Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature by Barbara Machosky (review)

Before the allegorical artwork can mean anything, its audience must encounter it simply as an artwork. Indications that the work is an allegory may be grotesque, such as the demonic possessions and anatomical deformities treated half a century ago by Angus Fletcher. Or they may exist in the mind of the beholder, as when Tasso decided after writing La Gerusalemme liberata that the poem had been allegorical all along. Analyzing such audience encounters in relation to artistic form is the task of anyone who wishes to go beyond the putative meaning of this or that allegory in order to talk seriously about allegory, yet because of its difficulty the task is rarely attempted. In Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature, Barbara Machosky makes the attempt and succeeds. Her book is a fresh, creative, erudite, intensely theoretical study of allegory from the Psychomachia to short stories by Kafka. In the hope of contemplating allegory in itself, Machosky develops a practice of phenomenological reduction to bracket the meanings, histories, and assumptions of subjectivity that apply to specific allegorical works. She concludes that allegory understood as an otherness (or, following Heidegger, a “rift”) within language makes possible not only the ascription of meaning to specific works but artistic apprehension at large. Continuing the work of Benjamin and de Man, Structures of Appearing turns an inclusive definition of allegory against Romantic positions on the work of art.

The book begins with Maurice Blanchot describing the “space of literature,” the placeless, timeless, solitary site of reading, where words appear against a moving backdrop of unspecified, limitless significance. Machosky contends that the theoretical discourse fittest to articulate this space is that of allegory, since allegory entails the “appearance of two things … in the same ‘space’ at the same time” (1). Because surface and meaning alike must appear, allegory is not a structure of meaning so much as a structure of appearance: enter phenomenology, the science of appearance. Machosky’s phenomenology draws on Husserl and especially Heidegger, in several instances substituting “allegory” for “art” in Heidegger’s account of the work of art. Like art according to Heidegger, allegory is to be separated from its examples and found within them. Like phenomenology for Heidegger, allegory is emphatically nonrepresentational in its presentation of the being it presents—which in allegory’s case is nothing other than the being of art, art’s being simultaneously itself and all that it brings to appearance. Machosky privileges allegory as “the literary form par excellence” (22) on the grounds that it “phenomenalizes art … by pointing to itself as allegory, as able to be art but also uniquely able to present art (without representing it)” (25).

The antagonist of such a conclusion is the tradition that requires art to deliver knowledge, to be intelligible as logos. Machosky’s shorthand for this tradition is “Aesthetics.” Although Aesthetics is as old as Plato, it comes of age in the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, when art is transformed into an object for the modern subject. As an alternative to Aesthetics, Machosky advocates “aesthetics,” precritical enjoyment of the work of art, which enjoyment Machosky believes conducive to the phenomenological contemplation she associates with allegory.

Structures of Appearing oscillates between the history of Aesthetics and the history of allegory, the latter being a tale—resonant with Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels—of religion’s rise, fall, and unsuccessful rehabilitation by Hegel. The first artists considered are Prudentius and Dante, who bring to simultaneous appearance the paradoxical unities of Christian theology. In the Psychomachia Prudentius makes appear the double nature of the soul, at once mortal and immortal, corrupt and pure. Machosky historicizes this doubleness with discussion of Early Christian teaching on Christ’s humanity and on spiritus, the image of God in human beings. One of the most convincing examples of Machosky’s phenomenology, the Psychomachia never represents the soul; the soul is the offstage prize and...