|
COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
I. Apocalyptic Fury in The Triumph of Life and Adonais
IN "SHELLEY DISFIGURED" PAUL DE MAN EXPLORES THE DELUSION OF figuration as the "erasure" of what de Man describes as the nonphenomenal "positing power of language" (64).(1) Figuration, he argues, is "the madness of words" (68) that, by its false metaphysical assumption of meaning, erases the "senselessness" of language's "positing power" ("Be"), a power that acts randomly and autonomously prior to any human signification so that its mindless flat "Be" is entirely independent of "It Is" (or "We are"). Unlike the Biblical Logos or Word as the divine and absolute creator of all that is ("Be" and "It Is") that bestows a divine or symbolic meaning upon all that is, the mindless "positing power of language" ceaselessly erases whatever it posits in its blind act of positing. Implicit, if not explicit, in this "positing power" is Nietzsche's death of God that abandons the world to fiction and, as fiction, must no longer wear the disguise of truth. Fiction masquerading as truth is "madness." The "triumph of life" is a masquerade in which the poet's enslavement to figuration appears as "the just similitude / Of a triumphal pageant" (The Triumph of Life 117-18) from which in Shelley's final fragment both the Shelley and Rousseau figures seek release, a release that can only come through some final defacement, conveniently offered to de Man in the "defaced body" of Shelley "present in the margin of the last manuscript page" (67).
"How," de Man asks,
can this positional act, which relates to nothing that comes before or after, become inscribed in a sequential narrative? How does a speech act become a trope, a catachresis which then engenders in its turn the narrative sequence of an allegory? (64)
Unlike the questions posed in the text of The Triumph of Life that spring forth as if, like the sun of the opening stanza, they were "hastening to [their] task / Of glory and of good" (1-2) when in fact they are hastening to their own extinction, de Man, in answering his questions, is constructing "the narrative sequence of an allegory" of reading that renders meaning or comprehension problematic because, as David L. Clark explains, "[l]anguage's denegation [hidden for de Man by the "madness of words"] possesses the eventlike character of an accident that suddenly and irrevocably interrupts life: unpredictable, unmotivated, prosaically indifferent to human desire."(2) "It can only be," de Man replies to his own question, "because we impose, in our turn, on the senseless power of positional language the authority of sense and of meaning" (64). This "authority" resides in figuration and, for de Man, all figuration is, as figuration, mad. An allegory of reading understood as making sense of madness without "attributing value to it," he further boldly suggests, "may be a Verneinung, an intended exorcism" (68) of" [l]anguage's denegation" and of"the madness of words" (68).
De Man in his essay is constructing in the presence of "madness" an exorcizing, rational dialogue with himself very different from the dialogue between Shelley and Rousseau in The Triumph of Life. Through question repeating question to no end, the latter dialogue keeps canceling itself out much in the manner of the "great stream / Of people" in the narrator's "strange trance" (29) within which he "sate beside a public way" watching it, not as an "actor" (306) in it, but as a "spectator" (305) of it. The "stream" that the narrator observes is a metaphor (within an already operative metaphor) of questions repeating themselves as variations of the single question with which the fragment breaks off: "`Then, what is Life?' I said" (544). Rousseau tries to answer it, thinks he may partly know, becomes confused, and then forgets what he may have started to say. "Whence camest thou, and whither goest thou?" the Shelley figure asks the shade of Rousseau:
"How did thy course begin," I said, "and why?"
"Mine eyes are sick of this perpetual flow Of people, and my heart of one sad thought, --Speak."
To which the shade of Rousseau answers:
"Whence I came, partly I seem to know, "And how and by what paths I have been brought To this dread pass, methinks even thou mayst guess; Why this should be my mind can compass not; "Whither the conqueror hurries me still less." (296-304)
De Man's position as the reader of Shelley's text interrogating his own reading is constructing an allegory of reading. He thereby recreates and amplifies this figure of the narrator (as partially distinct from the poet Shelley) in Shelley's fragment. The result is a completed fragment which de Man's narration provides. He knows the "how and by what paths" the shade of Rousseau has been brought to "this dread pass." It is the "how" and "why" of being controlled by the "conqueror" which is "the positing power of language." More than that, he knows where the conqueror is hurrying him. He is hurrying him to death. This completion that makes the fragment a [w]hole into which the fragment disappears as if into itself resides in de Man's self-conscious reading of his reading of the narrator's "strange trance," a trance which the narrator in the fragment, as distinct from the narrator in de Man, considers a "trance of wondrous thought" (44), though, at the same time, the "wondrous thought" consists of "thoughts that must remain untold" (20). What for the poet as poet "must remain untold" de Man, as reader interrogating his own reading (in dialogue with himself), tells. He disfigures the "wondrous."
Because the poet's thoughts "must [by Shelley's narrator figure] remain untold," the Shelley figure within the fragment turns to Rousseau to explain the narrator's "trance." He turns, that is, from one poet to another poet whose influence on him as a poet is so pervasive that what, prior to the "strange trance," was the hillside on which he stretched his "faint limbs beneath the hoary stem" of"an old chestnut" on "grass which methought hung so wide / And white" becomes in the trance the decayed and still decaying corpse of Rousseau, and yet not quite a corpse, rather a living corpse such as Mary Shelley saw in her "waking dream" as it became the inspiration of her novel, Frankenstein. He sees the "shade" or "shadow" or "phantom" of Rousseau, while at the same time he sees through it to the landscape on which he is stretched out, though now the landscape glimmers as through a "veil of light" (24-40). The Rousseau whom he "sees" as it is figuratively inscribed on his brain is not unlike what he sees in the "stream" that flows like "one mighty torrent" (53):
And others as with steps towards the tomb Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath, And others mournfully within the gloom Of their own shadow walked, and called it death ... And some fled from it as it were a ghost, Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath. But more with motions which each other crost Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw Or birds within the noonday ether lost. (56-64)
What de Man sees in all this is the mindless stream of language whose enigmatic positing power, devoid of consciousness, posits only its own thoughtless action: "motions which each other crost" in pursuing or shunning shadows. When, therefore, de Man argues that the "signifying power of language" is more like "the power of death" (69) than of life, he is already radically reformulating the repeated question with which Shelley's fragment breaks off. "Then what is language?" de Man consistently asks, stopping, however, to give his answer that folds the poem back into its meaning, which the fragment of itself cannot supply.
For de Man, the fragment remains a fragment because it asks the wrong question of itself. If it had asked the right question ("Then what is language?"), the answer would have been provided, for the answer is there in the way that, for de Man, the "positing power of language" works in the poem. The narrator's "thoughts that must remain untold" are thoughts which the living corpse of Rousseau also cannot tell because, like the narrator and like the Shelley figure, it is still in some sense "living," still refusing to face and enter its own death as the "positing power of language." The only one who can tell these thoughts is, de Man demonstrates, the "defaced body" (66) of Shelley, "burned after his boat capsized and he drowned off the coast of Lerici." This "defaced body," of course, cannot tell them unless, following the drowning and the burning, he can be given what de Man calls "a represented or articulated meaning" (67). For that to occur, he must be refigured or mediated. The dead Shelley, now that he is dead in a way that neither he nor Rousseau nor the narrator are dead in the fragment, must speak with the power of death, which is, according to de Man, "the positing power of language."(3) In "Shelley Disfigured," de Man becomes the voice of the dead Shelley speaking the thoughts that in The Triumph of Life "must remain untold." De Man's function, as the voice of the dead, is to make present (as a seance makes present(4)) the "defaced body" of Shelley "in the margin of the last manuscript page" so that it becomes "an inseparable part of the poem" (67). As the voice of the dead Shelley, de Man becomes in his essay "the decisive textual articulation" of Shelley's otherwise unarticulated text. More than that, as the voice of the dead, de Man becomes the decisive textual articulator of "all texts" because "all texts," like Shelley's fragment, bear what de Man calls "the [hidden] wound of a fracture" (67). By exposing the killing wound, not so as to heal it, de Man embraces what Shelley calls poetry's "cold mortality" (486) which becomes in Adonais the trampling to fragments of the "dome of many-coloured glass" (462), a "false and fragile glass" which, Rousseau's shade declares, "stained that within which [he] still disdains to wear" (205).
De Man in "Shelley Disfigured" reads, by indirection, the "dome of many-coloured glass" that in Adonais "stains the white radiance of Eternity" in terms of Iris's "many-coloured scarf" (357) in The Triumph of Life, a reading, he explains, "of which it could be said that it wrenches the final statement of Adonais into a different shape" (55). But does it? De Man's supposed wrenching makes Shelley's "dome" what, with reference to Iris's scarf, he calls the false "glitter" that is figuration, a "glitter" that the "positing [and disfiguring] power of language" removes. In this sense, I suggest, de Man's reading of his reading of The Triumph of Life can be further read (as a reading of de Man's reading of reading) as a slow-motion, carefully analyzed account of the way in which "the [`non-phenomenal'] positing power of language" as the "power of death" tramples "to fragments" Shelley's "dome." Unlike The Triumph of Life, Shelley, under the dubious influence of his muse, Urania, has in Adonais carefully constructed his dome by, among other things, manipulating a set of images, in a manner beautifully described by Earl Wasserman, by relocating them in a series of opposing contexts: the contexts of matter, of cyclic renewal, and of pure spirit or mind.(5) This final context in which "the One remains, the many change and pass" (460) is the context in which Shelley tramples to fragments what he has carefully constructed and has been deconstructing all along, without, however, himself fully inhabiting the consciousness that is this radical disfiguration within figuration. Like the shade of Rousseau in The Triumph of Life who hoped finally to be taught by Shelley more than he, Rousseau, had taught him, the figuration of Shelley's death by drowning as his "spirit's bark" driven "far from the shore, far from the trembling throng / Whose sails were never to the tempest given" (488-90) remains from beginning to end dark and fearful, perhaps all the more so as it comes finally into intense focus. Shelley in Adonais is being "born[e]" by language "darkly, fearfully afar." How darkly and how fearfully and how far gradually unfolds as the poem progresses in its process of what Wasserman, ignoring the "deadly Apollo" that de Man finds in figuration, calls "progressive revelation."(6) The "stain" that still clings to the shade of Rousseau still clings to Shelley, though he, like the shade of Rousseau, increasingly "disdains to wear it." Joining Keats, who feared the horror of the death that Shelley wrongly diagnosed in his Preface, Shelley in some lingering sense remains bound to his "dome." In this dark Apollonian sense (the "shape all light" in The Triumph of Life is de Man's "deadly Apollo" [64]), Shelley hesitated consciously to recognize the disfigurement in what he had so carefully wrought as what he called the "least imperfect," most "highly wrought" of his poems ("orphans"). And yet all the signs of disfiguration are there without, however, a conscious awareness of the mindless "positing power of language" that is controlling the disfiguring.
Initially in the poem Shelley describes his muse, Urania, inhabiting her deceptive paradise where, "with veiled eyes, / Mid listening Echoes," she sits,
while one with soft enamoured breath, Rekindled all the fading melodies [of Keats] With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath, He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death. (13-18)
Urania's deceptive paradise resides partly in the fact that it is a place of"listening Echoes," Asia's "Sea profound, of ever-spreading sound" (Prometheus Unbound 2.5.84), the "secret Paradise" of an infinite number of possible sounds combining, dissolving, recombining (mindlessly(7) for de Man) as what Shelley calls in his Defence "the chaos of a cyclic poem" (482) that contains within it as its highest conceivable potential what he calls "that great poem, which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world" (492). The problem with this "chaos" as with "that great poem," a problem that Shelley calls "the burthen of the curse of Babel" (484), is that it comes down to the particular poem which must, like de Man's "positing power of language," spring forth out of "chaos" as if it were what Coleridge calls, with reference to Wordsworth's poetry, "the first creative flat" (Biographia Literaria 1.80). And yet, when and if it does thus spring forth, the question becomes: can it maintain its precarious...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
