Allegory Between Deconstruction and Dialectics: Gail Day's Analysis

Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics
Author(s): Gail Day

Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1999), pp. 103-118
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Gail Day
Claims that we live in an 'allegorical age', as one commentator put it in 1979,

have been running for some time, and have had a particular currency in much
1. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: recent art criticism and theory.1 The question of allegory and symbol has
Defining the Genre (Cornell University Press:
become increasingly familiar within art history. In debates on art, the pivotal
Ithaca and London, 1979), p. 155.
moment in the development of this conception can, perhaps, be identified with
2. Craig Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse:
Craig Owens' now canonical two-part essay of 1980, 'The Allegorical
Towards a Theory of Postmodernism', published
in two parts, October, no. 12, Spring 1980, Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism', although other writers
pp. 67-86 and October, no. 13, Summer 1980, associated with October, particularly Douglas Crimp and Benjamin Buchloh,
pp. 59-80; Douglas Crimp's essays from the
might also be cited.2 Critical writings such as these remain significant, even if
early 1980s are anthologized in On the Museum's
Ruins (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, and the claims to postmodernism - most prominent in the work of Owens and
London, 1993) - citations are to the essay 'On Crimp - have waned somewhat from the critical horizon. Subsequent and
the Museum's Ruins', p. 47; B. H. D. Buchloh,
lesser critics, however, have tended to transform the theses elaborated in this
'Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and
Montage in Contemporary Art', Artforum, vol. 21, period into fixed tropes and buzz-phrases. Terms associated with allegory,
no. 1, September 1982, pp. 43-56. Further such as 'ambiguity' and 'ambivalence', litter the art press. Increasingly, they
contributions include Joel Fineman, 'The
seem more a feature of intellectual laziness in the face of contemporary art
Structure of Allegorical Desire', October, no. 12,
Spring 1980, pp. 47-66. Stephen Melville than examples of critical thought, a way of eliding a difficulty rather than facing
criticized these accounts in 1981, 'Notes on the it. Indeed, in these popularized accounts, words like 'ambiguity' have drifted
Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of
from an employment within an allegorical understanding into its opposite - a
Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the
Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism', rhetoric of the symbol, and a particularly banal version of it. This version of
October, no. 19, Winter 1981, pp. 55-92. A ambiguity has come to suggest a weak declaration of transcendence,
wave of extended studies on allegory emerged
ineffability, an enigmatic 'beyond' of thought and concepts - the very
from literary studies departments in the United
States during the post-war period. See, for opposite of the original claim.3
example, Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making Owens' essays are of a different order. For a start, far from being a mark of
of Allegory (Oxford University Press: New York,
noncommitment, it is clear how much his interest in the undecidable was part
1966), originally from 1959; Angus Fletcher,
Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Cornell of an overall project. Owens sees the revival of allegory as an explicit challenge
University Press: Ithaca and London, 1964); to formalist aesthetics, a paradigm shift marked by practices involving
Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 1979. Paul de
appropriation and site specificity, though the concept also raised the possibility
Man's seminal essay, 'The Rhetoric of
Temporality' dates from 1969; references are to of a reinterpretation of previous art. The revival of allegory marked a reversal
the version reprinted in Blindness and Insight: of a hierarchy, dominant from Romanticism onwards. Treated as a lesser mode
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
of representation - indeed, as re-presentation - allegory had been unfavourably
(University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis,
1983). De Man's collection of essays on allegory contrasted with the symbol's ability to present. Accordingly, allegory had long
dates from 1979, Allegories of Reading: Figural been characterized as didactic, mechanical, ugly, ineffective, and barren. The
Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
symbol, in contrast, had been venerated as beautiful, effective, fertile, unique,
(Yale University Press: New Haven and London,
1979); references for the essay 'Reading (Proust)' and transcendent. The contents of these lists - which could be extended - are
are to this volume. Walter Benjamin's The Origin now familiar enough, as is their potential for forming a neat schema of binaries,
of German Tragic Drama, although written in the
binaries that seem increasingly set in stone. In the character-sketches outlined,
1920s, was reissued in Germany in 1963, and
published in English translation in 1977; Owens follows numerous observations on the allegory/symbol distinction and
references are to the Verso edition (Verso: the figuring of allegory within the 'aesthetic ideology' of the symbol. Most
London and New York, 1985).
commentators were content to explore the character of allegory in its modern
3. On the distinction between allegory and
and traditional forms, and to draw out certain ignored values in allegorical
enigma, and allegory's aim at 'emphatic clarity of
representation', see Paul de Man's discussion of
literature. Owens, in contrast, pursues a more polemical debate in which he
Hegel in 'Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion', in de revalorizes allegory and allies it to the cause of a postmodern project. As such,
Man, Aesthetic Ideology (University of Minnesota
the opposition of allegory to symbol coincided with the broader project of
Press: Minneapolis and London, 1996), ed. and
intro. Andrzej Warminski, pp. 51-2.
October and its opposition to Greenbergian Modernism.
( OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999 103-118
Gail Day
Owens shapes his account of allegory with the resources of structuralism

and poststructuralism. In the foreground of his argument are some now
familiar issues: the supplement, the palimpsest, the shift from speech to 4. Other criticisms of Owens' distinction can
writing or from image to text, counter-narrative tendencies, the breaking of be found in works as different as Melville's
'Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory' and
sign from referent and signifier from signified, and the constant deferral of
Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (Reaktion
meaning. Similarly, Crimp acknowledges the influence, on his analysis, of Books: London, 1994).
Foucauldian 'concepts such as discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, and 5. The symbol is the rhetorical figure of
transformation'. In line with these tendencies, he rejects 'the unities of 'throwing together' (sum-ballein), allegory that
historicist thought as tradition, influence, development, evolution, sources, of 'other-speaking' (allos-agoreuein).
and origin'. 6. Helga Geyer-Ryan, Fables of Desire (Polity

Press: Cambridge, 1994), p. 199.
In his essay, Owens draws on the work of Paul de Man and Walter
Benjamin, now the standard reference points in the accounts, to establish the
opposition of the modern and the postmodern, of symbolic and allegorical
impulses. In this article, I want to explore a different perspective on allegory
and symbol via an extended reading of the work of these same key authors. My
argument is with the tendency to treat the allegory-symbol distinction as a
dichotomy, and specifically with the static conception of this opposition.4 I am
most concerned with the impact that this tendency has on an understanding of
allegory itself. This said, I do not intend to do away with the distinction. There
is little doubt that Benjamin and de Man characterize the symbol as immediacy,
presence, identity, and transcendence, nor that they emphasize allegory's
qualities of nonidentity, rupture, disjunction, distance, and fragmentation.5
What matters, however, are the stakes, and the conception, of the distinction.
The point is highlighted, for instance, if we note a very different assessment of
allegory by Helga Geyer-Ryan. Her account contrasts with those of Crimp and
Owens, and she is opposed to the Saussurean conception of the sign and
Benjamin's description of allegory. Nevertheless Geyer-Ryan shares with
Owens and Crimp a conception of allegory as an 'unmediated construction'.
These authors, however, judge this lack of mediation differently: where the
latter two see it as a virtue, the former sees it as a problem.6 The terms used
here indicate the underlying issues on which my argument focuses. Crimp and
Owens' judgement comes in the wake of attacks on concepts such as
mediation. Today commentators are often inclined to attribute this shift in
evaluation to structuralism and poststructuralism, although the arguments
against 'Hegelianisms' came from a wider range of writers, many of them of
the left, Althusser and Colletti among them. The register of the debates varied
according to the participants, as did its level, but this is not the place to
explore the wider frame. Here I will focus on a particular part of the legacy:
the opposition of dialectics and deconstruction. This opposition plays out the
different valorizations of that unmediated construction. For instance, de Man
not only criticizes the 'temptation of immediacy' and 'impatient "pastoral"
thought'; he goes further, and criticizes premature syntheses of contradictions,
particularly targeting the sublation (the now notorious Aufhebung) of dialectical
processes of thought. Emphasizing discontinuity, de Man explicitly distances
his own accounts from dialectical conceptions. Yet, as I hope to show, the all-
too-easy conclusion - the fixed opposition between dialectics and
deconstruction- is not as secure as it first appears.
The fixity of this opposition is at its least secure at the point where we
displace the more orthodox accounts of dialectics for the more radical ones. In
fact, we might frame de Man's position in dialectical terms- a dangerous
procedure, I realize, but not an unreasonable one. His emphasis is neither on
the immediacy claimed within the established rhetoric of the symbol, nor on
the mediated immediacy of the sublation, but on the negative moment. What
106 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999
de Man is doing is refusing reconciliation or closure to the dialectic. Within

the traditions of dialectical thinking this is not an unusual position. For
7. Both Benjamin and de Man emphasize a instance, certain Young Hegelians were inclined to equate mediation and the
temporal rather than a spatial grasp of Aufhebung quite explicitly with political reconciliation. Adorno was inclined to
disjunction.
more circumspection on the subject of politics, yet his negative dialectics and
8. Bainard Cowan, for instance, claimed that
fear of identity thinking - often seen as a critique of some generalized fascist
Adorno and, subsequently, Rolf Tiedemann
were responsible for putting a Hegelian gloss on
mentality pervading all areas of cultural and everyday life - ring at times as a
an essentially anti-Hegelian project. See Bainard critique of social democracy.
Cowan, 'Walter Benjamin's Theory of In the polemics of art theory, that opposition of dialectics and
Allegory', New German Critique, no. 22, Winter
1981, pp. 109-22.
deconstruction is reproduced in the distinction between, respectively,
symbol and allegory. Accordingly, the symbol (in its more advanced forms)
9. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama,
p. 208, p. 198. From now on, unless otherwise substitutes for dialectical mediation and sublation, allegory for deconstructive
stated, all references to Benjamin are to The disjunction (grasped as temporal deferral).7 What I am interested in is a rather
Origin of German Tragic Drama. In the text I refer
different framing of the problematic: how the conception of allegory itself
to this work as the Trauerspiel.
seems torn between dialectics and deconstruction. Allegory may turn out to
be an interesting test-case for the problem. In this sense it may not be
accidental that the works of the key figures in the discussion of allegory -
Benjamin and de Man - have a somewhat ambivalent position in relation to
both bodies of thought. In a climate where the debates have tended become
ritualized, neither of these two figures occupies a neat purist position; and this
is precisely their virtue for my consideration. Benjamin will not easily play the
role of dialectician to de Man's deconstructor, nor vice versa. If de Man
explicitly distances his work from dialectics, he nevertheless often poses
questions through a dialectical language and takes that language seriously as
interlocutor. His version of deconstruction, as has often been noted, works
out vestiges of his early Hegelian and Heideggarian influences. Obviously
'deconstruction' is not a defining term when we speak of Benjamin, although
some issues contained by that word may be. This only serves to underline my
point about avoiding being dogged by the names of bodies of thought.
Benjamin's writings, and their subsequent interpretation and translation, are
caught on a similar knife-edge in their relation to the legacy of Hegel.
Whether or not Adorno Hegelianized an anti-Hegelian project remains a
point of contention.8 The difficulty is apparent perhaps: the answer, either
way, is forced in particular terms and according to new projects; what is lost
in the production of polemical positions and postures are the important
tensions and processes. In line with the dominant intellectual tendencies of
recent times, it is the dialectical side of the equation that has been the main
casualty. This essay does not seek to reiterate these positions, nor to explore
their making and histories, nor even to weigh the pros and cons of the
different emphases. Rather, it tries to attend to those tensions and processes.
In doing so it is impossible to ignore the legacies of all the disputes I've
alluded to. Another way of putting this is: how to move beyond ritualized
oppositions into the very question of oppositions and distinctions, and
dynamic relations within them, and how to find a language to work them.
Finally - if this all seems a long way from the concerns of art and art history -
what is striking about the relevant debates and passages in de Man and
Benjamin is the way they centre on visual references.
II
Benjamin pursues his analysis of the form of German mourning-plays through a

'disjunctive, atomizing principle' and 'disjecta membra'.9 However, such
disjunctions, and the language through which it is possible to describe
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999 107
Gail Day
Benjamin's approach (antithesis, division, duality, dichotomy, duplicity) have

to be understood in a specific way. The oppositions in play here are not static,
whether defined externally (allegory as the negative to the symbol), or 10. Benjamin, p. 195.
whether construed as allegory's internal economy of negativity (the disjunction 11. Benjamin, p. 187.
of sign and meaning). Instead, these disjunctions and oppositions need to be 12. Benjamin, p. 160.
grasped in terms of the dynamics, movement, unfolding, working and playing
13. Benjamin, p. 160.
that they put into action. This holds, I think, even when- especially when -
14. Benjamin, p. 165-6, p. 189.
Benjamin explicitly refers to allegory's 'rigidity'. Indeed, Benjamin warns of
15. Benjamin, pp. 174-5.
treating the very terms employed in describing allegory and symbol too
rigidly;10 allegory's opposition to the symbol should not be rendered as the 16. Benjamin, p. 189.
opposition of 'thing' to the 'personal', or of 'the fragment' to 'the total'.1 17. Benjamin, p. 191.
Benjamin suggests that both symbol and allegory became debased concepts in 18. Benjamin, p. 192.
the hands of those who had sought to elevate the former over the latter. 19. Benjamin, p. 197.
Initially the later Romantics and, later still, the neo-Kantians, he remarks, used 20. Benjamin, 'Central Park', New German
this false symbol to evade art's ethical dimension. In his Trauerspiel study, Critique, vol. 34, 1985, p. 38. The notes making
up 'Central Park' were collected under this title
Benjamin challenges the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Carl Horst for
from 1939 tol940.
attempting to maintain a subservient status for allegory. They fail, he says, to
21. Benjamin, 'Central Park', p. 36.
grasp these concepts in their dialectical complexity. Although their concept of
the symbol sounds dialectical, Benjamin insists that it had sunk into a pale
shadow. This 'distorted conception of the symbol', he argues, lacks 'dialectical
rigour'; what claims to be a dialectic of appearance and essence is nothing but a
paradox, and 'fails to do justice to content in formal analysis and to form in the
aesthetics of content'.12 This emphasis on dialectics is striking in its insistence.
The 'baroque apotheosis', he argues, 'is a dialectical one' and 'is accomplished
in the movement between extremes';13 allegory's temporality is dialectical,
and an understanding of Baroque drama requires a dialectical sense of
allegory;14 we need a dialectical discussion of allegory's antinomies; and we
need a consideration of allegory's dialectic of form and its dialectic of
content.15
The play of antinomies in Benjamin's text is interesting, not least for the
roles accorded to a range of visual properties. Benjamin explains how, in
Baroque drama, there is a structural division in which the acts are interrupted
by interludes, the latter assaulting the drama's 'claim to be a Greek temple'.16
These interludes emphasize the 'genuinely visual' (Novalis) and 'spectacle
proper' with the tableau vivant,'7 and the 'display of expressive statuary':
With all the power at its disposal the will to allegory makes use of the 'dumb show' to bring
back the fading word, in order to make it accessible to the unimaginative visual faculty.18
The division between the action of the acts and the frozen nature of the
interludes echoes, for Benjamin, the division of dream and reality, or of
meaning and reality. Often seen by the critics as a deadening device, Benjamin
suggests that these interludes are best thought of as 'the irregular rhythm of
the constant pause, the sudden change of direction, and consolidation into new
rigidity'.19 This sense of a moment of frozen movement can be found
throughout Benjamin's writing: for example, in the famous formulation- one
especially favoured by Adorno - of 'dialectics at a standstill'. Similarly, it is
there in the 'dialectical image', 'the image of transfixed unrest'20 or even
Benjamin's analogy of allegory and the Stations of the Cross.21 The disjunction,
then, is not static but is presented as if it were akin to the children's games of
musical statues or peep-behind-the-curtain: there is a good deal of movement
before the 'freeze-moment', and, it could be argued, just as much during it.
The point to emphasize here is not simply the fact of disjunction and
discontinuity, but the play of interchanges and effects set in motion.
22. Benjamin, p. 183. Against the false faith in the symbol Benjamin presents allegory as a
repressed negative power:

Where man is drawn towards the symbol, allegory emerges from the depths of being to intercept
the intention, and to triumph over it.22

For Benjamin the allegory is not simply an alternate mode of representation to
28. Benjamin, pp. 209-10.
the symbol; rather, the symbol itself will dissolve in the allegorical gaze.
29. Benjamin, p. 201. Repeatedly we find that, as he puts it, 'the symbolic becomes distorted into
30. Benjamin, p. 176. the allegorical'.23 A good example of this transformation is his passage on J. J.
31. Benjamin, pp. 234-5. Wincklemann's discussion of the Belvedere torso. In the very attempt to see
32. Benjamin, p. 161. and to describe symbolically, Wincklemann is forced, in Benjamin's view, to
render the torso allegorically. By exploring the torso part by part,
Wincklemann's attention dissolves 'the false appearance of totality';
meanwhile, his attempt to bring the torso into the realm of knowledge, of
necessity, evaporates the symbolic claim to transcend the concept.24
Benjamin also picks up on the polarity of speech and writing: 'The division
between signifying written language and intoxicating spoken language opens
up a gulf in the solid massif of verbal meaning'.5 He treats this (now familiar)
polarity in an interesting way. Again the rupture is presented not for the sake
of rupture per se, rather his focus is on the processes of unfolding and mutual
inflection within the force-field of tensions established by the antinomy:
The antithesis of sound and meaning could not but be at its most intense where both could be
successfully combined into one, without their actually cohering in the sense of forming an
organic linguistic structure.26
Baroque language, Benjamin says, is constantly convulsed by the rebellion of

its elements; the fragments- considered to be stripped of signification-
contain a threatening 'remnant of meaning'.27 Thus, in Baroque drama,
episodes opening into the realm of pure sound - and within which Benjamin
includes, on the one hand, what he calls the sound of spontaneous, 'creaturely'
utterance, and, on the other, the free play of the sound of an echo- become
episodes that provoke meaning and serve as prophecies or warnings.28 The
stakes are high. According to Benjamin, the division of speech and writing
'forces the gaze into the depths of language',29 or, as he notes earlier, the
Baroque was particularly attuned to 'the problematic character of art'.30
Elsewhere he remarks on how massive pedestals and columns hold up 'the
perilously soaring angels' of Baroque architectural sculpture. This stonework,
then, draws 'attention to the difficulties of supporting ... from below'.3 This
sounds a bit like foregrounding one's devices, but its effect goes beyond
drawing attention to the artifice of representation; as Benjamin's figure makes
clear, it also highlights 'the difficulties' that ground acts of representation. In an
inversion of the traditional relation of symbol and allegory - where allegory is
'the dark background against which the bright world of the symbol may stand
out'32 - Benjamin implies a different inflection to the symbolist's own claim.
Here, that 'dark background' ceases to be the 'mere' backdrop to the symbol's
starring performance, and becomes the symbol's necessary ground. What is
significant about this inversion is that it is not just an inversion of the valuation
of the symbol-allegory opposition. Symbol and allegory are not treated as
available for aesthetic choice (as in: each to their own). Benjamin's claim here
Gail Day
is stronger: allegory (or that which allegory recognizes) is the ground of any
act of choosing; this act either acknowledges or denies that ground.
33. De Man, 'Reading (Proust)', p. 57.
III 34. De Man, 'Reading (Proust)', p. 67.

The concern with 'the problematic character of art' continues through
Benjamin's oeuvre. It does so despite otherwise protean shifts of attention, and
despite the different phases of his work often noted by commentators. The
question of allegory is also prominent in the writings of Paul de Man. Indeed,
despite the more obvious differences between the two bodies of work, de Man
makes some similar points and moves to Benjamin. I will focus on de Man's
essay 'Reading (Proust)', written a decade or so after 'The Rhetoric of
Temporality', the canonical essay on symbol and allegory. De Man's later
work supposedly presents the author at his most clearly deconstructive and
serves as a useful comparison with Benjamin's almost excessive insistence on
dialectics. The important point in de Man's argument turns on a passage
concerning visual representation, and he returns to this episode in one of his
very late essays.
De Man takes as his object Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. As he
observes, this is a text that has traditionally been treated as a prime example of
symbolic work, celebrated for its richness of metaphors and 'imagistic'
language. This assumption is subjected to critique via a close reading of the
text's rhetorical structure. The work is not, de Man insists, 'the unmediated
experience of an identity'; nor does it describe or reenact the involuntary
memory (memoire involontaire) so celebrated by commentators.33 Here, de Man
reveals that what appears as the reign of metaphor in this book is shaped by the
trope of metonymy. Thus what seems symbolic in quality is shown to be
allegorical. The moves show a remarkable similarity to Benjamin's account of
Wincklemann. Proust's text uses a wealth of 'seductive metaphors', and even
makes explicit comments on the superiority of metaphor. However, de Man
insists, 'persuasion is achieved by a figural play in which contingent figures of
chance masquerade deceptively as figures of necessity'.34 While a thematic or
literal reading upholds metaphor as the defining trope in Proust, closer
rhetorical attention to the textual performance reveals the gaps and fissures in
such claims. There are, de Man explains, two incompatible readings of the
text: one forged by the reader's aesthetic response, the other by rhetorical
awareness. Recognition of this difference marks the aporetic state of the text;
this is an aporia based, as de Man puts it, not simply on representational but on
logical incompatibility. Most of de Man's essay is devoted to elaborating this
classic deconstructive analysis. However, it is the subsequent and final section
in which I am most interested. Here there is a change of gear. This is not
atypical of his work, although readers have often preferred to pursue the
argument no further than the classic deconstructive lesson.
De Man was not the first to note the role of metonymy in unpicking that of
metaphor in Proust. Following Gerard Genette and Gilles Deleuze's accounts
of Proust- accounts emphasizing metonymy, allegory and disjunction, and
acknowledged by de Man as significant contributions- de Man considers the
proposal that the text is an allegory of its own deconstruction. This proposal is
precisely what the latter part of de Man's essay aims to challenge. For de Man,
to say that Proust's novel is an allegory of its own deconstruction is to reinstate
a coherence to it. In other words, this kind of deconstructive reading may
undo and disrupt metaphoric or symbolic structures, yet it simply unifies and
stabilizes the reading at a higher level. '[A]t the far end of its successive
negations', de Man writes, the interpretation 'will recover the adequation

between structure and statement on which any thematic reading depends'.35 It
35. De Man, 'Reading (Proust)', p. 77. is precisely this 'safe' or 'secure' deconstruction that de Man hopes to
36. In this sense, certain dialectical accounts -
undermine. Deconstructive claims to superiority are challenged along with
and Adorno springs to mind - may come closer their targets. The consequences for de Man's own argument are this: not only
to this version of deconstruction than much self- must symbolic and the mimetic claims be traumatized, so must allegorical
professed deconstruction. An alternate reading
would be to say that de Man is more Hegelian
ones. De Man's strategy could be described (although inadequately) as a
than deconstructive. The labels here - and the radicalizing of deconstruction. By this I do not mean that de Man is a sort of
invocation to choose between, or allocate expert trump-card player, always raising the stakes for the sake of the victory.
different accounts to, them - fail to respond
The stakes, indeed, are raised, but no victory follows. It does not need saying
adequately to the material. Jameson goes as far
as to argue that de Man and Derrida 'have that de Man is no leftist; nevertheless, his account shares with many leftist
nothing whatsoever to do with each other', the traditions of thought an epistemological exploration and a desire to push
latter being preoccupied with how to imagine
negative moments further.36
the unimaginable, inaccessible, radical
difference, with how to pose in language a pre- This is where 'Giotto's Charity' becomes significant for de Man's argument.
linguistic moment, the former with 'the birth of In this episode from 'Swann's Way', Marcel, Proust's fictional narrator,
abstraction and indeed philosophical
conceptuality as such'. See Fredric Jameson,
considers photographic reproductions of Giotto's Vices and Virtues in the
Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late Arena Chapel.37 The occasion is prompted by thoughts about the kitchen-maid
capitalism (Verso: London and New York, who works at the family's Combray home. Swann, a friend of Marcel's father
1991), p. 225, p. 227. Norris parallels de
Manian deconstruction with Adornian negative
and bearer of these photographic gifts, had nicknamed the kitchen-maid
dialectics: 'Deconstruction is indeed a form of 'Giotto's Charity'. In Proust's narration, Marcel considers several ways of
negative dialectics, an activity that carries on the seeing this resemblance. It is the unpacking of the relations of resemblance and
project of immanent or self-reflective critique
nonresemblance on which the substantive issues turn. The phrase 'Giotto's
developed by Hegel out of Kant, but which
turns this project against its own desire for such Charity' becomes, in Swann's hands, a metaphor for the kitchen-maid because
premature endpoints as Symbol or Absolute he sees maid and fresco as physiognomically alike. For Marcel, the
Reason'. See Christopher Norris, Paul de Man:
resemblance between maid and fresco is a more complex affair, and turns
Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology
(Routledge: New York and London, 1988), on the inability of each to grasp its own significance; in other words, it turns
p. 61. on the disjunction between 'vehicle' and its proper, or allegorical, meaning.
37. The role of these photographic The kitchen-maid is pregnant, and the fresco of Charity show her carrying a
reproductions is, I think, significant for the
basket. Marcel thinks that the maid is blind to the spiritual import of her
account although I do not pursue it here. For
the sake of simplicity, and to avoid the 'mysterious basket' (that is, the bulge of her pregnancy). Moreover, his
inevitable mise-en-abyme, I refer simply to the interpretation of the real and the allegorical cross over. The actual, particular
fresco.
kitchen-maid seems, to Marcel, to signify abstractly and figurally; she is, he
notes, but one moment in an ongoing representation of the quality of 'kitchen-
maid-ness'. Meanwhile the power of Giotto's allegorical fresco, he thinks,
resides in its realistic vehicle. What should be an abstract personification
resolves into the look of secular particularity: an everyday scene of someone
handing up a corkscrew through the cellar window. Both kitchen-maid and
fresco are representations, de Man notes, and both are representations that
require reading.
In de Man's account, then, Proust takes the reader from symbol to allegory,
primarily by shifting from Swann's perspective to Marcel's. We might - and
here it is necessary to engage in a detailed reading of the passages in de Man -
break down de Man's account as follows:
(i) The symbol's synthesis (in the proper meaning) of literal and figural is
played out across the figure of the kitchen-maid and her basic resemblance to
the fresco. This is Swann's perspective, although he lacks the terms to describe
it this way. Here several oppositions seem reconciled: particular and universal,
matron and virgin, profane and sacred, low and high.
(ii) Marcel- described by de Man as more rhetorically sophisticated than

Swann - sees not symbolically, but allegorically. He does not see a synthesis of
literal and figural, but a disjunction: a divergence between a meaning proper to
the literal and a meaning proper to the allegory. This discussion focuses upon
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the fresco images, with passing reference to the kitchen-maid, who simply
serves to show the same process of crossing from the opposite direction.
38. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past,
(iii) Initially, however, Marcel does not like this discordance, and sees the
vol. 1 (Penguin Books: London, 1983), trans.
frescoes as failures. The discordance between their 'look' and their meaning is C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin,
so pronounced that Charity was 'Charity devoid of charity', Justice looked p. 88.
more like Injustice, and Envy failed to invoke vice and looked more like a 39. Proust, Remembrance, p. 89.
medical illustration. These discordances hinder Marcel's attainment of the 40. Proust, Remembrance, p. 88.
symbolic reconciliation that Swann can attain. Marcel judges the frescoes as
failed symbols. In their failure and awkwardness they are allegorical. At this
point, however, he recognizes the strength of allegory. He sees in the
discordance not shortcomings but the core of frescoes' power or 'special
beauty'. It is this that Swann, in his ignorance of the difficulties, is oblivious to.
I came to understand that the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes
derived from the great part played in them by symbolism, and the fact that this was
represented not as a symbol (for the thought symbolized was nowhere expressed) but as a
reality, actually felt or materially handled, added something more precise and more literal to
the meaning of the work, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson it
imparted.38
(iv) It is crucial to grasp that this is not just a revaluation of allegory, in the
sense of placing a plus where once there had stood a minus (and here we will
see the difference of this reading with the claims of a postmodern 'allegorical
impulse' which has inverted the rule of the symbolic). Marcel's shift in
appreciation is quite distinct. It rests neither on seeing the frescoes as symbols,
nor simply on seeing the disjunctive mode summarized by 'Charity devoid of
charity'. Instead it depends on Marcel's recognition of the necessity of the
vehicle (the literal representation) for the allegory no matter how divorced
their relation appears. To be precise, this necessity works across the
disjunction. Marcel realizes that the fresco's meaning is more forceful because
of the realistic representation that seems 'devoid of charity'. Indeed, the
allegory is dependent upon a literal representation that is disjunct from the
proper meaning; allegory, asserts de Man, cannot do without the powers of
literal representation. There is not, then, a simple opposition between the
literal and allegorical meanings, but a disjunction that articulates something
like a dialectic of mutual dependence. Marcel goes on to note that in real life
the 'truly saintly embodiments of practical charity' never appear remotely
compassionate, but are as brusque as 'a busy surgeon'.9 He makes the
following analogy with his understanding of the frescoes:
... are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure,
visceral aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it happens, the side that death
actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a
crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we
are accustomed to give the name of Death?40
(v) If we put the emphasis on dialectical connections and transformations, we

could wonder what makes de Man's account different from metaphor's
'necessary link' or the return to plenitude. Or, looking at it from the other
aspect, what differentiates de Man's version of disjunction from Genette's or
Deleuze's? The answer is that the mutual interaction- the play of the forces of
necessity and disjunction at work here - is not one of mutual support so much
as one of destructive dependence, and an erosive dynamic is set in motion.
Allegory is not just the disjunctive, not simply the negative, but a process or
dynamic in which tensions are exacerbated, in which antinomies cross, interact,
and even degenerate. So, for instance, de Man describes a deflection through
which the literal representation overtakes the proper allegorical meaning. With
41. De Man, 'Reading (Proust)', p. 75. Giotto's Invidia, or Envy, an iconic detail is hyperbolized: the exaggerated
emphasis on the serpent-tongue - and we might extend the example to her ears
42. De Man, 'Autobiography as De-Facement'
(1979), The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Columbia - almost obliterates the proper meaning. We look at Envy, but we do not think
University Press: New York, 1984), p. 81. about the vice (the proper meaning), nor do we attend to goodness and virtue
43. De Man, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality', (the proper intent). De Man puts it this way: 'the allegorical representation
p. 208-28.
leads towards a meaning that diverges from the initial meaning to the point of
44. Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse', part 2, foreclosing its manifestation'. The force of our fixation upon such details, he
p. 62.
argues, redirects our thoughts: '. . . the mind is distracted towards something
45. Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse', part 2,
even more threatening than vice, namely death'.4
p. 61. The emphasis is Owens'.
46. Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse', part 2,

p. 70. IV
47. De Man, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality', Death, de Man famously wrote in 'Autobiography as De-Facement', is 'a
p. 222.
displaced name for a temporal predicament'.42 This is the same negative self-
knowledge that he attends to in his consideration of allegory in 'The Rhetoric
of Temporality', where he also discusses Baudelaire's concept of irony or le
comique absolu.43 Again, de Man warns of impatience. He criticizes the over-
hasty recovery of irony or its use in the service of self-satisfied triumphalism.
This reinforces the distinction between de Man's account of irony and its
travestied form; the latter is no more than a second-order knowingness that
figures prominently in some recent accounts of art and theory. For de Man,
such recovery turns irony back into 'simple comedy'. The inter-subjective act
of laughing at others (simple comedy) defuses the intra-subjective
consequences of irony. He sees irony's self-reflexive economy not simply as
a linguistic disjunction but more specifically as an 'unrelieved vertige'.
We should be able to see from this that de Man's account contrasts with
Owens' conception of aporia. The structure of the latter's disjunction seems
far less traumatized. Moreover, his version of allegory - functioning as
theoretical armature for the account of postmodern practices - is remarkably
affirmative in character. In the process the negative dynamics evident in de
Man's allegory have disappeared. Laurie Anderson's Americans on the Move takes
on a particularly significant status in Owens' explanation of allegory,
presenting, he argues, 'the world [as] a vast network of signs . . . [which]
continually elicits reading, interpretation'.44 The signs cannot be read
straightforwardly, however, and, with regard to a specific example from
Anderson, he states that 'two clearly defined but mutually incompatible readings
are engaged in blind confrontation in such a way that it is impossible to choose
between them'.45 Meanwhile, in his discussion of Rauschenberg's work,
Owens suggests that it functions as 'the narration - the allegory - of its own
fundamental illegibility'.46 The postmodern reading of de Man focuses on his
refusal of closure or reconciliation, and his emphasis on repetition. It is
inclined to do so, however, without de Man's sense of ever-exacerbating
aporia and increasing negative self-knowledge.
Although the focus varies, the processes of degeneration and paralysis recur
through de Man's writings. Of irony in 'The Rhetoric of Temporality' he wrote:
More clearly even than allegory, the rhetorical mode of irony takes us back to the predicament
of the conscious subject; this consciousness is clearly an unhappy one that strives to move
beyond and outside itself.47
The reference here is clearly to Hegel's concept of the unhappy

consciousness. In contrast to the externally driven dialectic of lordship and
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bondage, the unhappy consciousness internalizes negativity into split

consciousness (for Hegel, a split between Subject and Substance). As with
the distinction between simple comedy and irony discussed above, it is 48. De Man, 'Form and Intent in the American
internalization that exacerbates the effects of this split. This figure seems to be New Criticism', Blindness and Insight, p. 34.
central to the wider discussions of allegory, often in sublimated form (for 49. This might follow from the widely
most accounts of a postmodern orientation it is more forbidden than discussed anthropological readings of the master-
slave dialectic.
sublimated). The figure of the unhappy consciousness occurs elsewhere in de
50. Fletcher, Allegory, p. 159, p. 341.
Man's work. Typically his efforts focus on preventing a condition of negation
51. Honig, Dark Conceit, p. 68.
being turned into affirmation. He notes, for instance, that one commentator
treats the unhappy consciousness as a condition of 'plenitude', and lacks 52. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, p. 68.
'dialectical anxiety'.48 My interest in the unhappy consciousness is not to spot 53. Honig, Dark Conceit, p. 68.
legitimating (if unfashionable) sources. Nor am I interested in some potential 54. Benjamin, 'Central Park', p. 51.
existential thematic which is suggested rather too readily by the name 'the 55. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason:
unhappy consciousness'.49 Rather, I am concerned with the set of The Aesthetics of Modernity (Sage Publications:
London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 1994),
interchanges and transformations that the unhappy consciousness figures and
trans. Patrick Camiller, pp. 76-7.
with the patterns of movements it registers in de Man's version of aporia.
Moreover, the crucial point is to recognize the degenerative and exacerbating
tendencies in such dynamics. Indeed, one does not have to look too far in the
standard literature on allegory to find similar qualities highlighted. The 58. Benjamin, p. 199.
commentaries on allegorical literature characterize modern forms of allegory 59. Benjamin, p. 199.
as 'katagogic', 'anti-affirmative' or 'evil-daemoned' ;50 a typical narrative

'constantly dwindles',51 and the plot 'evaporates'.52 Meanwhile, the
protagonist has 'no vital mission', and, as one commentator puts it, 'shrinks
and is finally converted into nothingness'.53
It is useful at this point to return to Benjamin. He also describes modern
forms of allegory as etiolating and degenerating, and again emphasizes the
process of internalization: 'Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the
outside'.54 Christine Buci-Glucksmann observes how, in his account of
Baudelairean allegory, Benjamin internalizes death and the abyss as spleen. It is,
she observes, 'a radically disturbing novelty which demolishes the acquired
certainties of the 'subject'.55 Yet the degenerative dynamics here attributed to
modern allegory can also be found in Benjamin's account of the Baroque. The
divisions of the baroque dramas with interludes, he argues, also find form in the
very speech of the actors. There is the 'staged exemplum, staged antithesis, and
staged metaphor' (Kolitz),56 and this 'ornamental aspect' occludes the
'structural, logical meaning' of the actors' mode of speech. Benjamin analyses
the antinomies - or 'elegant antitheses' - in the metaphors of Baroque language.
A juxtaposition is made between the use of sensuous metaphors and 'an extreme
recourse to concrete words',57 as in Hallmann's composition: 'Lechery cannot
occupy the palace of virtue. . . Ironwort blossoms beside noble roses'.5
Something follows from these excesses. Benjamin cites Cysarz's description:
Every idea, however abstract, is compressed into an image, and this image, however concrete,
is then stamped out in verbal form.59
These tropes are not traditional poetic metaphors - or, rather, they do not
behave as such- because they serve to act otherwise. In Benjamin's account,
they invert their traditional characteristics and fail to emphasize the
metaphorical character of the formulation. Indeed, the 'visuality' implied by
such loaded metaphors, their 'imagistic' use of language - we might say: their
excess of metaphoricity- serves to undermine the metaphor itself. The point
about metaphor's excess is important, and contrasts to the usual characteristics
attributed to metaphor where it finds its ultimate moment in its 'image'. The
intensity of the metaphors makes Baroque language 'heavy with material

display', 'intent on the display of its own substance'.60 Instead of the
60. Benjamin, p. 200, p. 201. transcendent image, Benjamin spots a different result:

With every idea the moment of expression coincides with a veritable eruption of images, which
62. Benjamin, p. 199. gives rise to a chaotic mass of metaphors.61
63. Benjamin, p. 206. Cf. Benjamin's discussion
of the Baroque's - and the present's - 'so- The metaphors are extended to such a degree that their imagery gets out of
called decadence' in the 'Epistemo-Critical
hand. They degenerate and the 'ideas evaporate in images',62 or, as Benjamin
Prologue' (Benjamin, pp. 54-5).
writes a little later, the language of a German mourning play 'expands in
64. Benjamin, p. 232. A similar emphasis runs
throughout the established literature on allegory. painterly fashion in the alexandrine'.63
For Quilligan, for instance, allegory questions
'culture's assumptions about the ability of
V
language to state or reveal value' not to sink
into the 'infinite regressions' of linguistic self- Despite its promise to demystify the symbol, allegory is limited, Benjamin
referentiality but to provoke a move beyond
suggests, by its fetishism of fragments and its retreat into 'melancholic
(Quilligan, p. 221, p. 278).
immersion'.
66. The critique of 'negativistic quiet' comes As those who lose their footing turn somersaults in their fall, so would the allegorical intention
from 'Left-Wing Melancholy. (On Erich fall from emblem to emblem down into the dizziness of its bottomless depths ... 64
Kiistner's new book of poems)', Screen, no. 2,
Summer 1974, p. 30.
In the final pages of his book on the Baroque, Benjamin charts how 'the direction
67. Buchloh, 'Allegorical Procedures', p. 52.
of allegorical reflection is reversed; on the second part of its wide arc it returns,
68. Buchloh, 'Allegorical Procedures', p. 44. to redeem'.65 As has often been noted, Benjamin advocates a 'resolution' of
Cf. Verfremdungseffekt and the aim to alienate us
from our alienation.
allegory's destructive potential - or, at least, a leap - into praxis. Benjamin
qualifies his approval of 'destructive' work within, at least in part, the context of
his politicization, criticizing the nihilistic repercussions of unhindered and
indeterminate negativity, and the revelling in 'a negativistic quiet'.66
71. See Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer'
(1934), Understanding Brecht (New Left Books:
Benjamin Buchloh adopts a similar argument in his discussion of allegory
London, 1973), trans. Anna Bostock, and 'allegorical deconstruction'. Surveying allegorical practices in art, he
pp. 85-103. distinguishes the work of Sherrie Levine and Martha Rosler. Levine's strategy
72. Buchloh, for instance, registers some unease is presented as closest to the allegorical melancholic, and 'the strongest
with presenting the paradigm of Rosler as a
negation within the gallery framework'.67 Buchloh describes how 'The
solution, suggesting that her work, due to its
very externality, is subject to a certain allegorical mind sides with the object and protests against its devaluation to the
impotence. status of a commodity by devaluating it a second time in allegorical practice'.68
Levine, he says, 'devalues the object of representation for the second time'.
Her 'apparently radical denial of authorship', however, is 'complacent in
defeat', encouraging a 'fatalistic acceptance' and 'a silent complacency in the
face of the static conditions of reified existence'. Such work does not open
what Buchloh calls 'a dimension of critical negativity'.69 Like Benjamin's
melancholic it endures 'the violence of the passive denial that the allegorical
subject imposes upon itself as well as upon the objects of its choice'.70 Buchloh
sees in Benjamin's work - particularly in the work on Baudelaire and in the
essay 'The Author as Producer' - a move from the melancholic to the
political.71 For Buchloh it is Martha Rosler's work that best approximates this
latter sense of allegorical praxis. This wing of allegorical (or beyond
allegorical) activity is interventionist in character, and produces art outside the
accepted frames of reference. It 'produces' radical work, he argues, and
refuses to supply the apparatus.
The favoured option of many writers is the resort, finally, to Benjamin in his
Brechtian mode, even when glossed with Adornian cautions.72 But what
happens if we do not come to rest too quickly on this familiar status of 'The
Author as Producer' and pursue things a little further? My point here is not to
dismiss this essay, nor the practices working self-consciously with its legacy;
on the contrary, such work has often been formed under conditions of political
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and historical urgency. Rather, my aim is to follow the argument. The more
we move into the difficulties posed at the heart of the debate on allegory the
more intriguing it becomes. Indeed, we are referred not just to different 73. De Man, 'Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion',
modalities of representation. We find ourselves instead at the heart of a p. 52.
problem: the relation of representation to the real. This issue has become the 74. Norris, Paul de Man, p. 78. 'Rhetoric may
ground for easy statements and instant opinions. However, the central figure as the problematic term, the aspect of
language that complicates the move from
questions in debates on allegory represent real points of difficulty for theory:
phenomenal perception to concepts of pure
representation, knowledge, attempts to know the real or represent it, and, by understanding. But it can exert this
extension, we might include questions such as realism, materialism, etc. deconstructive leverage only in so far as it
remains an activity of thought closely in touch
Allegory criticizes a simplistic understanding of mimesis as much as it does the
with epistemology and critical reason' (p. 94).
grandiose claims of the symbol, but there is no naive 'beyond' or cheap
75. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol in Hegel's
dismissal of the problems raised. The debates on allegory, and the work of Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, Summer 1982,
both de Man and Benjamin- whatever their differences, whatever their p. 771. This essay is reprinted in Aesthetic
Ideology.
drawbacks - address such matters as the very stakes of their projects. De Man
emphasizes that allegorical texts raise the difficulty of 'moving from 76. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 773.
epistemology to persuasion': 77. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 773, p. 771.
78. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 770.
Allegory is the purveyor of demanding truths, and thus its burden is to articulate an 79. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 774.
epistemological order of truth and deceit with a narrative or compositional order of
persuasion.73
For de Man, the exploration of allegory highlights points of difficulty akin to

those identified in philosophy. As Christopher Norris has remarked, de Man
'allows of no premature appeal to rhetoric as a means of escape from
epistemological issues'.74
In his late writings de Man turns explicitly to a consideration of Hegel's
Aesthetics. He explores 'the commanding metaphor . . . of interiorization' in
Hegel's 'dialectics of internalization'. De Man takes this to be the most
powerful version of symbolic rhetoric and the aesthetic. He identifies the
concept of Erinnerung, or remembrance, at the heart of the theory of the
symbol, 'recollection as the inner gathering and preserving of experience'.7
However, he notes, in Hegel's philosophy it is not Erinnerung but Gedichtnis,
not remembrance but rote memorization, which plays the key role. The
argument is involved and fascinating to follow, and goes through some
characteristic gearshifts. In short, de Man identifies Gedachtnis with sign and
allegory, or with the Proustian memoire volontaire. Erinnerung is, for de Man, a
'defensive, ideological, and censored translation'76 of Gedachtnis, but he also
argues that, in the face of negative self-knowledge and the threat of self-
erasure in thought, Erinnerung is an entirely necessary defense, a strategy for
avoiding total paralysis. Memorization, in turn, is given a particular
significance; it figures in the passage from perception, through representation,
to thought. According to de Man, memorization often makes use of material
inscription, memorizing by writing down to forget - a 'machinelike
exteriority' through which 'the intellect, the mind, or the idea leaves a
material trace upon the world'.77 Two things follow. First, sign and symbol
are not just distinct and opposed, but are in a relation of 'mutual
obliteration'.78 Secondly, we find that memorization can only be preserved
as symbol: 'the sign can only survive as a symbol',79 or 'the sign, random and
singular at its first position, turns into symbol'.80
Memory effaces remembrance (or recollection) just as the I effaces itself.
The faculty that enables thought to exist [Gedachtnis] also makes its
preservation impossible. The art, the techne, of writing which cannot be
separated from thought and from memorization can only be preserved in the
figural mode of the symbol, the very model it has to do away with if it is to
occur at all.81
81. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 773. To claim that the sign can only survive as a symbol is not to return us to the

symbolic account, its illusions and ideologies, etc. What I've argued for comes
out, I think, on the far side of the argument for allegory; it is a pedantic point
to worry about whether this is still allegory, is beyond allegory, or is a proper
84. Benjamin, p. 232. Cf. Hegel on 'looking
the negative in the face', a passage favoured by
sense for allegory. Whatever we call it, it must take the figure of allegory
Adorno (note the epigraph to Minima Moralia). seriously - or, rather, it must take seriously the question of representation
85. Indeed, Benjamin argues that destruction is raised by this figure.
idealized by the symbol. Allegory, in contrast, Indeed, in the Trauerspiel study, Benjamin makes a similar argument. The
addresses 'thefacies hippocratica of history as a
context is his criticism of the denigration of allegory (and concomitant
petrified, primordial landscape' (Benjamin,
p. 166). elevation of the symbol) in neo-Kantian writing:

The undialectical neo-Kantian mode of thought is not able to grasp the synthesis which is
87. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 773. reached in allegorical writing as a result of the conflict between theological and artistic
intentions, a synthesis not so much in the sense of a peace as a treuga dei between the
conflicting opinions.82
Benjamin, then, goes as far as advocating a dialectical 'solution' to allegory's

antinomies. It is a contingent synthesis, to be sure: perhaps a fragile
suspension, perhaps a tension in extreme, always liable to reopen fractures or
open new ones. And this 'lies in the essence of writing itself'.8s As in de Man's
discussion, the act of inscription is significant in this more complex conception
of allegory; it is a conception, again with parallels in de Man, moving out of
any straightforward counterposition to the symbol.
Interestingly, the above passage occurs not, as might be expected, in the
closing paragraphs on redemption and salvation, but in the opening sections of
the chapter on 'Allegory and Trauerspiel'. Commentators on Benjamin's
Trauerspiel book have sometimes distinguished the final from the main part of
the text, the redemptive argument from the account of allegory; a rupture is
perceived. Yet, without going into the relevant debates on this perceived
rupture, it is worth noting how Benjamin relates the two aspects:
For it is to misunderstand the allegorical entirely if we make a distinction between the store of
images, in which this about-turn into salvation and redemption takes place, and that grim store
which signifies death and damnation. For it is precisely visions of the frenzy of destruction, in
which all earthly things collapse into a heap of ruins, which reveal the limit set upon allegorical
contemplation, rather than its ideal quality.84
'Destruction', then, is not an 'ideal quality' of allegory.85 And for

'destruction' we might substitute a whole range of supposed ideal qualities
- such as rupture or disjunction - that feature so large in recent accounts. As
de Man remarks on the disjunction of subject and predicate, it is equally vain
to deplore or praise it.86 Schemas such as allegory (a.k.a. postmodernism,
a.k.a. deconstruction) versus symbol (a.k.a. Romanticism and Modernism,
a.k.a. dialectics) just fail to hold. For Benjamin, destruction figures more as
the precondition for grasping allegory's limits. Again, the force of the
argument concerns a position 'on the far side of allegory', and again those
'limits' are not to allegory's detriment as its full effect.
VI
The emphasis on inscription appears to return us to matters pertinent to a

consideration of the visual art. However, within de Man's writing painting,
like music, is seen as immediate, functioning as the symbolic to writing's
allegorical system.87 Memorization, de Man says, 'is entirely devoid of
Gail Day
images'88 and is a 'deliberate forgetting of substantial, aesthetic, and pictorial

symbols'.89 This does make it difficult to establish any straightforward 'de
Manian art history',90 or to utilize the resources in unproblematic ways. In 88. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 772.
contrast, Benjamin seems to offer a more amenable account of the image, his
89. De Man, 'Reading History', The Resistance
writing being replete with image-based analogies and often explicitly addressed to Theory (University of Manchester Press:
to visual cultural phenomenon. But this discussion of 'images' - favourable or Manchester, 1986), p. 70.
not - cannot be collapsed into an art historian's sense of an 'image', no more 90. The phrase is Tim Clark's - the title of a
session from the Annual Conference of the
than Hegel's criticism of 'picture thoughts' can be understood as a critique of
College Arts Association in 1994 - although it
'pictures'. We must beware of forgetting a basic allegorical lesson about the should be noted that he endows it with a
reification of language: the need to distinguish 'good literalness' from 'bad doubtful tone: 'A De Manian Art History?'.
literal-mindedness'.91 The approach to the image has to be more tangential 91. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, p. 70.
than head-on. It is, then, perhaps appropriate that- via Proust, Marcel, 92. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary (Harvard
Swann, Ruskin, and the photographs - de Man approaches Giotto so Univesity Press: Cambridge and London, 1986,
p. 95) ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth
indirectly. And Benjamin, too, identifies as significant the same passages:
(entry for 18 January 1926).
Then I read the lesbian scene from Proust. Asja grasped its savage nihilism: how Proust in a 93. De Man, 'Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion',
certain fashion ventures into the tidy private chamber within the petit bourgeois that bears the p. 52.
inscription sadism and then mercilessly smashes everything to pieces, so that nothing remains 94. Benjamin, p. 233.
of the untarnished, clear-cut conception of wickedness, but instead within every fracture evil
explicitly shows its true substance - 'humanity', or even 'kindness'. And as I was explaining this
to Asja, it became clear to me how closely this coincided with the thrust of my baroque book.
Just as the previous evening, while reading alone in my room and coming across the
extraordinary passage on Giotto's Caritas, it had become clear to me that Proust was here
developing a conception that corresponds at every point to what I myself have tried to subsume
under the concept of allegory.92
De Man himself remarks on how the issues at the heart of allegory parallel
those in philosophy. As he sees it, philosophical texts articulating 'the furthest-
reaching truths about ourselves and the world' adopt the indirect mode of
allegorical texts and culminate in the same 'inconclus[ion] about their own
intelligibility'.93 For Benjamin, the issues seem to take on a more theological
flavour. Concerned as the latter is with 'the theological essence of the
subjective' and with 'knowledge of evil . . . [that] has no object', however, the
apparent difference in the nature of the difficulties may not be so sharp.94 The
question of negation is at the heart of both. That visual examples function so
prominently perhaps adds another key player to the debate.
Acknowledgements
This essay developedfrom doctoral research under the supervision of Fred Orton at the
University of Leeds. Fred's own work and teaching on allegory have provided an
invaluable intellectual stimulusfor this essay. Chris Riding's discussions were influential
in the early stages of this project. I am grateful to Tim Clarkfor inviting me to speak in
his session 'A de Manian Art History?' at the College Arts Association 82nd Annual
Conference, New York, February 16-18, 1994; this occasion provided aforum in which
to try out some of the ideas contained here. I would like to acknowledge the travel grant
awarded to me by the CAA. The Research Centre for Cultural History and Critical
Theory at the University of Derby provided financial supportfor this project. I wish to
thank the Centre's Director, Dr. Julia Welbourne, for her support. Steve Edwards has
offered significant comments and criticisms on numerous versions of this text. Thanks also
to Fred Schwartzfor his informed and sympathetic editorial work.

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Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics

Author(s): Gail Day

Claims that we live in an 'allegorical age', as one commentator put it in 1979,

( OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999 103-118

Owens shapes his account of allegory with the resources of structuralism

historicist thought as tradition, influence, development, evolution, sources, of 'other-speaking' (allos-agoreuein).

and origin'. 6. Helga Geyer-Ryan, Fables of Desire (Polity

106 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999

de Man is doing is refusing reconciliation or closure to the dialectic. Within

Benjamin pursues his analysis of the form of German mourning-plays through a

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999 107

Benjamin's approach (antithesis, division, duality, dichotomy, duplicity) have

108 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999

24. Benjamin, p. 176.

27. Benjamin, p. 208.

Baroque language, Benjamin says, is constantly convulsed by the rebellion of

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999 109

III 34. De Man, 'Reading (Proust)', p. 67.

110 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999

negations', de Man writes, the interpretation 'will recover the adequation

(ii) Marcel- described by de Man as more rhetorically sophisticated than

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999 111

(v) If we put the emphasis on dialectical connections and transformations, we

112 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999

46. Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse', part 2,

The reference here is clearly to Hegel's concept of the unhappy

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999 113

bondage, the unhappy consciousness internalizes negativity into split

as 'katagogic', 'anti-affirmative' or 'evil-daemoned' ;50 a typical narrative

114 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999

intensity of the metaphors makes Baroque language 'heavy with material

61. Benjamin, p. 173.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999 115

epistemology to persuasion': 77. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 773, p. 771.

78. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 770.

For de Man, the exploration of allegory highlights points of difficulty akin to

116 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999

82. Benjamin, p. 177.

86. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 775.

Benjamin, then, goes as far as advocating a dialectical 'solution' to allegory's

'Destruction', then, is not an 'ideal quality' of allegory.85 And for

The emphasis on inscription appears to return us to matters pertinent to a

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999 117

images'88 and is a 'deliberate forgetting of substantial, aesthetic, and pictorial

118 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.1 1999

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