back to the future the narrative of allegory in recent critical accounts of romanticism karen hadley

7/28/2019 Back to the Future the Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism Karen Hadley

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"Back to the Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical

Accounts of Romanticism

Hadley, Karen.

ELH, Volume 69, Number 4, Winter 2002, pp. 1029-1045 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/elh.2002.0036

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Hebrew University of Jerusalem (18 May 2013 09:05 GMT)

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suppress, or repress, the very criticism on whose shoulders theystand, that is, de Manian-inspired deconstruction. In formulating thisclaim, I turn to Robert Caserios Pathos of Uncertain Agency,

which, in the context of modern narrative, manifests a similar(repressive) tendency with regard to de Man. I argue that Caserio,could he acknowledge de Mans early deconstructive contributionssuch as Rhetoric of Temporality, would conceive of modern alle-gory as a more flexible trope than his structuralist-influenced argu-ment allows him to. Engaging Joel Finemans Structure of Allegori-cal Desire, I conclude that Romantic deconstructive materialistcritics would likewise understand allegory as a more historicallymorphological trope than their Jamesonian-influenced insights allowthem to; in particular that allegory, when understood as temporalsuccession, comes to resemble the narrative which Alan Liu canonly allow himself to associate with history.

Where allegory can be seen to approach narrative, then, I suggest(following Michael Sprinkers poststructuralist, materialist reading ofde Man) that language can be seen to instance the material. Twoimplications of this claim in the context of the present discussion are,first, that the deconstructive materialist critical narrative need not

discover its apocalyptic referent exclusively in historical context, butalso, in fact, in the lyric textin Sprinkers words, the site of politicalengagement need not be in the streets.3 Second, and again followingde Man but thinking beyond Sprinker in this respect, I argue thattemporality mediates the relations between allegory and narrative,language and materiality. Revising the Romantic deconstructivematerialist understanding of time, in light of a materialist under-standing of de Man, would encourage a rethinking of our understand-ing of Romantic allegory, and, finally, a reconsideration of the

materiality of the Wordsworthian lyric, along the lines of Sprinkersnew(ly retemporalized) materialist aesthetic.4

* * *

Samuel Taylor Coleridges definition of, and distinction between,the ideas of symbol and allegory comes most famously in hisStatesmans Manual following a brief discussion on the organicconception ofideas.5 Following the discussion of ideas and closelylinked to it, symbol, we learn, has the same seminal powers,

evoking the translucence of the special in the individual, thegeneral in the special, and of the universal in the general. Whilethis definition replicates the unity and organicism present in


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Coleridges discussion of the nature of ideas, above all we learn thatthe symbolic is associated with time, with the translucence of theeternal through and in the temporal, the reunion of the immortal

and the mortal realms. Coleridge places allegory in juxtaposition tothe cohesion of the symbol, where allegory, we learn, is but aworthless translation of abstract notions into a picture-language.With Coleridgean allegory, then, notions of translucence and thetemporal/eternal are left behind in favor of mere translation ofabstract context into pictorial text.

It was the Coleridgean symbolic which for generations of critics(particularly those representing what had become the Arnoldiantradition in Romanticism) constituted the Romantic aesthetic. M. H.Abrams, writing mid-century in his Mirror and the Lamp (1953),popularized the same Coleridgean-inspired aesthetic as appeared inthe Biographia Literaria, an account which compared the symbolicto the synthesizing, organic powers of the primary imagination. Thefollowing year, W. K. Wimsatts Structure of Romantic NatureImagery (1954) likewise claimed that the most authentic Romanticpoetry is represented by the solidity of symbol. Wimsatts accountin particular details a Romantic imaginative synthesis which effects

the sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual andmaterial world, involving a subject (the Nature of birds and treesand streams), a metaphysics (the plastic nature of the animatingprinciple), and a sensibility and theory of poetic imagination.6

Such figures are clearly recognizable as Coleridgean.Responding explicitly to Wimsatts Structure of Romantic Nature

Imagery, de Man marked a deconstructive shift in the Coleridgeantradition. The title of his essay, Intentional Structure of the Roman-tic Image, reflects his move away from Romantic conceptions of

Nature and towards language, where (in adjusting Wimsatts title tohis purpose) he eliminates the term Nature and modifies Struc-ture with the term Intentional. Familiar by now, his argumentbegins by confronting the tradition of Romantic imaginative synthesisas reflected in Coleridge, Abrams, and Wimsatt: the Romanticimagination, he claims, marks the possibility not for the synthesis ofmind and nature, of matter and consciousness, but for consciousnessto exist entirely by and for itself.7 Again breaking with tradition, heindicates that the primary vehicle of poetic consciousness is not the

Romantic Imagination, but rather language; language, he claims,mediates the poetic relation between matter and consciousness. DeMans radical observations regarding the interrelation of poetic


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consciousness, language, and rhetoric coalesce to form the openingmove of his subsequent Rhetoric of Temporality, which was tobecome at least as controversial as it was influential to future critics.

This essays opening move posits the question of the intentionality ofrhetorical figures, thereby shifting the locus of Romantic conscious-ness from the imagining subject to the figurative language employedby this subject.8 With this key move, Romantic figurative language istransformed from being the vehicle of consciousness, to becomingthe locus of intentionality.

De Mans second key move in Rhetoric of Temporality addressesthe rhetorical terms predominant in Coleridge and in the Romanticcritical tradition: symbol and allegory. In line with the tradition, hejuxtaposes symbol and allegory, and then (invoking Coleridge butinverting his terms) contextualizes them in terms of space-timerelations: in the world of symbol, image is seen to coincide withsubstance, producing a relationship ofsimultaneity which is spa-tial in kind; the world of allegory, on the other hand, must refer toanother sign that precedes it and with which it can never coincide,implying a relationship purelytemporal in kind. Entirely distinctfrom the merely referential, spatialized sense implied in the

Coleridgean tradition, de Mans sense of allegory indicates an au-thentically temporal destiny, where it prevents the self from anillusory identification with the non-self, which is now fully, thoughpainfully, recognized as a non-self. De Man, then, saw that thesubject/object, consciousness/matter dialectic of the tradition lies notonly within figurative language, but moreover, entirely in thetemporal relationships that exist within a system of allegorical signs;as such, the phenomenological, deconstructive reading of allegorymarks the primary conflict between a conception of the self seen in

its authentically temporal predicament and a defensive strategy thattries to hide from this negative self-knowledge.9 Here, de Manexpands his idea of Romantic figuration from viewing it as a questionabout intentionality to include viewing it as a question about linguis-tic temporality.

Where de Mans project presents intrinsically formalist critiques ofthe function of figurative language in its negotiation of the (Carte-sian) mind/nature divide, Marjorie Levinson, in her WordsworthsGreat Period Poems (1986), relegates the focus on lyric, poetic

language to only one side of her history of the recent criticism ofRomanticism. Addressing criticism of the late sixties, she lists deMan, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and othersthose who


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seized as their Wordsworthian truth the great epistemological andontological arguments of the poetryagainst the reconstructiveefforts of E. P. Thompson, David Erdman, and Carl Woodring.

Acknowledging Abrams, whose work located itself between the twoprojects but was rationalized and totalizied, and Marilyn Butler,lauded for furthering the historicist project, Levinson proposes herown Althusserian-inspired alternative, a way of mediating the twoprojects, deconstruction and reconstruction, which she names atheory of negative allegory. This theory of allegory, we learn, is inuse in a variety of similarly-inspired (Romanticist) studies (JohnBarrell, James Chandler, T. J. Clark, John Goode, Kurt Heinzelman,Kenneth Johnston, Alan Liu, Jerome McGann, David Simpson, andJames Turner) and provides a two-pronged opportunity,deconstructive and materialist, for writers to represent the literarywork as that which speaks of one thing because it cannot articulateanotherpresenting formally a sort of allegory by absence, wherethe signified is indicated by an identifiably absented signifier.10

Although she acknowledges him only in passing, LevinsonsAlthusserian, Jamesonian-inspired approach in many ways resemblesde Mans deconstructive approach, in that both, for example, con-

front a greatly idealized corpus and work to subvert Cartesiandualism bysplit[ting] the atom of Romantic symbolism and organi-cism.11 Both, too, work to solve the problem of the Romantic symbolby way of recourse to Romantic allegory. And yet de Man introducesallegory, it may be remembered, as a way of forcing the self toconfront its own anteriority or alterity, to prevent the selffrom anillusory identification with the non-self; while Levinsons negativeallegory, on the other hand, works to relate or identify the priva-tized world of the poem to the context of its possession by the

world.12

Clearly, then, these deconstructive accounts differ substan-tially with regard to their understanding of allegory: de Maniandeconstructive phenomenology proposes an authenticdifferentia-tion of the poetic self and its own alterity or anteriority, whileLevinsonian deconstructive materialism proposes an ethicalidenti-fication between the same, where the anteriority of self is designatedmatter-sociality-history.13

Like Levinson emphasizing the social and the historical, Liuarticulates the way in which literary texts emerge through a deter-

mined differentiation by which they do not articulate historicalcontexts. Citing much the same roll call of structuralist-influencedtheoristsand echoing Levinsons negative allegoryLiu posits a


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methodology he calls qualified, or denied positivism, whichconceives of Wordsworths poetry as a mimetic denial of history sovigorous, full, and detailed that denial, the shapednegation, becomes

itself the positive fact.14 Mirroring Levinsons effort to identify theidentifiably absented signifier in Wordsworth, Liu diagnoses andtranslates his version of Wordsworthian negation into positivefact.

In particular where it privileges historical narrative over historicalallegory, Lius project might be seen as the fulfilled realization ofJamesonian-inspired, Romantic deconstructive materialism, in thathistorical narrative, we are informed, possesses the complex narrativestructure ofhistorical retrospection, of viewing the present by wayof, and as part of, a future moment. Noting Marxist critics preoccu-pation with the relation of literary form to historical form, Liucontrasts historical narrative structures (such as his and Jamesons) tothe allegorical structure of Wordsworthian autobiographical poetry,which emerges as ideologically motivated and, therefore, anti-narrativistic. Wordsworths formulation is, we are told, anti-narrativistic,or allegorical, because it denies history; it turns its back on therupturing or narrativizing inherent in the historical in favor of textual

coherence or cohesion.15

Where Liu seeks to align himself with Jameson, he is clearly alsoaligned with Levinson, not only where his denied positivism recallsher negative allegory, but more fundamentally where each seeks toestablish a correspondence between text and context. This parallelsuggests a way in which Romantic deconstructive materialist criticssuch as Levinson and Liu engage elements of the tradition outlinedabove: they resemble de Manian deconstruction in their anti-symbol-ism and anti-idealism, and yet their accounts evidence even more

closely key elements of the Coleridgean (correspondence-based)model of allegory. This observation, that the new historicist/historicalmaterialist approach in some ways replicates a version of the ideologyit aims to critique, is by now no revelation.16 I am less interested insuggesting (as have others before me) that a version of the newhistoricism such as Lius instantiates the (symbolist, idealist) ideologyit critiques, as I am in exploring the ideological potential inherent inrecent Romantic critical use of the figurative term allegory. I shallproceed by establishing a strategy and a motive by which Levinson

and (especially) Liu succeed in oscillating between a Jamesonian anda Coleridgean model, on the back of the trope allegory.17


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* * *

For a remarkably similar strategy and motive, I turn to Caserio,

whose Pathos of Uncertain Agency: Paul de Man and Narrative,draws a parallel between the controversy over Paul de Man and thepowers and problems of literary modernism.18 Without assessingthe validity of Caserios argument, I will explore his critique of criticalapproaches to modern narrative in order to suggest a parallel withLius critique of the Wordsworthian lyric.

Noting that de Man and like-minded theorists of the novel havetended to see modern narratives as allegories of disjunction, Caserioasserts that it is possible to see de Mans approach to narrative by way

of allegory as a powerful revival, indeed as the most vital recent episode,in modernisms attack on story and plot. Where Caserio asserts thatde Man approaches narrative by way of allegory, he suggests that deMans approach to modern narrative takes the form of binarizedallegorizing: by his account, not only are allegory and narration for deMan grindingly antithetical, but overall de Man is characterized asalways incitingwars of elemental antagonisms. We are informed,finally, that these veryantagonisms, which Neil Hertz has charac-terized as de Mans lurid figures, are what have contributed to the

remarkable power and influence of de Manian rhetorical analysis.19Caserios argument succeeds, I argue, only by engaging a logic of

mutual exclusion: he represents a crudely allegorical de Man (de Manas lurid figure) in order then to reject this projection in favor ofwhat is presented as the only other viable alternative to readingmodern narrative, its pathos of uncertain agency. This logic, Isuggest, resembles the strategy by which Liu represents Wordsworth.That is, Lius logic of mutual exclusion represents a crudely allegori-cal Wordsworth in order to reject this projection in favor of what is

presented as the only other viable way of reading historical narrative,his denied positivism.20 Both accounts, then, interpret critical orliterary figures such as de Man and Wordsworth first by projecting acrudely allegorical model, and second, by rejecting it and substitutingan alternative which is presented as the only other option. In short,the very either/or binarism Caserio and Liu critique in de Man andWordsworth structures their own logic.

Clearly, these accounts function only by suppressing a long andvaried tradition of thinking allegory. Fineman, for example, begins hishistorical survey of thinking allegory (Structure of Allegorical De-sire [1981]) with the classical theologian Philo, who theorized an


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allegory that makes up for the distance, or heals the gap, betweenthe present and a disappearing past, which, without interpretation,would be otherwise irretrievable and foreclosed. This Philoan,

essentialist tradition of allegory continued on through the Patristics,who instituted it as the dogma that lies at the base of all Medievaland Renaissance critical theory. I contend that it is the Philoanmodel, rather than the later, poststructuralist one associated with deMan, which defines both the Coleridgean and the Romantic newhistoricist project: in each, the effort is made, through interpretation,to restore a text to its proper historical context by making up for thedistance, or healing the gap between the (denied or negative)signifier and its (absented) signified. Fineman describes the Philoanallegorical mode of scriptural criticism as presenting the contempo-rary necessity for a revelation expressed through figural extrava-gance, and likewise Liu seeks to reveal the apocalypse of referencelying behind a Wordsworthian version of figural extravaganceas hesuggests, the more extravagant the figure, the more powerful thereference. That Philos method is a negative theology revealingfiguratively an essentially mysterious divinity again recalls Lius ownversion of negative theology, his denied positivism.21 These parallels

suggest the extent to which especially Lius account is based in notonly a Coleridgean, but a Medieval, theological, Philoan model ofallegory rather than in the poststructuralist accounts that immedi-ately preceded him.

In pursuit of motive, now, I return once more to Caserio, focusingLius commentary through Caserios use of the term repression.Initially, Caserio cites de Mans perverse tendency to make mereexposition seem a form of repressive assertion, and then he identi-fies his view of de Mans repressed: De Manian allegory appears to

derive from a repression of what is an alternative to allegorys violentpositionings and antitheses [where the alternative is identified asmodern narratives anti-allegorical pathos of uncertain agency].22

Here, establishing Caserios strategy of associating allegory withrepression is useful not so much for its commentary on modernnarrative, but rather, in this context, for how the account modelsRomantic new historicists use of the term allegory. In the followinglines, I suggest, Lius account of Wordsworth bears a striking resem-blance to Caserios account of de Man:

it was the irruption of political narrative within the poets earlydescriptive forms that made timereified finally as an idea and


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ideologynecessary as the obscure allegorization of narrative. . . .Wordsworths great transform [was] a lyric mode that was not somuch any particular kind of lyric as an migrflight from narrative.23

This passage from Lius Wordsworth: The Sense of History observestwo, related effects of the irruption of political narrative in thepoets early forms: the obscure allegorization of narrative, and themigr flight from narrative. As such, the effects of politicalnarrative in the poets early work have apparently the same status:Wordsworths allegorization of narrative, that is, constitutes hisflight from narrative. From the comparison with Caserio we learnthat allegory, because of its critical and historical flexibility, has been

appropriated in recent criticism of Romanticism to construct what isin fact a critical polemic offering on the one hand, a critically-preferred option, and on the other (as the only other alternative) arepression of, or f light from, the initial option. As such, in theseaccounts allegory constitutes a vehicle for repression; more precisely,it constitutes the vehicle for the displacement of the repressed.

Drawing from the discussion above, I shall suggest, finally, that therepressed elements of accounts such as those of Liu, Levinson (andCaserio) are the antitotalizing, poststructuralist claims of early Ro-

mantic, deconstructive accounts.24 Where Liu and Caserio accuseothers, Wordsworth and de Man, of using allegory to repress or flee,I claim, rather, that Lius mention of repression is actually self-indicating: where he projects his own critical polemic ontoWordsworths text, he, rather, is the one repressing. Likewise, whereCaserio projects his critical polemic, he represses the key to a moreinformed understanding of his own critical object. Each, in fact, ismotivated by, and at the same time repressing, a version of a criticalfigure who in the end, were he acknowledged in their respectiveanalyses, would challenge fundamentally both their process and theirgoal. This figure is the de Man characterized by Jacques Derrida,Rodolphe Gash, Sprinker, and others, and the insight de Manprovides (the threat to be repressed) concerns not the oppositionality,as they claim, but the proximity of allegory and narrative. Caseriocannot acknowledge this because his argument depends on theforced opposition between (good) modern narrative and de Mans(bad) allegorized lurid figures; likewise, Liu cannot acknowledge

the proximity between allegory and narrative because for him narra-tive stands for (good) history, and allegory stands for (bad) ideologi-cally-motivated lyric poetry.


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De Man must exist in Lius account as an aporia, because de Mandirectly and powerfully confronts it. Where Liu of necessity over-looks poststructuralist thinking of allegory, it is likely because de

Manian deconstruction (counter to what Caserio or Hertz mightassert) interrogates the very binaries which key aspects of Liusaccount, such as time/history or allegory/narrative, appear to bebased in.25 The success of claims such as Lius, and also Caserios,rests on their ability to juxtapose and maintain a differential betweenconcepts such as allegory and narrative; the force of de Mansargument, rather, is in his ability to bring them together. Allegory inde Man, Gash reminds us, represents the subversion of the totaliz-ing potential of texts in an endless process of narrative.26 Theremainder of my account explores the relation, in this context,between one apparent pole (allegory) and the other (narrative) in theunderstanding of the term allegory through critical references toflight or repression. As de Mans account suggests, for example,where he sees allegory as the narration of a totality which neverquite takes place, an inherent proximity belies the deconstructivematerialist polarization.27 I contend that the use of allegory in recentcriticism of Romanticism narrates the negotiation of this proximity.

De Mans sense of allegory, for example, anticipates and challengesa centerpiece of Lius argumentthat the true apocalypse ofWordsworth is referencewhere he suggests that Wordsworths useof allegory subverts reference: to repeat, he comments that allegoryprevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self.28

Moreover, de Manian deconstructive reading, in contrast todeconstructive materialist readings, works to call the reader/criticback to the uncertainty (to use Caserios valorized term) of linguis-tic agency. Again, this uncertainty is contrary to the thrust of Lius

approach, which calls the reader/critic back to the denied (and bythis very denial, still critically determinate) agency of history, andwhich calling is often made most forcefully through a critical cer-tainty that revises the language of Wordsworths text to produce moredefinitively referential meaning.29 De Manian allegorical narrative,then, expresses just what Liu and Caserio must repress, that is, thatpoststructuralist allegory can function to narrate the subversion ofdeterminate referential meaning. Lius failure to acknowledge that poststructuralist allegory sub-verts reference, that its agency is uncertain, that it is in fact a formof narrative, takes him in the very direction which Jameson, his statedinfluence, warns against; that is, he succumbs to the burning


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temptation of expressive causality, as Jameson defines it, a vastinterpretive allegory in which a sequence of historical events or textsand artifacts is rewritten in terms of some deeper, underlying, and

more fundamental narrative, of a hidden master narrative which isthe allegorical key or figural content of the first sequence of empiricalmaterials.30Embracing (however consciously) the model of expres-sive causalityessentially what was described above as the Philoan,Classical modelallows a Romantic deconstructive materialist suchas Liu to overlook an alternative approach to linking deconstructionand materialism, an approach which would more fully acknowledgeits own deconstructive heritage. Such an approach would begin byrecognizing with Sprinker that the site of political engagement neednot always be the streets, that is, that the deconstructive projectitself can be seen as a form of political engagement.31

Sprinker proposes to rethink the deconstructive conception oflanguage, vis a vis the materialist concept of history, which isessentially a proposal to rethink de Manian deconstruction by way ofAlthusserian materialism.32 He raises the possibility of such a hybrid-ization when he suggests that texts have the same ideological relationto the conditions of their possibility, as does human society to the

conditions of its existence. In both lies the same ideological promiseto transcend and thus in both, concludes Sprinker, exists the sameformal relation drawing together texts and human society, languageand history.33 This ideological similarity entails, finally, the materialityof language, which Sprinker finds in both de Man and WalterBenjamin: it is the errancy of language which never reaches themark . . . that Benjamin calls history.34

The process of rupture, errancy, disruption, or estrangement inlanguage which Benjamin and de Man equate with history is, in the

end, a temporal process. Sprinker acknowledges this in citing Gashsdiscussion of de Man, but he does not acknowledge as much in hisown analysis. As quoted in the same piece (a quotation, however,which Sprinker relegates to a footnote), Gash concludes at one pointthat all of de Mans concepts are drawn without exception into amaelstrom of temporalization and consequently that texts them-selves represent the temporal process of detotalizing operations.35

Time is, and should be acknowledged as, a key factor in understandingthe deconstructive conception of text, because the rupturing of time is

what prevents concepts from closing in on themselves, from totalizing.Acknowledging the centrality of time in the deconstructive action

of language makes it possible to suggest in this context that (de


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Manian) deconstruction and (Althusserian) materialism, languageand history, allegory and narrative, are related to the extent that theyare mediated by time.36 Again, the central role of time in thinking

together language and history, deconstruction and materialism, isacknowledged by de Man, but not by Sprinker, who can only footnotea number of de Manian texts making just this observation. Here, forexample, is de Man addressing the question of an historical poetics,in the context of a critique of Marxism (and relegated by Sprinker tospeaking from a footnote):

Strictly speaking, Marxist criticism is not historical for it is bound tothe necessity of a reconciliation scheduled to occur at the end of a

linear temporal development, and its dialectical movement does notinclude time itself as one of its terms. A truly historical poetics wouldattempt to think the divide in truly temporal dimensions instead ofimposing upon it cyclical or eternalist schemata of a spatial nature.37

By de Mans account, the dialectic of Marxist criticism is spatial,whereas a truly historical poetics would think instead in terms ofthe temporal. To his credit, Sprinker does endorse de Mans laterlinkage of literature and politicalpraxis by way of temporalityThe

assertion of what de Man would once, in more programmaticallyHeideggerian terminology, have called the authentically temporaldestiny of literature is in this late text [Conclusions: WalterBenjamins The Task of the Translator (1985)] not opposed topoliticalpraxis, but rigorously identified with itbut even here, thepoint has more to do with critiquing Terry Eagleton, than it does withcontemplating the implications of what it might mean to formulate ahistorical poetics, in truly temporal dimensions.38 Not only istemporality clearly central to rethinking the deconstructive concep-

tion of language vis a vis the materialist concept of history, but,more generally, it is increasingly recognized by an academy coming toterms with the temporally contingent possibilities of structure.39

Returning, finally, to an early introductory discussion from Liusreading of Wordsworth reveals that Liu does in fact formulate atheory of time in relation to a historical poetics, and it is thisformulation on which we shall end. Returning to the moment whereWordsworth: The Sense of History constructs the opposition betweenallegory and narrative, we shall now observe that the early

Wordsworths willful transformation of narrative into allegory is saidto be effected through the vehicle of time: time, claims Liu, reifiedfinally as an idea and ideology, is made necessary as the obscure


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allegorization of narrative.40 Thus time in this way becomes for Liuthe (negative) linchpin for his historicized and historicizing account.In his Before Time, the introduction to his books part 2, Violence

and Time: A Study in Poetic Emergence, he observes the remark-able unanimity within the modern critique of Wordsworthian time,footnoting what appears to be a representative sampling of figuresand summarizing their methodand the modern method gener-allyelsewhere: The unthought continuum of everyday being isbroken in the middle and then time is thought as the explanation,mitigation, and denial of the difference history makes.41 By Liusaccount, time in recent Wordsworthian criticism has served asexplanation,mitigation, and denial of historical difference.

A key omission in Lius representative sampling of the moderncritique of Wordsworthian time is probably the best known, or atleast the most notorious: that is, de Mans Rhetoric of Temporality.Again, it is de Mans account in particular which foregrounds thephenomenon of literary time in the deconstructive context of narra-tive and figurative language. Clearly, the de Manian influence cannotbe acknowledged as such by Liu, since it so directly confronts a keyassumption in his approach: where Liu wants to see Wordsworthian

allegorized time as a figure of ideologically-motivated mitigation,denial, or closure, de Man forces us to confront the same as a figureof non-closure, of the temporal displacement of a would-betotality.42 If, finally, we are to acknowledge with recent poststructuralisttheory the materiality of language as one more sign of history, and therole of contingencyand thus temporalityin the thinking of struc-ture, then, we must acknowledge that it is not time, but rather recentmaterialist critics who would deny fully the difference historymakes.

University of Louisville

NOTES

1 See Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in BritishRomanticism (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997); and Thomas Pfau, WordworthsProfession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997).

2Negative Allegory is borrowed from Marjorie Levinson. See her WordsworthsGreat Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986).

3 Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory ofHistorical Materialism (London: Verso, 1987), 249.


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4 See Karen Hadley, Inventing the Little Space of Intermediate Time:Wordworthian Reflexive Historicism in The Prelude, Books 7 and 8,Criticism 42(2000): 46980, for such a reconsideration in the context of Wordsworths Prelude(reflecting in part on Theresa Kelleys reading in her recent Reinventing Allegory[Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998]).

5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, in The Collected Works of SamuelTaylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 6 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,1972), 6:30.

6 W. K. Wimsatt, The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery, in Romanticismand Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 87(solidity), 78 (sweet; subject; metaphysics; plastic; sensibility; theory).

7 Paul de Man, Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image, in Romanticismand Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton,1970), 76.

8

de Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in theRhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983),188.

9 de Man, Rhetoric, 207 (simultaneity; spatial; must), 206 (authentically),207 (prevents), 208 (entirely; between). Jerome McGann has observed, in ourpost-de Manian era, that Coleridge too was capable of seeing allegory as a poeticalform associated with a divided or alienated consciousness, not associated with theOne Life but rather peculiarly adapted to expose and explore critically the worldof illusions, divisions, and false-consciousness (The Romantic Ideology: A CriticalInvestigation [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983], 96). McGann argues thatColeridge applied just such allegorical deconstruction (97) to especially his laterpoems, in which poetic images are transformed from the desired generativesymbols into critical allegories (9899). And this transformation is due directly tohis attempted Constancy to an Ideal Object, as he titles a later poem: the loss ofindividual identity that entails thrusts him into a series of reflections and displace-ments, a process of dissolution, disappearance, and fragmentation. This, byMcGanns account, is what we see in later poems such as Limbo and Le PlusUltra, and even in earlier ones such as Kubla Khan: the poets remove from anoriginal (symbolic) medium to immersion in a critical solution of allegory (McGann,107).

10 Levinson, 6 (seized; great), 8 (reconstructive; rationalized; theory), 8

9 (John Barrell), 9 (represent).11 Levinson, 12, 10.12 de Man, Rhetoric, 207; Levinson, 9.13 Levinson, 10. Somewhat skeptically addressing Romantic new historicists such

as James Chandler, Levinson, McGann, and David Simpson, William Galperin, in areview of Alan Lius Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford Univ.Press, 1989), questions the extent to which such accounts represent an ethicalalternative to other modes of interpretation, or perhaps more to the point, theextent to which Wordsworth could travel a road only recently demarcated(Criticism 32 [1990]: 261).

14 Liu, 46 (determined), 48 (qualified; denied; mimetic), my emphasis.15 Lius version of Wordsworthian allegory emerges in apparent contrast to

Levinsons, where he posits the Wordsworthian allegorization of narrative as anideological reaction to the irruption of political narrative (51) in the poets early


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experience. Here, Lius version of allegory emerges as a defensive, reactionarystance in apparent contrast to Levinsons use of the term, where her negativeallegory doesnt obscure, but rather works to gain access (as in Lius deniedpositivism, [40] through negation or absence) to the historical-political.

And yet both accounts endorse a model of allegorical, structural correspondence,a critical approach which posits a clear relation between self and not-self, betweenthe privatized world of the poem and matter-sociality-history. Liu, whoseWordsworth was published three years following Levinsons influential Great PeriodPoems, predictably sees Levinsons work as highly consonant with the method Isketch. He cites his closest affiliation among Romantic critics with her (529 n. 25)and adds, Especially apropos is her discussion of a theory of negative allegory(525 n. 14).

Lius insistence on denial rather than on displacement (see SimpsonsWordsworths Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement [New York:

Metheun, 1987]), instances his influence by the Jamesonian, Althusserian insistenceon the denial, or negation, of history at work in (the idea of) the literary text. Liuenvisions a history, following Jameson, which is not a text, not a narrative, master orotherwise, but that as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form,and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its priortextualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious (Jameson, The PoliticalUnconscious: Narrrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,1981], 34). To the extent that the prior textualization or narrativization (Jameson,34) of history manifests itself in the literary, denial, for Liu, makes the connectionbetween the agon, contestation, affective weight (Liu, 529 n. 25) of the poetsexperience of history, and his temporally-influenced lyric poetry. If history isoriginally and deeply, quintessentially narrative (Liu, 50), and narrative is theall-informing process, the central function or instance of the human mind(Jameson, 13), thenby this accountWordsworths poetry necessarily repudiatesboth by ideologizing history and narrative into the lyricized forms of time andallegory, which become in his analysis the hybrid allegorization of narrative (Liu,51).

This line of reasoning enables Liu to sublimate figure to reference: The sense ofhistory, as I sketch it, involves a mode of antithetical reference to the real thatsubsumes figuration (522 n. 6). By this account, figuration becomes a type, ormanner, of reference to the extent that reference itself becomes the poets telos:

The true apocalypse for Wordsworth is reference (35). Here, Liu draws from atleast three influential strains of the tradition: that which would emphasize theWordsworthian transcendental apocalyptic (Abrams), that which would foregroundthe historical elements of Wordsworths poetry (Thompson), and later deconstructivecritics who would find meaning in Wordsworthian figurative language (de Man).These traditions are recast in this model to privilege Wordsworths antitheticalreference to the real, in Lius words, as historicized figuration.

16 Perhaps the most forcefully leveled criticism of Liu has been aimed by Liu athimself, both in the work in question and in subsequent publications. See, forexample, his Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and theRomanticism of Detail, Representations 32.3 (1990): 75113. See also Simpsons

introduction to his Subject to History (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 133.17 As Robert Caserio and Neil Hertz indicate, the term allegory suggests an

inherent shifting of reference, to an extent like all figurative language, but here the


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term itself can be seen to shift meaningsin this respect like Roman Jakobsonsshifters, simple grammatical terms which carry no referential content but rathertake on meanings derived from their contextual use. See Caserio, A Pathos ofUncertain Agency: Paul de Man and Narrative,Journal of Narrative Technique 20(1990): 195209; and Hertz, Lurid Figures, in The Ends of Rhetoric: History,Theory, Practice, ed. John Bender and David Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford Univ.Press, 1990), 10024.

18 Caserio, 195.19 Caserio, 197 (allegories), 195 (it is), 198 (grindingly; always), 199

(wars), 199 (lurid).20 Note in the peculiarly oxymoronic construction of Lius phrase denied

positivism (Wordsworth, 40) a similarity to Caserios uncertain agency. Itsderivation, Liu explains, has a historical epistemology whichfollowing WilhelmDilthey, Russian Formalism, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Fernand Braudel,

and Michel Foucaultis said to reground positivism on the premises of structuralthought: first that the basic stuff of structure is marked difference or negativity; andsecond, that the organization of such differentiation is knowable because it is not justfree play (as in the emphasis deconstruction gives the theme), but also a determina-tion of order (Wordsworth, 40).

21 Joel Fineman, The Structure of Allegorical Desire, in Allegory and Repre-sentation, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,1981), 29; Liu, Wordsworth, 35.

22 Caserio, 202, 203.23 Liu, Wordsworth, 51.24 Finemans account reminds us that all poststructuralist critiques are really

nothing more than the aftereffects of structuralism (48), and Galperin, in hisreview of Lius Wordsworth: The Sense of History, points out somewhat ironicallythat Lius new historicism is a criticism that stands firmly if somewhat apostately onthe shoulders of the very criticismspecifically poststructuralismit apparentlyfinds wanting (260). Maintaining the spirit of Galperins account, I would amend itonly slightly to read that Lius account, despite itself, stands firmly . . . on theshoulders of the very criticism that it represses. In this respect, my accountaddresses Lius reluctance to represent himself as a successor to early deconstructivepoststructuralism.

25 Liu perhaps anticipates this objection where he refers to the dialogism of

meaning that is social truth (Wordsworth, 42).26 Rodolphe Gash, Setzung and Ubersetzung: Notes on Paul de Man,Diacritics 11.4 (1981): 48.

27 Gash, summarizing de Man, 47.28 Liu, Wordsworth, 35; de Man, Rhetoric, 207.29 See Lius reading ofThe Preludes Simplon Pass episode (Wordsworth, 35).30 Jameson, 23, 25, 28. As Sprinker has forcefully suggested in Part and the

Whole: Jamesons Historicism (in Imaginary Relations, 15376), this is a temptationwhich Jameson himself succumbs to.

31 Sprinker, 249.32 Sprinker, 239.33 Sprinker, 264. Here is Sprinker on the relation of texts to society, language to

history: The de Manian concept of the text is a theory of the permanence ofideology. To the extent that literary (or any) texts continue to convey the (demonstra-


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bly false) promise to transcend the conditions of their own possibilityin de Mansconcept of the text as a result of complications inherent in the nature of language, alltexts must necessarily perform this functionthey instance the ideological relationto the real conditions of human existence which Althusser has claimed is apermanent feature of human society (Imaginary Relations, 264).

Linking allegory and narrative, language and history, deconstruction and material-ism suggests finally, following Sprinkers (materialist-influenced) discussion of deMan, the materiality of signs, their random and irresistible disruption of thephenomenal and semiotic systems of controlled meaning (247). See also de MansHypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterres Poetics of Reading,Diacritics 11(1981): 2735; and his Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, in Hermeneutics:Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: Univ. ofMassachusetts Press, 1984), 144.

34 Sprinker, 247. Sprinker is quoting from de Mans Conclusions on Walter

Benjamins The Task of the Translator,Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 4445.35 Gash, 49.36 Both Fineman and Gash suggest that the relation between allegory and

narrative is at least to some extent a temporal issue: Fineman addresses what hecalls allegorical narrative as a specifically temporal problem, regarding the wayallegories linearly unfold (26), while Gash, discussing de Man, describes the samephenomenon as a totality displaced in time, the narration of a totality which neverquite takes place (47).

37 de Man, The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism, in Blindness and Insight, 242.The passage is quoted by Sprinker, 242 n. 4.

38 Sprinker, 242.39 Sprinker, 239. See, for example, Judith Butler, who in the following sentence

marks hegemonys importation of the question of temporality into the thinking ofstructure (and, with the following sentence, won Philosophy and Literatures 1998Annual Bad Writing Contest): The move from a structuralist account in whichcapital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a

view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence,and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure,and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalitiesas theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility ofstructure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the

contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power (Further Reflectionson Conversations of Our Time,Diacritics 27 [1997]: 13).40 Liu, Wordsworth, 51.41 Liu, Wordsworth, 57.42 Gash, 48.

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