment is an activity of the understanding that proceeds in a strictly logical fashion and leads to the truth” (“From Classicist to Classical Literary Criticism” 43). Judgment’s exclusive claim to the truth sets the foundation for modern aesthetics and for Hegel’s observation that art is a thing of the past, and for his implicit claim that aesthetics, or the science of art, is art in a higher form.The historical development of aesthetics shows art to be thoroughly subjected to the law of reason. Gadamer takes issue with precisely this assumption, asking, “Is it right to reserve the concept of truth for conceptual knowledge? Must we not also acknowledge that the work of art possesses truth?” (Truth and Method 41–42). In his work on allegory, to which Gadamer gives a vigorous nod, Benjamin must turn to the baroque in order to articulate an “experience” of art that is neither metaphysical (in the Hegelian sense) nor transcendental (in the Kantian sense).6 The baroque marks the end of an epoch that extends through the medieval centuries and even reaches back to antiquity, but it is also the limit from which the modern epoch emerges. In the third section of his book, in which he finally takes up allegory directly, Benjamin expends a great deal of effort extracting allegory from what he calls the heavy-handed “neo-classical prejudice.”7 Although discrediting the triumph of idealism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Benjamin does not proceed by counterattack but by close readings that illuminate the contradictions or equivocity intrinsic to the theories of the symbol put forth in the “Age of Goethe.” Benjamin notes that allegories become dated because it is their intention to shock (183, 161)—perhaps true, but a bit of an overstatement. Allegories become dated because they are the product of an irretrievable past. They are “born” outdated, no matter how relevant their content. In this inherent tendency to be “time out of joint,” allegory problematizes common assumptions about the nature of art. Again by citing a neoclassical theorist, Carl Horst, Benjamin himself acknowledges the inherent marginality of the allegorical. Horst argues that allegory is always a crossing of borders between different modes, particularly a crossing from the plastic to the rhetorical arts. This crossing is seen as a violation deserving of “remorseless punishment”

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by the defenders of the plastic arts and the supporters of “the pure culture of sentiment.” Allegory is not strictly art or rhetoric—rather, it marks the contested limit between them. Despite his neoclassical posture, Horst notes allegory’s achievement in the realm of art. Nevertheless he remains incapable of recognizing this as an achievement, rather than as a bother. Horst observes that this mixing of the “pure ‘plastic arts’” (“den rein bildenden Künsten”) with the speaking arts or “rhetoric” (“den Redenden”)—which are tacitly neither “pure” nor “art”—is “remorselessly punished” by the pure culture of Sentiment, der reinen Gefühlskultur. Allegory contaminates this perceived purity. Nevertheless, despite allegory’s “disruption of law and order in the arts,” Horst admits that “allegory has never been absent from this field” (quoted in Benjamin, Origin 177, Der Ursprung 155). He only fails to recognize that this disruption comes from within the plastic arts themselves. Allegory’s disruptive tendencies can be attributed to a fundamental indifference to an aesthetics of taste. As Benjamin asserts, “Allegory . . . declares itself to be beyond beauty” (178, 155–56). Aesthetics proceeds on the assumption that it can phenomenalize the idea through the work of art, even though the idea itself cannot be intended. A universal can never be an object of knowledge. That does not, however, preclude the idea from being represented (dargestellt). Aesthetics forgets that this representation is merely an appearance of the idea, a representation that is always already theatrical. The neoclassical aesthetic sensibility is fundamentally incapable of sustaining a synthesis that not only emerges from but sustains itself in conflict. As much as allegory reveals itself to be other than the sentimental conception of “art,” it also shows itself to be other than aesthetics which, as Hegel astutely observed, has substituted itself for art. (Benjamin seems to be in tacit agreement with Hegel.With the backing of a long philosophical tradition, the power of the aesthetic is greater than that of art.) When art is conceived as the sensory manifestation of an idea, the beautiful becomes a concept. This is an act of substitution or translation, by which an idea becomes an object of knowledge. Art intrinsically resists this transposition. The force of art interrupts this metaphoric staging. In reawakening this beauty, the philosopher becomes an artist, but an artist with a different agenda. The philosopher creates art so that it can serve reason. In the hands of the philosopher, the artwork becomes primarily an object of knowledge. The work of art as such diminishes in importance. Under the auspices of aesthetic judgment, the artwork becomes a fragment (just one of many figures of Spirit in the Hegelian scheme). The work of art as such becomes a

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ruin, but from this ruin the work can re-emerge as a work of art and not as an object of aesthetic contemplation. In this way, the work of art is and is not the aesthetic object.The beauty that philosophy “reawakens” is an allegorical beauty, a beauty that is beyond beauty or other than beauty.8 In The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, in which “drama” is an appropriate term for history as well as for the actual plays of the baroque, Benjamin identifies the critical difference between medieval allegory and its baroque resurgence. In the Middle Ages, the tragedy of the secular world was redeemed in a gesture toward the divine. There was even the expectation that this world was bound to be full of trials and “mortal calamities.”9 Allegory was particularly suited to medieval culture because it provided a structure for secular knowledge of the divine. Symbols were through-andthrough doctrinally determined and dogmatically maintained. Allegory gave expression to that which was not and could not be secured doctrinally. Many pagan classics and the Hebrew Bible were ‘saved’ by virtue of their being linked to Christianity through allegory and typology. In comparing medieval and baroque allegory, Benjamin notes that both “share the character of the Passion play,” in which there is little distinction between drama and history. The medieval Christian world view was thoroughly typological. In the aptly titled Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, Erich Auerbach expertly describes and historicizes the system of typology in medieval culture, thought, religion, and literature. In the essay “Figura” Auerbach distinguishes the “figural system” of typology from the “modern view of historical development”: In the modern view, the provisional element is treated as a step in an unbroken horizontal process; in the figural system the interpretation is always sought from above; events are considered not in their unbroken relation to one another, but torn apart, individually, each in relation to something other that is promised and not yet present. Whereas in the modern view the event is always self-sufficient and secure, while the interpretation is fundamentally incomplete, in the figural interpretation the fact is subordinated to an interpretation which is fully secured to begin with. . . . Thus, the figures are . . . the tentative form of something eternal and timeless. (59)

Auerbach makes quite clear that this is not merely a religious hermeneutics or literary interpretive strategy, but also “provides the medieval interpretation of history with its general foundation and often enters into the medieval world view of everyday reality” (61).

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In the baroque, redemption is denied. Because of the unshakable authority of Christianity unique to this period in European history, religious fulfillment was denied to the profane world, consequently imposing upon drama and history the compulsion of a secular solution. The “medieval road of revolt”—heresy—was blocked by the vigorous authority of the Church and also by the “ardour of a new secular will.” As a result, “all the energy of the age was concentrated on a complete revolution of the content of life, while orthodox ecclesiastical forms were preserved.”The triumph of the will would surface later, in the milieu of romanticism, but the baroque world was “denied direct access to a beyond” (Origin 79, Der Ursprung 60). The age is thus characterized by a forceful secular will confined by an equally forceful rule of law. Benjamin observes, “The only consequence could be that men were denied all means of direct expression” (79, emphasis added; 60). This suppression of a relation between this world and a metaphysical world turned the human gaze inward, and transcendence began to be discovered in the essence of human being.10 The crucial difference between the Middle Ages and the baroque is the presence and absence of hope. This is where Benjamin’s work is important. Whereas the Middle Ages present the futility of world events and the transience of the creature as stations on the road to salvation, the German Trauerspiel is taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition. Such redemption as it knows resides in the depths of this destiny itself rather than in the fulfillment of a divine plan of salvation. (81, 62)

This difference pushed allegory into the mystification of the symbolic, and this mystification fertilized the ground from which the artistic “genius” of romanticism sprouted.The divinely based temporality of a typological world view was transposed into the finite world. Eschatology disappeared, and in its absence there was “an attempt to find, in a reversion to a bare state of creation, consolation for the renunciation of a state of grace” (81, 62). Once the promise of eternal redemption became confined to the finite world, the stations on the road to salvation became the “stations of decline.”The sadness (Trauer) of the Trauerspiel is that of a profound mourning, for it is hope itself that is mourned. Characterized by silence, or by the only way that language can be silent, in its fragmentation from meaning, language itself becomes hieroglyphic, either in the form of script on the page or in pronounced semantic disjunction.11

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In this expressed silence, the allegorical tends toward the symbolic, but it is symbolic in a secular form. The elaborate trappings of the baroque are indicative of a substantial change in the theater, which now had “artifice as its god.”There is both “the playful miniaturization of reality” and, more significantly for the history of allegory and symbol,“the introduction of a reflective infinity of thought into the finite space of a profane fate” (Origin 82–83, Der Ursprung 63–64). Based on the work of Karl Giehlow, Benjamin argues that the impulse for modern allegorical expression, the emblematics of the sixteenth century, began with the attempts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. The method consisted of transposing one kind of reading, that of epigraphs, which were construed lexically, to the reading of “enigmatic hieroglyphs,” which did not have a context and actually represented the ultimate stage in a religious initiation. As in the medieval tradition, but also independent of it, two strains of allegory developed in the modern epoch, allegorical expression (emblematics) and allegoresis (interpretation). These strains developed and intertwined, influencing one another and confounding their objective purpose.12 The humanists assumed that the Egyptians sought to create something corresponding to divinity. The emblematic writers believed that they could do the same. Far from Schopenhauer’s judgment that hieroglyphs were “trifling amusements,” Benjamin cites Pierio Valeriano’s remark that “speaking in hieroglyphia [cum hieroglyphice loqui] is nothing other than to open [aperire] the nature of things divine and human” (quoted in Origin 170, Der Ursprung 149). From this belief and the popularity of the baroque emblem books, the concept of a secular symbol arose. The advocates of this symbolic language disregarded its profanity. The baroque notion of the symbolic has great significance. On the one hand, the “misunderstanding thus became the basis of the rich and infinitely widespread form of expression” (168, 147).The misappropriation of religious symbolism for secular mysticism is the origin of the modern “symbol.” On the other hand, however, and of greater importance for Benjamin’s work, is that the baroque symbol reveals its allegorical structure. The baroque witnesses the symbol emerging from allegory. Like the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the mystery of the symbol has been profaned: Devoted neither to the earthly nor to the moral happiness of creatures, [the baroque’s] exclusive aim is their mysterious instruction [ihre geheimnisvolle Unterweisung]. From the point of view of the baroque, nature serves the

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164 Reconsidering Allegory and Symbol: Benjamin and Goethe purpose of expressing its meaning, it is the emblematic representation of its sense, and as an allegorical representation, it remains irremediably different from its historical realization. (270, emphasis added; 149)

The symbolic order forgets this irremediable difference.13 The temporal predicament is unavoidably allegorical. Allegory holds the “temporality exclusive to the poem” in a conflictual relation with the “actual temporality of experience,” as explicated by de Man in “The Rhetoric of Temporality”: The fundamental structure of allegory reappears here in the tendency of the language toward narrative, the spreading out along the axis of an imaginary time in order to give duration to what is, in fact, simultaneous within the subject. (225)

The simultaneity of subjective consciousness has been transposed—that is, translated and imposed—onto the phenomenal world with which it does not share an identity. Human consciousness and the natural world do not follow the same law. Nonetheless, beginning with Kant, the natural world is objectified, identified, and brought into a subservient relationship to the moral world of the mind. Whereas the baroque world had come to celebrate the sensible world in response to the deprivation of divine redemption, Kant provided the antidote with a moral universe in which the Subject became its own god, forming the world and everything in it. The premise for the Critique of Pure Reason is to prove the existence of a priori knowledge,“knowledge absolutely independent of all experience” (43; Ak B3).14 With Kant, the sensible figures of the profane world were retranslated into a transcendental system, but the fiction of the symbolic figure was lost in this translation. In the opening sections of Truth and Method, Gadamer shows how the concept of Bildung merged with the ideal of Erlebnis, which together mutated into the ideal of the genius, which “rose to the status of a universal concept of value and— together with the concept of the creative—achieves a true apotheosis” (59).15 This apotheosis was popularized by Schopenhauer and his philosophy of the unconscious, but it evolves from a complicated history. This history begins with developments in the word Bildung. In Kant, Bildung was still an act of the will, the cultivation of a capacity or talent.Wilhelm von Humboldt marked a difference between Kultur and Bildung, ascribing to Bildung a “higher and more inward cultivation.”16 No longer simply cultivation, Bildung came to signify some kind of initiation into a version of

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“the ancient mystical tradition according to which man carries in his soul the image of God, after whom he is fashioned, and which man must cultivate in himself ” (Truth and Method 11). Gadamer does not draw sufficient attention to the significant change in what it means to be “in the image of God.” From early Christianity through the Middle Ages, to be in the image of God generally meant the potential to submit freely, of one’s own will, to God and His will. Between the High Middle Ages and the nineteenth century this “potential” gradually came to be perceived as an omnipotence in and of itself.With the production of a strictly moral universe in Kantian philosophy, the conception of godlike human beings became the logical next step. This does not happen in Kant, as Gadamer is careful to point out, but after Kant’s transcendental analysis, the apotheosis of a creative mortal being is unavoidable. One notable unwitting victim of this kind of apotheosis was Goethe, which is perhaps why he looms so large in Benjamin’s work.17 Fully aware of these misappropriations and misunderstandings, Benjamin finds “immense value for the understanding of the allegorical” in the theories of the symbol because he reads them allegorically. As his prime example, he takes up Friedrich Creuzer in the first volume of his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, where Creuzer is anxious to preserve the distance between the allegorical and the symbolic, and yet the only distinction Creuzer really makes is between the momentariness of the symbol (the mystical instant) and the progression of allegory (narrative). Creuzer cannot develop the significance of the relation between allegory and symbol because it is not an oppositional relation. But according to Benjamin, an “acute observation” by Joseph von Görres “puts many things right”: “I have no use for the view that the symbol is being, and allegory is sign. . . . We can be perfectly satisfied with the explanation that takes the one as a sign for ideas, which is self-contained, concentrated, and which steadfastly remains itself, while recognizing the other as a successively progressing, dramatically mobile, dynamic representation of ideas which has acquired the very fluidity of time. They stand in a relation to each other as does the silent, great and mighty natural world of mountains and plants to the living progression of human history.” (Görres, quoted in Origin 165, Der Ursprung 144).

Görres directs attention away from the always-problematic distinction between the symbolic and allegorical conventions and focuses attention on

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the only real difference between allegory and symbol: the relation to time pronounced in the relation to death and decay. Benjamin declares that the “great romantic achievement” of Görres and Creuzer was to introduce into semiotics “the decisive category of time,” and it is time that formally defines “the relationship [Verhältnis] between symbol and allegory.” Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. (166, 145)

The symbol is the expression of hope; allegory is the expression of mourning.18 In the baroque, the displaced hope of redemption carried a fundamental flaw. The secular world is finite. Any redemption the finite world can offer is also finite; thus the facies hippocratica of history. “Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head.” This “thing” (as Benjamin calls it), this personification or reified object, which lacks everything that is beautiful, is nonetheless the form of expression most adequate to the nature of human existence, in both a general and an individual historicity (166, 144). In a secular world, the “symbol” represents “the striving . . . after a resplendent but ultimately noncommittal knowledge of an absolute” (159, 138), but allegory expresses the vision of this world. The mournful course of events may not be beautiful, but the emblematic death’s head “is the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious.” This is the heart [der Kern] of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline. (166, 145)

Allegory expresses both the human and the natural being towards death. Benjamin reminds us, “if nature has always been subject to the power of death, it is also true that it has always been allegorical” (166, 145). In the baroque, the “transfixed face of signifying nature”—the death mask—always triumphs over history. The distinction of modern allegory is its distance from history, from the Erlebnis and the anthropomorphism necessary for aesthetics. The modern allegorical tradition is profoundly related to the enigmatic, the concealed. Benjamin aligns modern allegorical concealment with the grotesque, described by Karl Borinski as “associated with

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its subterraneanly mysterious origin in buried ruins and catacombs” (quoted in Origin 171, Der Ursprung 150). Of note is the fact that the concealed can only be revealed by digging, by going into the earth, not by ascending to the heavens or transcending the physical world. It is revealed in darkness. Borinski suggests that the word grotesque does not etymologically derive from grotto in the literal sense of a cave, “but from the ‘burial’—in the sense of concealment—which the cave or grotto expresses,” and he notes,“For this the eighteenth century still had the expression das Verkrochene [that which has crept away]” (quoted in Origin 171, Der Ursprung 150). As this grotesque allegory developed in emblematics, the form became even more obscure and incomprehensible. Benjamin surmises that “[no] kind of writing seem[s] better designed to safeguard the high political maxims of true worldly wisdom than an esoteric script such as this [emblematics], which was comprehensible only to scholars” (172, 150).19 In a study of the baroque drama as a grotesque genre, Benjamin challenges both sides of the taste-judgment debate. The German Trauerspiel, overladen and belabored as it was, could be considered neither tasteful nor pleasurable, but it was the literature of the public, and it needed no mediation. The baroque defied the mediation of aesthetic criticism, with the unfortunate result that it was simply pushed aside and forgotten. Classicism could not contend with the baroque because it threatened the appearance of totality. “By its very essence classicism was not permitted to behold the lack of freedom, the imperfection, the collapse of the physical, beautiful, nature.” Benjamin asserts that “this is precisely what baroque allegory proclaims with unprecedented emphasis” (176, 154). The baroque questioned the ideal of art “reborn” in the Renaissance. Against the perfect harmony of form and content, the intrusion of allegory, in the words of Carl Horst, could be seen as “a harsh disturbance of the peace and a disruption of law and order in the arts” (quoted in Origin 177, Der Ursprung 155). Disrupting the aesthetic ideology imposed on art, a story such as Goethe’s Das Märchen becomes a great work dedicated to allegory, and an obscure work by a poet who supposedly privileged the symbol. Benjamin not only shows that allegory and symbol are not opposite or hierarchical concepts, but that, indeed, they should not be seen as concepts at all. The symbol, in its “genuine notion,” is sacred: it is a theological term that denotes “the unity of the material and the transcendental object” (160, 139). It is a paradox that can only be resolved theologically or mystically. When this mystical paradox is transposed to an artistic or plastic symbol,

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that is, to a profane symbol, which insists on a unity of form and content (the coincidence of the symbol), “the paradox of the theological is distorted into a relationship between appearance and essence” (160, 139). The symbol is presumed to be phenomenal or material when it is not. Berghahn notes that with the concept of critique, Kant reflected an important Enlightenment tendency “in a concept which took aim at Scheinwissen,” the knowledge of appearance (“From Classical to Classicist Literary Criticism” 17). When this distorted concept of the symbol is codified by the value system of aesthetics, art as such becomes a thing of the past. It is no longer art that is the object of such criticism, but the concept. Or, as Kant actually seems to believe, in the judgment of the beautiful it is the beautiful itself that is liked, devoid of any interest either in the materiality of art or in the morally good.The beautiful is an immediate experience in the imagination, and not an immediate experience of a work of art. In the lectures on aesthetics, Hegel is more sensitive to the work of art as an object for contemplation, no longer as an immediate experience but as a mediated one. The work of art first appears alien to the contemplating subject who comes to find his own reflection in it, and is thus able to absorb the work of art into consciousness. The work of art (like everything else in Hegel) is for Spirit. In the dialectic process the work of art becomes meaningful, and it is assumed that this meaning actually adheres in the work.20 It does not. A work of art can only endure when it becomes the object of aesthetic perception. Paradoxically, in order to endure, it must be allegorical. Benjamin writes, “The object [Gegenstand] of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of the artistic form is as follows: to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth” (Origin 182, Der Ursprung 160). Aesthetics, the very means by which the work of art is elevated to a universal status, simultaneously reveals the work of art as allegorical rather than symbolic. The symbolic will always decay into the allegorical, and it is the allegorical that endures. Perhaps one reason that the secular symbol decays is because the concept of the symbol as described and desired by the German and English Romantics did not actually exist. This is the contention of Nicholas Halmi in The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol. He points out, as others have also done, the problematic examples and theories of the symbol that its proponents offered (3, 12). Halmi also argues that the supposed antagonism between allegory and symbol has been exaggerated, that the symbol’s “opposition to allegory was, in fact, contrary to the impression fostered by the preoccupa-

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tion of twentieth-century critics with the subject, neither widely nor consistently maintained,”21 and “that the formation of the Romantic concept of the symbol was not crucially dependent on a corresponding denigration of allegory” (12–13). By undertaking a diachronic genealogical study of the Romantic symbol, Halmi takes something of a phenomenological approach, “asking what lay beneath the phenomena under analysis” (26). His book is actually a questioning of appearances, an interrogation of what it is that appears when the Romantic theorists and poets point to the symbol. What they pointed to was a desire for a certain kind of transcendent figure, and not really to anything actual. Halmi finds that the desired purpose of the “theoretical construct” of the symbol “was not to describe objects of perception but to condition the perception of objects” (1). With the concept of the symbol, a concept for which they could not provide adequate examples, the Romantics were trying to “overcome dualism” by maintaining that the symbol, by “being a part of what it represents,” becomes identical with the whole that is represented. And they wanted this to extend to all of nature, not just to art (17). The Romantics’ claim that the symbol, defined as inherently and inexhaustibly meaningful, existed equally and equivalently in diverse ontological and temporal realms—art and nature, antiquity and modernity—indicates that the principle concern of their symbolist theory was not in identifying, still less in interpreting, actual symbols, but instead in establishing an ideal of meaningfulness itself. (18–19)

The internal contradiction of the symbol actually illustrates the need for an allegorical structure, not an opposition to it. The Romantics desired the symbol and the potential it offered for transcendence, for an escape from time. Benjamin admits that the baroque only wants to endure, to exist in time. Art is thus preserved, not in its beauty (the object of “empty dreaming”), but in its bare and decaying materiality, and that materiality is a schema, an empty form, “now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own.” As Benjamin had already stated, “This transformation of material content into truth content makes the decrease in effectiveness, whereby the attraction of earlier charms diminishes decade by decade, into the basis for a rebirth, in which all ephemeral beauty is completely stripped off, and the work stands as a ruin.” The allegorist lends it significance, investing the ruin with ontological (not psychological) content (Sachverhalt). The allegorist makes of the lifeless object an emblem,

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an image, through which can be spoken “something different,” and through which the emblem becomes “a key to the realm of hidden knowledge” (Origin 182–84, Der Ursprung 160–62). Thus, the object itself becomes an object of knowledge at the same time that something other is expressed with the object. Only the schema can become the object of knowledge, and it is only secured as an object when it is simultaneously a fixed image and a fixing sign, “fixiertes Bild und fixierendes Zeigen in einem” (184, 161). When brought into time, “the mystical instant [‘Nu’] becomes the ‘now’ [‘Jetzt’] of contemporary actuality; the symbolic becomes distorted into the allegorical.” The symbolic cannot survive the moment of its presence, and thus, “where man is drawn towards the symbol, allegory emerges from the depths of being to intercept the intention, and to triumph over it.” Allegory preserves the arbitrary power of knowledge, and the extravagance and violence of this power is everywhere evident in the baroque, “in this age drunk with acts of cruelty both lived and imagined.” The essence of the emblematic image is dragged out and inscribed as a caption. In the baroque, everything, from nature to the life of Christ, was to be “read.” The Trauerspiel is a drama for a “reader,” which is not to say that it could not be performed, but that it required the attention and concentration of reading (183–85, 160–62).22 Exploring the Trauerspiel, Benjamin is able to show how allegory is the phenomenal structure of appearance in the work of art, that which gives form to any work of art. In The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, Benjamin has given us a way to read “allegorically,” but not in the well-known sense of discovering meaning in a system of textual signs. Rather, to read allegorically is to read the antinomies of a text, to read not only what it says but what it does not say, to read what appears and to read the appearance.This “method” of reading allegorically is not limited to the Trauerspiel, and in an ambitious effort, Benjamin took on the great mythic figure of German Kultur and the ideal icon of Bildung, Goethe. Reading the enigmatic novel Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandschaften) “allegorically” (but not interpretively), Benjamin illuminates the antinomies of the novel, and he reads the Schein of the Erscheinung (the appearance of appearance), not in order to show what it is not, but to show what it is. Benjamin explicitly states the thesis of his reading: Nowhere, certainly, is the mythic the highest material content [of Elective Affinities], but it is everywhere a strict indication of it. As such, Goethe made it the basis of his novel. The mythic is the real material content [Sach-

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Reconsidering Allegory and Symbol: Benjamin and Goethe 171 gehalt] of this book; its content [Inhalt] appears as a mythic shadowplay staged in the costumes of the Age of Goethe. (“Goethe’s Elective Affinities” 309, 271)

Benjamin offers some comparisons that bear this out. The initial reception of the work as “truly terrifying” (Wieland) and as expressing a profound but discouraging understanding of the human heart (Madame de Staël) has been effectively buried by “the hundred-year tradition,” which has erased all memory of the “robe of Nessus” by which Goethe himself characterized contemporary response to the novel. Contemporary praise for the novel was worse. Benjamin asserts that Goethe had two reasons for actually responding to the critical din. “He had his work to defend,” and, “He had its secret to keep.” Thus Benjamin’s explanation is neither apologetic nor mystical, and suggests instead that “one could call it the fable of renunciation” (312). Like the Trauerspiel book, however, this essay also met with suspicion and incomprehension.23 The story of symbol and allegory is not only a theoretical one. It is everywhere in literature but especially evident when literature tends towards the enigmatic. With his massive essay on Elective Affinities, Benjamin had hoped to rescue Goethe from the cultic following that surrounded him in Germany. Benjamin mourns for the Goethe who will never appear, but in the very experience of this mourning, the image of Goethe does appear. In the figure of Goethe, in the cultic icon of a man turned into an emblem, a man who could only appear allegorically as something other than his historical being, Benjamin recognized something more precious, not in the man but in the work. Indeed, it was the work that initiated the cult, but then the man became the work, and the work was judged against the illusion of the “perfect man.”24 The stature of “Goethe” still today makes it difficult to read the works without a gesture toward the figure. And the more enigmatic the work, the stronger the compulsion to explain the mystery through a transcendental analysis that links the work to the figure. Elective Affinities is one such enigmatic work. Even in the wake of Benjamin’s tour-de-force essay, included with most German editions of the novel, critical interpretations of the novel continue to be predominantly psychological or anthropological studies.25 Rarely do critical analyses focus on the novel as such. The resistance against both Goethe’s obscure works and enigmatic analyses of those works (like that of Benjamin) emanates from the work itself. If such work, including the work of criticism, is to be appreciated rather than

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appropriated, one must contend with this resistance. The preceding analyses of Benjamin’s book on the Trauerspiel and his essay on Elective Affinities are the fruit of my contending with this resistance, following Benjamin’s intuition about the complexity of Goethe as a figure and the critical resistance to contending with that figure and with the obscurity of his writing. Goethe’s Das Märchen has received sporadic critical attention, but there has been remarkably little development or new insight into the story. In 1972, in Goethe’s “Das Märchen,” Waltraud Bartscht offered a new English translation and a general summary of the tale’s critical reception along with his own arguments, and he made the keen observation that “one can almost discern a cyclical pattern, as whole groups of comments on it are published in intervals of thirty or forty years” (39).26 He also noted the challenge that Das Märchen has continuously presented to its readers. “There have been numerous attempts at an exegesis from the time the tale first appeared to this day. It is therefore an intriguing task to trace the origins of the work; to investigate its symbolic meanings, and if possible, to arrive at some new conclusions” (13). These goals are already evident in the initial response to the story by Schiller.27 However, I believe the only way to gain insight into Das Märchen is to suspend the exegetical imperative along with the quest for meaning, and simply to read what the text says, to let the obscurity unfold into its own clarity. Das Märchen is simply titled; it can be referred to as “The Tale” or “The Fairytale.”28 In another now-obscure work by Goethe, Unterhaltungen deutschen Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Emigrants), one of the figures perhaps offers some insight into Goethe’s view of the märchen genre, and at least suggests a way of reading Das Märchen that resists the usual exegetical appropriations. An old clergyman responds to a request to tell a märchen with the following commentary: It is part of the delight in such works that we enjoy them without making demands, because the imagination itself cannot demand anything but has to await that which it will receive as a gift. The imagination makes no plans; it is not intent upon a certain path but is borne and guided by its own wings; and floating about here and there, it will take the most eccentric course, forever turning and changing direction. (trans. by Bartscht, in Goethe’s “Das Märchen” 38–39)29

Bartscht cites this passage in support of his view that Goethe delighted in the märchen form but did not take it seriously. I repeat the citation here in sup-

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port of a contrary argument, and with unintentional support from Bartscht, who also comments that “Goethe expected his listeners or readers to enjoy his Märchen purely as a work of art” (39). For Bartscht, this means the aesthetic pleasure of interpretation. On the contrary, I believe Das Märchen resists this critical appropriation in demanding to be read “purely as a work of art” and in defiance of all interpretation. The story begins when a pair of Irrlichter—mythical will-o-the-wisps, dancing tongues of flame—appear late at night at the door of a ferryman. He dutifully rows them across the rain-swollen river, but worries when the shimmering figures shake gold coins into his boat as payment. Not only is this unacceptable tender—the ferryman can accept only fruits of the earth for payment—but the river does not tolerate gold; if the coins should touch its waters, it would rise and overwhelm boat and passengers. The Irrlichter must promise to pay in accord with the law of the land, but they slyly transfer the debt they owe to the ferryman and river to an unsuspecting old woman, whose playful dog dies after eating the gold they give her in exchange.These are some of the strange but strictly enforced laws of the land. The ferryman hides the gold he has received from the Irrlichter in a rocky crevice above the river, where it is later discovered by a beautiful green snake who devours it and becomes luminescent. The snake uses this power to illuminate a subterranean cave that she could previously explore only in darkness, tactilely discerning the figures installed there. In the cave she meets a man with a lamp that turns all wood to silver, all stone to gold, and all dead animals into precious stones, but only when it is the sole source of light. Meanwhile there arrives a woeful, bewildered, but handsome prince who seeks the fair Lily. He is ferried across the river, only to find, as had the Irrlichter before him, that Lily resides on the other side of the river, which one can return to only by a bridge formed by the snake at noon or by the powerful shadow cast by an otherwise impotent giant at dusk. As the old woman victimized by the Irrlichter tries to deliver the fruits of the earth still owed to the river and ferryman, the giant’s shadow robs her. As a result of her continued indebtedness, one of her hands turns black and begins to disappear, although she retains its full use. The promised bridge appears at noon, in exceptional glory thanks to the green snake’s new luminescence. Those seeking the fair Lily cross it and find her. Lily is surrounded by a complex of laws, and she brings death to every living creature she touches. She can reanimate the dead, however, and she resurrects the old woman’s playful pug. But the despairing prince reaches

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out, touches her, and dies. A mysterious prophecy known to Lily and others of the characters begins to be fulfilled when for the third time in a single day, she hears the hopeful pronouncement, “Es ist an der Zeit” (roughly, “The time is near”).30 A complicated and mysteriously orchestrated sequence of events ensues, with the result that a world emerges from the cave of the kings that had lain deep in the earth, the cave that was first illuminated in the story by the luminescent snake, who has been sacrificed in this process. As promised long ago, the opposing banks of the river are linked with a glorious and wide bridge, the prince is restored to life, to Lily, and to a kingdom; the giant with the dangerous shadow becomes a sundial; and the old woman and her husband (the old man with the lamp) become young and beautiful. They all “live happily ever after.” This fantastic tale of mysterious rules and a mystical time to come has perplexed commentators since its publication. Most often it is allegorized in the traditional sense. The characters are made to correspond to historical persons, events, or ideas, and a narrative is imposed on the cryptic elements of the tale in order to give it meaning, to have it make sense. Das Märchen has rarely been read under the auspices of its title, as a märchen, a fantastic, ahistorical story. Here is this work’s first “open secret.” The most important feature of Das Märchen is its utter lack of history. The events unfold in the course of a day, but it is any day; the past is merely a series of repetitions, and the promise of something to come is part of the everydayness and does not inspire hope.31 Certainly, the beautiful green snake is an important figure, a catalyst for much of the action that unfolds, but the snake holds a central place in the story only as a guide. The luminescence of the snake and the magical lamp of the old man indicate how the story is to be read: in its own light. Das Märchen illuminates itself by devouring its appearance and glowing brightest and most powerfully, like the old man’s lamp, when it shines alone. To read the text in its own light is to suspend history, reality, psychology, biography, and all of the other factors that can be brought to a reading or “found” in one. Goethe makes this easy—none of these factors is truly to be found in Das Märchen itself. This is another of the work’s open secrets. In its own light, the story shows itself. When it shines alone, it bestows invaluable treasures. The tale is a nonobject, an image. The image must be read in an otherwise darkness because an image is always singular, unique, and originary. It is not phenomenal, but exists in an ontologically distinct dimension; it is phantasmenal.32 The locus of this “other ontology” is language. In Das

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Märchen, Goethe has touched the truth-content or the essence of language. Language itself appears in the allegory of Das Märchen. The world of the story takes place in a “golden age” as described by Auerbach, an age “in which the surrounding world . . . was not rational but magic and fantastic” (“Figure” 192). In Das Märchen, the figures of human beings dwell poetically on the earth. In these terms, this story is Goethe’s greatest poem, and for a brief moment in the story, the world is symbolic. The crowd looks up and sees the heavenly radiance emanating from the risen temple and surrounding the royal entourage: The king, the queen, and their companions appeared in the twilight of the temple vault, illuminated by a heavenly radiance, and the people fell down before this sign. (Goethe’s “Das Märchen,” trans. Bartscht, 106; trans. modified) [Der König, die Königin und ihre Begleiter erschienen in dem dämmernden Gewölbe des Tempels von einem himmlischen Glanze erleuchtet, und das Volk fiel auf sein Angesicht. (Das Märchen 102)]

This is a divine moment. In this single moment the infinite world has united with the finite world.This is the world of the symbol, which de Man defines precisely in these terms: In the world of the symbol it would be possible for the image to coincide with the substance, since the substance and its representation do not differ in their being but only in their extension . . . Their relationship is one of simultaneity . . . spatial in kind, and in which the intervention of time is merely a matter of contingency. (“Rhetoric of Temporality” 207)

Goethe has made this symbolic world appear, and he does so by a masterful allegory in which time is suspended by means of the narrative, and the infinite appears. Goethe recognized that the symbolic moment cannot be sustained. Most poets who finally reach this symbolic moment want to grasp it, to sustain it. But to grasp the symbolic is to conceptualize it. The German word for concept, Begriff, comes from the verb begreifen, to grasp intellectually. The poet who tries to sustain the symbolic becomes an allegorist. Conversely, the poet who works for that moment of symbolic coincidence uses allegory as a technique, as indeed the only technique adequate to the image.When the image appears, the conceptual transformation joins with the idea in the image. The symbolic image stands between these worlds—for a moment. Goethe

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understands this momentariness and respects it. He does not try to capture it but only to repeat it. In Das Märchen, the moment occurs at twilight, a liminal time.The crowd would not even have noticed the heavenly radiance of the entourage if a mirror turned by a hawk had not directed their gaze. Even so, the vision lasts but a moment. The people bow before the divine presence, and when they look up again, it has vanished. By the time the crowd had recovered and rose to their feet again, the king and his retinue had descended into the altar and walked through secret passages to his palace. (106, 102)

The symbolic moment has passed. Goethe does not try to save it. The story appears to end, as many fairytales do, “happily ever after,” or at least with this hope, this promise. “Happily ever after” is, however, an infinite claim. Fairytale figures never die, at least not in the same way as the rest of us. Like Snow White or the Sleeping Beauty, the prince in Goethe’s fairytale is entranced but not dead. The snake does not die but undergoes a metamorphosis that becomes the foundation for a new world. The story ends in the world of shadows, where the powerful shadow of the giant is put to use, and that use is to tell time. Märchen are not simply moral lessons or fantastical stories. Rather, the experience (Erfahrung rather than Erlebnis) of the fantastical story is its most important feature. Because the elements of the narrative often involve magic powers, mysterious creatures, and strange occurrences, the tendency has been to ground these unreal elements in reality by “allegorizing” them to correspond to historical events and persons, or to synchronize with moral and ethical principles. The interpretations of Das Märchen have often done both.33 Planning to contribute Das Märchen to Schiller’s journal Die Horen, Goethe wrote to Schiller about this relation between reality and fantasy in the story: My contribution at this time is more of a bound [Übersprung] than a smooth transition from a tale of domestic life to a tale of wonder. (letter of 21 August 1795)

Goethe grounds the tale in reality (“domestic life”) and marks the movement towards “wonder.” It is an upward movement, a leap, but not a transcendental one.The connections to the past are severed.“All debts are forgiven,” says the character introduced in the story as the old man with the lamp. It appears that even time itself has forgiven its debts, as the elders of the land become

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young and beautiful. There is a call to remember the snake, which indicates, first of all, that she has been forgotten already. If this tale is not to be read “allegorically” in the traditional sense of assigning a coherent meaning to the literal level, then how is it to be read? How does one make sense of all the strange laws and events, the enigmatic figures and mysterious rituals? As I have already suggested, it is to be read by its own illumination, which is to restrict its meaning to what appears and to read this appearance, this Schein, not as representative of something else, but as itself phenomenal. Das Märchen is at the very least (and this is already a great deal) about the phenomenon of Schein. Indeed, the word märchen carries the strong sense of unglaubwürdige, untrustworthy or unbelievable, of blatant appearance that is indeed not intended to be historical, but contrived. It is not a leap to put the title Das Märchen together with this story. Indeed the story unfolds into ever-greater strangeness, ever-more-puzzling enigmas. In his correspondence with Schiller, Goethe expressed at least this much intent: I hope that the eighteen figures in this drama may be welcome to those who are fond of riddles [Rätselliebenden], for they are so many enigmas [so viel Rätsel]. (26 September 1795)

In this statement Goethe does not express an intended meaning, but only a mastery of technique. In the same brief letter, Goethe had commented, in the context of the political unrest in Weimar, “Blessed are those who write stories, for stories are à l’ordre du jour.” In this remark, Goethe suggests that the events of the historical world are themselves but stories, mere appearances, and equally enigmatic. References between Das Märchen and reality are made by Schiller. On 16 October 1795, Schiller comments to Goethe, “The shadow of the giant might have easily laid hold of you in a rather rough fashion. It often strikes me as strange to think of you thrown so much in the midst of the world while I sit between my paper window panes.” Even this brief exchange of letters during the transmission and revision of Das Märchen bears out the differences between Schiller and Goethe, leading Goethe to distinguish himself from Schiller in his aphorism (#751 in Maximen und Reflexionen) that begins: My relationship to Schiller grounds itself on the declared direction by which we both individually strive to reach towards a goal, our common activity toward the difference of the middle [Verschiedenheit der Mittel].

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This relationship to “the difference of the middle” is the following of a different route. By one slight difference which first came up between us in language, and after which I would remember again in a place in his letters, I made the following observation. There is a great difference when the poet seeks the particular in the general or sees the general in the particular. (my trans.) [Es ist ein großer Unterschied, ob der Dichter zum Allgemeinen das Besondere sucht oder im Besondern das Allgemeine schaut. (Goethes Werke 12:471)]

Schiller is the poet who seeks the particular from the general, and Goethe claims to see the general in the particular. Schiller’s Richtung is an allegorical path, “where the particular is only an example of the general.” Indeed, this is how Schiller reads Das Märchen. Goethe never directly responded to Schiller’s interpretive gestures, seemingly taking them in stride and quietly insisting on his own reading. Several times Goethe expressed a strong desire for the relatively brief story to be divided between two issues of Die Horen, over Schiller’s persistent request that it be published whole “because the two halves have so much need of one another” (Schiller to Goethe, 29 August 1795). In the end, for predominantly logistical reasons, Das Märchen appeared “whole” in volume 11 of the journal, along with the first installment of Schiller’s own essay “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung,” (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”), which also notes the “difference of the middle” between these two friends. Schiller marks the division between the “naïve” poet of genius and the “sentimental” modern poet, who pursues “lost nature” (“Naïve and Sentimental” 106). Although Schiller accords equal value to both types of poet, he can only mourn for the naïve. “Poets of this naïve category are no longer at home in an artificial age. They are indeed scarcely ever possible” (109). In his suggestive interpretations, Schiller tries to turn Goethe into a sentimental poet, to preserve him as a modern poet. In their correspondence over the publication of Das Märchen in Die Horen, Schiller acknowledges that Goethe has, “by [his] mode of treating the subject . . . pledged [himself] that all is symbolical.” To Schiller, this symbolic quality calls for interpretation. He writes,“One cannot refrain from trying to find a meaning in everything” (29 August 1795)—in other words, from alle-

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gorizing. In response to Schiller’s desire for meaning and wholeness, Goethe replies, The story I do wish to have divided simply because the main thing in such compositions is to excite curiosity; for even at the end it remains pretty much of an enigma [Rätsel]. (3 September 1795)

If Goethe tells us anything about how to read Das Märchen, he tells us not to read it like an “Allegoriker” (as Goethe himself defined the species personified in Schiller), by seeking the particular in the general. This allegorical way of reading is what Schiller calls “symbolical.” The symbol cries out to be interpreted, but the symbol, if it is indeed symbolic, should require no interpretation. The symbol does not mean; it is. Goethe understands this. In the aphorism numbered 749 in Maximen und Reflexionen, he explains the symbol: The symbolic transforms the appearance into an idea, the idea into an image, and so, insofar as the Idea in the image remains eternally valid and unattainable and, pronouncing itself in all languages, [it] thereby remains unsayable. (my trans.) [Die Symbolik verwandelt die Erscheinung in Idee, die idee in ein Bild, und so, daß die Idee im Bild immer unendlich wirksam und unerreichbar bleibt und, selbst in allen Sprachen ausgesprochen, doch unaussprechlich bliebe. (Goethes Werke 12:470)]

The symbol is unspeakable. It cannot be pronounced, but it can appear. In the aphorism that appears next, as #750 in the Maximen, Goethe describes the other mode of appearance, that of allegory: Allegory transforms the appearance into a concept, the concept into an image, such that the concept, having and holding [itself] in the image, limited and complete, and in the same way, can be pronounced. (my trans.) [Die Allegorie verwandelt die Erscheinung in einen Begriff, den Begriff in ein Bild, doch so, daß der Begriff im Bilde immer noch begrenzt und vollständig zu halten und zu haben und an demselben auszusprechen sei. (12:471)]

Both the allegorical and the symbolic transform appearance into an image. The difference lies strictly in the mode of transformation, the difference of the difference. Allegory can be spoken; symbol cannot be. What these apho-

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risms say together is that the symbol needs allegory in order to speak. The poet needs the critic. The naïve poet needs the sentimental poet. Goethe needs Schiller. Goethe makes the same argument in Das Märchen, both more effectively and more obscurely. Schiller is correct in treating the story like a baroque emblem, and he would even be correct in identifying the “whole” as truly symbolic, but only in its entirety and in its secrecy. In one more aphorism, Maximen und Reflexionen #752, Goethe writes, That is the true symbolic where the particular represents the general, not as dream and shadow, but as living-immediate revelation of the impenetrable. (my trans.) [Das ist die wahre Symbolik, wo das Besondere das Allgemeinere repräsentiert, nicht als Traum und Schatten, sondern als lebendig-augenblickliche Offenbarung des Unerforschlichen. (12:471)]

If Das Märchen is symbolic, then the answers to its riddles are not to be found in the interpretations of dreams or the explication of the empirical world of shadows, but in the work itself, in its opening up, in its immediacy and not its mediation. To explain the work of art is to mediate it. The “symbolic” work of art, however, represents itself in its immediacy, without explanation. That is how Das Märchen calls to be read. The symbolic appears in Das Märchen. The story transforms appearance into a concept, and the concept becomes an image, the image of a begrenzte und vollständige community. In this transformation, an entirely different transformation also appears. This transformation cannot itself be spoken. It remains unaussprechlich, unspeakable. It needs to be spoken in some other way. It needs to be pronounced through something limited and complete: an allegory. Das Märchen is an allegory; it is an allegory of the symbol.

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6

Allegory as Metonymy: The Figure without a Face

In the land of Homer’s Phaiakians, a stranger listens passionately to a rhapsode who sings of the adventures of Odysseus. The crowd gathered in the agora is entranced, but no one so much as the stranger, who draws his cloak over his head and remains concealed as he weeps, as a woman weeps, lying over the body of her dear husband, who fell fighting for her city and people as he tried to beat off the pitiless day from city and children; she sees him dying and gasping for breath, and winding her body about him she cries high and shrill, while the men behind her, hitting her with their spear butts on the back and the shoulders, force her up and lead her away into slavery, to have hard work and sorrow, and her cheeks are wracked with pitiful weeping. Such were the pitiful tears Odysseus shed from under his brows. (Odyssey 8.523–31)

The tears shed by the stranger, Odysseus, go unnoticed by the entire assemblage except for King Alkinoös, who finally interrupts the singing so that the stranger can identify himself.1 Immediately thereafter, Odysseus comes out of his concealment and, in the place of the rhapsode, he tells his own story.2 The place of Odysseus’ concealment is the agora, the place of assembly. In the agora, present and absent, sung and silent, Odysseus is a figure of allegory, not the allegory of hermeneutic allegorizing, but the allegory that is the structure of appearance, the structure of antinomy. He is simultaneously what he is and what he is not. The figure of Odysseus is here emerging into what he is as allegorically structured, self and other at the same time. Because he is a poetic figure, Odysseus can simultaneously be two beings at the same time, and this particular figuration demonstrates how the phenomenon of allegory works. The 181

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figure of Odysseus appears in the court of Alkinöos, listening to a rhapsode sing. The figure of Odysseus also appears in the story Demodokos sings, the particular story of the Trojan horse and the destruction that descended on Troy, “and how in particular, Odysseus went, with godlike Menelaus, like Ares, to find the house of Deiphobos” (8.517–18). Because of the continuous present characteristic of epic, when Demodokos sings, we are in the moment of the Trojan War. The scene is not of the past but in the present.3 At the mention of Odysseus, the epic narrative turns to Odysseus in the court, weeping.The final victory over Troy was one of Odysseus’ greatest moments, and yet he now identifies not with the Odysseus of the story but with the woman who has lost everything in the conquest. As Odysseus begins to tell his own story, he shows himself as no longer identical with the Odysseus of the story, although he is the same man. The first event after leaving Troy that Odysseus recalls is the pillaging of Ismaros: “I sacked their city and killed their people, and out of their city taking their wives and many possessions, we shared them out” (9.40–42). Quickly he admits to being one of those men whose spear butts tortured the weeping woman. There are thus two figures of Odysseus, the same, yet different: the glorious and wily hero of whom Demodokos sings and the humbled and empathetic human being who listens. At this very moment Odysseus emerges from concealment. According to Heidegger, a moment of emergence is characterized as phusis, and phusis is fundamental to the question (and understanding) of Being. In addressing this issue in The Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger articulates the founding structure of being as phusis, “the process of a-rising, of emerging from the hidden, whereby the hidden is first made to stand” (14–15). In proposing this particular definition and the etymology he creates for the word, Heidegger aligns philosophy with poetry. “[I]t was through a fundamental poetic and intellectual experience of being that [the Greeks] discovered what they had to call phusis” (14). As he digs deeper into the fundamental question of metaphysics, “Why are there beings rather than nothing?” a fundamental affinity between philosophers and poets emerges. “Only poetry stands in the same order as philosophy and its thinking, though poetry and thought are not the same thing” (26). They are the different held together in the space of the same. Heidegger actually describes what I identify as the phenomenological structure of allegory. The poets and the philosophers “stand in the same order” because they are each capable of experiencing the illogical simultaneity of this structure, of phusis.

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Allegory as Metonymy:T he Figure without a Face 183 He who speaks of nothing does not know what he is doing. In speaking of nothing he makes it into a something. In speaking he speaks against what he intended. He contradicts himself. But discourse that contradicts itself offends against the fundamental rule of discourse (logos), against “logic.” To speak of nothing is illogical. He who speaks and thinks illogically is unscientific. (23)

This trespass is most grievous in philosophy, “where logic has its very home” (23). But for Heidegger, the thinking of the illogical is the very heart and being of philosophy. He admits that philosophy has become “[frozen] into its scientific cast,” but he insists, “Philosophy never arises out of science or through science” (26). Philosophy, like poetry, arises from language, and it arises from language that is itself conceived as phusis. “It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.” Heidegger opposes this conception of language to “words and language [as] wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak” (13).This is a secondary point in the Introduction to Metaphysics, but it is an essential force in Heidegger’s oeuvre. It sets an important philosophical precedent for another way of thinking, a way not based in the science of knowing but in the allegory of being. In order to write the simultaneity of being and not being, in The Question of Being Heidegger wrote Being (80–83)—the shortest allegory ever composed, although I doubt Heidegger conceived it in this way. Heidegger does not use the term allegory to describe the structure by which both philosophers and poets can speak in a non-self-contradictory discourse that does not say the same, but he describes allegory’s structure. Heidegger thought that poetry was the language through which philosophy could speak illogically, and thus he turned toward poetry (not always very convincingly) in his later work. I am suggesting that it is neither poetry nor philosophy as such that supports illogical saying and thinking, but allegory that is the underlying structure by which language can speak other than logically. The etymological roots of the word allegory are the privative prefix allos, “other than,” and the verb agoreien, “to speak in the agora,” the marketplace or the assembly, so more generally, “to speak in public.” Allegoreien in some way means “to speak other than one speaks in public.” Jon Whitman’s translation of the compound allos-agoreien aligns with the traditional modern definition of allegory as “to say other than one means” or literally, “to say other than what is said in the agora” (“Appendix I: On the History of the Term

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‘Allegory,’” in Allegory:The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique). He concludes that allegory is both a secret and an elite language, but in either case, it is a language based on meaning, where language points outside of itself to derive its value. However, an alternative translation of the compound might be “other than to speak in the agora,” and this yields a modified definition of allegory: that allegory is other than to speak; to be silent in the agora. The definition I propose suggests that allegory is not articulated in the language that is spoken and whatever it signifies, but in the silence or concealment within language. Allegory directs us toward the structure of appearance in language: what appears there and, more importantly, what does not appear in language, but with or within it. This broader and deeper understanding of allegory is essential for the perception of allegory’s modern faces, as well as for providing new looks at its old familiar faces. Insofar as allegory finds its place in the concealment of language, allegory cannot speak itself or of itself. Allegory as such cannot be articulated in language—but can only be approached by or with language. Allegory needs allegory. Thus it is in poetic or artistic language that we are most likely to approach the phenomenon of allegory, and indeed that has been a privileged locus. Allegories composed with the primary interest of expressing an extrinsic meaning are not the place to understand what allegory is, but rather what it does. An intentionally composed allegory uses the structure that allows two things to be present in the same space at the same time, but it uses this structure to its own ends (at its worst resulting in the kind of pedantic moralizing allegory that has given the general term a bad reputation). However, even in intentionally composed allegory, the essence of allegory as phusis actually brings the work into a more genuine allegorical mode. Spenser is a good example of this. He intentionally uses allegory to offer moral virtues, but the plan is hijacked by nothing other than the poem itself and the force of allegory. The poem has a lot more to say than he means or even than he could possibly say. Allegory is sometimes dismissed on the presumption that its significance can be exhausted because it points to a meaning outside of itself, effecting a closed hermeneutic circle. However, when allegory turns to itself, it reveals a less restricted meaning, perhaps even a surplus of meaning, or a surplus of being allegorical. And this may be the defining characteristic of allegory’s modern face. Allegory is concealed in plain sight, and it is everywhere. But that also means that it is easier to ignore. Allegory shares this modern fate with poetry, as Charles Baudelaire realized and demonstrated. In the nineteenth century, Baudelaire understood

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two essential things about poetry in the emerging epoch of modernity. First, there was no longer a viable place for poetry in this world; second, there had never been a world more in need of poetry. Baudelaire recognized the dilemma in which the modern poet finds himself. The poet is no longer the divinely sanctioned individual, not even the madly possessed individual (Plato’s alternative); the poet is just another self-deluded subject. Fully aware of its limitations, Baudelaire intuitively understood that prose held a certain promise for poetry. Even if the writer of a short story remains at a great disadvantage because deprived of rhythm, the “most useful instrument” for attaining Beauty, Baudelaire realized that the story could be a viable path. Baudelaire acknowledged that “in all literatures efforts have been made, often successful, to create purely poetic short stories.” The most successful of these attempts are “struggles and efforts which serve only to prove the strength of the true means adapted to the corresponding goals” (“New Notes on Edgar Poe, in Selected Writings, 128). As a poet, Baudelaire himself took on this struggle. In the letter to Arsène Houssaye that prefaces the prose poem collection Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire confessed his desire and his failure to write a “purely poetic prose”: As soon as I began the work, I noticed [je m’aperçus] that not only did I remain far from my mysterious and brilliant model, but also that I was doing something (if this can be called some thing) singularly different, an accident that anyone other than me would glory in without doubt, but which cannot but profoundly humiliate a spirit [esprit] which sees as the greatest honor of a poet to accomplish exactly what he has projected to do. (my trans.)

The thick and unresolvable irony of this dedication is precisely its point. The prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris are both the expression of Baudelaire’s despair and the product of his poetic victory. Barbara Johnson identifies the prose poems as evidence of a “second Baudelairian revolution,” although they were not treated as such by Baudelaire. In the book’s difficult-to-interpret Dédicace to Arsène Houssaye, Baudelaire claims to have failed in his effort “to accomplish exactly what he had projected to do.” To read this remark literally is both accurate and misleading. If there is a second revolution in Baudelaire’s prose poems, Johnson asserts, it is not the same kind of revolution as in Les fleurs du mal. It is not about a “supplemental discovery of originality” (Défigurations du

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langage poétique 18; my trans.); hence the odd filial regards to Aloysius Bertrand, his “brilliant model,” in the Dédicace. The revolution occurs at the very foundation of poetry, as a questioning of the differences upon which poetic language has been based, that is, as a questioning of language as such. The “singularly different . . . accident” that Baudelaire acknowledges in the Dédicace” is the subversion “of the very opposition between Imitation and Originality” (Défigurations 20). The object of study is not the prose poem as such, but poetry itself, and ultimately language itself. Johnson overrides the typical understanding of the Dédicace as a veritable manifeste of the poem in prose. Rather, “the Dédicace thus posits less a theory of the poem in prose than [a theory of] the problem of its proper reading. The Dédicace, with all its undecidabilities, invites us to wander [à errer] among the innumerable relations” (23). Johnson suggests that even the Dédicace is a prose poem and already poses the problem that poetry in prose manifests: how to read language literally, yet appreciate what we might call its poetic qualities. The prose poem occupies a place suspended between the figurative language that constitutes poetry and the language we use in ignorance every day. The problem of how to read the prose poem is, in fact, the problem of how to read all literary language as language, how to read all language in its inherent poetic literality. The prose poem brings to appearance both the presence and the absence of poetic language in the world and treats that loss as if it mattered, and mattered in the most profound sense possible for human existence. By comparing the corresponding verse and prose “Chevelure” poems, Johnson demonstrates how Baudelaire was able to separate figurality from poetic language. She shows how the prose version lacks the transporting metaphoricity of the verse poem. The verse poem has a “proliferation of paradigmatic substitutions” that empties the hair of its literal qualities: Ô toison, moutonnant jusque sur l’encolure! Ô boucles! Ô parfum chargé de nonchaloir! Extase! Pour peupler ce soir l’alcôve obscure Des souvenirs dormant dans cette chevelure, Je la veux agiter dans l’air comme un mouchoir! (“La Chevelure,” lines 1–5 in Flowers of Evil, 50) [O fleece, billowing even down the neck! O locks! O perfume charged with nonchalance!

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Allegory as Metonymy:T he Figure without a Face 187 What ecstasy! To people our dark room With memories that sleep within this mane [chevelure] I’ll shake it like a kerchief in the air. (“Head of Hair,” trans. McGowan, in Flowers of Evil 51)]

The word chevelure (hair) does not even appear until the end of the fourth line. As Johnson remarks, the poem begins with an “explosion of figures” and nautical references. “By beginning thus metaphorically midway between the hair and the voyage, the verse poem casts off precisely from an absence of a point of literal departure. At the moment that the reader arrives at ‘cette chevelure,’ he is already, rhetorically, in full voyage” (41). In contrast, the prose poem “Un hemisphere dans une chevelure” begins quite literally. Laisse-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps, l’odeur de tes cheveux, y plonger tout mon visage, comme un homme altéré dans l’eau d’une source, et les agiter avec ma main comme un mouchoir odorant, pour secouer des souvenirs dans l’air. (Oeuvres 252) [Let me breathe, long, long, the smell of your hair, to plunge my face into it, like a thirsty man in the water of a spring, and wave it with my hand like a scented kerchief, in order to rouse memories in the air. (my trans.)]

The prose contains no metaphors. Johnson writes, “The head of hair, metamorphized by the verse, is here named literally, and the perfume . . . becomes here a simple odor. . . . [N]othing transgresses the domain of the possible” (Défigurations 41). She summarizes the difference in terms of the relation to the literal. The verse poem proceeds by an imperceptible progression that eliminates the literality of the hair, while the prose poem maintains a descriptive context that is “literal and banal” (42). And yet the language of the prose poem is not banal. Far from it. By insisting on the contiguous metonymic stages by which the head of hair exceeds its literal limits, by showing the intermediary stages effaced by the quick, powerful metaphors of the verse poem, the prose poem forces attention away from the metaphysical power of language and towards the power of language as such. This is poetic language, nonetheless, stripped bare of its glittering tropological costumes. As Johnson concludes, “the distinction between ordinary language and poetic language . . . is effaced” (54). And it is with this that what she calls the “second Baudelairian revolution” begins.

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188 Allegory as Metonymy: The Figure without a Face It is precisely by its mode of writing the disappearance of poetry that the nonprivilege of the prose poem privileges itself. The prose poem interests us not because it is ordinary, but because its way of being ordinary is strategic. It is impossible to know whether a mark announcing “not marked” is or is not marked. . . . The definition of “marked” is no longer certain. (54)

Thus the prose poem manifests not the difference between poetry and prose as such, but the possibility of prose language as poetic. Johnson returns attention to the structure and function of language as the basis for all poetry. She notes a “moment of crisis” in the nineteenth century, a crisis illuminated in the work of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. However, she emphasizes that it is a momentary crisis, “when the putting in question of a difference becomes a speaking about the difference” (10). Thus, it is no longer just a question about a difference between poetry and prose, but a question about the difference that constitutes all language. The socalled crisis actually returns us to a fundamental truth about language. All language is constituted by an irreconcilable difference between what it says and what it means. In the past, poetry had been a privileged site for the experience of this difference. In Baudelaire’s poem about a woman’s hair, “La Chevelure,” the hair serves as a metaphor for transcendent ideas. Using metaphor in this way, the poem brings into relief the arbitrary nature of language, the difference between word and meaning. Johnson points out that the metaphoric function of language has lost its power to bring two different things together in the same space, at the same time, and thereby to achieve a transcendent effect. Thus allegory, sometimes called “extended metaphor,” seems bound by this same predicament. But poetry (and allegory) is more resilient than that. Johnson asserts that metaphor is replaced by metonymy, and she identifies a “systematic literalization of language” as characteristic of the prose poem (54). The crisis in poetry forces us to return to the significance of the literal sign, and to grant it preference over the abstraction of the signified. Like Hegel’s star-gazing spirit, the poetic soul must also turn its attention back to the material world. The crisis comes about because metaphoric poetry has lost its power to seduce. Johnson compares Baudelaire’s corresponding poems “La Chevelure” and “Un hémisphère dans une chevelure.” “The verse poem tends to empty all ‘literality’ from the hair and to efface the difference between present and past, between here and there” (48). In the prose poem, however, the figurative characteristics are part of the literal

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object. In “Un hémisphère,” the hair is never transformed into the figurative sense, despite the prose poem’s use of figurative images. In the verse poem, the hair becomes an “aromatic forest” and “a sounding harbour where my soul can drink / from great floods subtle tones, perfumes and hues” (lines 8, 16–17; McGowan trans.). The images transport the poet and the reader into a wider world, and we forget about the hair that is the literal foundation of each image. In the prose poem, the hair never disappears.There are figurative references, but they are bound into the literal hair. “[T]he ocean, the caresses, the hearth, the night, the shores are not metamorphoses of the hair but its characteristics” (48). In the absence of powerful transporting metaphors, the prose poem seems less “poetic.” But the metaphors of lyric poetry no longer enjoy this transporting power either. Thus we have the pathetic figure of the poet in Baudelaire’s prose poems. In “Le vieux saltimbanque,” Baudelaire identifies the poet as an alienated figure barely existing at the margin of the marginal, a lone figure at the all-but-forgotten end of a row of carnival booths. The narrative “I” can see the poet and decides eventually to reach toward him, but it is impossible to make contact. The narrator resolves to communicate silently with the poet by leaving a few coins with which he hopes to convey his will. Enfin, je venais de me résoudre à déposer en passant quelque argent sur une de ses planches, espérant qu’il devinerait mon intention. (Oeuvres 249) [Finally, I became resolved to deposit in passing some money on one of the boards, hoping that he would divine my intention. (my trans.)]

This very act once again firmly divides the narrator-poet from the artist, just as the narrator of another prose-poem, “Une mort héroique,” is profoundly separated from the performer Fancioulle. And yet, Baudelaire is reaching toward what is the alienated version of himself. In the old clown, the narratorpoet recognizes himself, but too late: [D]u vieux poëte sans amis, sans famille, sans enfants, dégradé par sa misère et par l’ingratitude publique, et dans la baraque de qui le monde oublieux ne veut pas entrer! (Oeuvre 249) [The old poet without friends, without family, without children, degraded by his misery and by the ingratitude of the public, and in the shanty which the oblivious world does not want to enter. (my trans.)]

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Baudelaire struggles with this split identity of the poet. In both “Une morte héroique” and “Le vieux saltimbanque,” Baudelaire separates the “I” from the object, but it is indisputable that the I and the object are the same being, which is not Baudelaire as an individual but the poet as a poet. And this is the same poet who offered us “flowers of evil.” Johnson has suggested one way that the lyric poet and the prose poet are two faces of the same being, or two beings in the same figure. I suggest that this is an allegorical image. Allegory is not an extended metaphor. Metaphor essentially has a metaphysical structure. A present thing substitutes for an absent thing, and usually the absent thing is the more significant, thus effecting a hierarchical relationship focused on meaning. Metaphor has become the figure by which all language, and especially literary language, tends to be understood. As metaphor, language itself is an empty form. The richness and depth of a metaphor lies in what it is not (its referent) and only secondarily in the language that it is. As long as we pursue metaphysical interpretations in the mode of aesthetics, metaphor serves well as the predominant trope of all language. But there is another way. To find that way we need to stop reading aesthetically. In order to read unaesthetically, we need to stop reading metaphorically. As Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle argued in Fundamentals of Language, “any linguistic sign involves two modes of arrangement” (74), combination (metonymy) and substitution (metaphor). Language really requires both metonym and metaphor in a kind of competition for the expression of meaning. By studying the breakdown of one faculty or the other in human speech in the conditions of aphasia, Jakobson and Halle made some startling observations about these rhetorical devices in literary work. Jakobson realized that metaphor has long been privileged in the study of poetry but also surmised that “metonymy easily defies interpretation,” and this defiance contributes to its neglect. “Not only the tool of the observer but also the object of observation is responsible for the preponderance of metaphor over metonymy in scholarship” (95). While Jakobson and Halle recognized the cause of the prejudice, this did not preclude a rather strong diagnosis: The study of poetical tropes is directed chiefly toward metaphor. The actual bipolarity has been artificially replaced in these studies by an amputated, unipolar scheme, which, strikingly enough, coincides with . . . contiguity disorder. (95)

In other words, literary criticism suffers from a failure to recognize metonymy.4

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Metaphor is the master trope of poetic diction. Metaphor substitutes one thing with another thing with which it arguably shares a similarity or figurality of some kind.This similarity is often only evident once the metaphor has been introduced. The expression of difference within this similarity is what makes poetry interesting. Prose is more aligned with metonymy because prose moves forward by means of contiguous connections between signs. However, Jakobson and Halle suggest that even in prose forms, the metaphoric act of substitution overshadows the contiguity of metonymy. In the act of interpreting prose works, metaphor becomes the dominant trope. In fact, all acts of interpretation are metaphoric in principle, substituting meaning for the literary text. (Hence Northrop Frye’s famous comment in The Anatomy of Criticism that “all commentary is allegorical interpretation” [89].) In order to understand literature, such acts are necessary. In the extreme, however, these acts become a disorder requiring a corrective.5 As Jakobson and Halle suggest, the corrective is a more metonymic approach. The suggestion of metonymy has occasionally surfaced in literary criticism, as in Johnson’s work on Baudelaire (cited above) and tacitly in Maureen Quilligan’s theory of allegory. What is it about metonymy that makes it so difficult to articulate? Why are literary scholars prone to suffer from “contiguity disorder”?6 As Jakobson pointed out, metonymy is more difficult to explain than is metaphor. René Dirven takes up this challenge in “Metonymy and Metaphor: Different Mental Strategies for Conceptualization.” From a linguistic perspective Dirven demonstrates that metaphor and metonymy relate to each other on a continuum (see figure on the next page).The difficulty with metonymy is that at a certain point on the continuum, it becomes figurative (and thus similar to metaphor), while retaining its literal significance as well. The prominence of the figurative element can be so strong as to lead one to confuse metonymy with metaphor. The deciding factor depends on the relationship between the conception domains of signifier and signified. Both metaphor and metonymy entail the mapping of one conceptual domain onto another. However, “in metonymy, two related domains or subdomains are construed as one domain matrix. In metaphor one domain is effaced in the mapping operation” (92). The effaced domain in metaphor is the literal one, that is, the source domain, the domain of the sign. Dirven concentrates on how metonymy can be figurative and thus approach metaphor without losing its metonymic ground. What is interesting is that the figures through which he demonstrates this theory are themselves metonymic constructions.

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linear metonymy

(a)

conjunctive metonymy

(b)

inclusive metonymy

(c)

metaphor

(d)

non-figurative

(e)

figurative

syntagmatic

paradigmatic

In explaining this continuum he adds the descriptor polysemous, as follows: (a) linear metonymy is nonfigurative and not polysemous (b) conjunctive metonymy can be nonfigurative but polysemous (c) conjunctive metonymy can be figurative and polysemous (d) inclusive metonymy is figurative and polysemous (e) metaphor is figurative but need not be polysemous (“Metonymy and Metaphor” 93)

Potentially (but not always) lost in metaphoric figuration is the polysemous feature of language. If polysemy is retained in a metaphor, however, it is retained in the target domain, not the source domain (what an allegorical writer would call the literal level). In Dirven’s scheme, the third and fourth types would account for the figurative power of allegory that remains connected to its literal domain. Metaphor essentially presumes a hierarchical relationship between language and meaning, and this hierarchy actually leads to a reduction in referents. The hierarchical implications of metaphor are quite prominent in traditional notions of allegory (understood as “extended metaphor” to a greater or lesser degree).When allegory is conceived as metaphor, the meaning tends to be constricted, leading to the limited view of allegory as a closed signifying system. In the “levels of meaning” approach to allegory, the hierarchy has become entrenched. As Maureen Quilligan points out, the “very word [level] signals our tendency to think about allegory in terms of a vertically organized spatial hierarchy” (Language of Allegory 27). The base level is the literal. The next level “up” is called the metaphoric or allegorical, and it provides the “real meaning” of the literal words. In the traditional four-fold scheme, above the metaphoric level is the moral meaning, and at the “highest” level

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there is the anagogical relationship to the sacred or spiritual. A close reading of a literary text reveals its meaning. An application of that meaning yields a moral lesson, and reveals the work’s transcendent value. The literal level virtually vanishes from this progression, despite the fact that it supports the entire edifice.7 What Jakobson and Halle point out is that we predominantly read literature metaphorically, beyond its materiality. That is, we read literature metaphysically.8 Jakobson and Halle were following Ferdinand de Saussure’s lead in their study, and he described metaphor as a construction in absentia, while metonymy exists in presentia (described in Fundamentals of Language 75). As a system of substitution, metaphor is a mode of representation. If allegory is conceived as an extended metaphor, then it, too, depends on a system based on the representation of what is absent. But allegory, even more than other types of poetry and literature, also depends heavily on a contiguous narrative. When we study allegorical texts, the first move is often to separate the contiguous elements. We break down the narrative into its constituent parts (the personified characters, for example9), and it is the parts we study. The parts have meanings, reassembled into an allegorized whole. Our interpretations are usually based on these discrete meanings. In proceeding thus, the metaphoric is privileged over the metonymic. Jakobson and Halle point out that we tend to avoid metonymy because it defies such metaphysical interpretative gestures. Metonymy is not a metaphoric trope, but a contrary force pulling language in another direction, what Quilligan calls the horizontal. Quilligan argues that the “vertical conceptualization of allegory and its emphasis upon disjunct ‘levels’ is absolutely wrong as a matter of practical fact” (Language of Allegory 28; emphasis added). We read allegories (even if they are visual forms), and reading is a linear process. Quilligan argues that “it would be more precise to say therefore that allegory works horizontally, rather than vertically, so that meaning accretes serially” (28). Although Quilligan never uses the term, what she is describing is a metonymic process rather than a metaphorical one.10 She ascribes the erroneous vertical conception of allegory to tradition, “passed down to the Renaissance with all the authority of classical precedent.”This conception of a “great distance between the literal level and the allegorical significance had grown out of a special kind of literary criticism” (29). Allegory thus became the “basis of all textual interpretation whatsoever,” as Ernst Robert Curtius remarked (quoted in Language 29). Quilligan sets out to challenge this tradi-

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tion by reading allegorical texts linearly instead of hierarchically. She does not seem to realize that she is proposing and offering a metonymic reading of allegorical texts, but the trope of metonymy seems to provide a more appropriate figure for her project. As I hope the various readings in this book have shown, the phenomenological structure of allegory is not metaphoric. I would now like to suggest that allegory is metonymic in the way that Jakobson and Halle describe “similarity disorder” as the polar opposite of “contiguity disorder.” The aphasic who cannot comprehend metaphoric language in its abstraction (even the most basic abstraction of a linguistic sign in the absence of the thing) compensates by articulating a contiguous series of connections to construct a “meaning” that is in fact the literal meaning. Jakobson and Halle cite a case study in which a patient “failed to recall the name for ‘black,’” and instead, “he described it as ‘what you do for the dead’; this he shortened to ‘dead’” (Fundamentals of Language 83). For this type of aphasic, all language is construed in the present tense, and all language is truly allegorical (and precisely not metaphysical). Without seeing anything black, the aphasic cannot provide the absent word. Absent object, absent name, but not absent understanding. The aphasic understands, but he cannot speak that understanding except metonymically, or allegorically. Jakobson and Halle cite another case that demonstrates understanding without verbalization. “Told to repeat the word ‘no,’ Head’s patient replied, ‘No, I don’t know how to do it.’ While spontaneously using the word in the context of his answer (‘No, I don’t . . . ’), he could not produce the purest form of equational predication, the tautology a = a: ‘no’ is ‘no’” (81). The aphasic condition provides a fundamental insight into the phenomenological construction of allegory as an intrinsically (rather than extrinsically) significant sign system. Because metonymy is not a metaphorical trope, it is impossible to situate a metonymical approach within the hermeneutic process. Metonymy is not primarily about “finding meaning” (by interpreting words); it is about understanding the structure of meaning (by focusing on words themselves). In The Language of Allegory, Quilligan studies the “phenomenon of the pun” in allegorical texts and through the intrinsic polysemy of words themselves, the polysemy that makes puns possible. In puns, “words mean exactly what they say they mean” (35); they just happen to mean two different things. By extension, “the plots of all allegorical narratives therefore unfold as investigations into the literal truth inherent in individual words” (33). By focusing on the phenomenology of the pun, Quilligan argues, as I have, that the

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particular linguistic phenomenon of allegory is primarily and intrinsically structural (33). By parsing the structural components rather than the signifying components, we are engaging in a very different mode of reading and understanding texts, a mode that is comprehensive without providing much in the way of interpretation. As Jakobson and Halle asserted, metonymy defies interpretation, and it demands a radically other mode of reading. In the foreword to her book, Quilligan admits that “the central paradox of the problem of allegory is that generic allegories form that class of works which it is best not to study with the tools of allegorical criticism” (20). Allegories cannot be allegorized into a hierarchical structure of meaning, and if they are, they become something other than allegories. However, allegories can (and should) be read allegorically, which is, I think, what Quilligan is trying to do.To read allegorically is to read metonymically rather than metaphorically. To read allegorically is to read without a metaphysical gesture, or at least to read while resisting this gesture. To read allegorically is to read unaesthetically. Like all metaphysical thought, Aesthetics works through a process of metaphoric substitutions, basically telling stories about things that it judges as beautiful (or not).11 This tendency is especially evident when philosophy comes up against ideas that can only be expressed by allegory or analogy, such as Plato’s cave, or Hegel’s Calvary. Philosophy denies the metaphoric construction of this act of substitution by insisting on its own narrative. In Hegel, the art work is only significant insofar as Spirit manifests itself there. The aesthetic narrative relates the appearance of Spirit in works of art, which serve a mediating function. But art is indifferent to both Hegel’s philosophy and to the Spirit that philosophy finds in works of art. Art allows the aesthetic dialectic to stake its claim, but art itself remains unaffected. Kant at least recognized the indifference of the work of art. Like any other thing, the artwork is unknowable in itself. Art is understood as if its metaphor gave us access to the thing itself. But it does not. Allegory is not a story about something else, something other. Allegory is itself the other about which it speaks, the kind of story that tells itself and judges itself. Allegory describes the language that Charles Baudelaire called for in the “best criticism”: I sincerely believe that the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic; not a cold analytical type of criticism, which, claiming to explain everything, is devoid of hatred and love, and deliberately rids itself of

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196 Allegory as Metonymy: The Figure without a Face any trace of feeling, but, since a fine painting is nature reflected by an artist, the best critical study, I repeat, will be the one that is the painting reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. Thus the best accounts of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy. (part 1 of The Salon of 1846, “What Is the Good of Criticism?” in Selected Writings 50)

Baudelaire proposed a criticism with a metonymic structure, emphasizing a sort of contiguity with the work of art rather than a disjoined judgment of it. In the poem “Le Masque” Baudelaire expresses this idea by reading Ernst Christophe’s sculpture “La Comédie humaine” (later renamed “Le Masque” by the artist to honor the poem—art illuminating art illuminating art). As one approaches this sculpture from the front, it seems a beautiful woman, with one arm wrapped around her head, a faint smile on her face.12 Baudelaire begins, Contemplons ce trésor de grâces florentines; Dans l’ondulation de ce corps musculeux L’Élégance et La Force abondent, soeurs divines. Cette femme, morceau vraiment miraculeux, Divinement robuste, adorablement mince, Est fait pour trôner sur des lits somptueux, Et charmer les loisirs d’un pontife ou d’un prince. (lines 1–7, in Oeuvres) [Let us contemplate this treasure of Florentine grace; in the undulation of its muscular body Elegance and Force abound, divine sisters. This woman, a really miraculous morsel, divinely robust, admirably slim, was made to be enthroned in sumptuous beds, and to charm the pleasures of a pope or a prince. (my trans.)]

The following stanza continues to relish the features of the statue, “the fine and voluptuous smile” and her “long look, sly, languorous and mocking.” The image is so enticing, it beckons a closer look: “Let us approach and turn around this beauty” (16). But then the division of the image is revealed. At first, one thinks that perhaps the sculpture is some kind of monster with two heads, for at the top of the body is a second face: —Mais non! Ce n’est qu’un masque, un décor suborneur, Ce visage éclairé d’une exquise grimace (20–21)

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Allegory as Metonymy:T he Figure without a Face 197 [—But no! It is only a mask, a bribing decoration, the face lit by an exquisite grimace.]

When Baudelaire writes, “It is only a mask,” the nearest reference is the second head, or rather the two-headedness (“le monstre bicéphale,”19). The reader hesitates—which face is the mask? The ambiguity of the pronoun replicates the ambiguity of the statue.The statue has two faces. “The Human Comedy” (the statue’s original title, translated) is no mere “allegory of human life,” but the work itself is the allegory that is human being. Christophe’s original title for the sculpture plays with its words.The mask plays on the dramatic representation of human happiness. “La Comédie humaine” also calls to mind the better-known comedy of Dante. In the Commedia, we begin in a dark wood, emerge into a heavenly light, and find peace in our image as the reflection of divinity. As argued in chapter 3, the reader undergoes this experience in reading the poem. This sequence is ironically repeated in the experience of the sculpture “La Comédie humaine.” We begin in darkness, but we do not know it. As we move closer to the object of our desire, we are enlightened with a confounding obscurity. And we find our own image reflected there. The actual face is the hidden face, the concealed. In this statue we experience our own phusis. As with the figure of Odysseus at the court of Alkinöos, the statue captures the moment of emergence, the figure being both what it is and what it is not. Baudelaire attempts to capture this experience in his poem by creating confusion through the ambiguity of the fourth stanza.The recognition that the statue has a face and a mask does little to resolve the confused experience. We are captured in the moment of emergence, and we notice (like Alkinöos) the tears on the actual face, and we want to know her other story. We indulge in the self-reflection of the poet, who is either conversing with himself or giving voice to our thoughts when he asks, —Mais pourquoi pleure-t-elle? Elle, beauté parfaite Qui mettrait à ses pieds le genre humain vaincu, Quel mal mystérieux ronge son flanc d’athlète? (29–31) [—But why does she cry? She, perfect beauty who could put at her feet the conquered human race, what mysterious evil gnaws at her athletic flank?]

She is a being both concealed and revealed, and we search for a reason, an explanation, an interpretation. The poet gives us a nonanswer:

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Elle pleure, insensé, parce qu’elle a vécu! Et parce qu’elle vit! Mais ce qu’elle deplore Surtout, ce qui la fait frémir jusqu’aux genoux, C’est que demain, hélas! il faudra vivre encore! Demain, après-demain et toujours!—comme nous! (32–36) [She cries, fool, because has lived! And because she lives [still]! But what she deplores above all, that which makes her tremble to her knees, it is tomorrow, alas! It will find her still alive! Tomorrow, the day after and always!— like us!]

In “Le Masque” Baudelaire trumps the Romantic desire to coincide with nature and thereby to claim immortality.We claim immortality in art not because art is a metaphor for nature, but because art is a metonymy of our own being. Contrary to the Romantic notion that human beings identify with the immortality of nature through art, Baudelaire asserts that art reflects our own peculiar temporal condition.With his emphasis on actual life and living, Baudelaire seems to suggest that human beings have more in common with art than with nature. However, once art is aestheticized, mediated by a process that subjugates art for us, it no longer reveals this affinity with the essence of being human. When art is “for us” (the quintessential Hegelian construct), it is no longer what Heidegger terms “the highest manner in which truth obtains existence for itself ” (“Origin of the Work of Art” 80). Heidegger’s alternative to the Hegelian dialectic is phusis, art as the emergence of truth. For Heidegger, truth is not something that exists in works of art as “the beautiful.” Rather, the appearance of truth is beautiful. “Thus, the beautiful belongs to the advent of truth, truth’s taking of its place” (81). The antithesis to the Hegelian conception of art (as object in a dialectic relation to a subject) would require a different experience of the artwork than the experience of aesthetic appropriation. In this alternate approach, art is not for us. Art is only for itself, and we meet art at the limit we share with it. We can “understand” art by understanding what we as human beings have in common with art (and not what our understanding of art has in common with our understanding of nature).13 Literature and criticism have long operated under the presumption that the “I” is a metaphor in which the person of the poem substitutes for the

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person of the “author” (actual or constructed) and simultaneously substitutes for the person of the reader who reads “I” in the poem. In his critical writing, Baudelaire called for a new type of criticism.This criticism-art accounts for the way in which art has always had a relationship to itself and to human beings, especially when the “I” speaks in poetry.The poetic I is a particularly difficult metaphor because there is no discernable difference between the literal signifier and the figurative one. I is I.The trope of the poetic I depends on an understanding that what appears identical is really different. I is not I. In his own application of the Saussurian linguistic operations of the signifier, Jacques Lacan remarks on this problem more generally. “There can be no relations between the signifier and itself, the peculiarity of the signifier being the fact that it is unable to signify itself, without producing some error in logic” (Four Fundamental Concepts 249; emphasis added). To say that the lyric I is a metaphor of an actual I is thus suspect. Rather, it is better to say that this relationship is metonymic, because as a metonym it can signify itself as well as something other. The metonym gives voice to the illogical language of art. As Jakobson and Halle realized, metonymy resists interpretation (Fundamentals of Language 95), and that is because its structure is illogical. However, this is the very illogic that underlies all logic (according to Heidegger), in poetry and in philosophy. Lacan also points out that underlying every metaphoric substitution is a metonymic relationship. The “occulted signifier remain[s] present through its (metonymic) connexion with the rest of the chain” (Écrits 157). In the literary realm, and attempting to provide an objective definition, Thomas McLaughlin defines metaphor as “a transfer of meaning from the word that properly possesses it to another word which belongs to some shared category of meaning” that therefore works as a “compressed analogy” (“Figurative Language” 83). Without recognizing it, McLaughlin also describes an underlying metonymic structure through the shared category of meaning. Metonymy makes metaphor possible through this “shared category.” Metaphor requires a transfer of meaning from one mode to another.Thus, poetic metaphors transfer literal images into a figurative realm. Literary criticism transfers those figures back into new literal images, and the literal images back into figures of meaning. Despite similarities, the literal and figurative maintain their distinct modes of being. Metaphor retains the rift that makes its meaning possible through a “hypocritical” identity, an intentional disjunction between appearance and actuality or an act of substitution. In metaphor, the signifier and the signified are always sliding away from each

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other. In metonymy, the signifying images maintain their connections while sustaining the limit between them, providing a security by which to gaze into the rift within language as such.With the strength of the literal, the allegorical poet forces us to engage with language on its own terms by resisting the gestures toward meaning and metaphor. We are forced to confront the rift within words and language, the rift that is language. There is no face for absence, for nonbeing, but nonbeing must appear for there to be Being as such, Being that embraces all that is and all that is not. Concealment, or absence, is the basis upon which presence (unconcealment) is thought. Being must be thought in the thinking together of concealment and unconcealment as appearance, as present and absent. Franz Kafka gives us a way to read this appearance of absence and to elude, even if only in the moment, the metaphorics of the metaphysics of presence. Kafka is the quintessential allegorical poet of prose. Kafka (a metonym itself for the historical person with whose works the name is contiguous) is the nonface of the absent presence of allegory. Kafka’s particular mode of allegory reveals the structure of allegory as such. In this way, and not as an interpretation of allegory’s meaning, Kafka’s work is often an allegory of allegory. Benjamin wrote surprisingly little on Kafka, but he offers one guiding thought in a letter to Gershom Gerhard Scholem. “To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. . . . There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized this failure” (Illuminations 145). Kafka’s “failure” is only a failure relative to the metaphysical privilege of modern subjectivity. Kafka’s work does not relate to the metaphysics that judges it. This “irrelativity” gives this failure its strength, or as Benjamin puts it (perhaps borrowing an image from The Trial’s famous parable “Before the Law”), its “radiant serenity.” Characteristic of this failure to be metaphysical and metaphoric, in Kafka memory becomes something to which we are inclined, but which we no longer remember. There are memories in Kafka, but nothing is recollected in them. They are always of an irretrievable past, and they are most often the memory of community.The literary work gestures toward community, more emphatically (and more frantically perhaps) than any political, ethical, or metaphysical project is capable of doing.The literary work always fails to deliver the community it has promised, but it gives us hope. Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community repeats this statement, already announced by Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and echoed in works of literature and phi-

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losophy that circumnavigate the profound mourning, some call it negativity, or perhaps it is just the complexity that pervades modern existence. Kafka also remembers solitude, the singular aspect that is not subject to subjectivity and individuality. This is not the solitude of an individual but of a singular being who has the capacity to be with other beings and to incline towards them without identifying with them and without differentiating itself from them. Nancy has theorized the difference between the individual and the singular being, a difference that must be remembered before any thought of community can commence. Whereas the singular being can incline toward others (Nancy calls this inclination the clinamen), the individual can only be immanent with others, and immanence precludes community. The immanent individual is “the absolutely detached for-itself, taken as origin and certainty,” the absolute subject. The absolute must be the absolute of its own absoluteness, or not be at all. . . . To be absolutely alone, it is not enough that I be so; I must also be alone being alone—and this of course is contradictory. The logic of the absolute violates the absolute. It implicates it in a relation that it refuses and precludes by its essence. (3–4)

Conversely, as Nancy acutely points out, “the question of community is markedly absent from the metaphysics of the subject” (4). The absence of the question has been tacitly interpreted as indicative of its superfluousness. Seemingly, the question does not need to be asked, for it is “self-evident” that in identity there is community. This is a ruse, a convenient misrepresentation of community as identity.The Subject is an immanent being in a relation of immanence to other immanent beings, all of whom are always alone. This solitude arises from an absence that interrupts the professed absolution of the Subject. Kafka writes this absence, this silence within the Subject. The challenge is to learn to read allegorically rather than hermeneutically, “il-logically” rather than philosophically (that is, aesthetically). We can learn to read allegorically by reading texts that resist the standard gestures of hermeneutic interpretation and aesthetics. Heidegger has done this with philosophy, and in his wake, so have Derrida, Blanchot, and others in modern philosophy who believe that philosophy and poetry “stand in the same order.” Kafka is a favorite example in this poetic-philosophical register, and Kafka’s work offers an enigmatic challenge to the best of literary critics. Kafka gives us memories of events that have not happened and images of things that do not exist. And yet, something in Kafka presents itself to us as

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something we instinctively understand (giving us the adjective Kafkaesque). In our attempts to grasp that intuitive understanding, the work of Kafka is objectified. It becomes other to us in order that we may interpret it, and once we have interpreted the work, it becomes a reflection of ourselves, as we try to explain what the work means. Unfortunately—or rather, fortunately—Kafka doesn’t really permit that satisfaction. Every reading of Kafka is interrupted by Kafka. No interpretation is neatly executed. Some detail will not fit and threatens the entire interpretive edifice with collapse. Kafka’s figures often have no face, no name, and this is, I think, what Lévinas actually tries to imagine with his figure of the face, of the Other, a figure that appears by way of language although not contained in it. “Language cannot encompass the other: the other the concept of whom we are using at this very moment, is not invoked as a concept, but as a person.” But that person is not the face: “The one to whom I speak is further back, behind the concept I communicate to him.” And there is no “common plane,” no commonality between the speaker and the other, the interlocutor. “It is a relation with a being who, in a certain sense, is not in relation to me – or, if you like, who is in relation with me only inasmuch as he is entirely in relation to himself ” (“The I and the Totality” 32–33). This relationship with the absolutely other is philosophically difficult to imagine because it is a relation and not a relation. However, fiction can clarify its truth. It often seems frustratingly but fruitfully hopeless to work on Kafka, because he says so much more than he—or we—can say. Or conversely, and just as illogically, he insists on silence in his saying. In most Kafka stories there is a thing or a person, something tangible, upon which to base the inexplicable events that unfold, even if that thing remains itself inexplicable.The castle never appears, but still serves as an ominous and omnipresent force to which one can attribute the perverse actions of people and institutions. The castle is constructed by the power of perception. In The Trial the image of the law is abstract, but within the narrative, the abstraction of the law is figured by means of a parable. Kafka insisted that the specific identity of creatures, like the insect in The Metamorphosis, should remain undetermined. If the creature in that tale is assumed to be a cockroach, this already imparts a negative value to the metamorphosis, misleading the reader into associations with scavenging and dark corners. Kafka’s images are not metaphors, and therefore his work is impossible to interpret (definitively) because it resists metaphorization; it resists meaning. It is.

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In Kafka, Benjamin heard tradition, the tradition of truth and wisdom (“the epic side of truth”), a tradition which has decayed into a ruin, from which another wisdom emerges. Benjamin calls it “transmissibility” or the “haggadic element” of truth, a transmission or a commentary without an object. Benjamin notes that Kafka’s works are parabolic, but “it is their misery and their beauty that they had to become more than parables” (Illuminations 143). Kafka’s stories are not parables of something. Even a rather insightful effort, like Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, ends up appropriating Kafka, focusing on the individual in Kafka and forgetting the singularity that draws us toward these works, not only Kafka’s singularity but the singularity of his figures. Although they incline toward us, we can never touch them. If we were to touch the hunger artist, he would disintegrate in our grasp. If we were to listen for the piping song of Josephine of the mouse folk, we would be deafened by silence. If we were so much as to approach the creature who burrows, it would surely die of shock. We cannot touch, but we can incline ourselves toward this personified (or animalized) absence. In the singular being capable of inclination Nancy offers hope, the hope of a community that he calls “literary communism.” He uses the qualifier literary because literature or writing, écriture, is the voice that interrupts the myths of absolution, because literature “gives voice to the common,” a voice without a body, a voice that does not speak for itself (or for us). Since being-in-common is nowhere, and does not subsist in a mythic space that could be revealed to us, literature does not give it a voice: rather it is being-in-common that is literary (or scriptuary). (Inoperative Community 64)

Of all his writings, Kafka believed only six worthy of preserving. He offered no explanation. The works he named were “The Judgment,” “The Stoker,” Metamorphosis, “In the Penal Colony,” “A Country Doctor,” and “The Hunger Artist.” These are not stories about community. There is only the rather desperate hope for a being-in-common. “Community” is a symbolic concept of totality, and thus it is necessarily constituted by allegory. Allegorically, being-in-common must be thought other than as community. As Nancy suggests, that thinking is literary (or poetic). The clinamen is fundamental to Being, and a place must be cleared for it. ‘Literature’ . . . would designate that singular ontological quality that gives being in common; that does not hold it in reserve, before or after commu-

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nity, as an essence of man, of God or of the State achieving its fulfillment in communion, but that rather makes for a being that is only when shared in common, or rather whose quality of being, whose nature and structure are shared (or exposed). (64)

The “literary world” designates a distinct ontological existence. It is the ontology of the image, constituted by what Lévinas has described as “an ambiguous commerce with reality” and has attributed to allegory (“Reality and Its Shadow” 135). Nancy locates this “other world” in the rupture of the absolute, the rupture that breaks apart and fragments the myth of totality.14 For Lévinas, “[t]ranscendence is what turns the face toward us,” but “[t]he face breaks the system” (“The I” 34). Literature is a phantasmenon, that which appears without showing itself because it cannot otherwise appear. Unavoidably, allegory is the structure of literature, and as this structure it constitutes our hope for being-in-common. The inclination, the clinamen, has the structure of allegory in which two distinct singularities can be held together, maintained in the between of being-with one another; and, as revealed in art, in the character Odysseus and in “Le Masque,” it is the experience of oneself as other and self. The allegorical structure of this inclination will in turn reveal something about allegory, something that cannot be revealed in anything other than literature or art. Allegory is subject to its own exigency. It cannot appear other than allegorically, in something that it is not but with which it shares a limit. Allegory is not literature, but it appears in literature and in figures that personify literature. Kafka might himself be one such figure, but the figures in Kafka’s work are more illuminating. The figure who appears again and again in Kafka is the solitary figure who is not an individual but a singularity, the complement to the individual. Baudelaire suggested that the poet could speak other than the crowd by speaking like the crowd. Kafka simply speaks without any attention to the crowd. Benjamin aptly and simply explains this: “Kafka lives in a complementary world” (Illuminations 143). And he lives in this world alone. Kafka lives under the law of literature, and he is not willing to abide by any other. The protagonists in his stories are not subjects. Indeed, they are often not human. Even though anthropomorphized, these figures are not subjects, not individuals, but singularities. Benjamin understands Kafka’s solitude (perhaps because it was also his own) and the apparent prophecy of Kafka’s singularity that was not “farsightedness or ‘prophetic vision,’” but a listening;

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“Kafka listened to tradition” (143). What Kafka heard was an almost imperceptible murmur. Kafka’s singular contribution is to offer a “complement” to a world capable of destroying itself. Benjamin thus concluded: The long and short of it is that apparently an appeal had to be made to the forces of this tradition if an individual (by the name of Franz Kafka) was to be confronted with that reality of ours which realizes itself theoretically, for example, in modern physics, and practically in the technology of modern warfare. . . . [T]his reality can virtually no longer be experienced by an individual, and Kafka’s world . . . is the exact complement of this earth which is preparing to do away with the inhabitants of this planet on a considerable scale. (143)

Kafka split open the indivisible totality of the Subject as scientists were soon to split the atom. Benjamin was witnessing world destruction first hand in 1938, but he resisted the temptation to find in Kafka a prophet, a seer, and he also resisted any kind of identification with Kafka. In Kafka, Benjamin found a listener, another listener who could hear “the most indistinct sounds,” even silence. Kafka could make this silence heard by writing it.Writing is always silent, but there remains an internal “reading aloud” that accompanies most writing, and the chatter of critique and commentary is incessant. Kafka hushes the chatter, and the reading aloud becomes rhythmic. Kafka is a storyteller, and he tells stories, as all storytellers do, of far-away lands and exotic beings. The only difference is that the distant and the different is our own world revealed in its concealment. Kafka grants us a glimpse of this “other” world. Usually we call it “fiction.” Differently, but similarly to Dante and Spenser, Kafka shows us that there is something more real in the fictive world than the actual one. We have the opportunity to hear something other in literary form. In literature, poetically human beings dwell on the earth. The ontological difference is neither temporal nor spatial, and literature is the place of this difference. Kafka’s story “Josefine die Sängerin, oder Das Volk der Mäuse” (“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”) seems to be about music and piping among the community of the mouse folk, a people not musical by nature and doing well all but without music. The entire story wavers between superlative praise for Josephine and a generalized indifference to her performance, and periodically, and ultimately, it raises the question of whether indeed she sang at all. The story is about the question of music, asking what

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it is that defines music, and answering that question, finally, with silence (Stummheit). The story of the mouse folk ends when Josephine suddenly disappears, and the narrator contemplates the impact of the withdrawal of Josephine’s singing, for the one thing it seemed to do was to gather the community together. Indeed, Josephine insisted on gathering a large crowd, and she would even poise herself to sing but refuse to begin until the crowd had grown sufficiently large. When Josephine stands to sing, “it is not so much a performance of songs as an assembly of the people, and an assembly where except for the small piping voice in front there is complete stillness” (Complete Stories 367, Schriften und Fragmente 2:361).15 Once Josephine has vanished, the narrator can remember only the silence. It will not be easy for us, for how is it possible for our gatherings to take place in perfect silence [volliger Stummheit]? Still, were they not silent even with Josephine? (376, emphasis added; 2:376 )

The story opens with the laudatory words, “Unsere Sängerin heißt Josefine, wie sie nicht gehört hat, kennt nicht die Macht des Gesanges” (2:350); “Our singer is called Josephine; whoever has not heard her, does not know the power of song” (360). However, the story not only reveals an increasing disquietude about the power of song, but by the time Josephine has vanished, we have not heard a single note (or, the narrator has not even described a note for us to hear, in our willing suspension of disbelief). The narrator has proven himself a suitable representative for the mouse folk, and for Josephine. He speaks silence.The mouse folk are unmusical, but they have a tradition of singing. “In the old days our people did sing . . . and some songs have actually survived, which, it is true, no one can now sing” (351, 2:361)—not even, or especially not, Josephine. There is a question of whether Josephine sings at all. The narrator confides that “among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine’s singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary,” and immediately asks the pertinent question, “Is it in fact singing at all?”The mouse folk know that her singing does not conform to the tradition of the old songs—which have survived but cannot be sung. Indeed, it seems that Josephine “pipes” just like any other mouse, or even pipes with skill perhaps a bit below average, or pipes not at all. The idea that Josephine does not really sing, and does not even pipe particularly well, leaves the question of her tremendous effect. If it can be established that Josephine is only a poor piper or a nonpiper, “that would merely clear the ground for the real riddle which needs solving, the enor-

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mous influence she has” (352, 361). Nonetheless, the story continues about her piping, or singing, or her standing open-mouthed wherever she pleases until a sufficient crowd gathers, and the story ends when Josephine simply vanishes, and even the memory of her singing is questioned. Was her piping notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it even in her lifetime more than a simple memory [Erinnerung], was it not rather because Josephine’s singing was already past losing in this way that our people in their wisdom prized it so highly? (376, 2:376)

The entire story has folded in on itself. Kafka has done something truly remarkable. He has written the allegory of silence and at the same time shown that silence appears allegorically, in the appearance of singing that is not sung, in the telling of a story that is not told. “Josephine the Singer” is an allegory of silence: the story does not refer to silence, does not point to it as its meaning, but silence appears there. Kafka does not offer us causes or meanings, but merely says what is. Is hungering work? A hunger artist says that it is, but how? What does he do?16 Hungering produces nothing and causes nothing. What is its reward? Hungering has no force; it is the absence of force, the absence of will and desire. Like the hunger artist who can no longer hunger, the singer can no longer sing. This impotence is not particularly modern. Kafka is not prophetic. He simply sees the world in its concealment, in all that it is not but pretends to be. Kafka’s “prophecy” is just as much hindsight. In Plato’s Republic, the philosophers can no longer philosophize. Like Plato himself, they must tell stories, “severe rather than amusing” (3.398b). They must remember events that never happened and refer to a place that does not exist.There is only the cave. In book 7, the philosopher-king is required to return to the cave from whence he apparently emerged but really has never left (520c). It is his duty and his calling, his place in the Republic.When Glaucon wonders if it is just that the “best natures” should be compelled to “live an inferior life,” Socrates reminds him: “You have again forgotten my friend, that the law is not concerned with the special happiness of any class in the state, but is trying to produce this condition in the city as a whole, harmonizing and adapting the citizens . . . and requiring them to impart to one another any benefit which they are severally able to bestow upon the community” (520a). The Republic is nothing other than an attempt to think community, to devalue the individual in favor of a greater organism, the Republic.17 The philosopher-kings do not reign in the realm of ideas. The cave of shadows is

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their kingdom, and they will rule there not because they know the eidos but because of a keener vision in the darkness. Socrates assures these imaginary kings, “For once habituated, you will discern [the obscure things there] infinitely better than the dwellers there, . . . and so our city will be governed by us and you with waking minds” (520c-d). Plato does not write philosophy. He writes dialogues, plays in the theater of the mind, and philosophy appears there. Philosophy only appears in what it is not, and that is why it appears in literature. Literature has the same structure, except intensified, because literature appears in literature without being identical with it. If all language has an implicit and unavoidable allegorical structure, literary language is doubly allegorical—literature is an allegory of allegory itself. Therefore, what literature can tell us about itself, about its language, provides the greatest insights about ourselves because we are who we are by virtue of language. In Kafka’s posthumously published story “Der Bau,” or “The Burrow,” we are invited once again into a cave, into the darkness, which is privileged and secret. In “The Burrow” it takes a tremendous effort to go up into the light as well as to return to the darkness. This is not because the darkness itself is inferior, but because the threshold between the two worlds is almost impossible to cross. Dwelling within, the creature avoids the entrance,18 because it is a “defect” in the construction and danger emanates from it. If I merely walk in the direction of the entrance, even though I may be separated from it by several passages and rooms, I believe already in sensing an atmosphere of great danger. . . .Yes, the mere thought of the door itself, the end of the domestic protection, brings such feelings with it. (Complete Stories 588, Schriften und Fragmente 2:332)

To leave the burrow requires an effort both physically and mentally exhausting. At the very threshold where the moss conceals the real entrance to the burrow, there is but one final effort, “a little push with the head,” “noch ein Ruck des Kopfes,” and the creature is out, in der Fremde, into the unknown. But even this requires great effort, and the only obstacle to turning back is the thought of wending through the labyrinth again. This place beneath the moss door has its own curious comfort. In the moment of his darkest terror, the creature will return here and find comfort in the stillness. Deep stillness [Tiefe Stille]; how lovely it is here, outside there nobody troubles about my burrow, everybody has his own affairs, which have no connection with me. . . . Here under the moss covering is perhaps the only

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Allegory as Metonymy:T he Figure without a Face 209 place in my burrow now where I can listen for hours and hear nothing. (621, 2:352)

But something disturbs the quiet of the burrow, which has been designed explicitly with silence as its objective. There is a barely audible whistle, or a piping, which seems to modulate, although barely, within the creature’s imagination. He has become unavoidably attuned to it, listening for the sound even when he does not hear it initially, and tormenting himself when he finally discerns it. This sound haunts him only after his return from die Fremde. Perhaps the creature has incorporated this heightened sense in the world above, and that explains why he can hear what was inaudible before. As in Plato, the realm of light has enhanced the philosopher-king’s senses, bringing him a keener vision that does not bring happiness, but torment. While Plato admits that the philosopher-kings will not want to leave the realm of light, he is silent as to whether an infinitely better discernment of obscure things is a gift or a curse, and recalling the pharmakon of the Phaedrus, most likely it is both. The turn back is just as difficult, if not more so, for the creature to return to his burrow. A bit like Plato’s philosopher-king, the creature admits that he has been “spoiled by seeing for such a long time everything that happened around the entrance,” but unlike the philosopher, the creature is drawn downwards. It is not the enlightened world that fascinates him, but the goings-on about the threshold between this world and the burrow. And yet, the creature hesitates. “I find great difficulty in summoning the resolution to carry out the actual descent,” he says, and indeed pages of torment and anguish intervene between the decision to descend and the final descent, which is, like the ascent through the labyrinth, thoroughly exhausting in both body and mind. And then, too exhausted to be any longer capable of thought, my head hanging, my legs trembling with fatigue, half asleep, feeling my way rather than walking, I approach the entrance, slowly raise the moss covering, slowly descend, leaving the door open in my distraction for a needlessly long time, and presently remember my omission, and get out again to make it good. . . . Only in this state, and in this state alone, can I achieve my descent. (Complete Stories 593–94, 602; Schriften und Fragmente 2:336, 341)

The passage through this threshold, both going and coming, lies at the core of this story.

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Initially, as readers or hearers of Kafka’s story, we become comfortable in this burrow and charmed by the eccentric creature who has implicitly invited us into the maze of passages, explained the intricate architecture, taken us out and brought us back again. We are just settling in again when an intrusion begins, the intrusion of the slightest of noises, “ein kaum hörbares Zischen,” an almost imperceptible whistling, or perhaps ein zischende Geräusch. From this moment on there is no rest, only exhaustion, and it is almost as if the creaturely host would like nothing better than to be rid of his listeners because he has to keep explaining things and justifying things that are neither explicable nor justifiable.We might even ask if we are the whistler, “the beast,” as the Muirs have translated the more banal German word das Tier. As readers of this tale, we are no longer welcome. In the story of Josephine, the singer finally vanishes, and even the memory of song is called into question. In “The Burrow” it is the audience that should vanish. There is a storyteller who finally wants to tell a story to no one, without anyone to witness it. He fails. Everywhere he goes, every turn, every safe haven, even the castle keep itself, is exposed, unprotected, open to the assault of . . . the reader, the listener. The creature is caught in the threshold between two entirely different worlds, that of the reader and that of the writer. Only on the threshold does it find peace, but it cannot remain there. Instead, it survives only by scurrying between one world and the other. Once over the threshold, the creature could finally sleep, but he does not sleep because he has finally, in all exhaustion and a state of delirium, crossed the threshold. I have changed my place, I have left the upper world and am in my burrow, and I feel its effect at once. It is a new world, endowing me with new powers, and what I felt as fatigue up there is no longer that here . . . it is as though at the moment I set foot into the burrow I had wakened from a long and profound sleep. (603, 2:341)

The rejuvenation that Plato found in an upward gaze has become the invigoration of returning into the earth. Whereas the philosophical figure glories in the Oberwelt, the Fremde, the literary figure is more alive on the side of the threshold just beneath the earth, in the familiar world of shadows. But die Fremde has entered while the door was open too long. After the creature finally sleeps, it awakens to that barely audible whistle. His senses, like the senses of Plato’s philosopher-kings, have been tuned in the upper world.

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In this comparison between Kafka’s burrow and Plato’s cave, there is something much greater at stake than quibbling between philosophers and poets. The literary appears to be the inversion of the philosophical, but we need to see what is concealed in the literary text and to hear what is silenced in philosophy. Kafka directs us to a limit shared by philosophy and literature. In both The Republic and “The Burrow,” there are not only two worlds; there is also the threshold that joins them.The threshold is language.The language of passage is what is easily identified as “literary language” because of its use of tropes and figures to express its meaning. Philosophy needs “literary” language in order to be understood, and literary language exists in difference, indifferent to the demands of philosophy, indifferent to the hierarchy of metaphor and the judgments of Aesthetics. The problem of contiguity remains, and it takes someone who is neither a philosopher nor a poet to draw our attention to this necessary threshold.This is what happens over and over again in Kafka, although it is perhaps most pronounced in “The Burrow,” a story in which the entire text turns on the threshold and is engulfed by it. If “Josephine the Singer” is an allegory of silence, “The Burrow” is an allegory of allegory. It shows how allegory is the structure of its own appearance. Allegory appears in full form in Kafka because of his attention to the very division, the rift, that allegory sustains with itself. That rift exists within the very words of language, not simply between language and its “meaning.” This is the limit that not only makes possible their linkage, but is the rift from which they both emerge.

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Notes

Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach to Allegory 1. Hegel insists that any such dialectic relationship between the artist and the real world has already been synthesized. Directly leading into the proclamation about art being a thing of the past, Hegel appropriates the artist into his systematic world view: It is not, as might be supposed, merely that the practicing artist himself is infected by the loud voice of reflection all around him and by the opinions and judgments [Meinens und Urteilens] on art that have become customary everywhere so that he is misled into introducing more thoughts into his work; the point is that our whole spiritual culture [die ganze geistige Bildung] is of such a kind that he himself stands within the world of reflection and its relations, and could not by any act of will and decision [Willen und Entschluß] abstract himself from it; nor could he by special education or removal from the relations of life contrive and organize a special solitude to replace what he has lost [das Verlorene Wieder ersetzende Einsamkeit erkünsteln und zuwege bringen könnte]. (Hegel, Aesthetics 1:10–11; Einleitung in die Ästhetik 22) This is exactly the thought that Blanchot recognizes and engages in The Space of Literature, and why the artists with whom Blanchot makes his case come from the same limited pool into which many literary theorists and philosophers of literature tend to dip: Kafka, Mallarmé, Char—the poets of solitude. 2. See Statkiewicz, Rhapsody of Philosophy, esp. “A Polemic Introduction” and “Rhapsodic Conclusion.” 3. Statkiewicz cites several of Harry Berger Jr.’s essays: “Levels of Discourse in Plato’s Dialogues”; “Facing Sophists: Socrates’ Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras”; and “Plato’s Flying Philosopher,” Philosophical Forum 13.4 (1982): 385–407. 4. Berghahn makes the connection of aesthetics to philosophy quite clear, noting that Baumgarten “was still indebted to rationalistic philosophy” and understood aesthetics to be “the analogue of logic.” Berghahn even suggests, although with admitted exaggeration, that Baumgarten sought “to complete the rationalistic system

213

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by going to investigate the lower cognitive faculties (such as feelings, imagination, taste) and integrating them into the system.” This system was through and through philosophical. “The task of aesthetics is to recognize (by means of the senses) beauty as perfection” (“From Classicist to Classical” 44–45). 5. Murrin prefers the term auditor because his argument is founded on the presumption that allegorical poetry of the Renaissance represents the last vestiges of an oral poetic tradition. 6. In Exemplary Spenser, Jane Grogan agrees that Spenser wanted his readers to think, but she argues that he wanted everyone in his audience to learn, and he achieved this by the effectiveness of his affective ekphrastic images (103–10). 7. In “The Possibility of ‘the Poetic Said’ in Otherwise than Being,” Gabriel Riera writes: For Lévinas the work of art in general, and poetic language in particular, is neither the other (alter, alius) of philosophy nor a type of other (heteron) able to interrupt the working totality and thus give access to the “otherwise than being.” In general, and for the most part, it is a “fake” other that totality can easily assimilate and reduce to propositional utterances (said), or at best, . . . “The said is reduced to the Beautiful, which supports Western ontology.” (16) In this book I suggest that not the work of art but the more “originary” structure for which the work of art is the face, that allegory (as that structure) is the other to philosophy, and is especially other to the aesthetics of the beautiful. In this way, as argued in the first chapter, allegory and aesthetics “face off.” 8. This is not to say that Dante did not want his poem read in the world, but that making his poem meaningful within the context of the actual world was not his goal. The world of the Commedia is an other world. 9. According to Tuve, “[I]n many modern writings [the four senses] are more dogmatically and perseveringly applied than we find them to be by medieval writers” (Allegorical Imagery 3). 10. See Ronald L. Martinez, “Allegory,” in The Dante Encyclopedia. 11. In his reading of Sidney’s Apologie for Poetry and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Angus Fletcher argues both that poetry can incorporate the methodical language of philosophy and that poetry and philosophy are distinct languages. The “deep connection between wonder and philosophical affirmation” (“Marvelous Progression” 7) is itself a paradox. 12. In the essay “Aesthetics and Ideology—What Happened to Poetics?” Peter Brooks laments the lack of background in philosophy and poetics among American students of deconstruction and the consequently vacuous “deconstructive readings” that usually result. Once you teach them that there is a way of construing a text that does not assume that its rhetoric, structure, and argument work toward an organic unity— however complicated by irony or paradox—but may rather expose aporia, a fundamental disjuncture of apparent argument and rhetorical implication, they

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Notes to pages 16–28 215 can quite easily produce ‘deconstructive readings’ that have all the marks of professional accomplishment. With the difference, however, from the work of a de Man or a Derrida that there seems to be very little at stake in many of these readings—that there is no real interrogation of literature or language at work. Without a passage through either philosophy or poetics, deconstruction becomes one more exegetical practice to fill the classroom space, and the pages of the academic journals. (156) 13. Fletcher still sees allegory as protean. See his recent essay “Allegory without Ideas” in Machosky, ed., Thinking Allegory Otherwise. 14. In Reinventing Allegory, Theresa Kelley uses the Romantic period as a gravitational center. She provides much useful analysis of the ways that the genre of allegory changed from the Renaissance to modernity. Although she invokes many of the same theoretical figures (Hegel, Benjamin, and de Man), Kelley’s project differs substantially from my own. For Kelley, allegory is a generic term, characterizing a type of narrative discourse that has been forced to “reinvent” itself under cultural and historical pressures. Kelley also follows de Man’s lead in challenging (even deconstructing) Hegel’s concept of “symbolic art” and provides a helpful account of Hegel’s remarks on allegory. See esp. pp. 135–43. 15. I am interlacing my commentary with descriptions borrowed from de Man in The Resistance to Theory. And I would like to take a moment to comment on my juxtaposition of Murrin and de Man. The focus on rhetoric certainly makes these two figures comparable, although in method and focus they could not be more different. I find it productive to juxtapose the oft-demonized and radically perceived figure of de Man with the more conventional, less contentious figure of Murrin, in part to defend de Man’s work against the still lively ad hominem attacks that would dismiss it. But more importantly, considering Murrin and de Man together allows me to emphasize that my work derives not only from recently trendy (if perhaps no longer so trendy) works of “theory” based in philosophy, but also from more traditional scholarship in literary fields. 16. For an excellent collation of current work on allegory in the classical context, see David Konstan, “Introduction,” in Heraclitus: Homeric Problems. 17. See my reading of “The Hunger Artist” in the article “Fasting at the Feast of Literature.” 18. This history and its consequences are recounted by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of the German Tragic Drama. I develop Benjamin’s ideas explicitly in my second chapter and generally throughout the book. Benjamin articulates the shift in attitude towards allegory as a change in attitudes towards knowledge.

1. Face Off: The Allegorical Image and Aesthetics 1. Lévinas, “Reality and Its Shadow” (135). 2. Quoted by Andrzej Warminski, as compiled from the notes of students in de Man’s fall 1982 seminar “Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Hegel,” in Warminski’s

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introduction to de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology, titled “Introduction: Theories of Reference” (4). 3. The doubling of the philosopher and the poet is not such an unusual idea. The philosopher Berel Lang, for one, has suggested ways in which philosophy is literary, and further that productive thought about the relationship between philosophy and literature emerges as a result. See his The Anatomy of Philosophical Style. 4. Cf. De Anima 3.3.427b–430a. Translations of De Anima and Parva Naturalia are from Aristotle in 23 Volumes, tr. W. S. Hett. 5. For confirmation of this view, cf. Parva Naturalia, 453a-ff. Lévinas also clarifies that the image is not to be understood as a metaphor. See note 2 above. 6. For a fuller discussion of this etymology, see Erich Auerbach’s essay “Figura,” especially pp. 11–17, and for his discussion of the wax and seal, pp. 22–23. See also chapter 2, below, for further discussion of Auerbach’s work on figura, allegory, and typology. 7. The only alteration I have made in the translation is changing the word poet to philosopher. 8. The dialogue with Ion, a direct confrontation between the philosopher and the rhapsode who speaks on behalf of poetry, may be the only dialogue from which Socrates does not emerge the unqualified victor. That is because Ion does not take the Socratic bait, but blithely and indifferently insists on the skill of singing Homer and cannot even comprehend Socrates’ references to reality, yielding nonsensical answers to the philosopher’s questions. 9. See the extended study by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute. 10. See Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory” and “The Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory. 11. For example, after his troubling observation that “considered in its highest vocation” art is and remains a thing of the past, Hegel concludes: “The Philosophy of Art [Wissenschaft der Kunst] is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in times when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction” (Aesthetics 11, trans. modified; Einleitung 22). 12. In this passage I have at times preferred the translation of Bernard Bosanquet in Hegel: Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (Penguin: London and New York, 1993), 15. I have included the German in places where the translation differs significantly; notably, Knox uses the word expresses for the German entäußern, whereas Bosanquet uses renounces, and there are other subtle differences. 13. See Hegel, Aesthetics 41f, Einleitung 51f. In this conceptualization, Hegel departs radically from the traditional understanding of art. He directly disputes both the Platonic view of art as mimetic and the Aristotelian view of art as didactic. Hegel also distinguishes art absolutely from nature. 14. De Man here echoes his own argument in the seminal essay “The Resistance to Theory.” He ended the essay “Sign and Symbol” on this provocative note,

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Notes to pages 46–52 217 and died a year later. The last page of this essay may constitute de Man’s most important contribution to the understanding of allegory, leaving much work to be done. 15. The Preface in fact concludes with this comment: “[T]he share in the total work of Spirit [gesammelten Werke des Geistes] which falls to the individual can only be very small. Because of this the individual must all the more forget himself, as the nature of science [Wissenschaft] implies and requires” (Phenomenology 45, Phänomenologie 59). 16. The unavoidable allegorical structure is first revealed in Prudentius’ work (as elaborated in chapter 2) and then in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (chapter 4).The comparison shows the affinity between these two very different works of art. 17. Heidegger strikes through Being in The Question of Being, 80–83. See also Jacques Derrida’s engagement with this move in Of Grammatology, and also Gayatri Spivak’s longer analysis in the “Translator’s Preface” to Of Grammatology. 18. In a phenomenological study, familiar aspects cannot be taken for granted. This goes for phenomenology as well as allegory. Heidegger’s work on phenomenology must be carefully rehearsed in order to show how phenomenology itself has been concealed by the methods of phenomenology. With Husserl, phenomenology became institutionalized. It has become a tool, useful for many things to many fields of study, but no longer useful to itself. Heidegger subjects phenomenology to the method of phenomenological reduction introduced by his teacher, Husserl. Heidegger articulates how phenomena appear, without jumping to the usual question of how phenomena appear to consciousness. Since Hegel and traceable to Kant, and largely because of the work of Husserl, phenomenology has primarily been defined as “the study of the development of human consciousness.” The tradition of “phenomenology” does not study what appears to the senses, but instead studies the human beings whose senses perceive. The phenomenon that is studied is the phenomenon of mediation, as if that is the ground of phenomenological investigation. Etymologically, phenomenology should be the study of appearances, but as Heidegger took great pains to demonstrate, there is not a clear understanding of appearance, and this lack of understanding has led to the groundless ground of most phenomenological investigation. Hegel begins the Phenomenology of Spirit with the immediate object of sense-certainty. However, Hegel also recognizes that the immediate object, the phenomenon as such, is a pharmakon for the universal system. The assumption that an appearance is the representation or indication of something more significant or meaningful is not at all phenomenological. It is metaphysical. The problem with this system is that it treats the universal as if it were something particular, and even more problematically, it assumes that the universal can be known. Such assumptions run rampant in philosophical discourse and every one of its relatives, including literary criticism and aesthetics in general. Within the field of philosophy, Heidegger must expend a great deal of effort

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simply to establish Being as something worth asking about. Hegel was forced to do the same for Spirit. 19. Heidegger always maintained that this turn, known in Heidegger studies as “the Kehre,” came about in Being itself. The phenomenological investigation of Sein led Heidegger to poetry. 20. Heidegger likes to play with this phrasing in German, Es gibt Kunst, which is literally translated with the impersonal phrase, “it gives art,” and so Heidegger wonders, what is “it” that gives art? 21. See Heidegger’s discussion in The History of the Concept of Time, 82f. 22. For a critical view of Benjamin’s depiction of the “baroque” and of allegory, see Blair Hoxby’s essay, “The Function of Allegory in Baroque Tragic Drama: What Benjamin Got Wrong,” in Brenda Machosky, ed., Thinking Allegory Otherwise. Hoxby offers an alternative view of seventeenth-century drama and allegory based in theater and ritual. 23. Benjamin aligns the mosaic with the treatise: “The relationship between the minute precision of the work and the proportions of the sculptural or intellectual whole demonstrates that truth-content is only to be grasped through immersion in the most minute details of subject-matter. In their supreme, western form [Ausbildung] the mosaic and the treatise belong to the Middle Ages; it is their very real affinity which makes the comparison possible” (Origin 29, Der Ursprung 10–11). 24. The doubt of “whether it is true” has vanished from the discourse. The image is transposed into the actual as Plato returns to the fabrication of the philosopher-king. “It is the duty of us, the founders . . . to compel the best natures to attain the knowledge which we pronounced the greatest” (Republic 519c). In the narrative of the cave, Plato has given an example of the “severe poetry” that abides by the ethical and moral principles set out for the ideal Republic, the Republic that serves the law of reason and in which there is no place for poets who give “amusement” and “rare pleasure.” Although such poets will be accorded “the reverence due to a priest,” Socrates notes, “their presence is forbidden by our code” (398a). Socrates does not exile the poets. He simply recognizes that, like the ministers of the sacred, the priests, the poet submits himself to a different law, a law that reason cannot overcome but only judge according to its own principles. Plato can use literary and rhetorical devices with impunity because their use is subject to knowledge and subjected to an aesthetic judgment that universally asserts the “vision of the good.” 25. Cf. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: “Post-Aristotelian metaphysics owes its development not to the adoption and elaboration of an allegedly pre-existent Aristotelian system but to the failure to understand the doubtful and unsettled state in which Plato and Aristotle left the central problems” (12, Kant und das Problem 8). 26. As a philosopher, Kant follows the first way, but Heidegger attempts to find the poetic way that is concealed by the philosophical structure. “We shall follow

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Notes to pages 62–66 219 thereby the inner movement of the Kantian laying of the foundation but without holding to the disposition and the formulation favored by Kant. It is advisable to go behind these in order to be able, by a more fundamental understanding of the eternal character and development of the laying of the foundation, to pass judgment on the suitability, validity, and limits of the external architectonic of the Critique of Pure Reason” (Kant and the Problem 47, Kant und das Problem 42). 27. Allegory is quite often mistaken for metaphor, even defined as “extended metaphor.” I will take this misnomer on more fully throughout the book and especially in the final chapter. 28. There is an obvious echo of Benjamin here—not for the mystical gesture that he makes to the “Reine Sprache,” but more particularly for his praise of Hölderlin’s gibberishlike translation of Sophocles. For Benjamin, all art is characterized by mourning because of its essential failure. 29. In The Symbolism of Evil Ricoeur tacitly dismisses the distinction between compositional and interpretive allegory so crucial to a literary critic such as Jonathan Whitman. Ricoeur argues that all allegories are already hermeneutic.

2. A Phenomenological Reduction: Allegory in Prudentius’ Psychomachia 1, Plato, Timaeus (52c), in The Collected Dialogues. 2. As Jon Whitman notes, this dating depends on whether the treatise De Elocutio [On Style] was written by the rhetorician called “Demetrius” around 270 BCE, as argued by G. M. A. Grube, or whether it was written in the first century CE, as argued by W. Rhys Roberts. See Whitman, Allegory, “Appendix I: On the History of the Term ‘Allegory,’” esp. p. 264. This appendix and the one that follows, “On the History of the Term ‘Personification,’” provide an invaluable bibliographic history of early sources and usages of these terms. 3. Whitman uses Augustine’s example of the allegorical serpent, in De Doctrina Christiana 2.16, as an allegory of early Christian allegory. Whitman notes a tendency for Augustine’s text continually to “slither away” from itself. “The intensive effort to shift between words and things, to turn each verbal item into a moral fact, requires the kind of in bono/in malo exegesis that weakens the consistency of words and undermines the integrity of things” (Allegory 81). 4. Most often, the title is simply not translated, which is perhaps preferable. When “Psychomachia” is translated as “The Fight for Mansoul,” as it is in the Loeb Library parallel text edition with translation by H. J. Thomson (Prudentius vol. 1), the interpretation of the poem as a struggle to save the soul of a representative human being is predetermined, and this flattens the undetermined relationship of the fight and the soul that appear together in the title word. S. Georgia Nugent provides an important new direction in the understanding of this compound in Allegory and Poetics:The Structure and Imagery of Prudentius’ “Psychomachia.” As the reviewer Ralph Hexter wrote of her work in Speculum, “What appear inconsisten-

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cies in the structuring of the allegory become invitations to read the Psychomachia anew and to reexamine allegory itself ” (“Allegory and Poetics,” 448). 5. See also, as cited by Christian Gnilka Smith, Studien zur Psychomachie des Prudentius, Klassische-Philologische Studien 27 (Weisbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1963). Gnilka also discusses three viable options for translating psyche, according to Smith: as “in the soul,” “on behalf of the soul,” and “of the soul.” 6. Smith also highlights the conflicted state of the soul that is the emphasis of the poem: “Since the soul’s condition of warfare, rather than its aim or end, is announced, the stress is put on the problematic nature of the warfare” (Prudentius’ “Psychomachia” 114). 7. This is similar to Maureen Quilligan’s approach to allegory by way of the pun. See chapter 3 below. 8. That Prudentius’ poetry not only can be but should be read in this way is the core of Malamud’s analysis and of her well-grounded argument that this poetry is “far more complex and intelligently crafted” than most Prudentius scholars will admit. See her introduction to A Poetics of Transformation, esp. pp. 8–11. 9. Two notable exceptions are Ernst Robert Curtius and Macklin Smith. Curtius refers to Prudentius as “a solitary phenomenon” in the era of early Christianity. “With full command of classical literary style, [Prudentius] opened up great new realms to poetry. . . . He is the most important and most original of the early Christian poets” (European Literature 458–59). Smith cites Auerbach in his introduction and variously explores the possible reasons for and implications of Prudentius as primarily a poet, and as a “solitary phenomenon.” See especially the section of his chapter 2 titled “The Essence and Forms of Poetry,” which begins, “[Prudentius] views his particular poems less as responses to particular occasions than as poetic manifestations of one basic activity, poetry” (Prudentius’ “Psychomachia” 51ff). 10. This view is suggestive of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria until 335, when he was exiled by the influence of the Arian Eusebius. As summarized by Kelly in Early Christian Doctrines, Athanasius believed that in the Fall the divine image was lost, but not irretrievably. Because the soul retained its immortality and its free will, the “obliteration of the image” could be reversed; “it is always open to men, Athanasius seems to think, using their free will, to throw off the entanglements of sensuality and recover their vision of the Word. The image is not so much annihilated as lost to sight, like a picture overlaid with dirt” (347). 11. Prudentius describes the vision of the divine as dull and cloudy, visible as in a gray mirroring and watery glance. Cf. Apotheosis lines17–21, and see the argument that follows in this chapter. 12. Gordon Teskey also notes the “rift” at the center of allegory, a rift that the allegorical work is at pains to conceal (a task at which it usually succeeds). He specifically observes that allegory hides its own internal rift at the same time that it exposes the “absurdities” in “the foundations of an eidetic metaphysics by repairing this rift imaginatively because logical means are inadequate” (Allegory and Violence

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Notes to pages 70–89 221 12). Teskey seems to allow (or to allow an opening) here that allegory operates under something other than logical means, what he here calls “imaginative means.” 13. See also the preceding argument in Paxson, Poetics of Personification 67–69. 14. For purposes of easy reference, quotations (in Latin) from Prudentius’Apotheosis, Psychomachia, and “Praefatio” are from vol. 1 of Prudentius, the Loeb Library parallel text edition that provides translations by H. J. Thomson; numbers in parentheses following the quotations are line numbers. Endorsed by Macklin Smith, Thomson’s translations are more than adequate. However, the translations of Prudentius that I provide in this chapter are my own. For scholarly editions, see Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 61 (Vienna: HoelderPichler-Tempsky, 1926), and Jacques Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina, vols. 59–60 (Paris: Migne, 1847). 15. Prudentius states this explicitly: “quid apertius, absque aliena / quam sumat facie Verbum non posse videri” (43–44); “What could be plainer than that, apart from an external form which He assumes, the Word cannot be seen.” 16. It is notable that Prudentius borrows psyche and pneuma from Greek. In a Greek borrowing of Tertullian, psychicus, an adjectival form, specifically refers to the carnal, not the spiritual (Lewis and Short, Harper’s Latin Dictionary). 17. For a detailed history, see Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines. 18. For the various perspectives on the nature of this unity, see Kelly, pp. 109–36 and 138–62. 19. The theological implications of this passage are obvious in historical context. Prudentius is offering his theological disputation against Manichaeism, as in the Apotheosis he had disputed the anti-Semitic Gnosticism of Marcion. For Prudentius, the body cannot be inherently evil because it is one of God’s creations, molded by “his hand,” as the soul is the inspiration of “his breath.” 20. Such a phenomenological approach certainly underpins de Man’s groundbreaking work on allegory. De Man refocuses attention on allegory as primarily tropological, and this challenges the conception of allegory as a fixed genre with predictable components. The return to close reading, the philological sensitivity that characterizes de Man’s work, came to be called deconstruction because it pulled apart the idealized stability of language and revealed the ideology of the systems of poetics that largely determined the reading of literature without actually (or closely) reading the work of literature. 21. Although not addressing this section of the poem, Smith directly connects the soul with the lack of hope: “Because of his carnal condition of alienation from God, man feels a sense of lack, and therefore he desires. His faculty of desire is his soul. . . . The will must continually fight to affirm the aid offered by God” (Prudentius’ “Psychomachia” 113). 22. Cicero translated Chrysippus’ “desmos” as “vinculum” in De Rerum Naturae, and the metaphor of the chain became an image of cosmic harmony. Malamud is here abstracting from Michael Lapidge, “A Stoic Metaphor in Late Latin Poetry.”

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23. Malamud cites Cathemerinon 3, in which Prudentius employs the ancient topos of the poet’s double crown, the first in honor of his technical skill of weaving verses, and the second in the verse itself as a woven crown (76). 24. “Praefatio” appears in vol. 1 of in the Loeb Prudentius, tr. H. J. Thomson. This short poem appeared as the preface to a collection of Prudentius’ poems. 25. This last clause could also be rendered, “by peace the earth comes to rest.” This rest would be the perduring so important in Heidegger’s thinking on poetry. 26. See Maurice Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” in The Space of Literature, 254–63, and esp. 260–61. 27. H. J. Thomson’s translation of lines 905–07 of the Psychomachia.

3.The Changing Faces of Allegory: Dante and Spenser 1. Aquinas, Summa Theologicae (II.101.ad2). 2. Here is a perfect example of Berel Lang’s observation that through the very choice of the philosophical genre of the dialogue, Plato’s philosophy is bound up with something very like (or exactly like) literary style. “We recognize again and again the implausibility of identifying Plato’s position with any single proposition or argument simply because it appears in the dialogue.” Further, “we have then also to consider that this suspicion or bracketing of discourse itself an intention of the dialogue form” (Anatomy of Philosophical Style 15). 3. Sidney did not define virtue in the narrow sense of moral behavior (that which can be judged as “good”). Rather, “virtue is the most excellent resting place for all worldly learning” (Apology for Poetry 96).Virtue is the state of highest learning, not the highest knowledge of things but the highest ability to learn and to apply this learning. The ultimate virtuous action is moral, and this becomes the “place” where knowledge can be infinitely related. 4. Sidney’s first reference to Dante is as an examplar of the Italian language (82); later, as the prime example of a poet with a universe “under the authority of his pen” (95). And in the penultimate paragraph of Sidney’s essay, Dante’s Beatrice, along with Virgil’s Anchises, are the privileged examples of poetic immortality (117). 5. The only other essay I have found comparing the two poets actually focuses on the absence of scholarship and attention; see Matthew Tosello, “Spenser’s Silence about Dante.” I am grateful to an anonymous reader of the manuscript for reminding me of Hamilton’s embedded analysis of Dante in relation to Spenser and Sidney, in his The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene”; see esp.30–43. 6. Hamilton focuses on Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, which dovetails convincingly with the trajectory of the Commedia, as a trajectory of initiation onto the path to ultimate salvation. Although I find a fundamental difference between the ultimate ends of the poems, I don’t disagree with Hamilton’s comparison in

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Notes to pages 98–103 223 general terms. In fact, Hamilton’s focus on the literal image provides a significant critical precedent for the readings I propose here. 7. Sidney mentions allegory but twice, both times in a positive light: first, in regard to Aesop’s fables, “whose pretty allegories, stealing under the formal tales of beasts, make many, more beastly than beasts, begin to hear the sound of virtue from these dumb speakers” (92); and second, in asserting the “allegorically and figuratively written” that do not lie because they do not pretend a claim to reality (103). And once, in concluding, he refers to the mysteries contained in some poetry “written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused” (116). 8. Eco begins the section of chapter 5 titled “Aquinas’ Theory of Allegory” with this caveat: “Aquinas’ definitions of the poetic realm always have reference to the problems of scriptural exegesis” (Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas 148). 9. Robert Hollander suggests that Dante’s comparison of theologians and poets in Il Convivio is a clarification of the necessarily allegorical structure of secular poetry. “Dante was the first to make the troublesome claim that biblical exegesis could be used to elucidate the significance of a secular poem” (Hollander, quoted in John A. Scott, “Dante’s Allegory of the Theologians” 30). Scott argues that prior to the Commedia, Dante did not belabor the truth of a poem’s literal level. I disagree. In the second treatise of Il Convivio, Dante repeatedly insisted on the vital importance of the literal. Nonetheless, in the Commedia, the stakes became much higher. As Scott claims, “[I]n the Comedy, [Dante’s] whole purpose was to convince his reader of the truth of every part of the vision described in the poem” (31). The deep concern for its literal truth rests in Dante’s primary task, which was ethical and practical (not moral or speculative): the conversion of “men and women to virtuous action” (32). 10. In presenting the case for a Thomistic aesthetics, Umberto Eco contests the modern interpretation of Aquinas’ apparently harsh judgment of poetry as infima doctrina [inferior knowledge or baser teaching] when compared to sacred knowledge. Eco argues that Aquinas did not denigrate poetry for presuming this parallel in verbis, but simply keeps the modus poeticus in its proper place (Aesthetics of Aquinas 149). 11. See Summa, p. 34 note c. The commentator of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa counters the “antipoetic” tradition of Aquinas’ response: The objection has not been derogatory about poetry as such, but has scaled it down as a method of communicating clear ideas; philosophical pedagogics prefers reasons, logoi, to pictures or tales, mythoi. Notice the implied compliment of the reply; poetry is for delight (a wider and nobler term than easy pleasure) which is about ends, whereas sacred doctrine is for usefulness which is about means; Ia. 5, 6. 12. Summa, pp. 34–35 note d. 13. In The Body of Beatrice, Robert Harrison offers a similar argument about La Vita Nuova. He focuses on Beatrice as a material entity while she simultaneously

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serves as a spiritual symbol, as both phenomenal and noumenal. He argues that the material existence of Beatrice is an endorsement of a Thomist aesthetics in which “beauty is always embodied and is always form’s inhabitation of a material density” (40). Harrison argues that Beatrice is the Thomist aesthetic object par excellence because the experience of the body of Beatrice brings harmony. “It is as if the aesthetic subject is released from the promotions of his or her interested will, or from the commotions of subjectivity itself ” (41). In Harrison’s analysis, Beatrice becomes “a phenomenon of pure manifestation” that effaces her own objectivity as well as the observer’s subjectivity. In this “coming forth in appearance” Beatrice becomes “an aesthetic event” (43). This aesthetic event (la vita nuova) becomes the catalyst for the grander aesthetic event of Dante’s Commedia. 14. Quilligan and Teskey both acknowledge the confusion of these terms, and Quilligan in particular argues for the separation of allegoresis from allegory. See Quilligan, foreword to The Language of Allegory, and her conclusion that “[t]he central paradox of the problem of allegory is that generic allegories form that class of works which it is best not to study with the tools of allegorical criticism” (20). Teskey notes “a tendency to confuse allegorical interpretation with the making of allegories,” but also notes that “however valuable the results of allegorical interpretation may be, to allegorize a poem . . . does not make that poem an allegory” (Allegory and Violence 2). 15. The authenticity of this letter has long been disputed by Dante scholars, with strong views on either side. For one account of this history, see Richard Green, “Dante’s ‘Allegory of Poets’” 122f. The issue will be discussed in detail later in this chapter. 16. This particular argument was put forth by the early commentator Benvenuto da Imola, who asserts Dante’s demand for the reader’s attention to the figurations of the poem. Referring to Benvenuto’s reading of Dante’s apostrophe in Purgatorio 8, “Sharpen your eyes to the truth here, Reader . . . you may easily pass within it,” Richard Green describes the fourteenth-century critic’s remarks: “Benvenuto comments that here the poet is about to construct a noble fiction, and turns first to his reader to make him attentive to the truth beneath the literal sense, to the sentential hidden beneath the integument of the fiction” (“Dante’s ‘Allegory of Poets’” 122–23). See also John Ahern, “Can the Epistle to Cangrande Be Read as a Forgery?” published in the same volume as Ascoli’s “Access to Authority” (Baranski, ed., Seminario Dantesco Internazionale). Ascoli’s actual purpose in studying the letter is not to examine its historical authenticity but to explore its “real historical significance”: “its place in the history of a translatio litterarum from Latin to vernacular, its role in defining Dante as a canonical literary authority, and its participation in a generalized process of inventing the modern, self-reflexive author” (“Access to Authority” 311). However, Ascoli also provides a thorough account of the authenticity debate in the copious notes to the essay.

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Notes to pages 110–21 225 17. In the essay “Marvelous Progression,” Fletcher notes that Dante’s inscrutable moment defies an “attempt to explicate or resolve. . . . The effect is to dilate an already suspended moment, to reinforce the sense that the ultimate purpose of The Divine Comedy is to leave the reader frozen in a state of timeless wonder” (21). Against this frozen experience of wonder, which is an end in itself, Fletcher offers Spenser’s “Mutabilitie Cantos” as a movement beyond the moment of awe, through a progression, and into a state of resolution that is marvelous beyond the philosophical methodology it has used to get there (22). 18. This has been my repeated argument for the phenomenon of allegory— from Prudentius to Hegel. See especially the argument made through Goethe in chapter 4. 19. Ullén puts it more cogently: “[W]hat Dante, and the reader along with him, sees reflected in the revolving circle of God is his own image; God is a circle ‘with our image within itself,’ and Christ being man, man is both reflected and contained in God: through the image of Christ we see not only God but ourselves in God” (“Dante in Paradise” 177). 20. The provenance of this addition to the poem is largely unknown. Hamilton notes, “Nor it is known who provided the title, the division and numbering of the cantos (vi, vii, viii, ‘unperfite’), and the running title ‘The Seventh Booke.’” (Introduction, The Faerie Queene, p. 16). 21. Milton will take great pains to explain this distinction in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, and indeed that poem constitutes an attempt to translate the time and space of the divine (which is atemporal and unlocatable) into temporal and spatial constructions that pre- and postlapsarian human beings can understand. 22. While emphasizing their similarities, and even acknowledging that “Sidney’s embracing of visual affect . . . puts Spenser’s pictorialization on a stronger footing than it might otherwise have had,” Grogan does not believe that Spenser and Sidney share an identical poetics (Exemplary Spenser 8, 15). 23. This seems to suggest that not only does Spenser’s allegory show two things in the same space at the same time, but his poetics manifests two practices in the same space at the same time. 24. Jane Grogan provides a helpful overview of theories regarding the original placement of the letter to Raleigh after the poem and its disappearance from later editions. See the beginning of chapter 1 of her Exemplary Spenser, especially 28f and n. 4. 25. See n. 6 on lines 8–9 of the Proem to Book 4 in The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton. 26. Virgil’s Aeneid is perhaps the best example of this kind of nation-building (and its subtle critique) through epic. 27. Scholars approach the completion question through various means. Kathleen Williams admits a great loss in the “six unwritten books,” but then acknowledges that Spenser’s poem does not require a progression to an end. Rather, “the

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kind of unity which Spenser achieves, though cumulative, is not architectural; he works not by adding section to section so that the structure is meaningless until it is finished, but by revealing new levels of a structure which we thought complete at our first sight of it” (“Eterne in Mutabilitie” 115). Williams’ view is in accord with Quilligan’s sense that allegory capitalizes on “a polysemy, inherent in the very words on the page” (Language of Allegory 26). William Blissett argues that the “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie” form a fit ending as a “detached retrospective commentary on the poem as a whole, forming as they do a satisfactory conclusion to a foreshortened draft, a stopping place at which, after a seriatim reading, can be made a pleasing analysis of all” (“Spenser’s Mutabilitie” 26). For quite different reasons, Teskey also concludes that “Mutabilitie both belongs to and stands apart from the creative project called The Faerie Queene” (Allegory and Violence 187). 28. Directly following the stanza of perfection is a catalogue of particularly chosen locus amoeni. As noted in the Hamilton edition, “The five loci amoeni evoke scenes of natural beauty which, except for Parnasse . . . are marred by sin and death” (2.12.52; p. 279 n.). Or, to put it only slightly differently, they were places once perfect and present, and now lost, and this would perhaps include Parnassus. 29. See Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, especially p. 7. One of Elizabeth’s subjects, Edmund Plowden, recorded many of the legal proceedings that based their findings on this doctrine, and spells out the theory, quite logically and clearly. The “King” in this passage refers to Elizabeth as well as to Edward VI, insofar as they share the same virtual body politic: For the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident . . . and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his body politic is a body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects, . . . and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body. (quoted by Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies 7) The monarchy thus has an allegorical structure in which two bodies occupy the same space at the same time without being coextensive or coincident. They are united without being synonymous. This is an allegorical construction not because one thing signifies another, but because two things occupy the same space at the same time, and one appears by virtue of the other. This is the fundamental condition of allegory that has long been overlooked. For a particular application of the ideology to The Faerie Queene, see David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies. 30. In “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” de Man offers a similar observation about the delusion of the romantic self and the disruption of allegory. “The prevalence of allegory always corresponds to the unveiling of an authentically temporal

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Notes to pages 127–30 227 destiny. This unveiling takes place in a subject that has sought refuge against the impact of time in a natural world to which, in truth, it bears no resemblance.” The self ’s identification with nature is a self-mystification, “a defensive strategy that tries to hide from this negative self-knowledge. On the level of language the asserted superiority of the symbol over allegory . . . is one of the forms taken by this tenacious self-mystification” (207–08).

4.The Allegorical Structure of Phenomenology of Spirit 1. De Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in Aesthetic Ideology, 50. 2. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 492. 3. In the same essay, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” de Man will suggest that contrary to the view (represented there by Peter Szondi) that Hegel has an “inadequate conception of the essence of language,” perhaps there is something in Hegel “that we cannot or will not hear because it upsets what we take for granted, the unassailable value of the aesthetic” (95). De Man poses this as a question, but he implies that for Hegel, the aesthetic is perhaps not so unassailable. By extension, de Man suggests that Hegel is more unfamiliar than scholars and critics generally assume. Despite the essays focused on other figures (predominantly Husserl and Heidegger, among others), de Man’s collection titled Aesthetic Ideology is as a whole prefaced with three telling epigraphs from Hegel, epigraphs that demonstrate the way in which language turns on this philosophical master of mastery. 4. In his recent book The Genealogy of the Symbol, Nicholas Halmi argues that there never was an actual object corresponding to the Romantic concept of symbol and consequently no semiotic function of that concept. The dichotomy between symbol and allegory (upon which de Man’s analysis rests) is a false one (Genealogy 4–5). 5. De Man here echoes his own argument in the seminal essay “The Resistance to Theory,” published in his book of the same title. 6. This necessity can be traced back to Plato, and that argument will be developed in this chapter. However, the fact that the myth of the cave in book 7 of The Republic is commonly called “the allegory of the cave” in modern editions provides an initial ground for this argument. 7. Recollection is even more in line with de Man’s general way of thinking, especially in regard to theory, which he believes (and I agree) lies at the core of literary study. 8. “‘True’ and ‘false’ belong among those determinate notions which are held to be inert and wholly separate essences, one here and one there, each standing fixed and isolated from the other, with which it has nothing in common. Against this view it must be maintained that truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed ready-made. Nor is there such a thing as the false, any more than there is something evil. The evil and the false, to be sure, are not as bad as the devil, for in

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the devil they are even made into a particular subjective agent; as the false and the evil, they are mere universals, though each has its own essence as against the other” (Phenomenology 22, Phänomenologie 33). 9. Even with Plato, art is subjected to an aesthetic judgment, a judgment of its value. In de Man’s assessment, “under a variety of names, this category [of the aesthetic] never ceased to be prominent in the development of Western thought, so much so that its being left nameless until the end of the eighteenth century is a sign of its overwhelming presence rather than of its nonexistence” (“Sign and Symbol” 92). 10. This is not a Heideggerian delusion. Goethe’s story Das Märchen plays out precisely this event. At the beginning of the story the characters each have unique talents but are constrained by an elaborate system of arbitrary rules and yet sustained by a promise that “the time is near.” The story is about the gathering of a large number of conditions that satisfy some invisible force and lead to the fulfillment of the promise. The fulfillment is nothing other than a temple rising from the depths of the earth, and as it rises, it brings with it a world. It is a new day, and it is the temple that gives them this new look and this new outlook. These characters dwell in the temple. For a further reading of Das Märchen, see chapter 5 below. 11. One need think only of the scenes of Troy’s conflagration and the slaughter of Priam before the altars of Troy from which the figures of the gods have been removed, held fast by Hecuba and her daughters, no longer sacred because they have become purposeful, as when Priam’s wife cries out, “this altar shall yet save us all, or you shall die together with us” (Aeneid 2 703–04). 12. The Eleusinian mystery is referenced in the first section of the Phenomenology, “Sense-Certainty, or the This and Meaning” (A. i). 13. In a time when art is no longer possible, Spirit, too, suffers the need of mediation. Art was once art because it marked the limit between divine and mortal, and as this limit, art allowed for an immediate experience of the divine. This experience has been lost, and it has been lost for Spirit too. Hegel merely changes the subject of Hölderlin’s question about the poet: “What is Spirit for in destitute times?” The Preface to the Phenomenology continually gestures toward Hölderlinian language. Within the first pages, in the midst of mocking the traditional views of the Absolute, Hegel laments, “Not only is its essential life lost to [Spirit]; it is also conscious of this damage, and of the finitude that is its own content” (5, translation modified; Phanomenologie 12). This Spirit is not infinite, not at all universal or Absolute. This clarifies an earlier description of the “unlebendige Allgemeine,” the lifeless universal, the result that is but “the corpse [der Leichnam] of what has been left behind [der sie hinter sich gelassen]” (3, translation modified; 11). 14. See de Man’s essay “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics”: “The proof of thought is possible only if we postulate that what has to be proven (namely, that thought is possible) is indeed the case. The figure of this circularity is time.

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Notes to pages 135–41 229 Thought is proleptic: it projects the hypothesis of its possibility into a future, in the hyperbolic expectation that the process that made thought possible will eventually catch up with this projection” (99). This structure is entirely grammatical. The subject is expected to catch up to the predicate. 15. Narcissus remains the figure par excellence for the Subject, not because he falls in love with himself, but because he sacrifices himself for the image. In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot has restored the proper reading to the scene of Narcissus gazing into the pool. “Does Narcissus die? Scarcely: having turned into an image, he dissolves in the immobile dissolution of the imaginary, where he is washed away without knowing it” (126). 16. See the discussion of Lévinas and the figure of the face in my introduction for a comparable analysis of the image. 17. In Timaeus, in depicting the Soul of the Universe Timaeus describes a third element that joins indivisible Being with transient Being, forcing the Other into the Union with the Same, despite the difficulty of effecting this union, which is in essence a conflict. Timaeus must manifest this third thing, which cannot itself be either an eidetic or a mimetic substance and yet must participate in both eidos and mimesis, or else it could not hold the two together. This third thing is given the name Khora. This substance is peculiar in that it is a substance that can itself be nothing and yet must “itself be devoid of all these forms which it is about to receive” (50c). In receiving these forms, the substance is “moved and marked by the entering figures,” but the substance changes only in appearance. 18. All translations from “Eleusis” are my own. 19. In Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” Heidegger sees the ground for this step as founded by Descartes and opened up by Leibniz, who radicalized the “substantiality of substance”: “Within the living presence of the works of Kant and Fichte, and conditioned by Schelling’s doctrine of identity, it fell to Hegel to comprehend the subject as Absolute Spirit” (77). 20. This is the question Heidegger addresses in the long and complicated essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks”). See chapter 1 for further discussion of this essay. 21. Lacoue-Labarthe, usually a careful and thoughtful writer, makes some serious errors in interpretation and even translation in this essay. Near its conclusion, the essay degenerates into an almost ad hominem attack, in a desperate bid to gain (or regain) “credit” for philosophy. 22. Cf. de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics.” “In Hegel, the assimilation of ‘meaning’ to ‘me’ (or I) is built into the system, since the generality of thought is also the appropriation, the making of the world by the I. It is, therefore, not only legitimate but necessary to hear, in the German word meinen [to mean] . . . a connotation of meinen as ‘to make mine,’ a verbalization of the possessive pronoun mein. But that makes the innocuous pronouncement about the philosopher who, in humble self-effacement, has to progress beyond his private opinion,

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230 Notes to pages 141–58 into a very odd sentence indeed: ‘Ich kann nicht sagen was ich (nur) meine’ then says ‘I cannot say what I make mine’ or, since to think is to make mine, ‘I cannot say what I think,’ and, since to think is fully contained in and defined by the I, since Hegel’s ego cogito defines itself as mere ego, what the sentence actually says is ‘I cannot say I’—a disturbing proposition in Hegel’s own terms since the very possibility of thought depends on the possibility of saying ‘I’” (97–98). 23. Friedrich Hölderlin, “In lieblicher Bläue . . . ” (line 113), in Sämtliche Werke, Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. Friedrich Beissner et al., 8 vols. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1946–85), vol. 2.1, pp. 372–74. 24. Hölderlin describes the life of the mortal being after experiencing the image of the gods: Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben. Aber das Irrsal Hilft, wie Schlummer und Stark machet die Not und die Nacht Bis daß Helden genug in der ehernen Wiege gewachsen, Herzen an Kraft, wie sonst, ähnlich den Himmlischen sind (“Brot und Wein,” lines 115–18) [A dream about them (the gods) is thereafter the life. But the frenzy helps as sleep and the desire and the night make (us) strong until enough heroes have been cultivated in that steel cradle, hearts with strength, as before, like (those) of the heavens. (my trans.)] 25. Only Christ was both image and substance of both mortal and divine. 26. Rimbaud to Paul Demeny, letter of 15 May 1871, Oeuvres complètes 252.

5. Reconsidering Allegory and Symbol: Benjamin and Goethe 1. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” 19–20; “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” 4. 2. See Erich Auerbach on typology in the essay “Figura,” 11–75. 3. As I argue in the following chapter, the development of allegory was not intentional. Rather, allegory emerged as the structure appropriate for bringing together the sacred and the profane. The four levels of allegory are a codification of allegory’s structure but should not be construed as the definition of allegory as such. 4. There is an intersection here with medieval culture, in which manuscripts of the Bible were often written in a hand so ornate as to be indecipherable; this emphasized both the totality and the absolution of Holy Writ. The Book itself was a visual presentation of language that was not to be read but to be seen and experienced as “one single unalterable complex.” Much later, the symbolist poets would try to preserve poetry with a similar visual presentation, but in modernity such attempts could be, finally, only ironic.

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Notes to pages 158–63 231 5. Gadamer also notes: “The radical subjectivization involved in Kant’s new way of grounding aesthetics was truly epoch-making. In discrediting any kind of theoretical knowledge except that of rational science, it compelled the human sciences to rely on the methodology of the natural sciences in conceptualizing themselves” (Truth and Method 42). 6. See Martin Heidegger’s discussion of transcendence in Metaphysicische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz. 7. Benjamin also finds precedent for his views in German literary critics whose work did not achieve the prominence of criticism adhering to the neoclassical view. For instance, he cites Herbert Cysarz’ Deutsche Barockdichtung. Benjamin observes, “But either because the declaration of the primacy of classicism as the entelechy of baroque literature frustrates any insight into the essence of this literature—and most especially the understanding of allegory—or because the persistent anti-baroque prejudice pushes classicism into the foreground as its own forefather, the new discovery that allegory ‘is the dominant stylistic law, particularly in the high baroque,’ comes to nothing because of the attempt to exploit the formulation of this new insight, quite incidentally, as a slogan.” Even this insight as to allegory’s significance in the baroque, a significance that is not irrelevant to other periods of history, is contaminated by prejudice of the sort clearly seen in Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie. Noting that Cysarz has written that “it is ‘not so much the art of the symbol as the technique of allegory’ which is characteristic of the baroque in contrast to classicism,” Benjamin recognizes that “the character of the sign is thus attributed to allegory even with this new development. The old prejudice, which Creuzer gave its own linguistic coinage in the term Zeichenallegorie [sign-allegory], remains in force” (Origin 163, Der Ursprung 142). 8. See Plato’s Symposium and the beauty of the ugly Socrates. 9. “In these books the prudent reader will be able to find not so much histories as harsh tragedies of moral calamities.” Otto von Freisingen, quoted by Benjamin in Origin 78, Der Ursprung 59. 10. The “essence of human being” does not refer to the individual being, but to Being as the ground of beings. 11. Benjamin writes, “The language of the baroque is constantly convulsed by rebellion on the part of the elements which make it up.” He cites the example of German orthography, which first established nominative capitalization in the baroque period, and this capitalizing practice asserts “the disjunctive, atomizing principle of the allegorical approach.” Important in this atomization of language into its meaningless or almost meaningless parts is that “language has ceased merely to serve the process of communication” (Origin 208, Der Ursprung 184). 12. The observation that modern allegory developed rather independently of the medieval tradition, and yet followed a similar pattern, causes one to reflect on the possibility that these strains, the compositional and the interpretive, emanate from the rift within allegory itself.

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232 Notes to pages 164–68 13. Reading William Wordsworth’s poem “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” Paul de Man demonstrates the temporal predicament concealed in “an organic world postulated in a symbolic mode of analogical correspondences or in a mimetic mode of representation in which fiction and reality coincide.” See “The Rhetoric of Temporality” 222. 14. For references to Kant’s Critique of Judgment I have included the Akademie edition page numbers that are often included in the margins of English translations, so that the references can be found in translations other than the one I have used. 15. For the full scope of this argument, see Gadamar, Truth and Method, part 1, section 2B, “The Aesthetics of Genius and the Concept of Erlebnis.” 16. Humboldt, quoted in Gadamer, Truth and Method, 10, from Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften edition, vol. 7, part 1, 30. This cultivation was described as “namely the disposition of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavor, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character.” 17. Benjamin specifically and directly counters such apotheosis. For this argument, see Hope Hague, Brenda Machosky, and Marcel Rotter, “Waiting for Goethe.” 18. Such mourning is not hopelessness, but rather both a peculiar mourning and a peculiar hope. Benjamin concludes the essay “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” with the thought, “Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope” (356). 19. Auerbach makes precisely this argument regarding Vico’s relative obscurity. “Vico was a solitary old professor at the University of Naples who had taught Latin figures of speech all his life. . . . The difficulties of his style and the baroque atmosphere of his book . . . covered it with a cloud of impenetrability” (88). I feel compelled to counter the levying of this criticism against contemporary literary theory, and even against Benjamin himself, often accused of writing obscurely in order to limit access to this thought. That Benjamin’s writing is difficult will receive no argument from me, and nowhere is this more true than in his book on Trauerspiel, but I am arguing (with Benjamin) that there is no other way to write about allegory. 20. Berghahn notes that with the Critische Dichtkunst (1737) of Johann Christoph Gottsched, literary criticism was “liberated . . . from its restriction to philological textual criticism and from tutelage to ancient authority” (33). Criticism of the work of literature was freed from philology and poetics. I will add, however, that this “freedom” comes at a high price. Art is no longer art. That is not to say that philology and poetics were adequate to art, but they never pretended to be. However, philology and poetics did not only classify the attributes of art, but they protected its work. Like philology, allegory is connected to language, and it is indifferent to epistemology, to morality, and to the concept. That is why Benjamin can claim that allegory is “beyond Beauty.” In Benjamin’s estimation, neoclassicism

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Notes to pages 168–72 233 sought only to preserve in art a classical ideal of perfection in form and a harmony of content. The aestheticized work of art is conceived as an organic whole, to be admired and absorbed in its complete beauty and preserved. In contrast, according to Benjamin, “in the true work of art pleasure can be fleeting, it can live in the moment, it can vanish, and it can be renewed” (Origin 181, Der Ursprung 59). 21. Actually Halmi is not entirely accurate in this observation. Paul de Man, for one, has noticed these inconsistencies. However, Halmi draws attention to them in a new and productive context. He is generally right that the antagonism is too easily (and too facilely) presumed in scholarly discussions of symbol and allegory, which is also my rationale for this chapter, albeit with a focus on the perspective of allegory. There is as much of an overreliance on this supposed antagonism between allegory and symbol as on the four-fold structure of allegorical interpretation (see the discussions of this in my introduction). 22. See especially Origin 185, Der Ursprung 163: “Basically, then, the Trauerspiel, too, which grew up in the sphere of the allegorical, is in its form a drama for the reader. Although this says nothing about the value or possibility of its stageperformance.” 23. Benjamin saw the essay as a great corrective to the Goethe cult of commentary that passed itself off as criticism, but the cult prevailed in spite of Benjamin’s noble effort. See Hague et al., “Waiting for Goethe” 94f. 24. For a fuller development of this argument, see my essay with Hope Hague and Marcel Rotter, “Waiting for Goethe”: “In the period between the world wars Emil Ludwig described a Goethe not only ‘menschlich vollendet’ (humanly perfect) but ‘vollendet menschlich’ (perfectly human), an image that Friedrich Gundolf elevated to the status of myth” (85). 25. For a recent psychological reading, see Denise Blondeau, “Goethes Naturbegriff in den ‘Wahlverwandtschaften.’” For a religious reading, see Eberhard Lippert-Adelberger, “Die Platanen in Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften.’” For a sociological reading, see the most recent book-length study that is emphatically anthropological, Werner Schlick, Goethe’s “Die Wahlverwandtschaften”: A Middle-Class Critique of Aesthetic Aristocratism. In the summary provided in the “Conclusion,” the author notes, “Die Wahlverwandtschaften [is] a novel evidencing Goethe’s disillusionment with a decadent and moribund nobility and [is] the politically subversive literary discourse of a burgher.” A refreshing alternative to these exegetical approaches is Brigitte Peucker, “The Material Image in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften.” Peucker pursues the “impulse in art that is antithetical to the attitudes of classicism” while also unable to avoid them. In questioning the relationship between reality and representation, Peucker follows Benjamin. 26. The most recent book-length study of Das Märchen, published in 2000, is not much different in approach from the scholarship of the 1970s. See Eugen Drewerman, Goethes Märchen tiefenpsychologisch gedeutet oder Die Liebe herrscht nicht.

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234 Notes to pages 172–90 27. Such goals are also generally the same in Drewerman’s book. In the concluding Bedeutung, Drewerman writes, “On all three grounds, the psychical, the religious-moral (philosophical), and the political-historical positions, therefore, we must discuss the Märchen one more time” (277; my trans.). Thirty years prior, Bartscht had noted, “Most expositors of Das Märchen have intermingled its esthetical, philosophical, and psychological aspects to some extent” (Goethe’s “Das Märchen,” 40). This is still the case. For a recent example of the “cyclical” utopian reading, see Rudolf Geiger, Goethes Märchen: Bilder Einer Konkreten Utopie, which finds the overturning of the paradise myth in the redemptive figure of the snake. 28. I agree with Bartscht, who writes, “The German word ‘Märchen’ is difficult to render in English; apparently it has no exact equivalent in any other language” (Goethe’s “Das Märchen 11 n. 1). 29. See also Goethe’s Conversations of German Refugees, vol. 10 of Goethe’s Collected Works. For the German text, see Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe, und Gespräche 9:368. 30. It is impossible to translate “Es ist an der Zeit” with the sense proper to the German. 31. When the snake tells Lily of the glorious bridge she has made, Lily pessimistically replies, “Forgive me if I cannot yet believe that the prophecy has been fulfilled. Only pedestrians can walk over the high arch of your bridge, and it has been promised to us that horses and carriages and travelers of all kinds could pass over the bridge in both directions at the same time” (trans. by Bartscht, Goethe’s “Das Märchen” 93). 32. See chapter 1 for my use of the term phantasmenon. 33. See n. 24 above.

6. Allegory as Metonymy:The Figure without a Face 1. See Odyssey, book 8, 521ff, and also the beginning of book 8, when Odysseus first weeps and remains concealed except from the sight of Alkinoös, who stops the singing and proposes sporting competition in a quiet effort to comfort his unknown guest. Citations are from The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore. 2. Heidegger invokes this scene as a “point[ing] toward the event [das Ereignis]” in reading Heraclitus’ fragment B-16. Heidegger’s reading of Homer is unusual but does attend to something usually forgotten in this scene. See “Aletheia (Heraclitus Fragment B-16)” in his Early Greek Thinking, 106. 3. In the essay “Odysseus’ Scar,” Erich Auerbach describes the tense of the epic as “an independent and exclusive present.” See Mimesis: A Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask. 4. Although dated and revised by later scholars, the work of Jakobson (and Halle) remains an important reference for the relationship between metaphor and metonymy. In the 2002 collection Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Con-

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Notes to pages 190–96 235 trast, edited by René Dirven and Ralf Pörings, Jakobson’s essay “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” opens the volume and serves as its touchstone. In his own contribution to the volume, Dirven acknowledges Jakobson’s continued influence as well as a dearth of recognition of Jakobson’s founding contribution to the field. As just one example, Beatrice Warren, in the same volume, admits that her work is an extension of Jakobson’s distinctions (125). 5. Jakobson and Halle identify “the primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism,” something that has been “repeatedly acknowledged.” But when metonymy is the predominant underlying structure, as in the “‘realistic’ trend” that followed romanticism and preceded symbolism, the dominant trope of metonymy is ignored. 6. I believe this observation shares an etiology with Jonathan Culler’s observations in The Pursuit of Signs on apostrophe in the lyric: “Apostrophe resists narrative because its now is not a moment in a temporal sequence but a now of discourse, of writing. This temporality of writing is scarcely understood, difficult to think, but it seems to be that toward which lyric strives” (152). 7. Quilligan cites the extreme example, now admittedly dated, of D. W. Robertson, who “developed a principle for reading medieval texts which tends to deny the validity of the ‘literal’ level altogether. He has reasoned that the ‘incoherence of the surface materials is almost essential to the formation of the abstract pattern, for if the surface materials—the concrete elements in the figures—were consistent or spontaneously satisfying in an emotional way, there would be no stimulus to seek something beyond them’” (28). 8. Jonathan Culler’s understanding of the Romantic symbol as “an instance of metaphysics which makes the relation between the subject and object its fundamental problem” identifies a crucial symptom of this approach: the desire to fuse, to abolish difference by subsuming it into the same (“Literary History, Allegory, and Semiology” 263). 9. For the important distinctions between personification and allegory, see James Paxson, The Poetics of Personification. 10. Ullén also recognized the tacit presence of metonymy in Quilligan’s view. See “Dante in Paradise” 182–83. Ullén accuses Quilligan of ignoring the “bilateral process of allegory . . . as a continuous transference between [text and reader].” Because “allegories do not need allegoresis” according to Quilligan, Ullén argues, “the metaphorical aspect of allegory is thus subsumed under its metonymical aspect.” Ullén considers the metonymical tantamount to the symbolic, and argues, in fact, for a desire (no longer fulfillable) for the metaphoric. In this respect, our views radically diverge. 11. The “beautiful” here stands for any criteria of judgment: political, postcolonial, grotesque, and so forth. 12. An image of this sculpture is on the cover of this book, and the sculpture itself resides at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

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236 Notes to pages 198–208 13. In a reconception of literary history as a composition of semiological systems rather than a sequential narrative, Jonathan Culler remarks on “the tendency of demystified symbolism towards allegory”: The internalization of the signifying relation leads one back towards an allegorical mode in which a series of external objects or agents figure another, internal drama: the drama of attributing meaning to situations and scenes. The very considerations which support a preference for the symbolic—the desire that poetic meanings be true, inherent, and natural rather than artificial and arbitrary—provoke a self-conscious questioning of the symbolic mode which reaches its height in Baudelaire. (“Literary History” 265) 14. Nancy admits that this rupture is analogous, perhaps even identical to, the ontological difference in Heidegger (Inoperative Community 6). 15. Unless otherwise noted, translations of passages from “Josefine die Sängerin, oder Das Volk der Mäuse” and “Der Bau” are my own. Parenthetical citations provide, first, the corresponding pages in Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (which includes translations of the two stories by Willa and Edwin Muir), followed by pages locating the original passages in Schriften und Fragmente. 16. “It was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward” (Complete Stories 170, Schriften und Fragmente 2:276). 17. Hegel reminds us of the same condition regarding the Absolute: “The share in the total work of Spirit that falls to the individual can only be very small” (Phenomenology 45, Phänomenologie 59). 18. I use “creature” to refer to the narrator of Kafka’s tale, an inadequate attempt to sustain the secret of the narrator’s identity, which is to be without identity except for the identity with the burrow.

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Murrin, Michael. The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Ed. Peter Connor. Trans. Peter Connor et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967. Nugent, S. Georgia. Allegory and Poetics:The Structure and Imagery of Prudentius’ “Psychomachia.” Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985. Origen. Exhortation to Martyrdom. Trans. Rowan A. Greer. New York and Toronto: Paulist Press, 1979. Paxson, James. The Poetics of Personification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Perpich, Diane. “Figurative Language and the ‘Face’ in Levinas’s Philosophy.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 38.2 (2005): 103–21. Peucker, Brigitte. “The Material Image in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften.” The Germanic Review 74.3 (1999): 195–213. Philo. Philo in Ten Volumes (and Two Supplemental Volumes), vol. 1. Trans. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Prudentius. Prudentius. Trans. H. J. Thomson. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949; reprint 1969. Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979. Ricouer, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Riera, Gabriel. “The Possibility of ‘the Poetic Said’ in Otherwise than Being (Allusion, or Blanchot in Lévinas I).” Diacritics 34.2 (Summer 2004): 14–36. Rimbaud, Arthur. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Antoine Adam. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Roney, Patrick. The Approach of the Unpresentable: Postmodernity, the Sublime, and the Language of the Lyric. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1995. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. Reginald Snell. New York: Continuum. ———. Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, and On the Sublime:Two Essays. Trans. Julius A. Elias. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979. Schlick, Werner. Goethe’s “Die Wahlverwandtschaften”: A Middle-Class Critique of Aesthetic Aristocratism. Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte 172. Heidelberg: C. Winter Universitätsverlag, 2000. Scott, John A. “Dante’s Allegory of the Theologians.” In The Shared Horizon: Melbourne Essays in Italian Language and Literature in Memory of Colin McCormick, ed. Tom O’Neill, 27–40. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990.

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Bibliography 245 Sidney, Sir Philip. An Apology for Poetry, or,The Defence of Poesy. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. 3rd ed. revised and expanded, ed. R. W. Maslen. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002. Singleton, Charles S. “Dante’s Allegory.” Speculum 25.1 (January 1950): 78–86. Smith, Macklin. Prudentius’ “Psychomachia”: A Reexamination. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton; text ed. by Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki. 2d ed. London and New York: Longman, 2001. ———. “Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh.” In The Faerie Queene, 737–38. Statkiewicz, Max. Rhapsody of Philosophy: Dialogues with Plato in Contemporary Thought. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009. Teskey, Gordon. Allegory and Violence. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Tosello, Matthew. “Spenser’s Silence about Dante.” Studies in English Literature 17.1 (Winter 1977): 59–66. Tuve, Rosemund. Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. Ullén, Magnus. “Dante in Paradise: The End of Allegorical Interpretation.” New Literary History 32.1 (Winter 2001): 177–99. Vergil. Aeneid. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam, 1971. Warminski, Andrzej. “Introduction: Theories of Reference.” In Aesthetic Ideology, by Paul de Man, ed. by Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Warren, Beatrice. “An Alternative Account of the Interpretation of Referential Metonymy and Metaphor.” In Dirven and Pörings, Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, 113–30. Watkins, W. B. C. Shakespeare and Spenser. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1950. Whitman, Jon. Allegory:The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Williams, Kathleen. “‘Eterne in Mutabilitie’: The Unified World of The Faerie Queene.” English Literary History 19.2 (June 1952): 115–30. Wilson, Rawdon. “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism.” In Magical Realism:Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, 209–34. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995.

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absence of gods, 134, 147, 149; in Hegel, 149, 152–53, 154; in Hölderlin, 134, 149–51; in Mutability Cantos, 115, 124–25 absolute, 45, 47, 61, 130, 134–36, 140, 146, 149, 201; knowledge, 8, 144–46; other (different), 11–12, 75, 134, 202; role of individual, 236n17; rupture in, 204 absolute monarchy, 126 Absolute Spirit, 130, 135–36, 140, 144, 152–53, 228n13, 236n17 Absolute Subject, 47, 127, 129–30, 131 134, 201 aesthetic: experience, 6–7, 20–22, 38, 48–49, 198; ideology, 13, 38, 40, 167; judgment, 22, 36, 38–39, 63, 158, 160–61, 168, 211; value(s), 21, 24, 27, 40, 53–54, 141, 227n3, 228n9 aesthetics, 23, 26, 28, 39, 158–60; and appearance, 63, 160; capital A, explained, 5; challenge to, 14, 19, 37; and criticism, 9–10, 20–23, 167, 173; Danto, 5–6; in Hegel, as misnomer, 5, 41, 45; history of, 6, 22, 159, 213n4; and the image, 30; in Kant, 22, 231n5; law of, 38; literature and, 6, 9, 15, 21–22, 40, 45, 129; and philosophy, 5–7, 19, 36–39, 45, 62–63, 201; resistance to, 25, 40, 155; and the sublime, 48–49. See also Science of Art; and under allegory; art; artwork; Hegel Agamben, Giorgio, 132–33, 143, 147 agora, 181, 183–84

Ahern, John, 224n16 Alighieri, Dante. See Dante allegoresis, 100–101, 103, 163, 224n14, 235n10 allegorical: experience, 103, 111–12, 121, 124; expression, 157, 163; image, 31, 62, 190; structure, 10, 14, 16, 18, 20, 25, 26–27, 31, 43, 46, 48–49, 57, 58, 65–66, 70–71, 77–78, 93, 97, 100, 102, 110, 111, 119, 127, 129, 136, 164, 200, 204, 208, 211, 223n9, 226n29 allegory: and (not) aesthetics, 9–10, 15–16, 19–20, 22, 26, 37, 39, 40, 46, 63, 155, 160, 195; of allegory, 1, 12, 25–26, 157, 184, 195, 200, 204, 208, 211; and art, 15, 20, 25, 26, 43, 49, 63, 70–71, 93, 126–28, 155, 158–60, 167, 204; of the cave (Plato), 5, 32–33, 54–55, 60–62, 195, 207–8, 211, 218n24, 227n6; change in face of, 11, 12, 22, 119, 156, 184, 200; crisis in, 9; disruptive, 160, 170, 225– 26n30; and ethics, 120, 126; etymology of (allos-agoreien), 104, 183–84; and language, 183; as limit, 63; and the literary, 6, 22, 129; and meaning, 1–2, 20, 32, 41, 57, 98, 101, 157, 200; medieval, 10, 13, 125, 156, 161; not metaphysical, 1–2, 11–12, 66, 159; as (not) metaphor, 62, 80, 101, 106, 188, 190–91, 192–94; metaphoric aspect, 235n10; and metonymy, 27, 193–95; modern, 163, 166; as necessary, 112, 117, 119, 130, 184,

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allegory (continued) 203; necessary obscurity of, 232n19; and philosophy, 18–19, 22, 26–27, 31, 45–46, 62–63, 129, 144, 161, 195, 214n7; and poetry, 93–94, 98; “of poets,” 100–5, 108–10; 106–7, 223n9; how to read, 17–18, 98, 100, 103, 170, 201; and Renaissance, 98, 115–16, 126–27, 167, 193, 215n14; and representation, 1, 3, 5, 12; and rhetoric, 10–11, 20, 22–23, 64, 157, 160; and Romanticism, 10, 162–63, 169; and silence, 27, 63, 184, 207, 211; space of, 2, 62; and sublime, 48–49; and symbol, 10, 45, 48–50, 54, 103, 110–11, 155–62, 166–69, 170–71, 178–80, 226n30, 227n4, 233n21; “of theologians,” 100–10, 223n9; and thinking, 10, 28; and time, 164, 166–67, 175; and unsayable, 77; what is, 1, 12, 13, 19, 23, 24, 25, 28, 65, 82, 92, 184. See also Faerie Queene; gap; literal level (of allegory); personification; polysemy; rift; structure of appearance; structure of meaning; two things in the same space; and under appearance; art; image; language; meaning; narrative; phenomenology; phenomenon; representation anima, animus, 34, 66, 73, 78–79, 81, 87–88, 92, 149 antinomy (antinomies), 56, 157–58, 170, 181 aporia, 49; in allegory, 65; in philosophy, 61, 214n12 apotheosis, 123, 125, 164–65. See also under Prudentius for poem Apotheosis appearance, 1, 50–52, 80–81, 158, 177, 179, 199; and aesthetics, 37, 160, 195; of allegory, 13, 24–26, 156, 179–81, 207, 211; of art, 20, 26, 53; of art work, 24, 42, 57–58, 71; in Benjamin, 56–57, 126, 170; and concealment, 69–71, 200; in Dante, 111, 127, 224n13; false, 67, 69 82, 84, 126; in Heidegger, 51–52;

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57–59; 69–70, 198; and khora, 32–34, 229n17; mere appearance, 50–52, 54, 79, 130, 177; phenomenology of, 1–2, 49–52, 55, 77, 217n18; in Phenomenology of Spirit, 16, 42, 129–30, 136–37, 142, 152–53; and prose poem, 186; in Prudentius, 67, 71–73, 79–85, 91; reading, 170, 177, 200; of the soul, 80, 92, 112; and symbol, 168–69, 179; of totality, 126, 158, 167. See also Erscheinung; image; Schein; structure of appearance; and under representation Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 19, 22, 223n8, 223n10; on allegory, 101–5; and Dante, 101–5, 108–9; and Sidney, 109 127; Summa, 95, 101, 223n11 Aristotle, 59, 142, 218n25; imagination 34, 79; De Anima 34, 78–79; Parva Naturalia 34; Physics 65; and Sidney 97 art, 6–8, 15–16, 39, 57–58, 77–78, 131, 147, 204, 216n13, 228n13; as absolute, 147; aesthetic quality of 6; and aesthetics (see also and philosophy below), 9, 20–22, 24–26, 37–52, 63, 131, 158–60, 161, 168, 198, 228n9, 232–33n20; and allegory, 2, 22, 25–26, 77–78; appearance of, 24, 26, 53, 93; death (end) of, 7–8; and Geist 42–43, 127; in Heidegger, 24–25, 43–45, 49–52, 53–54, 57–59, 69–71, 142, 218n20; highest destiny (vocation), 43–45, 130, 132, 144, 198; and imagination, 40–41; judgment of, 6, 20, 22, 168, 196, 213n1; new language for, 7, 19, 26, 199; phenomenology of, 24, 53; and philosophy (metaphysics), 5–8, 15, 19, 22, 30, 37, 39–46, 131–32, 144, 148, 195, 216n1; as phusis, 59, 70, 83, 198; problematic character of, 126–27, 158, 159, 167; space of, 2; in Spenser, 124; symbolic, 20, 45, 158, 168–69, 180, 215n14; a thing of the past (referenced), 7, 37, 39, 43, 45, 132, 141, 147, 148, 159, 168, 213n1, 216n11; relation to truth, 43, 58, 70, 159, 198; what

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Index 249 is, 24–25, 49–50, 52, 53–54, 141. See also experience of art; Science of Art; and under allegory; artwork; concealment; Hegel; Spirit; symbol art-ness 5, 24, 25, 26 artwork (work of art, art work), 6, 8, 22, 24–25, 52, 63, 127, 160–61, 232–33n20; and allegory, 20, 25–26, 63, 70, 155, 168, 170, 214n7; as art, 54, 57, 59, 93, 141, 161, 173; and the beautiful, 38, 168, 214n7; as concealment, 38, 70; contradiction in, 40, 49, 57–58, 66; Das Märchen as, 173; definition of, 24–25, 49–50, 53; as fragment (ruin), 160; and Geist, 42–43; and gods 147, 149–50; as happening of truth, 71, 159; in Heidegger, 49–50, 53, 69, 70, 155; indifference of, 195, 211; as mediating, 38, 48–49, 144, 168, 180; as object, 6, 24, 38, 42, 53, 57, 141, 160, 168; phenomenology of, 26, 49, 50, 53–54, 82, 141; as phusis, 59; and reader 20; relation to artist, 53; as remainder, 151; sublime, 48–49; as symbol(ic), 155, 180; and temporality, 93; and truth, 57–58, 70–71, 159; unknowable, 195. See also art, Gestalt; and under Hegel; structure of appearance; truth art’s work, 20, 25, 52, 53–63, 69, 141; as unworking, 63 Artaud, Antonin, 24, 26 Ascoli, Albert Russell, 105–6, 224n16 atemporality, 62, 69 Auerbach, Erich, 69, 105, 175, 220 n9; “Figura” 68–69, 161, 216n6; on Odysseus 182, 234n3; on typology 161, 230n2; on Vico, 232n19 baroque, as used by Benjamin, 55–56, 156–59, 161–64, 166–67, 169–70, 218n22, 231n7, 232n19 Bartscht, Waltraud, 172–73, 175, 234n27, 234n28, 234n31 Bataille, Georges, 200

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Baudelaire, Charles, 184–85, 204; Chevelure (hair) poems, compared, 186–89, 236n13; Arsène Houssaye, 185–86; as literary critic, 195, 199, 204; “Le masque,” 196–98; metonymy in, 187, 188 190–91, 198; “Une mort héroique,” 189–90; second revolution, 185–88; “Le vieux saltimbanque,” 189–90 Baumgarten, Alexander, 6 Beautiful (the), 21–22, 38–39, 48–49, 155, 158, 160, 166, 168, 195, 198, 214n7 Being, 50, 183, 217n17 being, 204; allegory of, 63, 78, 183–84; of art, 24–26, 39, 69, 78, 131; in Benjamin, 56–57, 165, 170; and concealment, 200; found in language, 57, 140, 148; in Hegel, 47, 130, 136, 146, 148; in Heidegger, 9, 50, 58–59, 69–70, 131, 148, 182–83, 218n19; and the image, 28, 63, 94, 110; in Plato, 32–33, 62, 64, 229n17; in poetry, 139; structure of, as phusis, 70, 182; and the sublime, 48 in the world, 68. See also community; nonbeing Benjamin, Walter, 26, 231n7, 231n11; on allegory, 155–57, 159–63, 231n7; on allegory and art, 126–28; on allegory and symbol, 165–66, 167; and concept of System, 55; on Goethe, 165, 170–72; on Hegel, 46; and Heidegger, 55, 56; on Kafka, 200, 203, 204–5; representation (see also Darstellung), 55–56; and Spenser, 126–28; and task of philosophy, 57. See also baroque; mourning; Origin of the German Tragic Drama Benvenuto da Imola, 105, 224n16 Berghahn, Klaus, 6, 159, 168, 213n4, 232n20 Berger, Harry, Jr., 5, 17; on Guyon (Faerie Queene), 121–23, 213n3 Bild. See image Bildung, 44, 164–65; and Goethe, 170; in Hegel, 213n1; and Kultur, 170; of spirit, 135

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Blanchot, Maurice, 15, 200, 201; and Dante, 13–14; and the image, 81, 92; Space of Literature, 2–3, 213n1; the unsayable, 5; Writing of the Disaster, 73, 229n15 Blissett, William, 225–26n27 Blondeau, Denise, 233n25 Borinski, Karl (in Benjamin), 166–67 Bower of Bliss, 118, 121–24; compared to Mutability Cantos, 121–24; as image, 124; as unallegorical image, 122–23 Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, 101–2 Brooks, Peter, 214n12 Christophe, Ernst, 196–98. See also “Le masque” Commedia (Divine Comedy), 3, 12, 25, 31, 97, 99–120, 197, 214n8, 223n9; Beatrice, 223–24n13; final vision of, 102, 103, 110–12, 225n19; Francesca (Inferno 5), 117; image of God (Paradiso 33), 13–14, 110; as true, 120 common sense (a), 33, 39 community, 29, 90, 180; as being in common, 203–4; in Kafka, 200–3, 205–6; in Jean-Luc Nancy, 201–3; thought in Republic, 207 concealment, 197, 200, 211, 217n18; in/of allegory, 19, 38, 106, 166–67, 184, 220; of/with art, 20, 38; in Hegel, 49, 143; in Heidegger, 51–52, 70–71, 135, 145, 217n18, 218n26; of language, 184; in literature, 32, 52, 205, 207, 211, 232n13; of Odysseus, 181–82; in Plato, 96; in Spenser 113; and unconcealed, 70–71, 200; of violence in allegory, 38 conflict, held together in, 30, 33, 44–45, 58, 70, 131, 156, 160, 164, 229n17. See also antinomy; rift (Riß) continguity disorder, 190–91, 194 contradiction, 49–50; and allegory, 136; in art, 42, 45, 49; in Hegel, 40, 44–45, 48–49, 128, 139, 144; internal, of symbol, 159, 169; in Lévinas, 31; in Plato, 35; in Prudentius, 82

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Creuzer, Friedrich, in Benjamin, 165–66, 231n7 Culler, Jonathan, 235n6, 235n8, 236n13 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 193–94, 220n9 Dante (Alighieri), 77, 101–12, 118, 120, 127, 197, 225n17; on allegory, 10, 12, 14, 25, 100–1, 104–12, 120, 214n8, 223n9; and Aquinas, 101–3, 104–5, 109–10; and Blanchot, 13–14; il Convivio, 105–7, 223n9; on polysemy, 98, 104–5; in Sidney, 97–98, 100, 222n4; Singleton, on, 106–7; and Spenser, 12–13, 26, 31–32, 97–100, 113, 205, 222n5; La Vita Nuova, 105; de Vulgari Elqouentia, 105. See also “allegory of poets”; “allegory of theologians”; Commedia; letter to Can Grande Danto, Arthur C., 5–8; “Death of Art,” 7–8; and Hegel, 7–8 dark conceite, 97–98, 112–13 Darstellung, 141; as representation, 29, 42, 55, 129,141; setting forth, 43, 35; als umweg, 56 Dasein, 59–62, 129 deconstruction, 9, 16, 221n20. See also destructive ontology; destructive phenomenology Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 203 de Man, Paul, 20–23, 40, 128; on aesthetics (and Aesthetic Ideology), 23, 28, 216n14, 221n20, 227n3, 228n9; on allegory and/or symbol, 93, 164, 167, 175; on Hegel, 45–46, 128–29, 144, 227n3, 228n14, 229–30n22; Resistance to Theory, 23, 215n15, 216n14; Rhetoric of Temporality, 164, 227n30, 232n13 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 201, 214–15n12, 217n17 destructive: ontology, 8; phenomenology, 52 dialectic, 140, 168, 195; in Benjamin, 157; in Faerie Queene, 2–3, 13; in Hegel, 5, 8, 42, 133, 141–43, 146, 148, 198, 213n1 Dirven, René, 191–92, 234–35n4

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Index Divine Comedy. See Commedia Dorter, Kenneth, 35 drama: baroque as, 167, 170, 233n22; and history, 161, 162 Drewerman, Eugen, 233n26, 234n27 duologue, 5 Eco, Umberto, 19, 22, 101, 127, 223n8, 223n10 Elizabeth I: in The Faerie Queene, 116,119; two bodies of, 119, 126–27, 226n29 Eleusis (Hegel), 132–33, 137–38, 143, 147, 151–52, 228n12 emblem, 126, 163, 169–70, 171, 180 emblematics, 163–64, 166–67, 170 epic, 36, 64–65, 67, 77, 87, 147, 182, 225n26, 234n3; allegorical, 113, 118–19; Protestant, 120–21, 122 Erscheinung, 50–51, 136, 170, 179; bloß Erscheinung, 51 experience: of art (poetry) 20–22, 38, 40, 48–49, 53, 68, 147, 159, 188, 197–98; of the poet, 20, 86, 93; of reading, 14, 17–18, 103, 111, 197, 230n4 face: of God, in Dante, 112; in Lévinas, 11–12, 30–31; and Narcissus, 73; nonallegorical, 112; in Prudentius, 71–72; in relation to allegory, 11–12, 22, 31 Faerie Queene (Spenser), 3, 4, 12, 38, 119–20; and allegory, 12–13, 25–26, 31–32, 98, 112–13, 115, 116–19, 126, 127, 184, 225n23, 225–26n27; as epic, 113, 120; Errour (Book 1), 2; Genius (Book 2), 118, 121, 123; and the image, 31, 99, 112, 113, 115–16; as Protestant, 13, 26, 97, 114–16; and monarch’s two bodies, 126–27; unity of, 225–26n27. See also absence of gods; Bower of Bliss; hope; Mutabilitie Cantos; Spenser; and under self fascination, 2–3; in Blanchot, 13–14; and image, 14 figura, 35, 161, 230n2

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figure of allegory, Odysseus as, 181 finite being (finitude), 61–62, 92, 115, 146; in Aristotle, 78; in Dante, 112; as limit, 35, 69, 93, 130; in Prudentius, 68, 93; relation to infinite, 47–48, 79–80, 129–30, 136, 138, 141–42, 147; in Spenser, 125; and Spirit (Geist), 46, 47, 130, 228n13 finite world, 34, 162–63, 166, 175 Fletcher, Angus, 16, 36–37, 214n11, 215n13; on Dante, 110, 225n17 foreconceit, 96–97 fourfold. See levels of meaning Freccero, John, 110–11 Frye, Northrop, 191 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 158–59, 164–65, 231n5 gallery of images, 128, 131, 142; referenced, 134. gap: and allegory, 12, 16–17, 19, 26, 129; and image, 34; in reason, 39; within unity of symbol, 158. See also aporia; rift Gedächtnis, 42, 49 Geiger, Rudolf, 234n27 Gegensatz, 44, 49–50 Geist, 16, 42–43, 47, 127, 142, 217n15; geistlose, 135; phenomenological appearance of, 130, 149. See also Spirit genius, artistic (Romantic), 53, 162, 164, 178, 232n15. See also under Faerie Queene for Genius as character Gestalt, 29, 31, 47, 58, 71, 129, 131, 135, 141–42, 144; as figure of Spirit in Hegel, 134–36 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 24, 171; Age of, 159, 171; on allegory and symbol, 177–80; in Benjamin, 167, 171–72, 232n17, n18, 233n23; Conversations of German Immigrants, 172; Elective Affinities [Die Wahlverwandtschaften], 170–71, 232n18, 233n25; as genius, cult figure, 165, 170–71, 233n24; and Schiller, 176–80. See also Märchen

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golden world, 32, 97–100; in Sidney, 96–98 Görres, Joseph von (in Benjamin), 165–66 Green, Richard Hamilton, 105, 108, 224n15, 224n16 Gregerson, Linda, 120, 122 Grogan, Jane, 115–16, 214n6, 225n22, 225n24 groundplot, 99 Halmi, Nicholas, 168–69, 227n4, 233n21 Hamilton, A.C., 101, 111; comparing Dante and Spenser, 31, 97–100, 118, 222–23n6; on the image in The Faerie Queene, 31–32, 99–100; theory of allegory, 32, 97–100 Harrison, Robert 223–24n13 Hegel, G.W.F., 15, 61, 128, 188, 195, 198; Aesthetics (and aesthetics), 5, 39–40, 41–46, 48–49, 128–29, 131, 133, 147, 149, 216n13; and allegory, 41, 45–46, 129, 130–32, 144, 215n14; on allegory, 20, 45; and appearance, 129, 136, 142; and art, 5, 7–8, 28, 37, 40, 42–43, 45, 49, 130–32, 133, 141, 144, 147, 159, 160, 168, 195, 198, 216n13; in Benjamin, 46; and Danto, 7; dialectic, 141, 142–43, 146, 148, 198, 213n1; Encyclopedia, 129; compared to Faerie Queene, 126; Heidegger, on, 37, 43, 45, 49, 139–40, 142, 144, 145, 148, 229n19; and Hölderlin, 132, 134, 138, 149, 152, 228n13; and image, 149; and immediate, 129, 135, 138, 142, 144–46; and individual in, 141, 236n17; influence on C.S. Lewis, 37–38; in Lacoue-Labarthe, 141–42; and language, 133, 139, 148, 153, 227n3; and literary criticism, 39; and Marx, 128, 142–44; and mediation, 49, 130, 133–34, 145–46; and Orpheus, 146; and Plato, 39, 138–39; as poet, 132, 134, 137–39, 140, 148, 151–52, 154; compared to Prudentius, 36, 149, 217n16; recollection in, 129, 148–49, 152; sign and symbol in, 45–46, 48,

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128–29; symbolic art, 20; as threat to metaphysics, 140; on true and false, 130, 227n8. See also Absolute Subject; Eleusis; gallery of images; Gedächtnis; Geist; mediation; Phenomenology of Spirit; sense-certainty; Spirit; and under aesthetics: capital A, explained; being; de Man Heidegger, Martin, 24–26; on allegory (and symbol), 43–45, 49–50, 54, 58, 70–71, 155, 182–83; on appearance, 24, 50–52, 58, 70; on art, 25–26, 53, 69, 141; art as happening of Truth, 48; Basic Problems in Phenomenology, 9; Being and Time, 9, 50, 59; and Benjamin, 26, 55, 57; Dasein, 59, 62, 129; History of the Concept of Time, 50–51, 54; on Hölderlin, 52, 139, 148; Introduction to Metaphysics, 182–83; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 58–59, 61–62, 92, 218n25, 218–19n26; Lacoue-Labarthe on, 141, 142; “Language,” 139; language without meaning, 4; Lévinas, 77–78; ontology, 9; “Origin of the Work of Art,” 24, 29, 37, 43, 49–50, 53–55, 57–58, 69–70, 131, 155, 198; phenomenological reduction, 9; phenomenology defined by, 50–54, 217n18; phenomenon, 50, 54, 59; philosophy, 9, 145; and poetry, 52, 139–40, 147, 148, 182, 201, 218n19, 218n26; post-aesthetic, 6; and Psychomachia, 85, 92; The Question of Being, 183, 217n17; question of being, 9, 148; reading of Odysseus, 234n2; on Socrates, 29; and truth 70, 198. See also destructive ontology; Gestalt; phenomenology; phusis; Ursprung; and under being; Hegel; philosophy Hexter, Ralph, 219n4 history, 156; of allegory, 8, 10, 12, 17, 20, 23–24, 26, 66, 101, 163, 215n18, 219n2; and art, 6, 7–8, 131, 158; in Benjamin, 161–63, 165–66; in Dante, 99, 108–9; in Hegel, 134, 143, 152–53; interpretation of, 161–62; lack of, 174; literary, 110,

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Index 226 n13; and philosophy (metaphysics), 8–9, 45–46, 96, 109, 129, 140–41, 143, 145; and poetry, 100, 109, 139–40; in Psychomachia, 68–69, 76, 85; in Spenser, 99, 120 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 52, 132, 138, 139, 150–51, 152–53, 154, 219n28, 228n13; “Brot und Wein,” 127, 134, 149–50, 230n24 Hollander, Robert, 223n90 Honig, Edwin, 17 hope, 162, 200, 203–4; in Benjamin, 162, 166, 232n18; in Faerie Queene, 112, 114–15, 125; in Goethe’s Das Märchen, 174, 176, 177; in Psychomachia, 81, 87–88, 221n21 Horst, Carl (in Benjamin), 159–60, 167 Hoxby, Blair, 218n22 humanism, 11 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 164–65 Husserl, Edmund, 15, 217n18; epoché, 8–9; Ideas, 8–9 “I is I,” 136, 146, 198–99 I, grammatical, 134–36, 141, 228–29n15, 229–30n22 iconography, in Spenser 120 identity and difference, 136; in allegory, 62, 132; in Faerie Queene, 119; in Hegel, 132, 136; (referenced), 189–90, 199 idol: not allegorical, 122; in Plato, 60 image, aesthetics of, 30; and allegory, 13, 28–37, 38 ,62, 77, 80, 93, 136, 175, 179, 190; as appearance, 51, 79–81, 92, 136, 179; appearing phenomenologically, 46, 74, 79, 82, 136; in Aquinas, 102–3, 105; in Aristotle, 34, 78–79; in Benjamin, 55–57, 157; as Bild, 129, 142, 144, 157; in Blanchot, 2, 13–14, 73, 81, 92, 229n15; as commerce, 28, 31–31, 39, 63; and communication of, 62, 111, 170; in Dante, 102–3, 110, 120; and the face, 11–12, 30–31, 71–73, 112–13, 115, 229n16; in Faerie Queene, 31–2, 99–101,

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112, 119, 122–24; function in epic, 120; and/against figure (figuration), 30, 62, 189, 196, 199; in Hegel, 128–31, 134–37, 141–42, 152; in Heidegger, 58–59; in Hölderlin, 150, 230n24; of human (soul), 68. 75, 111–12, 119, 125; in Kafka, 200–2; in Kant 39, 58; and language, 62, 81, 149; in Lévinas, 28, 29–31, 63, 77–78, 204, 229n16; as limit, 34–35; 76, 93; as literal 100, 102, 110, 199, 222–23n6; not metaphoric, 35, 202, 216n5; and metonymy, 200; not mimetic, 30, 80; and Narcissus, 30, 73, 239n15; as nonobject, 174; ontology of, 29–30, 204; our own, 119, 125, 197; and personification, 70–72, 79–81; and philosophy, 29–31, 32, 56; in Plato, 30, 34, 62–63, 218n24; (Timaeus) 32, 64, 136; and poetry, 68, 80, 87, 94; in Protestantism, 116, 120; and resemblance (semblance), 28, 29–30, 31, 73, 79, 92; as singular, 35, 174; seal and wax, compared to, 35, 216n6; of Spirit, 135–36; of the (Absolute) Subject, 136, 149; and symbol, 175, 179; two things in same, 1, 31, 62–63, 64, 77, 81, 110, 150; unallegorical, 122; unsayable, 179–80. See also gallery of images; image of God; and under truth image of God (imago Dei), 13, 74–76, 165, 220n10, 230n25; in Dante, 13–14, 110, 112, 197, 225n19; in Hegel, 136; in Protestant England, 115 imagination: in Aristotle, 34–35, 78–80; faculty of, 92; in Hegel, 40–42; in Kant, 168 imitation, 73–74, 85; in Baudelaire, 186; in Plato, 35; in poetry (Sidney), 97–98. See also mimesis infima doctrina, 102, 223n10 Jakobson, Roman and Morris Halle, 190–91, 193–95, 199, 234–35n4, 235n5 Johnson, Barbara, 185, 190

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254

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judgment: and aesthetics, 19–22, 36, 39, 63, 160, 211, 218n24; against allegory, 20; of art, 20, 22, 36, 196, 228n9; in Hegel, 39, 43, 47, 128; and interpretation, 20; in Kant, 158, 168; and taste, 6, 158–59, 167; Urteilskraft, 39 Kafka, Franz, 12, 25, 200; and allegory, 200, 207, 211; Benjamin, on, 203–5; “The Burrow,” 208–11; community in, 203; figure(s) in, 202, 204; “The Hunger Artist,” 203, 207; “Josephine the singer,” 203, 205–7, 211; between philosophy and poetry, 201, 211; as singularity, 203–5; as storyteller, 205 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 28, 164–65, 168, 195, 218–19n26, 231n5; Critique of Judgment, 38–39, 158–59; Critique of Pure Reason, 58, 164. See also under Heidegger Kantorowicz, Ernst, 226n29 Kelley, Theresa, 17, 215n14 Kelly, J.N.D., 79, 220n10 khora, 32–34, 62, 136, 229n17; logical impossibility of, 65–66 king’s two bodies, 126–27; 226n29 Konstan, David, 215n16 Kudielka, Robert, 5–6 Lacan, Jacques, 199 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 141–42 Lang, Berel, 216n3, 222n2 language, 14, 133, 188, 194, 230n4; and allegory, 1, 11–12, 15–16, 17–18, 19, 26, 57, 62, 82, 93–94, 97, 112, 175, 183–84, 194–95, 208, 226–27n30, 232n20; arbitrary nature of, 82, 188; for art, 7, 19, 26, 199; of baroque, 231n11; concealment of, 184; of critique, 63; in Dante, 109; and deconstruction, 214–15n12, 221n20; divine nature, 133; figurative, 29, 186; and figure, 200; and gap or rift, 12, 16, 46, 67, 129, 200, 211; in Goethe, 178–79; used by Hegel, 128–29, 227n3; in Heidegger, 139–40, 148, 183; and image, 73, 81, 149, 174; insufficiency

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of, 109; literal, 67; how to read literally, 186; literary, 186, 190, 208, 211; (without) meaning, 4, 133, 162, 184–88, 192, 200, 211, 231n11; metaphoric, 101, 108, 188, 190–92, 194, 195; metaphysical, 11, 39; and metonymy, 193, 199; new (different), 7, 11, 16, 19; nonlanguage, 2; and philosophy (metaphysics), 15, 16, 19, 39, 140, 183, 187, 214n11; as phusis, 183; poetic, 67, 109, 139, 140, 148, 183–84, 186–88, 214n7; in poetry, 109, 139–40, 183, 188; and polysemy, 192; in Psychomachia, 59, 66–67, 72, 82, 86, 93–94; in Rimbaud, 154; semblance of, 73; silence of, 132–33, 139–40, 162; of the soul, 153–54; symbolic, 163; and time, 164; as threshold, 211. See also Quilligan; and under Hegel Lapidge, Michael, 221n22 letter (epistle) to Can Grande della Scala, 104–7; authenticity of, 224n1, 224n16 levels of meaning, 32, 98–100; in Dante’s Commedia, 103–6, 110; fourfold or four levels, 10, 14, 68, 99–101, 110, 192–93, 214n9, 230n3; in Quilligan, 18, 101, 192. See also literal level Lévinas, Emmanuel, 63, 214n7; definition of allegory, 28; face, 11–12, 30–31, 202; on the image, 29, 204; “Reality and Its Shadow,” 29–31 Levine, George, 21 Lewis, C.S., 17, 37–38 Lippert-Adelberger, Eberhard, 233n25 literal level (of allegory), 10, 18, 67–68, 177, 192–93, 199–200; in Aquinas, 102, 104–5, 108; in Baudelaire, 185–89; in Dante, 102, 104–5, 106–8, 110–11, 223n9, 224n16; in Faerie Queene, 122; as part of four levels, 14; importance of, 57, 82, 98–101, 192, 223n9; in Das Märchen, 177; in Psychomachia 67–68, 82–84. See also levels of meaning literary (the), 5; and allegory, 22; mode of appearing, 6; and philosophy, 211; and its space, 3–4

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Index literary criticism, 13, 39–40, 54, 193, 232n20; by Baudelaire, 195–96; and metonymy, 190–91, 198–99 literature: relationship to philosophy, 12, 15–16, 19, 22, 96, 109, 128–29, 211, 216n3, 220n9; space of (literary space), 2–6 logocentric, 5, 19–20; logos-centric, 15–16 Lyotard, Jean-François, 48 Machosky, Brenda, 21–22 Märchen (Das), by Goethe, 167, 172–80, 228n10; allegorization of, 174, 177, 180; Goethe comments on, 172–73, 176, 180; language appearing in, 175; Schiller comments on, 177–80; symbolic moment, 175–76, 180. See also under artwork; hope; narrative Martinez, Ronald L., 214n10 Marx, Karl, 128, 142–44 “Le masque” (or, “Le comedie humaine”), 196–98, 204 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 108–9 magical realism, 3–4 McLaughlin, Thomas, 199 meaning, 46, 67, 100, 229–30n22, 236n13; and allegory, 1–2, 3, 5, 10, 11–12, 17–19, 20, 43, 57, 65–66, 98, 107, 157–58, 170, 184, 192–93, 195, 200; and appearance, 51–52; and art work, 52, 168–69; creation of, 18, 174; figurative, 104–5, 108; hidden, 12, 35, 63, 70, 100–1, 172, 184; of image, 32; imposing (forcing), 49, 63, 107; indifference to, 34, 41, 43; in Kafka, 200; and metaphor, 188, 190–93, 199–200; and metonymy, 188, 190–94, 199; and the name, 56–57; no, 50, 135, 207; outer and inner, 106–7; quest for, 172, 177–79; resistance to, 23, 46, 202; and revelation, 102–3; sign and, 67, 108, 170; in Spenser, 32; structure of, 1–2, 5, 11–12, 194, 195; and truth, 56, 59; unmediated, 133. See also levels of meaning; literal level; and under language; structure of meaning

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meaningless, 43, 49, 156, 225–26n27, 231n11 mediation: and allegory, 127; of art, 38, 144, 180, 198; in Benjamin, 156, 167; as covering over, 54, 93; in Hegel, 44, 47–49, 130–31, 133–35, 145–47, 168; and phenomenology, 217n18; priest as, 150; defied by sublime, 48; of unmediated (or immediate), 21, 49, 77, 130 metaphor, 107, 190–91, 199; in Aquinas 101–2, 105; in Baudelaire 186–89; as figurative, 199; as figure, 75, 88; of I (lyric I), 198–99; and image, 216n5; interrupted, 160; in Kafka, 200, 202; and language, 108, 188, 190; and personification, 80; in philosophy, 33, 34, 134, 195, 200, 211; poetry without 187, 189; in Psychomachia, 80, 84, 89, 91–92; and rift, 199–200; structure of, 106; in theology, 107. See also under allegory; meaning; metonymy metaphysics, 55, 61, 140, 193, 200; as absence, 194; and allegory, 1, 11–12, 19, 37, 66, 100, 108, 128–29, 190, 195; and appearance, 51, 54–55, 57, 217n18; and art (aesthetics), 7, 24, 37, 39, 158, 195; in Benjamin, 159, 162; challenge to, 16; and Hegel, 128–29, 140–41, 159; and Heidegger, 6, 7, 51, 54–55, 60, 61, 140, 182; history of, 140, 143; and the imagination, 34; and language, 62, 82, 187, 190; and metonymy, 193–94; overcoming of, 16, 60; in Plato 29, 54, 61; and Psychomachia, 67–68, 82, 87, 89; resistance to, 60; of the subject, 200–1, 235n18 metonymy, 103, 106, 190–95, 198–200, 235n5, 235n10; in Baudelaire, 187, 188, 196, 198; and contiguity disorder, 190–91, 194; in Kafka, 200; in literary criticism, 190–91, 193; and metaphor, 27, 35, 103, 106, 188, 190–95, 199, 234–35n4, 235n5; as present, 193; and relation to prose, 191; resisting interpretation, 190, 199; and structure of meaning, 194–95. See also Jakobson; and under meaning

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256 Index Miller, David Lee, 226n29 Milton, John, 225n21 mimesis: and allegory, 93; in Aristotle, 34, 97; and personification, 72; in Plato, 32, 34, 141, 229n17; in Sidney, 97 mourning, 157, 162, 166, 171, 201, 219n28, 232n18 Murrin, Michael, 10–11, 20, 22–23, 214n5, 215n15 Mutabilitie Cantos, 36–38, 112–15, 121, 225n17, 225n18, 225–26n27; compared to Bower of Bliss, 121–24; figure of Mutability, 112, 124 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 200–1, 203–4, 236n14 Narcissus, 30, 73, 147, 229n15 narrative, 69, 156, 182, 235n6; and allegory, 12, 17–18, 156, 164, 165, 193, 194, 215n14, 236n13; of Commedia, 103; of completion (C.S. Lewis), 37; of Faerie Queene, 4, 120, 122, 127; in Goethe’s Das Märchen, 174–76; “I” 189; in Kafka, 202; of Narcissus, 73; of philosophy, 195; in Plato, 60, 62, 218n24; of Psychomachia, 12, 64, 65, 68, 71, 77, 83, 88–89, 91 Nichtigkeit, 49, 129, 133 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72, 140 nonbeing, 200 nonobject, 30, 174 Nugent, S. Georgia, 219n4 Odyssey, 181–82, 197, 204, 234n1 ontological: and ontic, 51–52, 57; difference, 57, 205, 236n14 ontology: in Heidegger, 9, 59; of image, 174, 204; in Lévinas, 29–31, 214n7 Origin of the German Tragic Drama (Benjamin), 46, 56–57, 126–28, 155–58, 161, 170; constellations, 57; emblem, emblematics, 167; on the ruin (fragment), 126; on the treatise, 46, 218n23; on truth, 55–57, 169

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Paxson, James, 71–72, 235n9 Perpich, Diane, 30–31 personification, 26, 166, 193, 203, 204, 219n2, 235n9; in Prudentius, 64–67, 71–72, 79, 80–82, 94, 235n9; in Spenser, 112, 124; and Truth, 70 Peucker, Brigitte, 233n25 phantasia. See imagination phantasma, phantasmata, 33–34, 79, 80, 85, 174, 204 phantasmenon, 62, 81, 87, 93, 149, 204 phenomenological reduction, 8–10, 49; and allegory, 11, 12, 24; applied to Aquinas, 101; of appearance, 51–52; applied to Psyschomachia, 12; of phenomenology, 217n18 phenomenological structure of allegory, 182, 194 phenomenology, 14–15, 24, 52, 54, 65, 217–18n18; of allegory, 1–2, 8–9, 14, 18, 25, 27, 54, 64, 108; defined by Heidegger, 54; of phenomenon, 49–50; of the pun, 194; of soul, in Psychomachia, 77; and work of art, 49–50, 53–54 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 16, 20, 42, 49, 129, 139, 144–146, 153, 227–28n8; allegorical structure of, 26–27, 48, 129, 136; gallery of images, 128, 131, 142; and Eleusis (see also Agamben), 132–33, 137, 138, 143, 147, 152–53; as poem 134, 136–37, 147–54; and the sublime 48–49. See also Hegel; Spirit; and under allegorical structure; representation phenomenon, 8, 51, 59, 103; of allegory, 22, 24, 26, 57, 66, 97, 99, 155–56 181, 184, 195; covered over, 8, 52, 54; definition of, 50–52, 55; definition by Benjamin, 155–56; and image, 136; of judgment, 158; of mediation, 145, 217n18; as mere appearance, 57; of phenomenology, 50; of pure manifestation, 223–224n13; of Psychomachia, 65; relation to truth, 56, 59; of Schein (appearance), 177; structure of, 54; of work of art, 24, 26

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Index philosopher as poet, 160, 182–83, 216n3; Hegel, 132, 140, 143–44, 151, 153, 154; Plato, 15, 29–30, 36, 95–96, 139, 207 philosophy, 8–9, 16, 44, 48, 61–62, 128, 141, 214–15n12; and appearance, 41, 69, 140, 153, 208; in Benjamin, 46, 55–57; Christian, 69, 93; crisis in 9; dangerous, 140; and figuration, 30, 130; in Heidegger, 9, 145, 182, 201, 217–18n18; illogical, 182–83, 199; and judgment, 63, 158; limit of, 6, 47, 144, 211; and phenomenology, 15, 26, 69; poetic structure of, 32; system of, 30, 39, 42, 46–47, 55; truth, relationship to, 55, 59; wonder of, 37. See also metaphysics; poetry and philosophy; and under allegory; language; literature; metaphor; truth philosophy and poetry. See poetry and philosophy phusis, 59, 70, 83, 93, 182–84, 197, 198. See also under art Plato, 96, 209; and art 6, 15, 36, 39, 228n9; vs. Aristotle, 34, 61; Berger on, 5, 213n3; critique of poetry, 138–39, 185; definition of poetry, 96; in Deleuze, 4; divided line, 60; figuration in, 29–30, 33; ideal world, 52; and image, 62, 64; intelligible realm, 32–33, 60–61; Ion, 15, 19, 97, 138–39, 216n8; irony in, 35; mimesis (imitation), 35, 141; Phaedrus, 209; and rhapsody, 4–5; Symposium, 95–96, 231n8; Timaeus, 32, 136, 229n17. See also allegory of the cave; khora; Republic; and under poetry and philosophy: old quarrel between Plowden, Edmund, 226n29 poet and thinker: in A.C. Hamilton, 99; in Heidegger, 182–83 poet in philosopher, image of, 29–30, 95–96 poetic language, 67, 186–87, 214n7 “poetically man dwells,” 139, 149, 205 poetry, 39, 63, 80, 82, 113, 120, 140, 184–86, 188–91, 216n8; in Aquinas, 101–2, 104,

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223n10, 223n11; crisis in, 127; in Dante, 109–10; and Hegel’s Spirit, 228n13; in Heidegger, 50, 52, 139–40, 147–48, 182–83, 222n25; as infima doctrina, 102; and language, 81, 139, 186; modern dilemma, 18; phenomenologically unique, 100; in philosophy, 26, 29; defined by Plato, 96; purpose of, 11; Psychomachia, significance of, 67–69, 87, 92–93, 22n9; in Sidney, 96–98, 100, 110, 118, 127; in Symposium, 95–96; and thinking, 182; as true, 103. See also poetry and philosophy; and under truth poetry and philosophy, 19, 29, 140, 201, 214n11; in Hegel, 132–34, 148; in Heidegger, 182; limit shared, 211; old quarrel between, 15, 29, 36, 61, 211; compared by Sidney, 36–37, 96, 100. See also philosopher as poet; philosophy; poet and thinker; poet in philosopher; poetry polysemy, 18, 98, 122, 192; in Dante, 104, 108; in Quilligan, 101, 194, 226n27 presence, 2, 48, 200 presentation, 57, 59, 110, 230n4; of art, 25 prose poem, 185–90 Protestant allegory, 26, 97, 114–15, 156–57 Protestant Reformation, 13, 115, 124. See also under epic Prudentius: Apotheosis, 58, 73–77, 92, 220n11, 221n19; and Hegel, 217n16. See also Psychomachia Psychomachia (Prudentius), 12, 26, 59, 64–66, 136, 219n4, 220n8, 220n9, 220n11; as allegory, 67–68, 71–72, 82, 91–92; and Apotheosis, 73–78, 87; as battle, 66–67, 91, 93–94; conception, 86–87; Concordia, 79, 80–82, 84, 89–91; Discordia, 67, 81–82, 84, 89; etymology, 80–81, 219n4; and finitude, 93; and Hegel, 136; Luxuria, 84–86, 88; phenomenological structure of, 68–69, 78. See also personification; and under hope; representation

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258 Index Quilligan, Maureen, 11, 101, 224n14, 225–26n27, 235n7; and metonymy, 191, 192–95; and phenomenology, 18; pun, 194; theory of allegory, 17–18. See also polysemy Republic (Plato), 15, 35, 60, 62, 95, 207; exile of poet 15, 28–29; mirror in, 29; philosopher-kings, 32, 207, 209–210, 218n24. representation, 4–5, 95, 197; and allegory, 1, 3, 12, 28, 31, 57, 77, 157, 164; and appearance, 51, 57, 160 217n18; and art, 38, 42, 48; as digression (Benjamin), 56; in Faerie Queene 99; of idea, 160; and the image, 29–31, 35, 56–57, 58; in literature, 3–4, 5, 28, 80; metaphor as, 193; other than, 5; and personification, 72; in Phenomenology of Spirit, 13, 134, 148; of phenomenon, 155–56, 177; in Plato, 35, 117; in Sidney, 96–98; of soul in Psychomachia, 66, 78, 91; and symbol, 165–66, 169, 175, 180; theatrical, 160; and truth, 46, 55–56, 67. See also Darstellung; presentation; unrepresentable resemblance, 12; and image, 28–31, 56–57, 59, 92 revelation: and allegory, 20, 27, 32, 77; in Aquinas’ Summa, 102–3; in Dante, 105, 110, 120 rhapsode, 15, 138–39, 181–82, 216n8 rhapsody (alternative to hermeneutics), 4 Ricoeur, Paul, 63, 219n29 Riera, Gabriel, 214n7 rift: in allegory, 19, 211, 220n12, 231n12; in language, 199–200; Riß, 58, 70. See also gap Rimbaud, Arthur, 153 Robertson, D.W., 235n7 Romanticism, 10, 22, 41, 54, 215n14, 235n5, 235n8; in Baudelaire, 198; in Benjamin, 158, 162, 166; in Halmi, 168–69, 227n4. See also allegory: symbol Roney, Patrick, 48–49

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Saussure, Ferdinand de, 193 Schein, 50–51, 170, 177 Schiller, Friedrich, 153, 172; and Goethe, 172, 176–78; “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 178–80 Schlick, Werner, 233n25 Science of Art, 5; as Aesthetics, 22, 41–42, 46, 131, 132 158–59 Scott, John A., 223n9 self (the), 226–27n30; in The Faerie Queene, 118, 121–24, 127; in Hegel, 128, 142; and other, 181, 204 semblance, 57, 60, 73, 75, 79 sense-certainty (in Hegel), 132–33, 137, 144–46 Sidney, Sir Philip, 36–37; on allegory, 223n7; Apology for Poetry, 96–100, 109, 115–16, 127, 222n3; on Dante, 97, 100, 107–9, 222n4; compared to Spenser, 118 sign and symbol, in Hegel, 45–46, 128–29, 227n3 silence, 139–40, 147, 162, 184; and allegory, 27, 163, 207, 211; image of, 2; in Kafka, 201–2, 205–6; in literature, 211; power of, 132–33; speaking of, 62, 140, 206; within the subject, 201. See also under allegory Singleton, Charles, 101; on allegory of theologians (and poets), 106–7; and Sidney, 107 singular aspect, 201–4 singularity: in Dante, 109; in Hegel, 135; in Kafka, 204–20 Smith, Macklin, 66–67, 220n6, 220n9, 221n21 Spenser, Edmund, 23, 115, 126–27, 184; and Dante, 12–13, 25, 26, 31–32, 97–100, 113, 205; Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, 112, 116–17, 126, 225n24. See also Bower of Bliss; Faerie Queene; Mutabilitie Cantos Spirit: and aesthetics, 46; appearance of, 142, 153, 236n17; and art, 42, 130, 132,

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Index 168, 196; impoverished, 46–47, 134, 137, 228n13; role of individual, 141, 217n15, 236n17; and mediation, 46, 48, 130, 134, 135, 145 structure: of allegory, see allegorical structure; of appearance, 5, 11–12, 16, 39, 50, 51, 55, 57, 81, 120, 127, 170, 181, 184, 211; of meaning, 1–2, 5, 10, 11–12, 194–95 subject (the), 141, 147, 164, 229n15; in relation to art, 147; in Hegel, 134–36, 138, 149; and Kafka, 201, 205; in Spenser, 113, 118, 127. See also Absolute Subject subjectivity, 147, 200–1; and allegory, 11; in Protestantism, 13, 26 sublime (the), 21, 48–49, 128–29, 139; in Kant, 139, 158 symbol, 27–28, 48–49, 175, 227n3, 227n4; allegorical structure of, 10, 27, 31, 158, 163–64, 169, 175; and art, 27, 38, 40, 45, 168; baroque (Benjamin), 158, 163, 231n7; becoming allegory, 103, 168, 175–76, 236n13; challenged, 158, 159, 168–69; in Goethe, 175, 178–80; and need of allegory, 168, 169–70, 180; romantic, 136, 169, 227n4, 235n8; sacred term, 167; secularization of, 158, 161–63, 166, 167–68; confused with sign, 45–45, 128, 165; unsayable, 179. See also allegory: symbol; emblem; and under contradiction taste: aesthetics of, 6, 160; as judgment 158–59, 167 temporality, 93, 114, 162, 164, 226n30; dialectic based in, 3; escape from, 69; of writing, 235n6

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Teskey, Gordon, 5, 220n12, 224n14; Allegory and Violence, 18–19, 37–38; on Mutability, 226n27 Tosello, Matthew, 222n5 truth, 56–57, 70–71, 95, 108–9; and appearance, 41, 55–56, 58, 70; and Being, 59; in Faerie Queene, 117; and fiction (falsity), 97–98 108, 118, 130; and the image, 56, 78, 87, 110; indifference to, 34; and language, 82, 188; and mediation, 44, 56; in philosophy, 44, 46, 55–56, 59, 70, 136; in poetry, 96, 103–4, 109, 118; relationship to allegory, 77, 104; revelation of, 11, 102; Socrates as figure of, 95–96; and work of art, 37, 43, 45, 47, 48, 57–58, 70–71, 132, 159 Tuve, Rosemond, 14, 17, 214n9 two things in the same space, 1, 6, 26, 43, 62, 119, 194, 225n23, 226n29; in Aquinas, 102 typology, 64, 68–69, 161; confused with allegory, 10; literary, 109–10 Ullén, Magnus, 103, 225n19, 235n10 unaesthetic, 190, 195 unrepresentable, 12 Ursprung, in Heidegger, 49, 53 Virgil: Aeneid, 225n26, 228n11; in Dante, 107 Watkins, W.B.C., 121 “What are poets for?” (Wozu Dichter?), 127, 149–50, 153, 228n13 Whitman, Jon, 16–17, 64–66, 183–84, 219n2, 219n3 Williams, Kathleen, 225–26n27 Wilson, Rawdon, 3–4

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