Sy bee JAve? Heeadredd ene od veel py A ese) ad poate? 43> xX >» am ena © ei IAS OID / 8) feewet" 4 The Rhetoric poss ans Cod) Sypeces™ (202) of Temporality D)aeeriva) fhe Camiens D) rete net an Set S te enn Ae vy TP emi { Ae aot of i NRA geome” me grovel @) Link “yeremnme f ' OTT pe | I. Allegory and Symbol ~ (PAM 2.92 1. ice the advent, in the course of the nineteenth century, of a subjectivistic critical vocabulary, the traditional forms of rhetoric, have fallen into disrepute. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, thet this was only a temporary eclipse: recent developments in criticism! reveal the possibility of a rhetoric that would no longer 1. The trend is apparent in various critical movements that develop independently of one another in several countries. Thus, for example, in the attempt of some French critics to fuse the conceptual terminology of structural linguistics with traditional terms of rhetoric (Gee, among others, Roland Barthes, “Eléments de sémiologie,” in Communications $[1964}, trans, Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Elements of Semiology (New York: Hil and Wang, | 1967] Gérard Genette, Figures [Paris: Soul, 1966} Michel Foucault, Les Mots ot les choses Paris: Gallimard, 1966) trans. The Order of Things [New York: Random House, In. 1970). Tn Germany a similar tend often takes the form of a rediseavery and reinterpretation of the allegorical and emblematic style ofthe baroque (ee, among others, Walter Benjamin, Ursprang des deutschen Traverspiels (Berlin: 1928; reissued in Frankfurt: Subrkamp, 1963), | trans John Osborne, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977} Albrecht Schone, Emblematth und Drama im Zeitelter des Barack (Munich: Beck, 1964). The evolu- tion from the New Criticism to the criticism of Northrop Frye in North America tends in the same ditetion | 187Moje] oe firsetrot] ~ 188 BLINDNESS AND INSIGHT Cepetonsinh Lemiin els" » be normative or descriptive but that would more or less openly raise c! the question of the intentionality of rhetorical figures. Such concerns are implicitly present in many works in which the terms “mimesis,” “metaphor,” “allegory,” or “irony” play a prominent part. One of ) the main difficulties that sill hamper these investigations stems from | the association of rhetorical terms with value judgments that blur distinc: | | tions and hide the real structures. In most cases, their use is governed by assumptions that go back at least as far as the romantie period hence the need for historical clarification as a preliminary to a more systematic treatment of an intentional rhetoric. One has to return, in the history of European literature, to the moment when the rhetorical key-terms undergo significant changes and are at the center of impor- tant tensions. A first and obvious example would be the change that sant, jtakes place in the latter half ofthe eighteenth century, when the word ‘oe symbol” tends to supplant other denominations for figural language, ’ including that of “allegory.” : Although the problem is perhaps most in evidence in the history of | German literature, we do not intend to retrace the itinerary that led i the German writers of the age of Goethe to consider symbol and allegory i as antithetical, when they were still synonymous for Winckelmana. The itinerary is too complex for cursory treatment. In Wahrheit und i Methode, Hans-Georg Gadamer makes the valorization of symbol at ; the expense of allegory coincide with the growth of an aesthetics that i cash refuses to distinguish between experience and the representation of * this experience. The poetic language of genius is capable of transcend- i ‘ing this distinetian-and can thus transform all individual experience | directly into general truth. The subjectivity of experience is preserved | when itistea inslated.into language; the world is then no longer seen | | | | as a configuration of entities that designate a plurality of distinct and isolated meanings, but as a configuration of symbols ultimately leading of. totality constitutes the main attraction of the symbol as opposed ‘oMegony a sgn that reer one Speot ‘meaning and thus exhausts ‘its suggestive potentialities once it has been deciphered. ‘Symbol and allegory,” writes Gadamer, “‘are opposed as art is opposed to non-art, in that the former seems endlessly suggestive in the indefiniteness of & its meaning, whereas the latter, as soon as its meaning is reached, has‘THE RHETORIC OF TEMPORALITY 189 run its full course."" Allegory appears as dryly in its reference 1o,a meaning that it doesnot itself constitute, whereas | 1 an_intimats.unity between. the image.that | sory totality that the image” ji this historical perspective, the names of Goethe, Schiller, aiid’ Schelling stand out from the background of the classical idea of a unity between incarnate and ideal beauty. Even within the area of German thought other currents complicate this historical scheme. In the perspective of traditional German, classicism, allegory appears as the product of the age of Enlighten- | ment and is vulnerable to the reproach of excessive rationality. Other ‘trends, however, consider allegory as the very place where the contact with a superhuman origin of language as been preserved. Thus the polemical utterances of Hamann against H the problem of the origin of language are closely related to Wamann’Sconsiderations.on + the allegorical-nature-of.all language,’ as well as with his literary praxis ‘that mingles allegory with irony. It is certainly not in the name of an enlightened rationalism that the idea of a transcendental distance be- tween the incarnate world of man and the divine origin of the word is here being defended. Herder’s humanism encounters in Hamann ‘a resistance that reveals the complexity of the intellectual climate in which the debate between symbol and allegory will take place. ‘These questions have been treated at length in the historiography of the period, We do not have to return to them here, except to in- dicate how contradictory the origins of the debate appear to be. It is therefore not at all surprising that, even in the case of Goethe, the choice in favor of the symbol is accompanied by all kinds of reserva- tions and qualification. But, as one progresses into the nineteenth cen- tury, these qualifications tend to disappear. The supremacy of the sym- bol, conceived as an expression of unity between the representative and thé semantic function of lanj becomes a commonplace that “‘Wnderties Tterary taste, Wicrary criticism, and literary history. The 2 Hans George Cadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tabingen: J.C, B. Mohr, 1960; 4th ed, 1975) p. 70; trans. G. Barden and J. Cumming, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 67 Johann Georg Hamann, “Die Rezonsion der Herderschen Preisscrift,” in J G. Hamann’s ‘Heuptschrifien ersdrt, vol 4 (Ober den Ursprang der Sprache), Elriede Bichsol(Gitersloh Gerd Mohn, 1963).a WO e # we aye ‘| | 190 BLINDNESS AND INSIGHT supremacy of the symbol still functions as the basis of recent French and English studies of the romantic and postromantic eras, to such ‘BHT extont that allegory is frequently considered an anachronism and dismissed as non-poetic. Yet certain questions remain unsolved, At the very moment when properly symbolic modes, in the full strength of their development, are supplanting allegory, we can witness-the.growth of metaphorical .e.rocace, but ‘that cannot be called “symbolic’” in the Goethian sense. Thus it would Be difficult to assert that in the poems of Hélderlin, the island Pat- mos, the river Rhine, or, more generally, the landscapes and places that are often described at the beginning of the poems would be sym- bolic landscapes or entities that represent, as by analogy, the spiritual truths that appear in the more abstract parts of the text. To state this would be to misjudge the literality of these passages, to ignore that they derive their considerable poctic authority from the fact that they_ are not synecdoches desighating a totality of which they are a pe but are themselves already this totality. They are not the sensorial equivalence of a more general, ideal meaning; they are themselves this idea, just as much as the abstract expression that will appear in philosophical or historical form in the later parts of the poem. A metaphorical style such as Hélderlin’s can at any rate not be described iijferms of the antimony between allegory and symbol—and the same could be said, albeit in a very different way, of Goethe’s late style. Also, when the term “allegory” continues to appear in the writers of the period, such es Friedrich Schlegel, or later in Solger or E. T. A. Hoff- mann, one should not assume that its use is merely a matter of habit, devoid of deeper meaning. Between 1800 and 1832, under the influence of Creuzer and Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel substitutes the word “sym- bolic” for “allegorical” in the oft-quoted passage of the ‘“Gespriich ‘aber die Poesie”: alle Schénheit ist Allegorie. Das Héchste kann man eben weil es unaussprechlich ist, nur allegorisch sagen.’ But can we deduce from this, with Schlegel’s editor Hans Bichner, that Schlegel “simply uses allegory where we would nowadays say symbol”? It could styles inno way related to the decorative allegorism of 4, Friedrich Schlegel, “Gesprach ober die Poesie;" in Krititche Ausgabe, Band 2, Charakeeristiken und Kritien 1, (1796-1801), Hans Kichner, ed. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1967), pp. 324. 5. Ibid, ps xin. 2