Dickinson's Misery (19 page)

According to de Man, in the course of these lines “the transcendence of substitutive, analogical tropes linked by the recurrent ‘comme,' a transcendence that occurs in the declarative assurance of the first quatrain, states the totalizing power of metaphor as it moves from analogy to identity, from simile to symbol to a higher order of truth” (248). To paraphrase: the identities that seem to be so seamlessly accomplished in the opening quatrain (“La Nature
est
un temple …”) are the results of an elaborate verbal performance motivated by an apparently threatening “totalizing” desire inherent in the very rhetorical structure of metaphor, which depends on the grammatical structure of analogy and leads inevitably to the generic structure of “a higher order” of symbolic, or lyric, value (“truth”). That this “higher order” precedes the “substitutive, analogical tropes” that make its existence possible allows it to seem to be a cause when it is in fact, de Man argues, an effect. And yet even if we grant this reversal, we are left with the question of how an effect can also be causal: if metaphors may have desires (or “totalizing power”) then so may genres. The fact that “Correspondances” is a sonnet means that all of its “confuses paroles” will be read as if they were (“comme”) their rhyming terms, “symboles.” Thus the formal architecture (or “temple”) of the poem will, generically, donate the effect of a significant intention to the words—and therefore to the subject—it contains and confuses.

Wary of this confusion, de Man proceeds carefully “à travers” each line of the poem, in a movement caught in the ambivalence he himself notes in the phrase “passer à travers,” which can mean to “cross” the wood but also “to remain enclosed in the wood” (248). This ambivalence reaches its crisis—in the poem as in de Man's reading of it—when, a belated Dante,
“à travers des forêts de symboles” in both senses, the critic arrives at the final “comme” in the poem: “Il est des parfums frais comme … / Doux comme … / /—Et d'autres … // Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies /
comme
l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens.” At this point, de Man remarks, in a performative statement of his own: “Ce comme n'est pas un comme comme les autres” (249). Lapsing from his lapidary English prose into “the declarative assurance” of Baudelaire's French (and, oddly, into an English pentameter rhythm in the French if pronounced as prose, and into Baudelaire's alexandrine if the line is pronounced as verse), this statement does much more than it says. While in one sense the declaration breaks away from the analogical movement of the preceding seven lines of the poem, in another it is entrapped by their “confuses paroles” so utterly that it is reduced to an imitative stutter (“comme … Comme comme …”). Here indeed the lyric and its interpretation, or, literally, the language of the poem and the language of the interpreter are difficult to tell apart. The French sentence that occurs nowhere in the poem “sounds” like Paul de Man, the smuggler of French theory into American literary studies, taunting his American readership. Thus at the climax or aporia of his strongly persuasive challenge to an essentially anthropomorphic or intentional subject of the lyric, the critic is suddenly possessed by that subject. In the most literal sense—in the sense peculiar to this shift in literacy—what this sentence enacts is exactly the sort of identification that de Man describes as “anthropomorphism,” which

is not just a trope but an identification on the level of substance. It takes one entity for another and thus implies the constitution of specific entities prior to their confusion, the
taking
of something for something else that can then be assumed to be
given.
Anthropomorphism freezes the infinite chain of tropological transformations and propositions into one single assertion or essence which, as such, excludes all others. It is no longer a proposition but a proper name, as when the metamorphosis in Ovid's stories culminates and halts in the singleness of a proper name, Narcissus or Daphne or whatever. (241)

Taking one entity for another—French for English, performance for statement—de Man's sentence eventuates in exactly the sort of metamorphosis he deconstructs on the level of an evocatively linguistic substance. Rather than taking apart the expressive subject, his reading gives the genre a critically expressive subject. No longer a proposition, the sentence culminates and halts in an identification to which we should give the name “lyric”: a genre resurrected from its theoretical abolition in the doubled proper name of “de Man” and (or as) “Baudelaire.” That momentary metamorphosis—as de Man's prose freezes into Baudelaire's verse, and
reader and writer exchange places—complicates the concluding move of de Man's essay, after ce comme qui n'est pas un comme comme les autres becomes comme un autre de Man qui est comme un autre Baudelaire. Following his show-stopping line (worthy of the accoutrements of the séances of which Baudelaire's verse was so fond), de Man goes on to soberly explicate the rhetorical difference between this final “comme” and the instances preceding it, concluding that while the other “commes” link “the subject to a predicate that is not the same: scents are said to be like oboes, or like fields, or like echoes,” the same word in the last tercet “has two distinct subjects” (249). If joined to the first of these subjects, “l'expansion,” “comme” would function “like the other ‘commes,' as a comparative simile.” Yet by this point in the extended sentence of the final two tercets, “comme” also refers back to “parfums”: “Il est des parfums frais … / /—Et d'autres … // … / comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens.” In the latter case, “comme” comes to mean “such as, for example” and thus enumerates rather than analogizes the attributes of its subject. It is as much as to say that “‘Il est des parfums … / / Comme (des parfums)'” (250).

While such a distinction between exemplification and analogy makes impressive sense of the strangeness of the penultimate catalogue of scents, the conclusion that the poem ends in a tautology is also only a weaker version of the confusion between “the two distinct subjects” named prose and poetry or de Man and Baudelaire, a confusion performed by the French sentence that hovers between or gives one over to the other. Likewise, de Man's extended comparison between “Correspondances” and Baudelaire's later sonnet “Obsession,” a comparison intended to demonstrate that the later poem lyricizes the earlier sonnet's resistance to lyric reading, stages as a merger of two texts the marriage that has already occurred between the two subjects. If, as de Man writes, “the relationship between the two poems can … be seen as the construction and the undoing of the mirrorlike, specular structure that is always involved in a reading” (252), a more striking exemplification of that relationship may be the mirrorlike, specular structure of the sentence that had already prescribed the phantasmatic recovery of the lyric subject in the confused practice of de Man-Baudelaire.

In effect, “Obsession” could be said to read “Correspondances” as a parody of de Man's rather possessed or obsessed reading of “Correspondances.” It is actually in the literal sense a
parody
or ode parallel to the earlier sonnet, the apostrophe latent in the first poem's abstractions having emerged as a direct first-person invocation:

According to de Man, the opening of “Obsession” reverses that of “Correspondances”: “it naturalizes the surreal speech of live columns into the frightening, but natural, roar of the wind among the trees” (254). What the direct address to the “Grands bois” does, according to de Man, is to anthropomorphize the woods that in “Correspondances” remained purely symbolic. “The claim to verbality in the equivalent line from ‘Correspondences,'” de Man writes, “‘Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent' seems fantastic by comparison. The omnipresent metaphor of interiorization, of which this is a striking example, here travels initially by ways of the ear alone” (256). If the lyric is, as de Man claimed, the instance of represented voice, then the later poem's naturalization of voice is a lyricization of voice. But what travels where how? De Man's use of the English idiom slips just slightly in its own “claim to verbality.” Few English speakers would
say
“by ways of,” but the plural makes an odd textual sense to an ear caught between languages. What is “the omnipresent metaphor of interiorization” that is said to be transported “by” these “ways”? As de Man notes, “no ‘comme' could be more orthodox than the two ‘commes' in these two lines. The analogy is so perfect that the implied anthropomorphism becomes fully motivated” (255). Yet if anthropomorphism “is not just a trope but an identification on the level of substance,” whose internalized, subjective identity is thus “motivated”? Are these lines driven by “a totalizing desire” toward the private interior or by means of (the idiom that must have crossed “by way of” in de Man's ear) a litany of conventional lyric figures? Whose depths—the poet's, the critic's, or the genre's—does this
De profundis
sound?
⁵⁸

De Man's answer is contained in one word: “pathos.” The experiential subject dispersed in the closing catalogue of “Correspondances” is “retrieved” by the opening swell of “Obsession”:

The gain in pathos is such as to make the depth of
De profundis
the explicit theme of the poem. Instead of being the infinite expanse, the openness of “Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,” depth is now the enclosed space that, like the sound chamber of a violin, produces the inner vibration of emotion. We retrieve what was conspicuously absent from “Correspondances,” the recurrent image of the subject's presence to itself as a
spatial enclosure, room, tomb, or crypt in which the voice echoes as in a cave. The image draws its verisimilitude from its own “mise en abyme” in the shape of the body as the
container
of the voice (or soul, heart, breath, consciousness, spirit, etc.) that it exhales. At the cost of much represented agony (“Chambres d'éternel deuil où vibrent de vieux râles[”]), “Obsession” asserts its right to say “I” with full authority. (256)

The indictment leveled at the recuperative anthropomorphism of the later poem is palpable in this prose; at the same time, however, there is a recuperation
of
the poem taking place in the critic's rendition of it. The analogies that de Man imports here—“like the sound chamber of a violin” and “the voice echoes as in a cave”—are not derived from the corpus of Baudelaire's lyrics but from the corpus of Paul de Man's readings of the lyric. The first alludes to de Man's comprehensive reading of Rilke in
Allegories of Reading
(1979), at the center of which is an analysis of the figure of the poet as the string of a violin (from Rilke's “Am Rande der Nacht”). De Man much admired the trope of the violin in Rilke's poems because, he writes, “The metaphorical entity is not selected because its structure corresponds analogically to the inner experience of a subject but because its structure corresponds to that of a linguistic figure: the violin is
like
a metaphor because it transforms an interior content into an outward, sonorous “thing” … it is the metaphor of a metaphor.”
⁵⁹

Whereas in his reading of “Obsession” de Man's analogical use of the violin is meant to evoke “the subject's presence to itself,” in his reading of Rilke the violin “corresponds” to a linguistic figure; on one hand the metaphor is said to evoke “emotion” but on the other merely to mime a “structure.” When a comparison of de Man's own figures reveals is that it is not the figures themselves that evoke “the inner experience of a subject” that de Man identifies as lyric; instead lyric reading produces the effect of that subject.

It is evident in both passages that de Man wants to oppose subjective experience to pure figuration; as in his comparison between “Correspondances” and “Obsession,” however, a comparison of de Man's own figures tends to collapse the very opposition that sustains his analyses. Yet perhaps that was de Man's point all along. In several earlier essays de Man had invoked the notion of the poem as a “spatial enclosure” (“room, tomb, or crypt … cave”) that figures the illusion of an interior consciousness, and in each his central move had been to turn that illusion inside out so that the enclosure was itself transformed from the subject's protective “shelter” (a favorite de Manian charge) into a device for its production.
⁶⁰
Yet in his passage on “Obsession,” de Man employed these analogies accumulated from his reading of other lyrics in order to mimetically enclose an analogy
to
the lyric. Baudelaire's “Chambres d'éternel deuil” are echo
chambers not so unlike those “de longs échos” of “Correspondances,” and what they echo is a lyric convention (
De profundis)
rather than an unmediated personal cry of anguish. Certainly this is “
represented
agony” at least as expansive as the sensations of the earlier poem, dispersed as it is among several figures (“bois,” “cathédrales,” “l'orgue”) and several persons (“
nos
coeurs maudits”) as well as transferred to an explicitly literary and textual register by the Latin phrase. It is hard to understand how that dispersion allowed de Man to assert that “‘Obsession' asserts its right to say ‘I' with full authority,” since the subjective form of the first-person singular pronoun appears nowhere in the stanza itself. Perhaps—as the accidental omission (bracketed in our text) of the closing set of quotation marks in de Man's closing citation of “Obsession” in parentheses ironically suggests—it is the critic's rather than the poet's “I” that emerges here “with full authority,” an authority derived from the pathos of his own elegy for the genre that is his subject.
⁶¹