Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature

Notes

213 Notes Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach to Allegory 1. Hegel insists that any such dialectic relationship between the artist and the real world has already been synthesized. Directly leading into the proclamation about art being a thing of the past, Hegel appropriates the artist into his systematic world view: It is not, as might be supposed, merely that the practicing artist himself is infected by the loud voice of reflection all around him and by the opinions and judgments [Meinens und Urteilens] on art that have become customary everywhere so that he is misled into introducing more thoughts into his work; the point is that our whole spiritual culture [die ganze geistige Bildung] is of such a kind that he himself stands within the world of reflection and its relations, and could not by any act of will and decision [Willen und Entschluß] abstract himself from it; nor could he by special education or removal from the relations of life contrive and organize a special solitude to replace what he has lost [dasVerlorene Wieder ersetzende Einsamkeit erkünsteln und zuwege bringen könnte]. (Hegel, Aesthetics 1:10–11; Einleitung in die Ästhetik 22) This is exactly the thought that Blanchot recognizes and engages in The Space of Literature, and why the artists with whom Blanchot makes his case come from the same limited pool into which many literary theorists and philosophers of literature tend to dip: Kafka, Mallarmé, Char—the poets of solitude. 2. See Statkiewicz, Rhapsody of Philosophy, esp.“A Polemic Introduction” and “Rhapsodic Conclusion.” 3. Statkiewicz cites several of Harry Berger Jr.’s essays:“Levels of Discourse in Plato’s Dialogues”;“Facing Sophists: Socrates’ Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras”; and “Plato’s Flying Philosopher,” Philosophical Forum 13.4 (1982): 385–407. 4. Berghahn makes the connection of aesthetics to philosophy quite clear, noting that Baumgarten “was still indebted to rationalistic philosophy” and understood aesthetics to be “the analogue of logic.” Berghahn even suggests, although with admitted exaggeration, that Baumgarten sought “to complete the rationalistic system 214 Notes to pages 6–16 by going to investigate the lower cognitive faculties (such as feelings, imagination, taste) and integrating them into the system.”This system was through and through philosophical.“The task of aesthetics is to recognize (by means of the senses) beauty as perfection” (“From Classicist to Classical” 44–45). 5. Murrin prefers the term auditor because his argument is founded on the presumption that allegorical poetry of the Renaissance represents the last vestiges of an oral poetic tradition. 6. In Exemplary Spenser, Jane Grogan agrees that Spenser wanted his readers to think, but she argues that he wanted everyone in his audience to learn, and he achieved this by the effectiveness of his affective ekphrastic images (103–10). 7. In “The Possibility of ‘the Poetic Said’ in Otherwise than Being,” Gabriel Riera writes: For Lévinas the work of art in general, and poetic language in particular, is neither the other (alter, alius) of philosophy nor a type of other (heteron) able to interrupt the working totality and thus give access to the “otherwise than being .” In general, and for the most part, it is a “fake” other that totality can easily assimilate and reduce to propositional utterances (said), or at best, . . .“The said is reduced to the Beautiful, which supports Western ontology.” (16) In this book I suggest that not the work of art but the more “originary” structure for which the work of art is the face, that allegory (as that structure) is the other to philosophy, and is especially other to the aesthetics of the beautiful. In this way, as argued in the first chapter, allegory and aesthetics “face off.” 8. This is not to say that Dante did not want his poem read in the world, but that making his poem meaningful within the context of the actual world was not his goal.The world of the Commedia is an other world. 9. According to Tuve,“[I]n many modern writings [the four senses] are more dogmatically and perseveringly applied than we find them to be by medieval writers ” (Allegorical Imagery 3). 10. See Ronald L. Martinez,“Allegory,” in The Dante Encyclopedia. 11. In his reading of Sidney’s Apologie for Poetry and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Angus Fletcher argues both that poetry can incorporate the methodical language of philosophy and that poetry and philosophy are distinct languages.The “deep connection between wonder and philosophical affirmation” (“Marvelous Progression ” 7) is itself a paradox. 12. In...