Decomposing Figures Chase, Cynthia Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Chase, Cynthia. Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.68474. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/68474 [ Access provided at 25 Sep 2021 23:04 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. HOPKINS OPEN PUBLISHING ENCORE EDITIONS Cynthia Chase Decomposing Figures Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Published 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3411-7 (open access) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3411-3 (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3409-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3409-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3410-0 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3410-5 (electronic) This page supersedes the copyright page included in the original publication of this work. Decomposing Figures CYNTHIA CHASE ta£ Decomposing Figures Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. © 1986 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press 701 West 40th Street Baltimore, Maryland 21211 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London (§l The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chase, Cynthia, 19 53- Decomposing figures. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Romanticism-Europe. 2. European literature­ History and criticism. I. Title. PN751.C5 1986 809'. 9145 85-45868 ISBN 0-8018-3136-9 (alk. paper) For Jonathan Contents Acknowledgments IX Introduction 1 I. Mutable Images: Voice and Figure 1. The Accidents of Disfiguration 13 Limits to Literal and Figurative Reading of Wordsworth's "Books" 2. The Ring of Gyges and the Coat of Darkness 32 Reading Rousseau with Wordsworth 3. Viewless Wings 65 Keats's Ode to a Nightingale 4. Giving a Face to a Name 82 De Man's Figures 5. Getting Versed 113 Reading Hegel with Baudelaire II. Past Effects: The Double Reading of Narrative 6. Mechanical Doll, Exploding Machine 141 Kleist's Models of Narrative 7. The Decomposition of the Elephants 157 Double-Reading Daniel Deronda 8. Oedipal Textuality 175 Reading Freud's Reading of Oedipus 9. Paragon, Parergon 196 Baudelaire Translates Rousseau Notes 209 Index 229 vii Acknowledgments I would like to thank Ellen Burt, Jonathan Culler, Neil Hertz, Richard Klein, and Philip Lewis for crucial help in thinking through the readings that appear in this book. Other friends and teachers gave me generous encouragement: Reeve Parker, Mary Jacobus, Barbara Johnson, Carol Jacobs, Eve Sedgwick, Andrzej Warminski, and J. Hillis Miller. For invaluable imaginative and practical help in assembling these chapters, I thank my husband, Jonathan Culler. Without him this book would not exist. My deepest gratitude is to Paul de Man. My debt to de Man for the thinking he made possible much exceeds what this book could acknowledge. Chapters 1 and 5 first appeared in Studies in Romanticism, copy­ right by the Trustees of Boston University. Chapter 2 is reprinted from Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed, copyright 1984 by Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. Chapter 3 is reprinted from Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, copyright 1985 by Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. An earlier version of chapter 6 appeared in the Oxford Literary Review. Reprinted by permission of the editor. Chapter 7 is reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Associa­ tion of America from PMLA 93:2 (March 1978), copyright by the Modern Language Association of America. Chapters 8 and 9 first appeared in Diacritics, copyright 1979 and 1981 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Another version of chapter 9 appeared in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham, copyright 1985 by Cornell Univer­ sity Press. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. IX Introduction Romanticism, more than any other literary historical concept, has been the target and the occasion of a compelling critique of the basic presuppositions of literary history. This book is an attempt to deal with that situation. Its difficulties arise first from the demonstrated invalid­ ity of a familiar conception of history. That demonstration was partly anonymous and diffuse: the practice of close reading, simply, fostered by the New Criticism, hermeneutics, and structuralism alike, made it hard to characterize literary works in the unequivocal, uncontradictory terms that make them illustrate a period or movement. The difficulty was confirmed and compounded by the writings of a small number of theorists carrying out arguments inimical to the assumptions of New Critical close readings-Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (who called the primary concern of Romanticism l'absolu litteraire), to name those whose work seemed most inevitable, most impossible to ignore, and most difficult to come to terms with. Their inquiries into the way any work defines, alludes to, and so eludes its genre effectively undercut attempts to claim de­ finitiveauthority for generic and historical classifications.1 Still graver implications arise from the far-reaching critique of teleology that has emerged in the last thirty years in detailed reread­ ings of certain philosophical texts (Nietzsche and Heidegger, but also Plato and Hegel): 2 a deconstruction of the genetic model that has been at the heart of the concept of history. Here Romanticism plays a decisive role. For Romanticism has been most tellingly identified, be­ yond considerations of style and theme, precisely with the full emer­ gence and elaboration of the genetic model, whereby we imagine the intelligibility of the cosmos in terms of an ultimate adequation between origins and ends. This would seem to be the Romantic tradition to which we inevitably still belong, a teleological orientation that is the lasting heritage of Romanticism, transmitting ultimately an orientation of Western thought or philosophy "from its beginnings." One can 1 2 Introduction evoke it, as de Man does, in assertions lifted from Wordsworth or from Hegel: the notion that "origin" is "tendency," that "the end is the same as the beginning, because the beginning is an end" (Zweck "pur­ pose," "goal"). Though the density and explicitness of the asser­ tion may feel unfamiliar, it spells out what probably remains our habitual way of thinking (postmodernist technologies and sensibility notwithstanding) and what seems the unavoidable assumption of any history-writing. Even histories that stress the discontinuity and incom­ mensurability of a culture or an epoch assume that events and per­ sons described do constitute and participate in the ultimate unity of the movement of history that consists in their totalization, in their interpretation as moments in a process with some shape and meanmg. Romanticism, though, poses a basic threat to this assumption. For the Romantic texts that apparently affirmand enforce it-and mark the historical moment that consists in the apogee of teleological thinking­ exceed and undercut the genetic models they appear to follow. This has been the argument worked out compellingly in rereadings of Rous­ seau, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wordsworth, by the critics mentioned earlier and by others, but above all by Paul de Man. 3 Those readings locate the contradiction not at the level of statement, in these texts, but in the interplay between a work's statement and its function, in­ cluding its function or position in the discourse of literary history. What emerges is that analysis of the rhetorical modes as well as the statements of individual Romantic texts generates an inconclusive or unhistorical scheme: a recurrence of works characterized by genetic patterns they simultaneously retrace and decompose. "If this were the case," de Man writes-characteristically posing the difficulty rather than making the assertion-"one may well wonder what kind of his­ toriography could do justice to the phenomenon of Romanticism, since Romanticism (itself a period concept) would then be the movement that challenges the genetic principle which necessarily underlies all his­ torical narrative." 4 What happens in testing this inference in the analysis of particular works, as this book seeks to do? De Man's work made writing about literature difficult, if irresistible, by inciting a tense awareness of the implicit claims or assumptions entailed in every interpretive move or rhetorical gesture. In his writing, this pressure generates a continual displacement and reinvention of terms and concepts as well as shifts of rhetorical strategy. What if one attempts to bring together and work out a variety of concepts and characteristic moves; what if one takes this work as an impetus to one's own reading, and to the specially Introduction 3 complicated enterprise of writing on Romanticism? That is what I have done in these essays. Through detailed rhetorical analysis of Romantic and post-Roman­ tic texts, this book attempts to clarify the strategies and stakes of the investigation that has emerged as one of the most crucial and complex projects of recent criticism.