Allegory, Pathos, and Irony: The Resistance to Benjamin in Paul de Man Andrea Mirabile ABSTRACT Paul de Man’s writings on allegory are significantly influenced by the work of Wal- ter Benjamin. Nevertheless, Benjamin is conventionally perceived as semireligious and pathos-laden, whereas de Man is described as secular and emotionless. A close reading of selections from the two authors’ works (in particular Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama and de Man’s Blindness and Insight) complicate this distinction, and the stereotypes supporting it. Both de Man and Benjamin help us to question the accepted borders between the emotively charged and the detached, the sacred and the profane, the redemptive and the nihilistic—hence their controversial yet unflagging resonance in contemporary culture. In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune. Its beauty as a symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it. —Walter Benjamin1 I intend to take the divine out of reading. —Paul de Man2 One of Paul de Man’s most original contributions to contemporary literary theory is a new formulation of the concept of allegory. De Man was perhaps the last great scholar of the twentieth century to deal with allegory, and he took upon himself the very difficult task of both giving a systematic definition of the concept and using it as a reading strategy. In order to fully understand and appreciate de Man’s work on allegory, it is essential to consider it in relation to Walter Benjamin’s writings on the subject. I propose to show how and where Benjamin’s influence is present in de Man’s reflections on allegory, and how de Man both absorbed and resisted this influence. German Studies Review 35.2 (2012): 319–333 © 2012 by The German Studies Association. 320 German Studies Review 35 /2 • 2012 After some general considerations regarding de Man’s reading of Benjamin, I will analyze some passages of the last chapter (“Allegory and Trauerspiel”) of Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama; I will then consider the first part (“Allegory and Symbol”) of de Man’s essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Finally, my conclu- sion deals with the second part of that essay, “Irony.”3 I focus on these texts because they are the more complete and structured among the works on allegory written by the two authors, who are both famous for the fragmentariness of their criticism. I will attempt a stylistic reading in order to identify the traces—or perhaps one should say the symptoms—of Benjamin’s presence, especially in de Man’s critical lexicon. I therefore inevitably give preference to a limited, horizontal reading of language and style, instead of a vertical reading of the wider theoretical and cultural implications of Benjamin’s and de Man’s writings. Nevertheless, it is important to note that de Man and Benjamin are typically associated with two very different kinds of criticism, which can be characterized by a potentially endless series of rather vague yet intriguing binary oppositions: secular vs. nonsecular, apathetic vs. pathetic, neutral vs. radical, technical vs. poetic, and many others.4 While questioning these simplistic distinctions on a rhetorical level, one must keep in mind the wider issues concerning traditional academic classifications, and on an even larger scale contemporary transformations of intellectual and ideological paradigms. Even though the complexity of these topics exceeds the limits of my essay, I hope it will still be of some use for those engaged in more challenging tasks.5 Although Benjamin wrote The Origin of German Tragic Drama in 1924 and 1925, the text, along with the full corpus of Benjamin’s works, was not fully rediscovered by American criticism until the sixties.6 Even if de Man was a cosmopolitan scholar, holding teaching positions in the United States and Europe,7 “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (first published in 1969) may be considered one of the most significant responses to this rediscovery. Surprisingly, given his slightly atypical yet authoritative position in American academia, at least before the shocking posthumous revelation of his antisemitic writings of the 1940s,8 de Man published only two books in his lifetime: Blindness and Insight (1971 and 1983) and Allegories of Reading (1979).9 In these two collections, Benjamin is quoted very rarely and almost incidentally: twice in the second edition of the first book (in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” where the quota- tions are in fact not much more than bibliographical references), and only once in the second book. In de Man’s posthumous works, on the other hand, Benjamin is quoted often. At first glance there may seem to be two de Mans. The early de Man (from the sixties to the end of the seventies) is a more or less formalist reader interested in rhetoric and language, who gradually but relentlessly rejects the pathetic nuances of “a kind of existential philosophical mode of discourse . . . used . . . by critics like Blanchot or philosophers like Heidegger,” whereas the late de Man (in the eighties) Andrea Mirabile 321 is a politically aware thinker, more and more interested in Marx and deeply inspired by Benjamin’s critical model.10 In fact, however, this distinction is erroneous, for if one reads carefully the quota- tions made by the late de Man, they are often slightly ironic, if not subtly negative: sometimes Benjamin seems an example to avoid, rather than a master to follow. For instance, in the brief “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’” (the last of six Messenger Lectures delivered at Cornell University in February and March 1983, before his death in December 1983), which is now included in the 1986 volume The Resistance to Theory, the author writes: You have the critical perception, you have the possibility of carrying on in apoca- lyptic tones, you have the particular eloquence that comes with that (because one can only really get excited if one writes in an apocalyptic mode); but you can still talk in terms of hope. . . . Benjamin would be an example of this combination of nihilistic rigor with sacred revelation.11 Or, in a 1981 article on Bakhtin’s “Dialogue and Dialogism,” in the same collection, de Man explains with a light touch of sarcasm the reasons behind Benjamin’s recent literary success: Literary theory . . . a rather barren area of endeavor constantly threatened by the tedium of its techniques as well as by the magnitude of the issues, offers poor soil for the heroes and the hero-worship that it rather desperately needs. So when a possible candidate for such a status comes along, he is likely to be very well received, especially if he is safely and posthumously out of reach. . . . A fairly recent example is, of course, the case of Walter Benjamin.12 Nevertheless, as Jan Rosiek points out, De Man’s own knowledge of Benjamin goes back at least to the mid-60s, where we find the first explicit reference in a 1964 review. One might argue that Benjamin’s influence can be detected even in de Man’s Ph.D. dissertation, Mallarmé, Yeats, and the Post-Romantic Predicament (1960), as it is structured on the basis of a distinction between the natural image and the emblem.13 In fact, Benjamin’s “Allegory and Trauerspiel” and de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Tem- porality” seem to have several similarities. The texts have two enemies in common. The first is the romantic concept of symbol as the immediate perfect union of form and meaning, distinguished from, and superior to, the fragmentation of allegory 322 German Studies Review 35 /2 • 2012 and its temporal development. The second enemy is the persistence of this concept in modern and contemporary aesthetics, in which symbol and allegory are often confused. According to Benjamin and de Man, the two figures are profoundly differ- ent. Both de Man and Benjamin stress instead the connection between allegory and temporality, in opposition to the instantaneity of symbol. Time leads allegorical signs to fragmentariness, arbitrariness, and discontinuity and demystifies the instantaneous fullness, naturalness, immobility, and organicity of symbol. If symbol is supposed to be a natural union of sign and meaning, allegory shows the distinctness of sign and meaning and their conventional relationship. Benjamin writes about German baroque Trauerspiel, while de Man focuses on romantic writers; nevertheless, Benjamin starts his monograph with a critique of the romantic definition of symbol (159) and often invokes baroque literature and romantic literature, as well as baroque allegory and romantic allegory, stressing their common opposition to classicism: The desire to guarantee the sacred character of any script . . . leads to complexes, to hieroglyphics. . . . The written word tends toward the visual. It is not possible to conceive of a starker opposite to the artistic symbol, the plastic symbol, the image of organic totality, than this amorphous fragment which is seen in the form of allegorical script. In it the baroque reveals itself to be the sovereign opposite to classicism, as which hitherto, only romanticism has been acknowledged. And we should not resist the temptation of finding out those features which are common to both of them. Both, romanticism as much as baroque, are concerned not so much with providing a corrective to classicism, as to art itself. (175–76) Both Benjamin and de Man discuss allegory as a rhetorical trope and an interpre- tative strategy.14 Their two texts are not only studies of allegory, but also polemical and metacritical surveys of other erroneous critical positions. On the one hand, the two works are erudite studies of allegory, synchronic with their subjects, the Ger- man baroque and the romantic writers. On the other they are diachronic, focusing on many other sources outside the historical context of their main subjects. Beyond being showpieces of erudition, they are also in a way militant pamphlets, speaking out not only against the confusion of symbol and allegory and the predominance of symbol over allegory, but also against every possible naturalness of the linguistic sign. These are the most evident similarities between the two texts; a close reading will reveal other connections. On several occasions Benjamin analyzes symbol and allegory in their different relationships with time, and gives various definitions of the two terms using examples from classical times up to the Middle Ages, from the Renaissance to modernity. “The measure of time for the experience of the symbol,” he writes, “is the mystical instant. . . . On the other hand, allegory is not free from a corresponding dialectic” (165). Symbol, which is associated with brevity, does not change, he notes, Andrea Mirabile 323 whereas allegory is always changing: “The allegorical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways. The symbol, on the other hand . . . remains persistently the same” (183). The different temporalities of symbol and allegory produce the specific semiotic structures of the two modes. Symbol is connected with idealization, whereas allegory deals with the crude materiality (“facies hippocratica”) of history (166). Symbol refers to a “bright world,” whereas allegory is its “dark background” (161). The equation or confusion of symbol and allegory, the interpretation of allegory as a kind of symbol, is a “classicistic commonplace” (214). For de Man too, the “supremacy of the symbol” over allegory is a “commonplace” and an error (189). De Man tries to situate this confusion within the modern history of literature, and therefore operates in a historical, more delimited way than Benjamin. He also resorts more frequently to quotations from the texts, therefore writing in a more philological way than Benjamin. De Man’s discussion of the relationship between symbol and allegory starts in the eighteenth century and focuses on early romantic writers; from here he develops a historical and philological analysis of the symbol’s supremacy in modern aesthetics from the eighteenth century to the twentieth in three literary traditions: German (188–90), English (191–98), and French (199–208). Interestingly, de Man connects the literature of the Enlightenment and of Romanti- cism with the critical account of those periods: the contemporary North American criticism of Romanticism in particular seems pervaded by glaring contradictions and aporias. The writers and their critics, with few exceptions, he claims, share the same fascination with the presumed totalizing capability of the symbol, as the etymology of the word “symbol” indicates. For de Man, the symbol claims the status of an organic entity, and the literary criticism that valorizes it claims to be an organic rational form of discursivity. As Jonathan Culler points out: “By opting for the symbol one expresses a faith that poetry can create forms in which the particular is indissolubly fused with the general, in which objects . . . give forth . . . an inexhaustible meaning organically present within them.”15 In the writers analyzed by de Man, in fact, the completeness or naturalness of the symbol is supposed to have an intrinsic supremacy over the fragmentariness and arbitrariness of allegory not only in literature but also in aesthetics; it is this supposed supremacy that leads to the confusion between the two terms in both literature and literary criticism. Still, de Man shows how deep the presence of allegory is (especially in matters of spatial and geographical representation) in authors such as Rousseau and Wordsworth, and how deep the blindness of criticism is in its misreading of symbol. The commonplace of the predominance of the symbol is also the commonplace of the symbolic reading of Romanticism scholars, who do not recognize allegorical structures in the writers they analyze; the presumed symbolic naturalness of Romanticism is in reality corroded by the arbitrary and conventional structure of allegory. Rousseau, especially, is in de Man’s reading a deeply allegorical author, for whom characters, 324 German Studies Review 35 /2 • 2012 places, and images (notwithstanding their referential misreading by scholars) are lin- guistic signs, with no reference to a reality outside language and literature. “Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification,” de Man stresses, “allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference” (207, italics mine).16 This last quotation reveals perhaps the main difference between Benjamin’s and de Man’s ideas of allegory. For Benjamin, baroque allegory is a form of mourning, whereas in de Man it does not carry the same melancholic nuance. Both Benjamin and de Man stress the fundamental link between allegory and time, or temporality, in the relationship between allegorical signs and meanings; the allegorical temporal dialectic demystifies and breaks the illusory, symbolic, and static coincidence between word and world. Both authors stress the powerful beauty of allegorical fragmentariness and its capacity to demystify the supposed symbolic totality. Yet there are differences between the two writers: Benjamin employs a pathetic and mimetic lexicon (prob- ably mimetically with the subject it analyzes, such as on page 205, where “pathos” is considered a characteristic element of the baroque drama), which insists on decay and demons, ruins and death, memento mori and ghosts, skeletons and corpses, dark- ness and fall. De Man, by contrast, (apparently) empties the description of allegory of all pathos, never going beyond the borders of literary history and rhetoric, except to situate allegory in the dialectic between the self and the nonself: there is (apparently) no room in de Man for nostalgia, nor for melancholy. Benjamin stresses the link between allegory and death; significantly, the first page of “Allegory and Trauerspiel” (159) starts with a long quotation from Theatre of Death, or Funeral Orations by Christoph Männling; and a few pages on, the author stresses that the allegorical character of nature, its “death’s head,” lies under the “power of death” (166). The connection between allegory and death leads Benjamin obviously to a similar connection between allegory and (or as a form of) mourning: “Mourning . . . is at once the mother of allegories and their content” (230). Nonetheless, Benjamin’s understanding of allegory simultaneously contains, at least potentially, an element of hope and salvation. Allegory appears as a way to escape from human temporality, and as a form of preservation: “An appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory” (223, italics mine). Similar expressions recur with almost obsessive frequency—“the baroque work of art wants only to endure, and clings with all its senses to the eternal” (181), or “allegory establishes itself most permanently where transitoriness and eternity confronted each other most closely” (224)—up to the very last page, and arguably one of the most lyrically intense passages, of The Origin of German Tragic Drama: Andrea Mirabile 325 In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are; and for this reason the German Trauerspiel merits interpretation. In the spirit of allegory it is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last. (235) Benjamin’s concept of allegory is in fact contradictory: for example, the author underlines the links between allegory in the sixteenth century and the Middle Ages (167). Some pages later he negates this relationship, connecting medieval allegory with Christianity, and baroque allegory with the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (171); further on, he defines baroque allegory as a synthesis of the antique and the medieval (223). In fact, Benjamin’s allegory appears to be both ancient and Christian, both secular and nonsecular, and, significantly, the author often mixes a secular vocabulary with a religious one. For instance, he writes that “the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque” is a “secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world” (166, italics mine). The dark side of allegory is rescued, as if in a sudden “about-turn” (232), by a subsequent positive-redemptive movement. That is why, concluding his work, Benjamin quotes for the second time some lines of verse by Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, in which the darkness of allegory is eventually transformed into an image of salvation: “Ja / Wenn der Höchste wird vom Kirch-Hof erndten ein / So werd ich Todten-Kopff ein Englisch Antlitz seyn” (“Yea, when the Highest comes to reap the harvest from the graveyard, then I, a death’s head, will be an angel countenance”; 232). “In the end,” writes Rosiek, “the symbols of transience and inevitable death, skulls and all, metamorphose into the allegory of resurrection.”17 There is no escape from temporality in de Man; allegory neither holds any religious connotation nor indicates any form of temporal preservation or resurrection. For instance, while Benjamin chooses as an example of allegorical expression the Italian trionfi (195), in which the religious content is fundamental, de Man chooses the Italian commedia dell’arte (218), a completely secular form of expression. In fact, de Man tries to isolate the materialistic side of Benjamin’s allegory from any possible redemptive movement. This critical strategy, which one might consider also a resis- tance, is evident whenever he quotes Benjamin. De Man writes, for instance, that “allegory is material or materialistic, in Benjamin’s sense, because its dependence on the letter, on the literalism of the letter, cuts it off sharply from symbolic and aesthetic synthesis” (68). Nonetheless, referring once again to Benjamin, the scholar writes that “the conflict between what language means . . . and the manner in which it produces meaning is suspended in what he refers to as pure language . . . this appar- ent transcendence does not occur in the realm of art but in that of the sacred” (62). De Man understands allegory first as a rhetorical process, in which a temporally shifting relationship between linguistic signs separates the literary text from the 326 German Studies Review 35 /2 • 2012 phenomenal world and confines it in the realm of language: “It remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it” (207). This process of semiotic regression continues ad infinitum, separating the text from the world. Second, and most importantly, de Manian allegory is connected with irony. The entire second part of “The Rhetoric of Temporality”—“Irony”—is dedicated to the demonstration of the similarity, or the sameness, of the temporal experience of allegory and irony: Irony comes closer to the pattern of factual experience. . . . Essentially the mode of the present, it knows neither memory nor prefigurative duration, whereas allegory exists entirely within an ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless future. . . . Yet the two modes, for all their profound distinction in mood and structure, are the two faces of the same fundamental experience of time. (226) According to de Man, allegory and irony show the same separation between sign and meaning: the sign, like a spiral from its center, progressively loses its connection to meaning. In contrast with the synecdoche of the symbol, part of a whole and an instantaneous representation of a whole, the temporally shifting spiral of allegory-irony is the total demystification of any linguistic organic totality whatsoever. In “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” for instance, de Man writes that: To the extent that language is always cognitive and tropological as well as performa- tive at the same time, it is a heterogeneous entity incapable of justice as well as of justesse. . . . The (ironic) pseudoknowledge of this impossibility, which pretends to order sequentially, in a narrative, what is actually the destruction of all sequence, is what we call allegory.18 The scholar even contends that true ironists such as Schlegel or Kierkegaard find rescue from this spiral—which has its end in madness and death—only in faith. De Man’s secularism decidedly rejects this option, as the author declares in a revealing interview with Robert Moynihan: I intend to take the divine out of reading. The experience of the divine is one that is totally conceivable, but which I don’t think is compatible with reading. One of the best theoreticians of irony, Friedrich Schlegel, after having said about irony some of the most astute things that anybody has ever said about it, including Kierke- gaard, and, I guess, Plato to some extent, did indeed go over to a certain mode of belief and adopted a religious life. He did not after that continue as a reader. The things he then still wrote which have to do with reading don’t compare with what Andrea Mirabile 327 he did before. Generally, the act of faith is not an act of reading, or for me is not compatible with reading.19 It is possible to define Benjamin’s notion of Baroque allegory as melancholic or nostalgic, but destined to redemption from time and death, and de Man’s allegory as serene and ironic, but condemned to temporal imprisonment and death. Never- theless, it is maybe in this connection between allegory and irony that de Man both resists and revitalizes Benjamin: with the introduction of irony as a sort of double of allegory (Benjamin too indicates this possibility in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 188), de Man’s version of allegory enriches the apparently neutral linguistic and rhetorical connotations of its structure with pathetic nuances or—as described by Hertz—with “a particular way of combining analysis and pathos, of blending technical arguments about operations of rhetoric (often presented in an abstract, seemingly affectless idiom) with language . . . whose recurrent figures are strongly marked and those themes are emotively charged.”20 De Man’s irony, like Benjamin’s allegory, is a dark experience of time within language: exposed to potentially endless duplication, the ironic sign loses its meaningfulness in a spiral, ambiguous shifting that leads to gnosiological undecidability. De Man quotes some passages, especially by Jean Staro- binski and Peter Szondi, in which irony is seen as a cure for melancholy—“Irony can be considered a cure for a self lost in the alienation of its melancholy” (217)—only in order to strongly negate this idea as a mistake. According to de Man, irony is an endless, disruptive process that completely separates language from reality. This absolute separation not only makes any coherent critical analysis impossible, but also exposes human beings to the end of consciousness that is madness. The author writes: Irony is unrelieved vertige, dizziness to the point of madness. Sanity can exist only because we are willing to function within the conventions of duplicity and dissimula- tion. . . . Once this mask is shown to be a mask, the authentic being underneath appears necessarily on the verge of madness. (215) This emotionally dense lexicon, this pathos—in words such as “vertige,” “dizzi- ness,” “madness,” “mask,” “authentic being”—is distinct from the rest of the essay. The passage is also the most contradictory one in de Man’s text, for if the perpetual regressive movement of irony-allegory is precisely the negation of any “authenticity” and originality (in the sense of original depth, starting point, and so on) outside the spiraling realm of language, here de Man seems to believe in the existence of an “authentic [mode of] being” outside language: madness. In fact, also under the apparently rationalistic and serene surface of the first part of the essay, “Allegory and Symbol,” de Man reveals his pathetic drive. It is the theme of authenticity or truth 328 German Studies Review 35 /2 • 2012 that recurs several times in relation to allegory, which, revealing the “authentic voice” (205) or the “true voice” (207), the “authentic experience of temporality” (226) of early romantic writers, contains an “authentically temporal destiny” (206). In a symbolic way indeed, allegory is even the “light” covered by the “veil” of symbolical style (208). Though the influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger is clear, the analogies with Benjamin’s idea of pure language also seem to play an important role in this quest for authenticity in an author, such as de Man, who usually rejects as undecidable any distinction between authenticity/nonauthenticity, truth/falsehood, and so on. In “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” for instance, de Man significantly describes allegory as “the purveyor of demanding truths,” and as a way to state “the furthest-reaching truths about ourselves and the world.”21 If there is illusion and falsehood, there must be a place from which someone is drawn aside, namely the “true” allegorical, nonref- erential nature of language: no more indecision and suspension, but an (idealistic?) polarization between Truth (the totally arbitrary nature of language) and Falsehood (the illusory seduction of the referential-symbolic coincidence between word and thing). In fact, even though de Man suppresses the redemptive movement of Ben- jaminian allegorical language, the damning movement of his own ironic-allegorical language forms its dark counterpart. The two processes, though moving in opposite directions, share the same vanishing point: the concept of language as an entity that mingles with the mystical—as a redemptive horizon in one case, a threatening abyss in the other. In fact, if one compares the last pages of Benjamin’s essay with de Man’s pages on irony, the overlaps in the critical lexicon are evident. Benjamin too writes about the “dizziness” of “bottomless depths,” and even of “blindness” determined by the “nonexistence” of the allegorical elements (223). Whereas the author maintains his critical style in a moderated philological tone in the first part of “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” which is dedicated to allegory, he uses a poetical, emotional, and highly pathetic lexicon in the second part, which treats irony. De Man’s readers have been understandably surprised by this turn. Hartman writes that “de Man’s eloquence concerning this vertigo is unsettling in a critic who renounces affect,”22 and Mileur stresses the “uncharacteristic hyperbole”23 of the passage on irony. Various commentators have seen Benjamin’s allegory as mystical, nostalgic, and pathetic but redemptive, and de Man’s allegory as secular, apathetic, and neutral but linked to death and silence. This opposition seems too simplistic. Gellrich opposes Benjamin’s “ruins” to de Man’s “silence” (150).24 Rosiek stresses the contradictions in Benjamin’s text, between allegory as “immanence” and as “resurrection,” but eventually points out the importance of the second type in Benjamin’s allegorical model, and concludes that “allegory [in de Man] renounces the quest for redemption and accepts the radical implications of Heideggerian Sein zum Tode . . . by demon- strating the unreliability of symbolic promises.”25 Flores writes that “while Benjamin