"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

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/summary/v069/69.4hadley.html

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BACK TO THE FUTURE?: THE NARRATIVE OF ALLEGORY IN RECENT CRITICAL ACCOUNTS OF ROMANTICISM
BY KAREN HADLEY

Recent Romantic criticism has been dominated by new historicist, deconstructive materialist accounts that, changing the map of the critical landscape, draw meaning away from the text and reveal it in the missing referent of history. One aim of these accounts is, following the relativism of deconstruction, to restore the promise of ethical meaning to the practice of literary criticism by making explicit the implicit relation of the literary to the historical. As useful as such accounts have been in establishing a context for a number of lyric texts of the period, a new formalism, or new pragmatism, has argued even more recently in this context that it is not necessary to absent lyric texts to discover historical meaning.1 Inspired by the new formalist approach, my account addresses the way in which key Romantic critics of the past decades have figured the trope allegory in their accounts; in particular, I am interested in deconstructive materialist accounts which would contrast allegory to historical narrative and align it instead with an unnecessarily limited, predeconstructive version of time. I reveal how such accounts of allegory work to suppress a deconstructively-inflected understanding of poststructuralist allegory which, were it made explicit, would lend to the materialist project valuable deconstructive insights into concepts such as narrative and time and demonstrate how pragmatic forms of the literary text instance key elements of its socio-historical context. Summarizing some key representative figures, I show how the negative allegory of the Romantic new historicismwhere it reflects its Jamesonian, Althusserian rootsembraces what is (in the Romantic tradition) a Coleridgean understanding of allegory.2 When such critics use a Coleridgean, or classical, understanding of allegory as structure, they then can displace the temporal component of allegory onto narrative, thus privileging historical, narrative context over the lyric allegorical text. I argue that in so doing, such critics
ELH Karen 69 Hadley (2002) 10291045 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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suppress, or repress, the very criticism on whose shoulders they stand, that is, de Manian-inspired deconstruction. In formulating this claim, 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 contributions such as Rhetoric of Temporality, would conceive of modern allegory as a more flexible trope than his structuralist-influenced argument allows him to. Engaging Joel Finemans Structure of Allegorical Desire, I conclude that Romantic deconstructive materialist critics would likewise understand allegory as a more historically morphological trope than their Jamesonian-influenced insights allow them to; in particular that allegory, when understood as temporal succession, comes to resemble the narrative which Alan Liu can only allow himself to associate with history. Where allegory can be seen to approach narrative, then, I suggest (following Michael Sprinkers poststructuralist, materialist reading of de Man) that language can be seen to instance the material. Two implications 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, but also, in fact, in the lyric textin Sprinkers words, the site of political engagement need not be in the streets.3 Second, and again following de Man but thinking beyond Sprinker in this respect, I argue that temporality mediates the relations between allegory and narrative, language and materiality. Revising the Romantic deconstructive materialist understanding of time, in light of a materialist understanding of de Man, would encourage a rethinking of our understanding of Romantic allegory, and, finally, a reconsideration of the materiality of the Wordsworthian lyric, along the lines of Sprinkers new(ly retemporalized) materialist aesthetic.4
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Samuel Taylor Coleridges definition of, and distinction between, the ideas of symbol and allegory comes most famously in his Statesmans Manual following a brief discussion on the organic conception of ideas.5 Following the discussion of ideas and closely linked to it, symbol, we learn, has the same seminal powers, evoking the translucence of the special in the individual, the general in the special, and of the universal in the general. While this definition replicates the unity and organicism present in 1030 Back to the Future?

Coleridges discussion of the nature of ideas, above all we learn that the symbolic is associated with time, with the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal, the reunion of the immortal and the mortal realms. Coleridge places allegory in juxtaposition to the cohesion of the symbol, where allegory, we learn, is but a worthless translation of abstract notions into a picture-language. With Coleridgean allegory, then, notions of translucence and the temporal/eternal are left behind in favor of mere translation of abstract context into pictorial text. It was the Coleridgean symbolic which for generations of critics (particularly those representing what had become the Arnoldian tradition 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 in the Biographia Literaria, an account which compared the symbolic to the synthesizing, organic powers of the primary imagination. The following year, W. K. Wimsatts Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery (1954) likewise claimed that the most authentic Romantic poetry is represented by the solidity of symbol. Wimsatts account in particular details a Romantic imaginative synthesis which effects the sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and material world, involving a subject (the Nature of birds and trees and streams), a metaphysics (the plastic nature of the animating principle), 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 Coleridgean tradition. The title of his essay, Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image, reflects his move away from Romantic conceptions of Nature and towards language, where (in adjusting Wimsatts title to his purpose) he eliminates the term Nature and modifies Structure with the term Intentional. Familiar by now, his argument begins by confronting the tradition of Romantic imaginative synthesis as ref lected in Coleridge, Abrams, and Wimsatt: the Romantic imagination, he claims, marks the possibility not for the synthesis of mind and nature, of matter and consciousness, but for consciousness to exist entirely by and for itself.7 Again breaking with tradition, he indicates 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. De Mans radical observations regarding the interrelation of poetic Karen Hadley 1031

consciousness, language, and rhetoric coalesce to form the opening move of his subsequent Rhetoric of Temporality, which was to become at least as controversial as it was influential to future critics. This essays opening move posits the question of the intentionality of rhetorical figures, thereby shifting the locus of Romantic consciousness from the imagining subject to the figurative language employed by this subject.8 With this key move, Romantic figurative language is transformed from being the vehicle of consciousness, to becoming the locus of intentionality. De Mans second key move in Rhetoric of Temporality addresses the rhetorical terms predominant in Coleridge and in the Romantic critical tradition: symbol and allegory. In line with the tradition, he juxtaposes symbol and allegory, and then (invoking Coleridge but inverting his terms) contextualizes them in terms of space-time relations: in the world of symbol, image is seen to coincide with substance, producing a relationship of simultaneity which is spatial in kind; the world of allegory, on the other hand, must refer to another sign that precedes it and with which it can never coincide, implying a relationship purely temporal in kind. Entirely distinct from the merely referential, spatialized sense implied in the Coleridgean tradition, de Mans sense of allegory indicates an authentically temporal destiny, where it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a non-self. De Man, then, saw that the subject/object, consciousness/matter dialectic of the tradition lies not only within figurative language, but moreover, entirely in the temporal relationships that exist within a system of allegorical signs; as such, the phenomenological, deconstructive reading of allegory marks the primary conflict between a conception of the self seen in its authentically temporal predicament and a defensive strategy that tries to hide from this negative self-knowledge.9 Here, de Man expands his idea of Romantic figuration from viewing it as a question about intentionality to include viewing it as a question about linguistic temporality. Where de Mans project presents intrinsically formalist critiques of the function of figurative language in its negotiation of the (Cartesian) mind/nature divide, Marjorie Levinson, in her Wordsworths Great Period Poems (1986), relegates the focus on lyric, poetic language to only one side of her history of the recent criticism of Romanticism. Addressing criticism of the late sixties, she lists de Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and othersthose who 1032 Back to the Future?

seized as their Wordsworthian truth the great epistemological and ontological arguments of the poetryagainst the reconstructive efforts of E. P. Thompson, David Erdman, and Carl Woodring. Acknowledging Abrams, whose work located itself between the two projects but was rationalized and totalizied, and Marilyn Butler, lauded for furthering the historicist project, Levinson proposes her own Althusserian-inspired alternative, a way of mediating the two projects, deconstruction and reconstruction, which she names a theory of negative allegory. This theory of allegory, we learn, is in use in a variety of similarly-inspired (Romanticist) studies (John Barrell, James Chandler, T. J. Clark, John Goode, Kurt Heinzelman, Kenneth Johnston, Alan Liu, Jerome McGann, David Simpson, and James Turner ) and provides a two-pronged opportunity, deconstructive and materialist, for writers to represent the literary work as that which speaks of one thing because it cannot articulate anotherpresenting formally a sort of allegory by absence, where the signified is indicated by an identifiably absented signifier.10 Although she acknowledges him only in passing, Levinsons Althusserian, Jamesonian-inspired approach in many ways resembles de Mans deconstructive approach, in that both, for example, confront a greatly idealized corpus and work to subvert Cartesian dualism by split[ting] the atom of Romantic symbolism and organicism.11 Both, too, work to solve the problem of the Romantic symbol by way of recourse to Romantic allegory. And yet de Man introduces allegory, it may be remembered, as a way of forcing the self to confront its own anteriority or alterity, to prevent the self from an illusory identification with the non-self ; while Levinsons negative allegory, on the other hand, works to relate or identify the privatized world of the poem to the context of its possession by the world.12 Clearly, then, these deconstructive accounts differ substantially with regard to their understanding of allegory: de Manian deconstructive phenomenology proposes an authentic differentiation of the poetic self and its own alterity or anteriority, while Levinsonian deconstructive materialism proposes an ethical identification between the same, where the anteriority of self is designated matter-sociality-history.13 Like Levinson emphasizing the social and the historical, Liu articulates the way in which literary texts emerge through a determined differentiation by which they do not articulate historical contexts. Citing much the same roll call of structuralist-influenced theoristsand echoing Levinsons negative allegoryLiu posits a Karen Hadley 1033

methodology he calls qualified, or denied positivism, which conceives of Wordsworths poetry as a mimetic denial of history so vigorous, full, and detailed that denial, the shaped negation, becomes itself the positive fact.14 Mirroring Levinsons effort to identify the identifiably absented signifier in Wordsworth, Liu diagnoses and translates his version of Wordsworthian negation into positive fact. In particular where it privileges historical narrative over historical allegory, Lius project might be seen as the fulfilled realization of Jamesonian-inspired, Romantic deconstructive materialism, in that historical narrative, we are informed, possesses the complex narrative structure of historical retrospection, of viewing the present by way of, and as part of, a future moment. Noting Marxist critics preoccupation with the relation of literary form to historical form, Liu contrasts historical narrative structures (such as his and Jamesons) to the allegorical structure of Wordsworthian autobiographical poetry, which emerges as ideologically motivated and, therefore, antinarrativistic. Wordsworths formulation is, we are told, anti-narrativistic, or allegorical, because it denies history; it turns its back on the rupturing 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 also aligned with Levinson, not only where his denied positivism recalls her negative allegory, but more fundamentally where each seeks to establish a correspondence between text and context. This parallel suggests a way in which Romantic deconstructive materialist critics such as Levinson and Liu engage elements of the tradition outlined above: they resemble de Manian deconstruction in their anti-symbolism 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/historical materialist approach in some ways replicates a version of the ideology it aims to critique, is by now no revelation.16 I am less interested in suggesting (as have others before me) that a version of the new historicism such as Lius instantiates the (symbolist, idealist) ideology it critiques, as I am in exploring the ideological potential inherent in recent Romantic critical use of the figurative term allegory. I shall proceed by establishing a strategy and a motive by which Levinson and (especially) Liu succeed in oscillating between a Jamesonian and a 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 the powers and problems of literary modernism.18 Without assessing the validity of Caserios argument, I will explore his critique of critical approaches to modern narrative in order to suggest a parallel with Lius critique of the Wordsworthian lyric. Noting that de Man and like-minded theorists of the novel have tended to see modern narratives as allegories of disjunction, Caserio asserts 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 that de Man approaches narrative by way of allegory, he suggests that de Mans approach to modern narrative takes the form of binarized allegorizing: by his account, not only are allegory and narration for de Man grindingly antithetical, but overall de Man is characterized as always inciting wars of elemental antagonisms. We are informed, finally, that these very antagonisms, which Neil Hertz has characterized as de Mans lurid figures, are what have contributed to the remarkable power and influence of de Manian rhetorical analysis.19 Caserios argument succeeds, I argue, only by engaging a logic of mutual exclusion: he represents a crudely allegorical de Man (de Man as lurid figure) in order then to reject this projection in favor of what is presented as the only other viable alternative to reading modern narrative, its pathos of uncertain agency. This logic, I suggest, resembles the strategy by which Liu represents Wordsworth. That is, Lius logic of mutual exclusion represents a crudely allegorical 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 or literary figures such as de Man and Wordsworth first by projecting a crudely allegorical model, and second, by rejecting it and substituting an alternative which is presented as the only other option. In short, the very either/or binarism Caserio and Liu critique in de Man and Wordsworth structures their own logic. Clearly, these accounts function only by suppressing a long and varied tradition of thinking allegory. Fineman, for example, begins his historical survey of thinking allegory (Structure of Allegorical Desire [1981]) with the classical theologian Philo, who theorized an Karen Hadley 1035

allegory that makes up for the distance, or heals the gap, between the 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 Medieval and Renaissance critical theory. I contend that it is the Philoan model, rather than the later, poststructuralist one associated with de Man, which defines both the Coleridgean and the Romantic new historicist project: in each, the effort is made, through interpretation, to restore a text to its proper historical context by making up for the distance, or healing the gap between the (denied or negative) signifier and its (absented) signified. Fineman describes the Philoan allegorical mode of scriptural criticism as presenting the contemporary necessity for a revelation expressed through figural extravagance, and likewise Liu seeks to reveal the apocalypse of reference lying behind a Wordsworthian version of figural extravaganceas he suggests, the more extravagant the figure, the more powerful the reference. That Philos method is a negative theology revealing figuratively an essentially mysterious divinity again recalls Lius own version of negative theology, his denied positivism.21 These parallels suggest the extent to which especially Lius account is based in not only a Coleridgean, but a Medieval, theological, Philoan model of allegory rather than in the poststructuralist accounts that immediately preceded him. In pursuit of motive, now, I return once more to Caserio, focusing Lius commentary through Caserios use of the term repression. Initially, Caserio cites de Mans perverse tendency to make mere exposition seem a form of repressive assertion, and then he identifies his view of de Mans repressed: De Manian allegory appears to derive from a repression of what is an alternative to allegorys violent positionings and antitheses [where the alternative is identified as modern narratives anti-allegorical pathos of uncertain agency].22 Here, establishing Caserios strategy of associating allegory with repression is useful not so much for its commentary on modern narrative, but rather, in this context, for how the account models Romantic new historicists use of the term allegory. In the following lines, I suggest, Lius account of Wordsworth bears a striking resemblance to Caserios account of de Man:
it was the irruption of political narrative within the poets early descriptive 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 so much any particular kind of lyric as an migr flight from narrative.23

This passage from Lius Wordsworth: The Sense of History observes two, related effects of the irruption of political narrative in the poets early forms: the obscure allegorization of narrative, and the migr flight from narrative. As such, the effects of political narrative in the poets early work have apparently the same status: Wordsworths allegorization of narrative, that is, constitutes his flight from narrative. From the comparison with Caserio we learn that allegory, because of its critical and historical flexibility, has been appropriated in recent criticism of Romanticism to construct what is in fact a critical polemic offering on the one hand, a criticallypreferred option, and on the other (as the only other alternative) a repression of, or flight from, the initial option. As such, in these accounts 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 the repressed elements of accounts such as those of Liu, Levinson (and Caserio) are the antitotalizing, poststructuralist claims of early Romantic, deconstructive accounts.24 Where Liu and Caserio accuse others, Wordsworth and de Man, of using allegory to repress or flee, I claim, rather, that Lius mention of repression is actually selfindicating: where he projects his own critical polemic onto Wordsworths text, he, rather, is the one repressing. Likewise, where Caserio projects his critical polemic, he represses the key to a more informed understanding of his own critical object. Each, in fact, is motivated by, and at the same time repressing, a version of a critical figure who in the end, were he acknowledged in their respective analyses, would challenge fundamentally both their process and their goal. This figure is the de Man characterized by Jacques Derrida, Rodolphe Gash, Sprinker, and others, and the insight de Man provides (the threat to be repressed) concerns not the oppositionality, as they claim, but the proximity of allegory and narrative. Caserio cannot acknowledge this because his argument depends on the forced 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 narrative stands for (good) history, and allegory stands for (bad) ideologically-motivated lyric poetry. Karen Hadley 1037

De Man must exist in Lius account as an aporia, because de Man directly and powerfully confronts it. Where Liu of necessity overlooks poststructuralist thinking of allegory, it is likely because de Manian deconstruction (counter to what Caserio or Hertz might assert) interrogates the very binaries which key aspects of Lius account, such as time/history or allegory/narrative, appear to be based in.25 The success of claims such as Lius, and also Caserios, rests on their ability to juxtapose and maintain a differential between concepts such as allegory and narrative; the force of de Mans argument, rather, is in his ability to bring them together. Allegory in de Man, Gash reminds us, represents the subversion of the totalizing potential of texts in an endless process of narrative.26 The remainder of my account explores the relation, in this context, between one apparent pole (allegory) and the other (narrative) in the understanding of the term allegory through critical references to flight or repression. As de Mans account suggests, for example, where he sees allegory as the narration of a totality which never quite takes place, an inherent proximity belies the deconstructive materialist polarization.27 I contend that the use of allegory in recent criticism of Romanticism narrates the negotiation of this proximity. De Mans sense of allegory, for example, anticipates and challenges a centerpiece of Lius argumentthat the true apocalypse of Wordsworth is referencewhere he suggests that Wordsworths use of allegory subverts reference: to repeat, he comments that allegory prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self.28 Moreover, de Manian deconstructive reading, in contrast to deconstructive materialist readings, works to call the reader/critic back to the uncertainty (to use Caserios valorized term) of linguistic agency. Again, this uncertainty is contrary to the thrust of Lius approach, which calls the reader/critic back to the denied (and by this very denial, still critically determinate) agency of history, and which calling is often made most forcefully through a critical certainty that revises the language of Wordsworths text to produce more definitively referential meaning.29 De Manian allegorical narrative, then, expresses just what Liu and Caserio must repress, that is, that poststructuralist allegory can function to narrate the subversion of determinate referential meaning. Lius failure to acknowledge that poststructuralist allegory subverts reference, that its agency is uncertain, that it is in fact a form of narrative, takes him in the very direction which Jameson, his stated influence, warns against; that is, he succumbs to the burning 1038 Back to the Future?

temptation of expressive causality, as Jameson defines it, a vast interpretive allegory in which a sequence of historical events or texts and artifacts is rewritten in terms of some deeper, underlying, and more fundamental narrative, of a hidden master narrative which is the allegorical key or figural content of the first sequence of empirical materials.30 Embracing (however consciously) the model of expressive causalityessentially what was described above as the Philoan, Classical modelallows a Romantic deconstructive materialist such as Liu to overlook an alternative approach to linking deconstruction and materialism, an approach which would more fully acknowledge its own deconstructive heritage. Such an approach would begin by recognizing with Sprinker that the site of political engagement need not always be the streets, that is, that the deconstructive project itself can be seen as a form of political engagement.31 Sprinker proposes to rethink the deconstructive conception of language, vis a vis the materialist concept of history, which is essentially a proposal to rethink de Manian deconstruction by way of Althusserian materialism.32 He raises the possibility of such a hybridization when he suggests that texts have the same ideological relation to the conditions of their possibility, as does human society to the conditions of its existence. In both lies the same ideological promise to transcend and thus in both, concludes Sprinker, exists the same formal relation drawing together texts and human society, language and history.33 This ideological similarity entails, finally, the materiality of language, which Sprinker finds in both de Man and Walter Benjamin: it is the errancy of language which never reaches the mark . . . that Benjamin calls history.34 The process of rupture, errancy, disruption, or estrangement in language which Benjamin and de Man equate with history is, in the end, a temporal process. Sprinker acknowledges this in citing Gashs discussion of de Man, but he does not acknowledge as much in his own analysis. As quoted in the same piece (a quotation, however, which Sprinker relegates to a footnote), Gash concludes at one point that all of de Mans concepts are drawn without exception into a maelstrom of temporalization and consequently that texts themselves represent the temporal process of detotalizing operations.35 Time is, and should be acknowledged as, a key factor in understanding the 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 Karen Hadley 1039

Manian) deconstruction and (Althusserian) materialism, language and history, allegory and narrative, are related to the extent that they are mediated by time.36 Again, the central role of time in thinking together language and history, deconstruction and materialism, is acknowledged by de Man, but not by Sprinker, who can only footnote a number of de Manian texts making just this observation. Here, for example, is de Man addressing the question of an historical poetics, in the context of a critique of Marxism (and relegated by Sprinker to speaking from a footnote):
Strictly speaking, Marxist criticism is not historical for it is bound to the necessity of a reconciliation scheduled to occur at the end of a linear temporal development, and its dialectical movement does not include time itself as one of its terms. A truly historical poetics would attempt to think the divide in truly temporal dimensions instead of imposing 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 of the temporal. To his credit, Sprinker does endorse de Mans later linkage of literature and political praxis by way of temporalityThe assertion of what de Man would once, in more programmatically Heideggerian terminology, have called the authentically temporal destiny of literature is in this late text [Conclusions: Walter Benjamins The Task of the Translator (1985)] not opposed to political praxis, but rigorously identified with itbut even here, the point has more to do with critiquing Terry Eagleton, than it does with contemplating the implications of what it might mean to formulate a historical poetics, in truly temporal dimensions.38 Not only is temporality clearly central to rethinking the deconstructive conception of language vis a vis the materialist concept of history, but, more generally, it is increasingly recognized by an academy coming to terms with the temporally contingent possibilities of structure.39 Returning, finally, to an early introductory discussion from Lius reading of Wordsworth reveals that Liu does in fact formulate a theory of time in relation to a historical poetics, and it is this formulation on which we shall end. Returning to the moment where Wordsworth: The Sense of History constructs the opposition between allegory and narrative, we shall now observe that the early Wordsworths willful transformation of narrative into allegory is said to be effected through the vehicle of time: time, claims Liu, reified finally as an idea and ideology, is made necessary as the obscure 1040 Back to the Future?

allegorization of narrative.40 Thus time in this way becomes for Liu the (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 remarkable unanimity within the modern critique of Wordsworthian time, footnoting what appears to be a representative sampling of figures and summarizing their methodand the modern method generallyelsewhere: The unthought continuum of everyday being is broken in the middle and then time is thought as the explanation, mitigation, and denial of the difference history makes.41 By Lius account, time in recent Wordsworthian criticism has served as explanation, mitigation, and denial of historical difference. A key omission in Lius representative sampling of the modern critique of Wordsworthian time is probably the best known, or at least the most notorious: that is, de Mans Rhetoric of Temporality. Again, it is de Mans account in particular which foregrounds the phenomenon of literary time in the deconstructive context of narrative and figurative language. Clearly, the de Manian influence cannot be acknowledged as such by Liu, since it so directly confronts a key assumption 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 figure of non-closure, of the temporal displacement of a would-be totality.42 If, finally, we are to acknowledge with recent poststructuralist theory the materiality of language as one more sign of history, and the role of contingencyand thus temporalityin the thinking of structure, then, we must acknowledge that it is not time, but rather recent materialist critics who would deny fully the difference history makes. University of Louisville

NOTES See Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997); and Thomas Pfau, Wordworths Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997). 2 Negative Allegory is borrowed from Marjorie Levinson. See her Wordsworths Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986). 3 Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical 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 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 6 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), 6:30. 6 W. K. Wimsatt, The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery, in Romanticism and 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 Romanticism and 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 the Rhetoric 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 our post-de Manian era, that Coleridge too was capable of seeing allegory as a poetical form associated with a divided or alienated consciousness, not associated with the One Life but rather peculiarly adapted to expose and explore critically the world of illusions, divisions, and false-consciousness (The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983], 96). McGann argues that Coleridge applied just such allegorical deconstruction (97) to especially his later poems, in which poetic images are transformed from the desired generative symbols into critical allegories (9899). And this transformation is due directly to his attempted Constancy to an Ideal Object, as he titles a later poem: the loss of individual identity that entails thrusts him into a series of reflections and displacements, a process of dissolution, disappearance, and fragmentation. This, by McGanns account, is what we see in later poems such as Limbo and Le Plus Ultra, and even in earlier ones such as Kubla Khan: the poets remove from an original (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 a review of Alan Lius Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989), questions the extent to which such accounts represent an ethical alternative to other modes of interpretation, or perhaps more to the point, the extent 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 an ideological 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, reactionary stance in apparent contrast to Levinsons use of the term, where her negative allegory doesnt obscure, but rather works to gain access (as in Lius denied positivism, [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, between the privatized world of the poem and matter-sociality-history. Liu, whose Wordsworth was published three years following Levinsons influential Great Period Poems, predictably sees Levinsons work as highly consonant with the method I sketch. 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 Simpsons Wordsworths Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement [New York: Metheun, 1987]), instances his influence by the Jamesonian, Althusserian insistence on the denial, or negation, of history at work in (the idea of) the literary text. Liu envisions a history, following Jameson, which is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, 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 prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious (Jameson, The Political Unconscious: 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 connection between the agon, contestation, affective weight (Liu, 529 n. 25) of the poets experience of history, and his temporally-influenced lyric poetry. If history is originally and deeply, quintessentially narrative (Liu, 50), and narrative is the all-informing process, the central function or instance of the human mind (Jameson, 13), thenby this accountWordsworths poetry necessarily repudiates both by ideologizing history and narrative into the lyricized forms of time and allegory, 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 of history, as I sketch it, involves a mode of antithetical reference to the real that subsumes figuration (522 n. 6). By this account, figuration becomes a type, or manner, of reference to the extent that reference itself becomes the poets telos: The true apocalypse for Wordsworth is reference (35). Here, Liu draws from at least three influential strains of the tradition: that which would emphasize the Wordsworthian transcendental apocalyptic (Abrams), that which would foreground the historical elements of Wordsworths poetry (Thompson), and later deconstructive critics who would find meaning in Wordsworthian figurative language (de Man). These traditions are recast in this model to privilege Wordsworths antithetical reference to the real, in Lius words, as historicized figuration. 16 Perhaps the most forcefully leveled criticism of Liu has been aimed by Liu at himself, both in the work in question and in subsequent publications. See, for example, his Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism 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 Jakobsons shifters, simple grammatical terms which carry no referential content but rather take on meanings derived from their contextual use. See Caserio, A Pathos of Uncertain 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. Its derivation, Liu explains, has a historical epistemology whichfollowing Wilhelm Dilthey, Russian Formalism, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Fernand Braudel, and Michel Foucaultis said to reground positivism on the premises of structural thought: first that the basic stuff of structure is marked difference or negativity; and second, that the organization of such differentiation is knowable because it is not just free play (as in the emphasis deconstruction gives the theme), but also a determination of order (Wordsworth, 40). 21 Joel Fineman, The Structure of Allegorical Desire, in Allegory and Representation, 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 his review of Lius Wordsworth: The Sense of History, points out somewhat ironically that Lius new historicism is a criticism that stands firmly if somewhat apostately on the shoulders of the very criticismspecifically poststructuralismit apparently finds wanting (260). Maintaining the spirit of Galperins account, I would amend it only slightly to read that Lius account, despite itself, stands firmly . . . on the shoulders of the very criticism that it represses. In this respect, my account addresses Lius reluctance to represent himself as a successor to early deconstructive poststructuralism. 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 of The 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 temptation which 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 of ideology. 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 Mans concept of the text as a result of complications inherent in the nature of language, all texts must necessarily perform this functionthey instance the ideological relation to the real conditions of human existence which Althusser has claimed is a permanent feature of human society (Imaginary Relations, 264). Linking allegory and narrative, language and history, deconstruction and materialism suggests finally, following Sprinkers (materialist-influenced) discussion of de Man, the materiality of signs, their random and irresistible disruption of the phenomenal and semiotic systems of controlled meaning (247). See also de Mans Hypogram 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. of Massachusetts 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 he calls allegorical narrative as a specifically temporal problem, regarding the way allegories linearly unfold (26), while Gash, discussing de Man, describes the same phenomenon as a totality displaced in time, the narration of a totality which never quite 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 of structure (and, with the following sentence, won Philosophy and Literatures 1998 Annual Bad Writing Contest): The move from a structuralist account in which capital 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 totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power (Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time, Diacritics 27 [1997]: 13). 40 Liu, Wordsworth, 51. 41 Liu, Wordsworth, 57. 42 Gash, 48.

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