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T H E O R Y
First, there is de Man’s revaluation o f allegory, which criticism, in the
wake o f Coleridge and Goethe, had treated as an undesirable and unsuc
cessful type o f figuration, a product o f the operations o f fancy rather than
imagination. An assumed superiority o f the symbol underlay literary taste,
critical analysis, and conceptions o f literary history. Looking at the sup
posed shift from allegorical to symbolical imagery in late eighteenth-century
poetry in The Rhetoric o f Temporality, de Man challenges the view that ro
mantic literature produces through the symbol a reconciliation o f man and
-an ethical and aesthetic theoretical conception— and instead iden-
nature
tifies the allegorical structures at work in its most intense and lucid passages.
Allegorizing tendencies “appear at the most original and profound moments
. . . , when an authentic voice becomes audible,” in works o f European lit
erature between 1760 and 1800. “The prevalence o f allegory,” he writes,
always corresponds to the unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny. This un
veiling takes place in a subject that has sought refuge against the impact of time in
a natural world to which, in truth, it bears no resemblance. . . .
Whereas symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification,
allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renounc
ing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void
of this temporal difference.
This account o f the relation between symbol and allegory, and its
revaluation o f allegory, has been central to recent work on romantic and
postromantic literature in America, but the implications o f de Man’s re
flection on allegory are not exhausted here. We can now see, as Minae
Mizumura writes, that “ [t]he tension between symbol and allegory is then
already another name for the tension between a temptation o f assuming
the readability o f a text, that is, o f reconciling sign and meaning, and a re
nunciation o f this t e m p t a t i o n . T h e exploration o f allegory is a resistance
to the theory (of literature) instantiated in the symbol, but to create a the
ory o f allegory is to resist the irreconciliation o f sign and meaning revealed
by close reading.
But the further question that now may pose itself for us more press-
ingly is the relation between allegory, as a certain resistance to symbol-
16. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 206-7.
17. Minae Mizumura, “Renunciation,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 91.
Resisting Theory
87
ic recuperation, and history. In the conclusion o f the “Promises” chapter
o f Allegories o f Reading, while arguing that the “redoubtable efficacy” of
Rousseau’s Social Contract is due to the rhetorical model of which it is a
version, de Man writes, “textual allegories on this level o f rhetorical com
plexity generate history,” as if the historical effect or productivity o f a text
were an allegorical power, a power o f allegory.'® The relationship seems
more intimate yet difficult to grasp in the last essays, where allegory seems
an incomplete narrative o f a nonfigurative occurrence that de Man asso
ciates with the “materiality o f actual history” or “historical modes o f lan-
guage-powen” ‘^ Here theory seems to focus above all on that which resists
theory.
One o f de Man’s major achievements has certainly been the revaluation
of romanticism, the demonstration through studies of Rousseau, Holderlin,
Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Baudelaire that romanticism includes the
boldest, most self-conscious writing o f the Western tradition. The early ro
mantics, Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Holderlin, are “the first modern writ
ers to have put into question, in the language o f poetry, the ontological
priority o f the sensory object,” for which later romantic and postromantic
literature and critical discussions o f it would remain nostalgic.^® It is now
apparent that other things are at stake in de Mans focus on romanticism,
that the focus on it is crucial to an understanding o f our recent past and
our cultural situation. For instance, there is the problem of what Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe in La fiction du politique calls the “national aestheticism”
that issues from a reading o f romanticism but to which the work o f a writer
such as Holderlin provides a divergence o f crucial, critical force.^’
18. Paul de Man, Allegories o f Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, N i
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