Paul de Man was that rare case of a truly brilliant mind landing by happenstance in literary studies, not a discipline used to such occurrences. At that time, the high point of his academic influence, he had completely revolutionized literary studies with his singular compulsive thought, that words mean anything the reader wants them to. This was collected under the powerful rubric of Deconstructionism, a term that refers to the process by which any linguistic meaning can be problematized (or deconstructed) by extremely close reading.
The owl-eyed bookworms had never been so excited. If the reader could be co-creator of the meaning of texts, the thumb was loosened on the rules of interpretation and a lot of latent energies could be utilized to expand the boundaries of how art is created and received. Presiding over it all was the impeccable figure of De Man the Walloon, leader as the Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University of the powerful "Yale School," fluent in the best European languages, charming and kind in even the briefest encounters, deploying in short essay form the messianic signs of metaphysical authenticity, crystal clear articulation and sublime taste with the tenacity of an academic pit-bull to take everything but his own truth down – in the most impersonal and respectful way possible of course.
I mention all this because Mr. Blood liked me. He wanted me to follow Paul de Man into the leaves as they open to the equatorial paradise where writer and reader dance. He learned too late I was already spoken for by my muse, and his august Nietzschean cries to lift me to an eagle-eye view of the ivory towers became the great untaken path in my life.
Such a followed road would have ascended to Nietzschean tragedy soon enough though, it turned out, as de Man’s life caught up with him after his death. Recovered writings revealed that he survived World War II in Belgium running a number of scam businesses while shilling for publication to the Nazis on the side. Worse, he abandoned his family to come to the U.S. as a new, blank-slate person. That new identity became a symbolic double of the old de Man: scrupulously honest, a devoted husband, a humble and giving soul, an associator with the right group of people not the wrong.
All that was left of what can only be conjected of his checkered at best past were his haunting essays, and perhaps the haunted eyes that survive in photos. He knew his time was short, and refused to use it not inquiring after the questions that really matter: Where do I begin and others end? What is the scope of the individual mind? Why have we agreed to this hell with no access to the meaning of the experience?
He found the trace of that meaning in almost imperceptible echoes from the great romantic poets – the hidden symbols that are clues enough to imagine unity, what would otherwise be irrecoverable.
I recently came across the following essay, which, shockingly, was first published in 1988, nearly six years after de Man’s death. It could have been written anytime between 1952, when he first came to America, and 1956, when he formally began publishing in intellectual journals. The researchers who compiled the manuscript date it around 1954, which makes linear if not cosmological sense, for it reads like something crafted specifically for today’s uncertainties about the borderlines between self and other, reality and belief, consciousness and source.
“The Double Aspect of Symbolism” begins with some attempt to validate the emerging ambition of post-war literary academics, but the first paragraph only reveals how futile any attempts to categorize literature – the lynchpin of creating order out of chaos – are:
When historians of literature refer to such general concepts as classicism or romanticism, they have a reasonably accurate notion of what they mean. They are thinking of a more or less specific set of characteristics, some thematic, some formal and some historical, which distinguish these movements from the literary norms of other periods. Of course, even such established terms are not altogether stable; from time to time someone points out that they cover a group of characteristics too diverse to be grouped under one heading, however comprehensive it may be. Such a crisis occurred, for instance, when the American philosopher and literary historian Arthur 0. Lovejoy, founder of the very prominent school of literary theory known as the history of ideas, claimed in 1924 that the term romanticism had become so vague and meaningless that it had better be abandoned. A polemic ensued during which more orthodox historians such as Rene Wellek tried, on the whole successfully, to defend the usefulness of the term. Until further notice, one is allowed to speak, with reasonable objectivity, of a romantic movement as of a definite and distinctive event in the history of Western literature. Such questions are not purely academic; for it is in such variations of interpretation that the deeper tensions of history are reflected.
“Until further notice, one is allowed to speak …” The notion that an individual has to be granted permission to speak, or by implication think, reads like the writer is taking unfair advantage of his position far in the future to make a series of uncomfortably honest points:
The attempt to make sense of literature is a collective not individual effort, and the arena for doing so is capricious, contentious and unforgiving;
The individuals making sense of literature may “have a reasonably accurate notion of what they mean,” but others don’t and cannot be compelled to;
However provisional happy accidents of agreement may be, they are enough to keep the void at bay – that’s how truly unconscious we humans are.
That’s quite a lot of critical thinking in one paragraph! And we haven’t really come yet anywhere close to De Man’s actual concerns, just the fringes of the Belgian lace. De Man finds in “variations of interpretation … deeper tensions of history.” Stated less diplomatically, we’re all on our own, and because mentally separated, lost at sea. He continues:
If romanticism proved to be a problematic term, what then shall we say of the more recent addition to the literary vocabulary of symbolism? It would be difficult to point to an instance in which a word has wandered further from its original meaning and moved from a narrow and local use to an extraordinarily broad and comprehensive meaning. The occasion on which the word was first applied to a specific literary group is now almost forgotten and rightly so; it was in a manifesto published in 1885 by a group of minor French poets headed by Moreas. They were disciples of Stephane Mallarme who wished to distinguish themselves from another group, followers of Verlaine, who called themselves decadents. Technically, this is still the correct meaning of the term "symboliste" as it appears in French literary history: a minor and short-lived school of poets at the end of the nineteenth century, at a moment when French poetry is going through a rather barren period, stretching from the productive years of Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Verlaine in the eighteen seventies and eighties to the publication of Apollinaire's Alcools in 1913 or of Valery's La Jeune Parque in 1917, which marks the beginning of better times. If this were the full meaning of the term symbolism, it would hardly still concern us today.
If this was not a deliberate strategy to diminish to the point of oblivion a whole so-called school of poem making this reader was fooled. His reason of course for wiping the movement clean, so to speak, is to sweep away its readers in the flood. Their absurdly outdated (as well as hopelessly vague) pronouncements dramatize exactly what De Man had just evoked, the frisson created from the extreme frailty of being human. The fragility of the human ego, more specifically, which had completely identified with this separate text object whose attraction was its relative proximity to the populi, aka the cool people. At one twist of their hip eyebrows, played here by De Man’s ridiculously astute taste in poets, they were categorically erased Roman Empire style, even though in the service of what everything seems to depend upon, an individual soul/voice.
Closer to the point, it affords De Man opportunity to name drop the important poets of both “symbolist” and “romantic” tendencies, to start to carve a different paradigm out for what poetry is and should say. He singles out Apollinaire as a poet of consciousness. Mirabeau Bridge and Vendemiaire from the cited Alcools are particularly acute examples of an all-pervading consciousness projected by poet seer that sees every little thing as a manifestation of something larger. Wine in “Vendemiaire”, for example, maintains its emotional hold as symbol over the length of a long and wide-ranging poem about the stealing (or rather giving away) of the sacred fire because it can mean anything that people want wine to mean, inspirer of war to holy kiss. Is it even a symbol if the thing itself is such a pale approximation? De Man continues in this vein:
At the other extreme, as referring to the metaphorical use of poetic language, symbolism has such a broad meaning that it would be hard to point to any poetry which would not be symbolist poetry. Nowadays, we often meet the term in this all-encompassing sense. In a recent book on Rimbaud (or rather, on the myth that grew up around the person of Rimbaud) Etiemble points out the inability of critics to state clearly why they consider the famous poem "Le Bateau Ivre" as the symbolist poem par excellence (which, indeed, it is not). As further instances of the inability to give a specific meaning to the word he quotes the statements of the Parnassian poet Heredia: "But why the devil do they call themselves symbolists? . . . All poets are symbolists!" and Verlaine: "[Symbolism] is a pure pleonasm, since the symbol is the essence of poetry". As the term romanticism had become useless to Lovejoy, it is clear that the term symbolism seems useless to Etiemble.
“Which, indeed, it is not…,” seemingly tossed off in parenthesis, is a bomb that, in true Rimbaudian fashion, explodes well after its release, in this case years and decades. It’s almost a joke how seriously Rimbaud (“or rather, the myth that grew up around the person of Rimbaud”) is taken in the face of his radical unseriousness as a poet. To even claim someone deliberately at odds with poetry itself as the supreme example of the symbolist poet, easily extrapolated since all poets write of symbols to mean all poets, exposes to ridicule how limited our ability is to judge and discern poetry for what it actually is. But that’s what, in this case, the herd demanded, wooed by tales of Rimbaud’s decadence (another literary fashion!) and human trafficking. To see the psychopathy at the heart of Rimbaud’s project is not a pleasant sight, no less so in the cited The Drunken Boat, where he bathes himself (baigné) in the “vomissures” (vomit) of the poem he makes deliberately bad not because it’s campy and fun but because he despised the people who wrote poems, as he despised all people.
But Rimbaud as a symbolist poet, De Man jokes, that even his biographer disowns does not prepare the litterateur for what comes next:
In between the all-too narrow historical definition and the all-too wide equation with all metaphorical poetry, symbolism has come to mean a certain tradition in nineteenth-century French poetry which is summarized in the excellent title of an otherwise rather shallow book: Marcel Raymond's De Baudelaire au surrealisme.
Did he just dismiss the book almost universally regarded as the most sensitive 20th century reading of poetry century with a wave of his hand? Yes I believe he did! And he did it slyly, by saying the title was great, which implies that the “shallow” surface promise of an organizing principle fleeced the book marks into offering the penguin their hides. But he does offer up some compassion: the urge to unify unique poets into easily digestible types, in this case based on their common “questions about the nature of poetic language” is given some space in historical fact, but his credence ends there:
It is felt that a common conception of the use of poetic language, for the first time openly apparent in Baudelaire, unites such otherwise diverse poets as Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valery and Breton – or, to be more precise (and less historical), it is felt that all of these poets raised certain questions about the nature of poetic language which are the very same questions with which we are concerned today. Symbolism, in other words, is an a posteriori, retrospective historical scheme which we have superimposed upon the poetry of the last century, isolating more or less arbitrarily certain elements in this poetry which are close to our own problems – regardless of whether we favor or object to the raising of those questions. Whether such questions were asked with the same urgency and lucidity by all of these poets, and asked fundamentally in the same manner, could only be determined by a detailed comparative study of their works – a study which is not available, since no measure of common agreement has been reached on the exegesis, let alone on the interpretation of these poets. But we can state with certainty, as a matter of historical fact, that the tendency has existed in the recent past and still exists today, to link them together as if they were a single group – and this phenomenon is interesting enough in itself to warrant our concern with a literary movement which is perhaps a somewhat mythical projection of our own uncertainties.
Here is a characteristically De Manian fusillade of accusations against the institutional keepers of wisdom: arbitrarily historical schemes imposed after-the-fact, not even a measure for common agreement on the straightforward meaning of a poem, the “phenomenon” of a phantom literary movement created as “mythical projection of our own uncertainties.” Also, characteristically, he is just getting started:
It may well be true that all literature is symbolic, but it is not sure that all literature has been explicitly aware of it, and it is still less obvious that all literature has felt the symbolical nature of its language to be a problem that made its own possibility of existence highly problematic, but also of exceptional importance and value for the being of human consciousness in general. When we look at symbolist literature – and I will now take the term to mean the postromantic tradition that started in France with Baudelaire and influenced the whole of European literature at the end of the nineteenth century – we find it haunted by two apparently contradictory concerns: first the very negative one contained in the question which keeps arising in a variety of forms: how can literature continue to exist? Mallarme: Comment la litterature est-elle possible? ... A savoir s'il y a lieu d'ecrire? [How is literature possible? … To know of a reason to write?]
To De Man, the tenuous correspondence between word and object inherent in the term symbol disconnects writer from reader. One doesn’t have to be a semiologist to know that symbols are arbitrary and that their truth lies in the heart of the person using them. So De Man flips the traditional question of “what does the symbol mean?” to “how can a symbol mean?” The people who create literature cannot answer or even approach this question, he asserts, because they are in effect unaware of the void they are writing into. Such self-conscious reflection is like looking at Medusa, De Man suggests through the example of Mallarme, who had to disregard meaning itself to compensate for the existential crisis involved in the act of writing.
It is in this vacuum that de Man begins to reclaim poetic language:
Simultaneously with this profound skepticism a very positive attitude appears: the extraordinary claim that poetry is man's only way of salvation out of an inner division which threatens his very being. On the one hand, the poet questions with growing anxiety the necessity to continue a task which becomes increasingly difficult; on the other hand, he does not hesitate to take over obligations and duties which, up to then, had been the exclusive concern of the religious life.
His mention of “religious life” is a good time to mention the “mute” De Man. This is a rare early glimpse where he dares to whisper of the spiritual nature of poetry. His reticence was deep, as he followed German philosopher Martin Heidegger – another thinker scrambling from a Nazi past and perhaps aware of every trap laid by his imagined pursuers, those in charge of the distribution of ideas – who advised that one should disguise spiritual topics in less charged and far more opaque words. This is of course the teaching of ALL occult schools, who valued secrecy above all else – in order not to profane the belief that creates the sacred. Like the mute woodsman of Wordsworth he identified with in one of his most famous essays, de Man felt but could not say. He occulted his voice behind abstract, almost meaningless terms. He had to continue to watch the workings of divine order without any language to convey it.
With that came a sadness. He could never leap as far as he wanted. This essay finds him struggling, not to find words to describe the vast concepts he’d taken on, but to resist calculating it one step further. It’s like a long dry journey to the mountaintop of light, only to find you have to stop there, at the very word of God.
This tension permeates the rest of the piece. Here he sees the best poets of the era reignited in their sense of poetic role, their “attitude” of purpose and relevancy, because they have an existential problem to solve – the division between spiritual and material life within each soul, the doubling of the title.
De Man first articulates this problem, strikingly, as an inner division within the poet’s mind about their poetic role. You heard right. Poets gain their purpose by writing about their purpose. It’s about as self-referential as it gets, but (as if to fully disclose the alienation between writer and reader) as from the poet’s perch above, so to the inner chasm of each discreet fractal soul below, to whom the poets’ voice is the only hope for redemption:
To combine in this manner Satanic doubt with the promise and the burden of a Salvation is typical of what we call a "symbolist" poet – although it is certainly already present, potentially and sometimes explicitly, in the greatest among the earlier romantics.
The inner division in question is between “Satanic” doubt – the poet’s lack of belief in their own abilities – and “Salvation” – the poet’s power to reclaim their druidic role of bard from increasingly irrelevant religious authorities. Doubt provides the lesson of self-consciousness – especially about language – which could lead to a poet’s loss of belief in words, the medium that would raise their voice to the worldly ear. Salvation on the other hand suggests an impact on collective thinking that poets have not had in a hot eon. What privileges and responsibilities come with the prophet role? De Man clarifies:
To set oneself up as a Savior, to speak in tones of prophetic hope or apocalyptic destruction, implies that there is something in the nature of existing reality that makes it unbearable and requires radical change.
For the poet to be Savior, the people have to want to be saved:
This urge may be expressed in the violently destructive rebellion of Rimbaud, or in the subtle self-alienation of Mallarme when he speaks of the "duty to recreate everything by means of memories in order to establish that we are indeed there where we ought to be (something of which we are not altogether certain)".
The actions of poet as would-be savior – violent destruction or hermetic isolation – do not suggest poets are ready anytime soon to rejoin Plato’s list of trusted occupations. But the growing alienation of poets may, De Man suggests, lead ironically to more authority to speak for the general human condition:
The symbolist poet starts from the acute awareness of an essential separation between his own being and the being of whatever is not himself: the world of natural objects, of other human beings, society, or God. He lives in a world that has been split -- and in which his consciousness is pitted, as it were, against its object in an attempt to seize something which it is unable to reach. In terms of poetic language -- which as an agent of consciousness is on the side of the subject (or the poet) -- this means that he is no longer close enough to things to name them as they are, that the light and the grass and the skies which appear in his poems remain essentially other than actual light or grass or sky. The word, the logos, no longer coincides with the universe but merely reaches out for it in a language which is unable to be what it names -- which, in other words, is merely a symbol.
The untraversable gap between self and other – beautifully expressed as a forced opposition (“pitted”) against something one cannot reach or even perceive – synergistically converges, in other words, with a parallel gap between the truth found in spirit and the words held in the grip of the material world. The poet “is no longer close enough to things to name them as they are.”
De Man brilliantly understates the abject failure of “mechanistically historical” readers to pick up on this “eternal question” that is “at the root of all human consciousness” as an actual detectable observation about the poets in question:
We could question incessantly and vainly why, how, and even when this separation came about. One is tempted to look for specific facts, historical events, or sociological determinations which caused it as a certain virus causes a disease. But in trying to think in such a mechanistically historical way, the problem becomes more and more elusive and vanishes in a series of endless circular reasonings in which it becomes impossible to distinguish cause from effect. Much rather than fall prey to the all-too simplistic historicism which one finds most prominently displayed by writers who claim to be against or above history -- and of which T. S. Eliot's attempt at "dating" what he calls dissociation of sensibilities is a striking example -- we should ask ourselves how this particular group of writers approached a problem which may well be at the root of all human consciousness. What matters then is not why the symbolists happened to be concerned with the separation between the realm of consciousness and the realm of objective being, but in what specific manner they experienced this eternal question.
As dubious as De Man is in this example about attempts to date literature into periods, what he crossed out in manuscript seems almost incredulous at how the collective readerdom of poetry would not have any record of where the nervous breakdown of sensibility happened so that true poetry could emerge:
… we should ask ourselves how this particular group of writers approached a problem which may well be at the root of all human consciousness. Even a dating of the event becomes impossible; we are often told that this kind of "dissociation of sensibility" occurred around 1800 with the advent of romanticism, but one can argue just as convincingly with the German philosopher Heidegger that it is the essential experience from which stems the whole of Western poetry and thought, or, more radically still, claim with Hegel that separation is the beginning of all human consciousness.
One doesn’t have to read Hegel (which I never did end up doing) to know that separation as the condition of human consciousness is an ancient idea, imbedded in most If not all religious texts.
He concludes, quite sensibly, that:
If the poet finds himself in this state of separation and solitude, his consciousness cut off from the unity of the natural world, his first and natural impulse will be to use poetical language as means to restore the lost unity. He can then look on the symbol as on a key to reenter this world of unity from which he has been exiled.
Poets have always migrated to cities to mourn the countryside. That how sacred and profane are brought together, in the poet’s words. This symbolizes the need to capture the spiritual principles animating human experience. Physical symbols are to De Man a key:
Something in the structure of the symbol allows for this, since it states the identity between two entities which are normally experienced as being different.
But it’s not just the way symbol marries earth and sky, it’s the reader forced to experience as the poet does. And then being asked, like all evangelicized, why they feel the way they do. De Man as reader is transported by the symbol’s power to quiet the mind by fragmenting it:
When Baudelaire writes a line like the following: "Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs." [And my sweet memories weigh as much as rocks, from "Le Cygne"] he confers upon a purely mental consciousness, by means of a mere act of symbolic language, the very quality which one feels to be the essence of matter: weight and opacity, eternal stability, whatever contrasts most with the fleeting transparency of a subjective awareness such as "memories." In such a metaphorical statement, the infinite distance that separates object from consciousness is crossed at lightning speed, and unity is restored, not merely among the diversity of natural objects but also among the spiritual and material world.
In another statement crossed out in manuscript De Man writes: “Following a precedent set by Marcel Raymond [yes the same Raymond he curtly dismissed], it is customary to take the famous poem by Baudelaire, ‘Correspondances,’ as the fundamental statement of the symbolist aesthetic, a statement with which the majority of the later experimentations and themes are merely a further development." The “early” De Man seems embarrassed by such a totalizing claim, yet he leaves himself open for just such an accusation with the following passage, which the later De Man would undoubtedly have been embarrassed by (not the least because it backs up Raymond’s claim of how symbols have been used in subsequent literature):
In the case of Baudelaire, we know that this use of the symbol was deliberate and founded upon a belief in the fundamental unity of all being; this unity is not immediately accessible to us and is not to be found in the direct apprehension of the real world as we meet it in our ordinary perceptions. But it is accessible by means of an act of the imagination, as the imagination discovers the hidden roads that lead (assisted by a very old and almost imperceptible memory) to a world of recovered one-ness. The symbols are these roads. In the sonnet on correspondences, Baudelaire speaks about the dark and mysterious unity, "une tenebreuse et profonde unite," to which man is led through the "forest of symbols."
“Imagination” as the key to “a world of recovered one-ness” begs the question of what imagination actually is. Could it be a code word for the mystical experience? Yes, I think it was. I doubt even Wallace Stevens would disagree. This suggests a higher, or at least different reality than the one we call reality. How can things of that world interpenetrate with things here? More to the point, how can the reader follow along if they live in the other earth and other heaven?
De Man appeals to Baudelaire’s bardic authority in the form of his famous articulation as reader of fellow poet Victor Hugo:
Elsewhere, in his prose, he has stated several times the same belief that "God has made the world as a complex but undivided totality." And in an article on Hugo, he says: "Everything, form, movement, number, color, smell, in the spiritual as well as in the material world, is significant, reciprocal, converse, correspondent.... We know that symbols are obscure only relatively, that is to say according to the purity, the responsiveness or the inborn clarity of vision of each individual soul. And what is a poet . . . but a translator, a decipherer? Among outstanding poets, all metaphors, comparisons or epithets are mathematically precise and fit the particular circumstance, because those metaphors, comparisons and epithets are taken from the inexhaustible fund of the universal analogy, and could not have been found elsewhere" (2:133, de Man's translation).
The later de Man brought such an acute self-consciousness to what the student of literature does, it’s jarring to note how he tries to recover meaning from Baudelaire himself because he is unable (or unwilling) to say himself what the symbol means. He does though convey why the shocking comparison of rocks and memories can have such a hold on him as a reader: there is … something (perhaps redacted) that makes even rarefied states accessible via a universal metaphor.
The thought that Baudelaire forces his fevered state on the transported reader doesn’t seem to occur to this de Man. To pre-post-modern Paul, the message must be brought back by the messenger to where it came from – instead of taking the messenger himself for a little deconstructionist ride before, say, shooting it.
Charles Baudelaire is not a Hermes young de Man wants to pierce. Still content to gather essences, he calls on the correspondence of another symbolist lion, Yeats:
More than thirty years later, another symbolist poet, W. B. Yeats, who at that time hardly knew Baudelaire and had never read "Correspondances," wrote: "All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their preordained energies or because of long association evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become as it were one sound, one colour, one form and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion."
We find this same concept of the symbol stated at the beginning and at the end of the movement by what are probably its two greatest poets.
The same concept of the symbol? In the words of Captain Willard to Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, “I don’t see any method at all, sir.” One should probably not grace as a “theory of the symbol” the ravings of poets defending what inspiration deposited in their laps. The later De Man would be aghast to be dependent on such clues to the meaning of poetic symbols, much less the provenance of a literary movement that claims (presumably above all other poetries and arts) to be “symbolist.”
Yet his heart is, as always, in the right place. There is something universal behind the expressions of singular consciousnesses – the trick is how to locate the one. His mind, vast as it is, may not be equipped to take on such logistics, but it certainly knows how to wave some of the most intriguing metaphysical ideas imaginable over the proceedings – as if by willing everything into patterns the patterns become creation itself:
No wonder then that symbolism has often been described by this broad definition: the use of language as a means to rediscover the unity of all being that exists in the realm of the imagination and of the spirit.
The use of language – aah, that’s the ticket. Like Benjamin Lee Whorf before him, De Man seeks to discover the unity of all being in language, a journey that for both of them led to the limits of language to articulate, to organize, to create thought.
But isn’t it ultimately the pressure put on language that is the structural flaw – if flaw it is? In this case, in a typically De Manian volte face, we discover it is the symbol itself, not the word for it, that unlocks the deeper mysteries:
It is indeed no mere coincidence that Baudelaire and Yeats would have made such closely similar statements about the nature of the symbol. In the sentence that precedes the one just quoted, Baudelaire has mentioned Swedenborg as his master, and when the young Yeats is writing his essay, "Symbolism in Poetry," he is under the direct influence of William Blake, whose works he has been editing and who is, of course, also a disciple of Swedenborg. And beyond Swedenborg, Baudelaire as well as Yeats were interested and to some extent initiated in occult wisdom.
Oh and by the way … This is where the words of 1954 – relics themselves of a vaporous, barely remembered past – may need some elucidation from 2024. “Occult” and “Swedenborg” are both in fact symbols, stand-ins for a diverse cast of thinking that includes the immortality of the soul in it. To put a current stamp on it, imagine “Swedenborg” as Deepak Chopra and “Occult” as YouTube tarot channels. These concepts of course widen into ever-larger constellations, like Quantum Healing and Salem, Massachusetts, indicative not so much of something anyone can perceive but a fundamental truth that is occulted – hidden or invisible – in any case missing.
De Man is the not the one to fill us in. Instead he inhabits a jargon – in this case attributing the causal theme to a figure – death – famously missing. But not before confusing us with some obfuscation, perhaps to make his motives more deniable:
During the nineteenth century, a period of strong scientific and positivistic leanings, the hermetic tradition appears both disreputable and philosophically suspect, but one does not have to go further back than to the Renaissance to find it in the much more reputable guise of Neoplatonism.
I am shocked how this now-conventional point of view had taken hold even by 1954, when there was a living memory of how the opposite was the case. The scientific revolution came directly from the hermetic tradition, and both disciplines were unified in fighting Christianity as the dominant belief system in fin de siècle Europe. It is odd for us now to think of spiritualists and Darwinians under the same political tent, but indeed they were – as scientists were leading lights in astrology and occultists considered themselves evolutionists. A few disagreements soured relations later on – topics like electricity and the nature of post-death experiences – but there was a great sense of freedom from religious tyranny shared by all “freethinking” (aka enlightened) types in the time period that ranges from early Baudelaire to mid Yeats, which encloses basically everyone on De Man’s list of notable poets:
And even in the nineteenth century, although it had by then fallen into ill repute, no other intellectual influence including orthodox Christianity had such a profound effect on a large number of writers: Blake, Balzac, Gerard de Nerval, Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle Adam and, closer to us, Yeats, Rilke, Stefan George, and the French surrealists are only some instances among many.
De Man acknowledges this dominant “intellectual influence” was only a “more reputable guise” for something older and much harder to define. He harmlessly labels it Neoplatonism, which is itself a meek shorthand for Idealism, which reduces to a mirror polarity of Materialism, which to the poets in question is an illusion, hence their ability to breathe material objects into symbols of spirit.
What exactly is the belief system that fueled these writers?
In all of them we find the Neoplatonic vision of a full, ordered universe; one that is a unified totality but can only be reached by the practice of a specific discipline which, for poets, is the discipline of literary form and symbolical invention.
The mystical practice of poets involved words, in other words. Words were at the beginning because all reality manifests out of them. The ancient bardic role of poets was to call forth reality, by allowing through the belief instilled by their song a tangible sense of the other, hidden, dark side. De Man calls to ancient memories many times in the one essay, hoping one supposes we his readers remember that the promised land of unity, where everything in the universe is an intrinsic part of divine order, was once available from the poetic gift. Current-day symbols are merely the trace of what vanished long ago. As if by secret agreement between reader and poet, the language could not convey the hidden meanings:
And they are all indebted to the representatives of this doctrine, from Plato himself to the obscure Cabalists that were pursuing their shady business in the Paris of the eighties. Remaining within Baudelaire's definition of the symbol, one could well argue that symbolism is the public aspect by means of which the occult, Neoplatonic tradition asserts and maintains itself during the nineteenth century.
It begins to seem like an invisible but definite object has entered into the funhouse and it’s messing with the mirrors. De Man’s backtracking seems to be setting us up. Language can’t possibly do what it had been tasked to do. Thus we begin to see in germ form the concern with the gaps and erasures involved in knowledge and its transmission that would preoccupy De Man’s later work.
However strong the occult root that grew the symbolist tree, there remains no real evidence of any underlying principle:
Although it is historically convenient, and brings out one important aspect of symbolism, this definition still does not cover the entirety of a literary phenomenon which, by some of its aspects, moves in an altogether different direction. To begin with, in the work of the very authors which seem to be closest to this concept of the symbol, there are inner tensions and hesitations that put in question their adherence to what can rightly be called a creed. A first complication arises from the necessity to name the unity to which they aspire, to describe this state as if it were a region that one naturally would inhabit.
One would add that naming is a problem common to all mystical and religious experiences that would be communicated. De Man finds an odd explanation for why that didn’t stop his leading poets:
They are committed to this because, for them, unity of being is not merely an intent, a future state towards which one moves without knowing it, but an actuality of which, in certain privileged moments, language can state and hold the true experience.
There it is: in certain privileged moments language can sustain reality. Like Descartes’ expression of the truth beyond all doubt, this much of the poets’ belief seems clear. A lot rides on whether the poets actually believe words can convey – which turned out, as the 20th century unfolded, to be a lot more problematic than supposed.
Yet, in pre-figuring that anxious past, De Man also pre-figures 21st century concepts of the entire universe residing indivisible in every cell:
Once the symbol achieves identity between all things, the poet in fact never names anything but the universal One of which the "minute particulars" are only immediately accessible emanations – or, as Yeats put it:
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass. ["Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors"']
If any word could serve as symbol, how can it symbolize any particular? It’s as if the whole and constituent parts are always engaged in a dance of annihilation where the whole absorbs the part before the part breaks off from the whole. The whole becomes lost in the particulars simply because the particulars have no coherence outside the whole. The particulars, in fact, become the expression only of the not-whole, which turns out to be the only way of understanding the whole:
But, as readers of Plato's dialogue Parmenides well know, it is a particularly vexing problem to develop the apparently simple statement that the One is. The ontological status of the One is ambiguous, and it is impossible to state unity of being except in terms of not-being.
Thus unity itself becomes a nullity, only expressible (at least for “all poets of the Baudelairean type”) with … wait for it … death as its symbol:
This metaphysical problem has a direct equivalence in the thematic evolution of all poets of the Baudelairean type: inevitably, they come to express unity in terms of death. The only human experience which offers a symbolical correspondence with unity is that of death, and we should not be surprised to find Baudelaire invoking death as the pilot on his voyage towards recovered unity:
o Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l'ancre!
Ce pays nous ennuie, 6 Mort! Appareillons!
Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l'encre,
Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons! ["Le Voyage," 1:134]
O Death, old captain, it is time! Raise anchor!
This country bores us, O death! Sail on!
If the sky and sea like ink are black ore
Our hearts, as you know, give illumination.
I remember coming across in an old National Lampoon a typically brilliant one-line explanation of every major poem of note in the English language. This list revealed (spoiler alert) that death was the meaning of every single poem. Granted this is anecdotal not scientific evidence for the proposition that poets can be obsessed with death outside of any ontological difficulties. Certainly Baudelaire, who died wretchedly at 44, can be excused for spending a whole section of his master book of poems on the subject. The cited Voyage (which you should read in its entirety here) paints in painfully exquisite strokes death and the seemingly meaningless hell of life on earth like the episode of South Park where all human suffering is televised folly to be laughed at by watching interstellar collectives: “So the whole globe is one endless bulletin."
The overwhelming sense of the passage De Man cites is, faced with the mystery of death as the last to be overcome obstacle, how much worse can it be, he asks, than this? It is not hard to see occult influences in a poem that references astrologers, mermaids, shapeshifting shamans, snake goddesses, angels, wandering Jews and lotus perfume, but De Man masterfully picks up the important spiritual principle that both heaven and earth are dark because we (“our hearts”) are the light that needs darkness for creation.
He is not as convincing on why death connotes unity other than as a return to unity. Here he takes on Yeats:
We find many similar prayers in the earlier poetry of Yeats, for instance:
I would that the Boar without bristles had come from the West
And had rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky
And lay in the darkness, grunting, and turning to his rest.
In a very helpful note, Yeats tells us that this "boar without bristles" is "the darkness which will at last destroy the gods and the world." [Yeats's text reads: "the darkness that will at last destroy the world."]
That the most powerful of all human desires, the desire for unity, should have to be stated in terms deriving from the most dreaded of all experiences, that of death, is a supreme paradox which is bound to introduce an almost unbearable tension in a poetry which set out to be all quietness and appeasement.
Here he doesn’t even try to present a case that the darkness Yeats refers to is death in any meaningful way. I would at least account for the grunting boar at the end of the exercise, which to me reads of the joy in getting to create again – a new world, something devoutly to be wished for at the fin de siècle – but one has to be non-judgmental about the world being destroyed. This may be too deep a leap into Occult thinking for De Man, the notion that worlds are created to be destroyed, it is the manifester not the manifestation that is the key to all magic.
His key point, though, of course, is one can’t realistically equate unity with death or, really, anything else:
It becomes impossible for these poets to maintain an attitude of positive assertion toward unity: instead, they have to resort to devices which are, all of them, to a point, methods of deceit.
Symbols as methods of deceit. Now there’s the De Man we all know and love! How much, indeed, is the reader supposed to take?
They try to elude the problem by means of a substituted language which covers up the original desire as under a mask.
I love this! Language that covers up rather than elucidates intention. The teeth mother naked at last. The false mask that must be drawn as onto a sad harlequin clown for the fool’s truth to be revealed.
We recognize this strategy in the unsettling irony with which Baudelaire celebrates the most repulsive aspects of death in a language of natural and joyful sensation, or in his deliberate use of necrophilic imagery (the source, by the way, of the symbolist admiration for Poe) which allows him to state desire in terms of death, hiding, as it were, the very inevitability of this association behind a pretense of the bizarre and the abnormal.
In other words, once the reader accepts death as the poet’s symbol of unity, death can be safely used to signify anything, especially – in the case of Poe and Baudelaire – desire. As long as the death mask is alluring enough:
Baudelaire's mask is this series of poses by means of which he releases his language from the burden of telling the truth …
The flip side of letting poets speak for themselves is speaking for them, and De Man shows off his skills in this arena here. I doubt very much if Baudelaire ever officially released his language from the burden of telling the truth. He just, I would argue, aspired to take words to the inaccessible regions where the truth resides. That’s why he called the poet (aka himself) “the Prince of the Clouds.”
Baudelaire would approve, however, of the spirit that has him posing in costume to intentionally distort reality for poetic effect. That’s what makes him the beloved figure he has become! The key to that desire, however, is very much like the one animating his frere Poe, to adequately represent a heightened emotional state that has disconnected from material reality and its rules. You gotta lie to tell the truth, as a long line of bestselling novels and movies will attest.
And part of unravelling the art of deceit is remembering that symbols were chosen for effect. Death is also a concept on its own. Death was not, to Baudelaire, appreciably different from life. Yeats, on the other hand, had reasoned a whole system, involving gyres and inevitable spiral cycles of doomsdays and enlightenments. It is not, an any case, the annihilation De Man has in mind. Yeats simply wanted to merge into the unitary consciousness like any self-respecting occultist.
Again we see – identified in Yeats – a voluntary suppression of saying, the muteness, the occulting:
Yeats's mask is the highly complicated machinery of antithetical themes which he sets up to hide his very persistent longing for annihilation. In his early work he allowed this idea to come freely to the surface, but later he suppresses it, letting instead his language act out antithetical conflicts which, actually, have no reality for him.
The longing is for the void, not annihilation. Every magician – shaper of reality – cultivates the darkness as the spring for all creation. To do this, one must first “see” darkness like Yeats did, as the simple polarity of light, without the judgement that De Man (for example) so clearly seems to have. By removing negative judgements of darkness in all its forms, balance is achieved. Yeats’ poetry is a testament to as much as anything else his investigation of the polarities in every aspect of human life, with a goal to find the neutral center, which, famously, at poetically pivotal times, cannot hold.
Such poets are at their greatest when, at rare moments, they drop the mask -- as in the extraordinary poem in which Baudelaire perceives that the promise of unity contained in death is itself a theatrical fiction, a game of the imagination which does not end the real torture of the eternal waiting for a reconciliation of opposites that will never occur:
-J'allais mourir. C'etait dans mon Ame amoureuse,
DIsir m616 d'horreur, un mal particulier; …
J'etais comme l'enfant avide du spectacle,
Haissant le rideau comme on hait un obstacle ...
Enfin la verit6 froide se revela:
J'etais mort sans surprise, et la terrible aurore
M'enveloppait.-Eh quoi! n'est-ce donc que cela?
La toile etait lev6e et j'attendais encore.
— I was going to die. It was in my soul like a lover,
Desire mixed with horror, an evil particular; […]
I was like the child greedy for spectacle,
Hating the curtain as one hates an obstacle
Finally the cold truth was delineated:
I was dead without surprise, and the terrible dawn
Enveloped me. — Eh what! Is that all there is to go on?
The canvas was raised and still I waited.
It’s hard for me to read this call-out (or the whole Dream of a Voyeur poem, translated here) as anything but a massive disappointment that, when death finally comes after all the goth cultivation of it, nothing has been resolved, one is in the same state of ennui. Death itself is the theatrical fiction, not the illusion of unity it supposedly symbolizes. De Man intuits how death doesn’t end the torture of life, but misses a more central poetic point that the overwrought human concern with good and evil – the great unraveller of balance – seems in such ironic circumstances to be a cruel joke.
De Man’s use of death as a synecdoche for something altogether different also clouds his appreciation of two of Yeats’ finer poems, both written near the end of his long life and addressing (as did Baudelaire’s voyage poems) the closing in of death as resolution and image to be fixed for the future.
The same thing happens in some of Yeats's last poems, where he uses the promise of a highly problematic and nonexistent future as a trick to reintroduce into his poetry the ecstasy of annihilation which he had carefully left unmentioned for well over thirty years. It permits him to name again this "rich, dark nothing" which reappears in such passages as:
... Those that Rocky Face holds dear,
Lovers of horses and of women, shall,
From marble of a broken sepulchre,
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter
The workman, noble and saint ... ["The Gyres," 564-65]
or:
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modem tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face. ["The Statues," 611]
By then, we have moved a long way from the Neoplatonic promise of unity; the voice we recognize is very similar to that of Nietzsche and we are in the familiar world of modern nihilism.
If one edits out the perplexing clauses from the first cited passage, The Gyres scans as “Those that Rocky Face holds dear … shall … disinter … the workman, noble and saint.” Disinter is a polarized word here, implying both preservation (bringing to memory) and desecration (dishonoring the life). Immortality in human memory is granted at a cost of the sanctity of the saintly life.
And what is this Rocky Face that decides things? De Man would not be aware of course of Freddy Silva’s research into the stone monuments throughout Ireland and Scotland, how they, as Occultists like Yeats knew, hold very specific and deliberate cosmological alignments in time and space with ancient epochs – epochs well before what we conventionally record as human history. They are literally Rocky Faces – stones imbedded with knowledge of the mysteries that are hidden from us. A longer time frame – one measured perhaps in the lifetime of rocks – is required to confer immortal memory on the experiences of earth, or more pointedly, any understanding of what goes on here.
The lack of knowledge, however, is not the repudiation implied by the term Nietzschean nihilism. It is simply an obstacle for the mystic Irish “thrown upon this filthy modern tide,” so that they may “climb [the rocks] to our proper dark.” The highest point for the seer is darkness, for it is what is created that matters not what is known. The circumstances of creation require an effort to escape earlier creation by occulting from the world, so that sight (light in the darkness) is preserved.
It is only in the final line that Yeatsian stoicism “reappears,” in its sense of a “plummet-measured face,” which neatly conveys both a downward trajectory to human drama and the difficulty of locating balance when humans veer so strong to the negative trough. Again, Yeats finds balance everywhere, weighing the scales so ever carefully despite the blood crying to be let all around him in 1937.
De Man – a casualty of war himself – sees only the Tower card, the inevitable cascade of human plans:
From symbolic language as the restorer of unity we have come to symbolic language as the agent of cosmic destruction, although those poets would never openly relinquish their original commitment to the ideal of unity.
Imbedded in this apocalyptic reading is an idea De Man and others will come back to: power deployed in the use of symbol, with either noble or nefarious intentions, to create truth through undue influence on readers. It is not a new idea, as anyone who has ever puzzled why so many large Egyptian monoliths are at key locations in important cities like Rome, London and Washington, D.C. can attest. The idea of the maker deceiving is as old as magic, for with magic comes that perpetual uncertainty how the magician did the trick.
The unity of separation conjured through De Man’s wand out of the very secretiveness by which Yeats and Baudelaire did their work coerces him – despite the distinctions he drops to disguising distraction – to find another kindred symbolist poet:
One might well ask, at this point, whether there appears, in the symbolist tradition, an alternate road – starting from the same awareness of human separation but using poetic language with a different purpose. The work of Stephane Mallarme suggests what is perhaps a different pathway, a different conception, which has been given much less attention and emphasis in general studies of symbolism. It is impossible to account for the general development of Mallarme's work if one confines oneself to the definition of symbolism derived from Baudelaire. Another dimension, a different aspect of symbolism appears here.
It is clear, for instance, that after a brief initial period during which Mallarme remains close to Baudelaire, a radical change of themes occurs. At first, we see Mallarme accepting the image of a divided world in which man is a prisoner of reality and aspires with all his strength to an ideal condition "anywhere out of this world. " The symbol of this ideal state is 1'azur, the blue sky of the natural universe. In his earliest poems Mallarme prays for union with 1'azur, exactly as Baudelaire had prayed for his harmonious paradise. But very soon, 1'azur changes from an altogether positive into a highly ambiguous symbol which still haunts the poet but from which he now tries, with even greater effort, to escape. And as the poetry develops we see that the union with natural being, Baudelaire's highest hope, becomes for Mallarme man's greatest – and unavoidable – misfortune and that, instead, his entire poetic effort goes to avoid direct identification between consciousness and the natural object.
This passage just oozes “critic at work.” De Man here shows in one simple symbol how l’azur cannot stay the desired state for Mallarme as it was for Baudelaire, but inevitably becomes the greatest human misery. That is one of the central innovations, is it not, of what came to be termed Modernism: the easy identification between consciousness and object so prevalent in Romantic, Decadent and Symbolist practices was reduced to “no ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams famously put it.
Mallarme on the other hand nullified all trace of himself to favor consciousness and oppose the material object:
In a well-known later poem, for instance, the poet is symbolized in the figure of a swan caught in a frozen lake and cruelly separated from the warmth and freedom to which its entire nature aspires. But we are told that the only possible chance the swan may ever have had to free itself was, not by finding in its own desire the necessary strength, but to the contrary, by contemptuously scorning this need:
Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se deliver
Pour n'avoir pas chante la region oP vivre
Quand du st6rile hiver a resplendi l'ennui. [Mallarme, 68]
A swan from long ago remembers: It is he
Magnificent without hope who is delivered
For not having sung about the flowing river
When the sterile cold offered resplendent ennui.
It certainly doesn’t seem as if Mallarme has tracked too far off-course from either Baudelaire or Yeats here. Meaning comes from experience, and experience must not be tainted by judgements of what should or should not be. Being clear about the experience – “casting a cold eye on life, on death,” as Yeats put it – illuminates poetic second sight. The swan is delivered through compassion, sympathy, the stock in trade of he who would put feeling into words.
De Man reads this, however, as an avoidance of experience, a denial of being he finds necessary to Mallarme’s poetic project:
Baudelaire's entire work is driven by a desire for direct, unmediated contact with Being, which, for Mallarme, is precisely what the poet should reject. He has an acute awareness that the kind of unity to which Baudelaire aspires is in fact the annihilation of a consciousness absorbed, as it were, by the power of being in which it searches to drown itself.
Annihilation, consciousness, power of being … if code words they be, what could they signify? Baudelaire’s poet as translator might say the individual – the poet suffering in isolation – loses the unique voice that gave them value by merging (annihilation) into the collective symphony of source (being), which includes their spiritual essence (consciousness). But what if they lose nothing at all? It almost like De Man pulls Mallarme’s mask off here by calling him too self-consciously un-self-conscious. Being – in the form of asserting our consciousness – always wins, to De Man, no matter what contrivance of striving – art, word, response – would get in its way.
What De Man doesn’t say is that he quoted two directly related poems, a Pair of Swans each from Baudelaire and Mallarme. Any discussion of self-consciousness (especially a French discussion) must inform us the word Cynge means both swan and sign, which is … what was the theme here? Oh yeah, symbol.
Mallarme’s Cygne is clearly an homage to what can only be read as his idol Charles Baudelaire, as both poems together in English show. Mallarme uses the same terms and postures to apply the same convulsions and traumas to the same symbol.
Baudelaire is a master, as he was with the albatross, of turning symbols into his poetic self, by investing the birds with such pathos they are defined by their Sisyphean futility. In this one, the swan has escaped from his cage and furiously tries to quench his thirst on powder. This is the condemned artist hungry for sensation and meaning, who gets none from his environment but stands (speaking of modern self-consciousness) as a symbol, like Kafka’s Hunger Artist, of the freak to be gawked at.
Mallarme’s identification with this “swan from long ago” is such he views himself as the young upstart swan, “the beautiful today.” But he views himself only as a threat to the older one, who, by refusing to be anything but resolutely himself, became, in true Baudelairean fashion, the undeserving victim doomed to be the eclipse (over poetry) for eternity, only visible as a father figure of pitiful warning:
Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.
In place of his brilliance, the phantom’s all one sees,
Immobilized with a cold, contemptuous eye
That dresses useless swans for the exile weather.
The denial of being De Man refers to is Mallarme’s denial of his own swan being, while being, as De Man notes, fully conscious of it – detached but open to his own nature.
But how to express such multi-valence in word? How can one be and not be a material object? Language turns the wave into a particle and cannot transmogrify like Mallarme’s images back to wave. So De Man concludes that language must be redirected to where it can be more profitably used – as a record of the thinking mind:
This kind of unity does not tempt Mallarme, because it lies beyond the realm of language. Consciousness annihilated this way is primarily the annihilation of language and since the poet's only but irrevocable commitment is to language, he can never accept unity on those terms. He has to be, by his essential choice, on the side of consciousness and against natural being.
In all the longing for the tower of Babel where there was one commonly understood language, few ask why it had to come down. Because all the ways we’ve created communication by region, culture, creed would be annihilated, lost in the soup of consensus. Translating again, not just the individual (Mallarme cares nothing for that) but his language would be lost when merged into the collective source, so he decides to oppose his own consciousness against the environment that would be his home.
The oft-noted hermeticism of Mallarme derives from such distance, from others, from objects, from words. In the Mallarmean world all poetic acts are ones of futility, in that the meaning only comes back to the mind, for the mind to recognize itself as not that.
The poetic act, then, is for him an act by means of which natural being is made accessible to consciousness. Consciousness attempts to think through the essential otherness of the object, to transform this otherness into a cognitive knowledge stated in language. Poetry is not an identification with the object but a reflection on the object, in which consciousness moves out towards the object, attempts to penetrate it and then, like a reflected ray of light, returns to the mind, enriched by its knowledge of this outside world. And it is by means of this process of thinking the other that the mind learns to know itself.
Awareness of a mind thinking about the object it identifies with breaks, to De Man, the essential relation between signifier (symbol) and signified (subjective feeling) – to such a degree that their true association is their non-relatedness:
The Mallarmean symbol, then, is not an identification between two entities that were originally separated. It is, much rather, a mediation between the subject on the one side and nature on the other in which both keep their separate identities but in which a third entity, language, contains within itself their latent opposition.
Thus language, as medium between the two distinct entities, enters the fray, much as a sheriff would enter a saloon in an old Western movie. Its task of unifying “latent opposition[s]” (as a way of absorbing and stating an identity) is Baudelairean to De Man, something that Mallarme is beyond even attempting:
If we look at a Baudelairean symbol, we always find it to be a statement of identity; he tells us that one thing is exactly like some other thing: "La Nature est un temple," for instance, or the innumerable comparisons introduced by the conjunction "comme," the word that establishes identity between distinct entities, and which is probably the key-word of Baudelaire's poetry. In the mature poetry of Mallarme, we find something altogether different. The common structure of Mallarme's symbol is always that of some object in the process of metamorphosis into another object or, more frequently still, in the process of dissolving into nothing: the sea becoming a boat, a cloud becoming a wing, a finger becoming a candle, the sun sinking behind the horizon, a boat sinking into the ocean, a curtain vanishing like foam on the water. Mallarme's things act out, as it were, the movement of the human mind as it grows in consciousness of its own self.
At the time this essay was written, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, two young New York poets enamored with certain kinds of French poetry, were consciously practicing the very kind of intention described of Mallarme. Their subsequent discursions have largely defined the space post-war 20th century American poetry had allowed itself – one where cause and effect was disrupted because the mind the great disrupter was always in the way with a new non-linear perspective frothed out of the increasing speed and chaos of life. It’s like De Man is speaking of this when he writes of Mallarme:
The symbolic object that we can observe in its strange transformations represents the motion of the mind as it goes back and forth between the natural world and its own realm. It partakes, up to a point, in the nature of things (since they are always described as objects) but they are things completely emptied of their material substance, become transparent as the mind takes possession of them.
De Man’s claims for Mallarme widen considerably at this point, turning him into some kind of Ayer-like linguistic philosopher who tries to put the mutability of language back into the Pandora’s box:
The language reflects this ambiguity of being: it is handled very much as if it were an object, with considerable attention given to its objective qualities of sound, visual appearance, and form – but on the other hand it is altogether determined by the necessities of cognitive consciousness which means, for instance, that the choice of each word and its place in the sentence is determined by the demands of truth and precision. At the limit, if language were able to be a perfect mediation and to contain within itself the essence of natural being as well as that of the subjective consciousness, it would succeed in establishing a true unity, not the kind of unity one had in Baudelaire, where consciousness is sacrificed, but the balanced unity in which, in Hegel's words, "the concept expresses the object and the object the concept."
Faced with having made so large a claim of intention, De Man simply concludes Mallarme fails at it:
We must state at once that, in Mallarme, language does not succeed in this task and that the poet knows it. The intrinsic superiority of natural being over consciousness is such that all attempts to master it are doomed at the outset.
So now “natural being” (by which he apparently means the day-to-day extrapolation of our lives onto material objects and other people aka the other) has “intrinsic superiority” over “consciousness” (by which he apparently means the isolated awareness of the poet aka the self). Understood in such terms, consciousness as pure receiver can only understand itself, it cannot touch what is outside it in any definable way, nor use of the external object language anything subjectively truthful:
Following a coherent development which it would take too much time to retrace, we see in Mallarme's work how consciousness progresses by means of a succession of failures. The general structure of those failures is always the same: the poet acquires a certain knowledge of himself in relation to the natural world which he hopes to be the foundation on which to build his poetic language. He thinks to have discovered a strategy which will allow him to accomplish the kind of ideal mediation described above. But it always turns out that, when he thought to have reduced the totality of being to a status which makes it fit to be expressed in language, he had been deceived by a part of it which he did not reach and which reappears to destroy the certainty he had achieved.
Mallarme is brilliantly portrayed here in a ceaseless and always unsuccessful war against the other, trying to detect something of himself in the vast, unknowable outside. Each time he loses something of himself in the exchange, something’s abraded away. In more contemporary terms, he may know we all are one, and all things are microcosms of the macro and the universe is one giant heart and mind, but he has no ability to penetrate through the earth matrix so decides to take his toys essentially and play by himself. He creates his own self-contained fantasy void.
De Man enters as evidence of the dangers of this Mallarme’s failure to complete an early (1864-65, his early 20’s) narrative poem on Herodiade (better known as the dancer Salome, who, in Mallarme’s fanciful version, demanded the head of John the Baptist because he had inadvertently caught a glimpse of her naked body):
For instance, at an early moment in his development, Mallarme hopes to have founded his work on the central attitude which we mentioned earlier: the description of the refusal to be reunited directly with the world of nature, the preference of a deliberately artificial and self-created, formal universe over the world of natural desires. It is in the scene from Herodiade that this purely formalist, Parnassian poetry finds its fullest expression. But it becomes clear to him soon enough that this solution is deceitful: the stoic resignation of his heroine, her refusal to yield to any temptation of spontaneous happiness, instead of leading to the heroic greatness which she expects, is merely a cause of ruin and death. The rejection of nature in favor of form turns out to be merely a choice for death, a death which means not only the death of the fictional Herodiade, but also the death of the work in which she was to appear, the failure of the poetic conception on which this work was to be founded.
The “failure” of purely formalist means – by which is meant an ideal world artificially constructed as if by use of makeup box brushes – resulted – quell surprise – from the deceit of such methods to capture the authentically human.
Mallarme's development appears then as a succession of such failures. But although they are totally destructive failures, in which one passes from the death of the heroine (in Herodiade) to the death of the poet himself (in Igitur) and finally to cosmic death of all things (in Un Coup de Des), they are not altogether meaningless.
Death is not meaningless, it should be pointed out, because it is a very figurative death, one that connotes only the inability to express in an immortal field:
The growth of the spirit is a tragic growth, which implies ever-increasing pain and destruction, but it nevertheless is a movement of becoming that marks a kind of progression. The failures are not just an alignment of identical absurdities; each one is enriched by the knowledge of the one that precedes it and the spirit grows by reflecting upon its successive aberrations. At the limit, the total accomplishment of the spirit will also be a total annihilation, but this event, of which Un Coup de Des tries to be a symbolical evocation, remains in the future as long as there remains a language able to express it. This language is the poetic work, and we see how Mallarme's entire enterprise is centered, not on unity like Baudelaire's, but on the incessant movement of becoming by means of which language grows to new dimensions of precision, universality, and clarity.
De Man’s understanding of Mallarme as a poet of evolving consciousness focuses us on how he, over a long succession of “failures” to, ultimately, merge with the larger consciousness, has compiled ever more refined words of his singular experience, but this “accomplishment of the spirit” too will find the same wall, the same demand to lose itself to be absorbed. Yet the very existence of poetic language attests such concerns are theoretical, premature. As long as there are words to use there is an opportunity to weave a mask of them that can be called the self – and can indeed stand outside of the self as objective marker of “precision, universality, and clarity.”
Thus the poet extinguishes themselves in the pursuit of words to describe themselves, thus preserving the poet, or rather their resonance, the shadow that can’t be seen but nevertheless informs the poem. The poet is revealed by being hidden, preserved by becoming extinct. It is in this uncomfortable location we are called to examine the “double aspect of symbolism” of the title, as the distinction between Baudelaire, the ghost maudit looming over the poetic firmament, and Mallarme, who feared for Baudelaire’s extinction more than his own:
If Baudelaire's poetry can be called a poetry of being, Mallarme's can be called a poetry of becoming, and in this contrast is summarized the double aspect of symbolism. For Mallarme, the only enterprise that mattered was the incessant pursuit of the supreme Book, the project which was always ahead of him and which was, in the most literal sense possible, his only concern. We know that when he died, he had progressed well beyond his latest published poem (Un Coup de Des) in the elaboration of this supreme work, of which the remaining outlines have recently been published, and which was to be a strange and altogether unsettling combination of a theatrical performance with a highly abstract mathematical puzzle and which, by some secret known only to Mallarme, was going to be a kind of universal best-seller, like the Bible.
The passage of 70 years has somewhat clarified this odd statement. The “incessant pursuit of the supreme Book” is of course that timeless goal shared by every poet of ambition, but all that other stuff has now crystallized in time to be more commonly known as multi-media, concrete poetry, intertextuality, chaos theory and “the death of the author.” The typography and formatting irregularities were such that Un coup de des was not published in the form Mallarme intended it until 2004. As for the mysterious “outlines” of his “final poem,” this appears to be un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hazard (“a roll of the dice will never abolish chance”), 21 pages of prose that lacks punctuation, eschews subject-predicate structure, offers a dizzying variety of different fonts and letter sizes and, in the long tradition of true avant-garde poetry, makes no actual sense (though this may be more an ideal than a reality upon closer examination than mine).
It might be helpful to note in the context of the overall essay, where Mallarme had just been juxt-opposed with poets motivated by Occult beliefs, how Mallarme chose the name “Grand Oeuvre” for his “supreme Book” because (as he wrote in a May 1867 letter), it was the secret formula sought by the alchemists of medieval times to transmute base metal into gold (or, figuratively, transforming reality from a material to an ideal one). Is this not an indication he sought the same “unity” – using the basic occult practice of what is now known as “manifesting reality” – as Baudelaire and Yeats?
De Man has too deep of an understanding of who these poets are as acting beings to be concerned with such arcana. He characteristically pitches both Baudelaire and Mallarme into identity crises, engaged in a battle of wills between self and other:
Symbolism leaves us with these alternatives: Mallarme's barren and ascetic concentration of a consciousness which has to learn to face the irrevocable division of being, and to find in this knowledge the power for its own growth. Or Baudelaire's dangerous promise that unity can be restored, in spite of the growing realization that this unity would merely be a form of immediate death.
The intra-poet distinction here is Mallarme’s solipsism versus Baudelaire’s loneliness. These qualities haunt the strange poems of each like an aether.
It is here where De Man takes his boldest, most thought-provoking leap:
In spite of this warning, it is a very natural impulse to prefer the second choice [unity], partly because it requires less patience and partly too because it contains a form of hope, the hope that if being ever were to return in the form of a direct revelation that would not be deadly, the poet would have prepared its return by his prayer and would be the only man ready to receive it on earth.
The role of the poet, as Martin Heidegger proposed in his 1946 speech, “What are poets for?,” is to replace the non-existent “trace” of the once but now-vanished unity of being and spirit (from which all hope upsprung) with a poetic marker for it, so that an awakened future humanity can recover it. The process to Heidegger is very similar to the way De Man characterizes it here, with the poet offering the sacrifice of poems to prepare for the return of the lost knowledge. Similarly, too, the poet to Heidegger cannot actually disclose what is unavailable. It is not even accessible in the form of an ideal. All the poet can do is allow disclosure, through the process of opening up to the void afforded by the poetic frequency, so nature may disclose itself as a result of that allowance.
Thus it is not surprising that De Man, when pointing towards a post-symbolist poetry, instead hearkens back in time, to the specific poet Heidegger was pondering when he formulated these theories, Friedrich Hölderlin, and to the specific line that prompted Heidegger’s titular question:
Most poetic developments that have followed symbolism have preferred this latter choice, and the modern poet has often become like one of the magi, underway towards a new epiphany. In order to see the choice in its true light, however, it is necessary to extend the perspective a little beyond symbolism and to refer briefly and in conclusion to the poet who has stated and lived this choice with more intensity than any other: the German poet of the romantic era Holderlin, whose work has of late become more and more associated with this vocation of the poet as a kind of magus. In one of his most admired poems, "Bread and Wine," Holderlin takes up one of his frequent themes and contrasts the greatness of Greece, when the Gods lived like actual presences among men, with the barrenness of the modern world, in which man has been abandoned by the gods. And he asks the question which the symbolists will in their turn ask so insistently:
.... Indessen dünket mir öfters
Besser zu schlafen, wie so ohne Genossen zu sein,
So zu harren, und was zu tun indes und zu sagen,
Weiß ich nicht, und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit.
… But better, I think, to
Sleep, to be free of companions is too much to be,
When it is to wait, not knowing what to do, and to say,
Not knowing what poets are for in a poorer age.
Notice how De Man, exactly as Heidegger did, turns Hölderlin’s statement into a question: What are poets for? The “durftiger Zeit” (poorer age) refers to the time period whose anxieties are catalogued in this essay, when what poets would write about – who we are and why we are here – is unavailable to humans, thus there’s nothing to express in poetry but the waiting for what may never show up. The crucial difference between Hölderlin and the other poets discussed is that words for him are just an aspect of the cursed, fallen world that surrounds him, whereas Baudelaire and Mallarme turn the use of language into a superpower that can allow them to withstand … all the rest.
This quality of seership vs. craft is what apparently qualifies Hölderlin to be a seer in contradistinction to the others:
In the part of the elegy that follows, Holderlin considers the possible answer: the poet can be one of the magi preparing for the return of the gods, he can be, like the priests of Dionysus who traveled from land to land:
Aber sie sind, sagst du, wie des Weingotts heilige Priester
Welche von Lande zu Land zogen in heiliger Nacht.
But they are, you say, like the holy priest of the wine god,
Who wanders from land to land in the holier night.
Holderlin does not present this as his own attitude, however, but as the opinion of the friend to whom the poem is dedicated and who was a boundless admirer, in the romantic manner, of the Hellenic world. Holderlin is more hesitant, but nevertheless, in the first version of this poem, he seems to agree with his friend. Later, however, he changed the end of the poem to five lines that are very difficult to interpret, but that gain in clarity if one considers them together with prose texts of Holderlin dating from the same period.
Before we get caught up in secondary prose and version timelines, bear in mind De Man is dailing up one six-line passage here, about one-third of a section, of which there are nine, each distilled from sometimes multiple earlier versions. The final Bread and Wine poem in its entirety is a religion-bending lament on how vast the gap between the human and the heavenly who oversee them is. The cited lines (at the end of part 7) seem in context to be a simple expression of frustration at what poets can do about this state of affairs. In this context, his friend (Heinze) is more of a companion to keep the poet from tottering into the void of not having a purpose in life. That Heinze calls poets troubadours in effect to cheer his friend up is a laughably small consolation for the existential abyss that had just opened up.
De Man’s focus on this aspect skirts interpretation of the poem as a whole. He insists that Hölderlin’s belief of the poet’s role is what’s important, and that he (De Man) could help us “gain in clarity” once we understand that Hölderlin “changed the end of the poem to five lines that are very difficult to interpret.” Unfortunately, the part of the poem De Man discusses in this passage is nowhere near “the end of the poem.” Even more unfortunate, he doesn’t offer an interpretation, explanation or alternative version for the last lines.
Fortunately, the last lines are fairly accessible for anyone with a basic education in the history of spiritual traditions. It imagines a future where great avatars of belief (Jesus Christ - “the Son”; the Goddess cults – the “wise woman” and ancient beliefs - the Hellenic father Titan and Egyptian guard Cerberus) come back to an earth with an enlightened populace:
Aber indessen kommt als Fackelschwinger des Höchsten
Sohn, der Syrier, unter die Schatten herab.
Selige Weise sehns; ein Lächeln aus der gefangnen
Seele leuchtet, dem Licht tauet ihr Auge noch auf.
Sanfter träumet und schläft in Armen der Erde der Titan,
Selbst der neidische, selbst Cerberus trinket und schläft.
But, meanwhile, the Son, swinging the torches of the Most High,
Comes, the Syrian, down among the shadows below.
The blessed wise woman sees; a smile shines out from the soul
That’s imprisoned, the light still melts inside of her eye.
The Titan has gentler dreams and sleeps in the arms of the earth,
Even the jealous, even Cerberus drinks and sleeps.
Hölderlin’s point – and one has to read quite a few of his poems to realize how big of a concern this is to him – is that the Gods really need humans to get it. It’s a co-dependent relationship where the divine needs to experience the human just as much as humans need to experience the divine. So far, as Hölderlin continually and mercilessly notes, the humans are so completely oblivious all the gods can do is cry. In this imagined alternative future, the Syrian (Jesus) can actually do what believers think he already does, bring light to the darkness; oracles can once again be freed from the shackles of human ignorance to share what they see (“the light still melts inside of her eye”); the nasty Titan can sleep in forgiveness as his purpose is better understood; even the dark Cerberus is appeased by the impeccability humans could show.
This state of harmony would of course save the poet, but humanity (and the gods) are equally rescued, which is an important point when it is the isolation of the poet De Man has been discussing. He suggests the transcendence has already occurred, and it is known as self-consciousness, a term for the acute awareness of all we, in effect, are not:
Our period of barrenness, says Hölderlin, has already ended, and the new and specifically Western (not Hellenic) form of divine presence has already occurred, not in the form of a closer proximity to the world of nature but as an increased consciousness of the self. But it is in the nature of men to prefer to state their desire for that which they do not have rather than dare to be what they really can be. We envy the physical proximity of the object which was natural to the Greeks, while the task in which we can excel, increased consciousness, appears to us as the most repellent and barren of roads.
One could certainly quibble with the notion that Friedrich Hölderlin – insane for the last 36 years of his life in large part out of hopelessness that his prophesied new earth would ever come – would believe the promised land was already here. Yet from another perspective, this is a wonderfully noted example of the utter joyfulness of Seer Poet Hölderlin, the steadfast way he sees hope manifest in all ways, despite so, so much evidence to the contrary and himself having had an impossibly difficult go at trying to assimilate into his own culture. He truly does believe that man can wake up, instantly, with all wisdom and resources at the ready, finally able to meet the waiting and blissful gods, so that they can finally be seen as the same, instead of as mortals.
This is the larger consciousness that De Man seems to almost actually believe can save the world through poetry:
The late Hölderlin expects from us the difficult act which Mallarme also demanded: to sacrifice our desire for what is not ourselves, to increase clarity and insight within our mind. Always according to Hölderlin, Western poetry has not yet dared to take this most difficult of all roads; it has not found itself yet and its greatest period still lies ahead in the future.
Future poetry requires us “to sacrifice our desire for what is not ourselves.” That is a larger claim than it may seem, for it includes the entire external world, all people, all belief forms that do not resonate with one’s soul essence. That is the essence most completely aligned with collective source. But it is an essence of nothingness, pure eye, the gift of the poet seer. Unlocking this consciousness is the key if there is one to leaving the belief prison of earth by seeing the creation possibilities inherent in every experience.
But poets have to take a stand, De Man suggests, as the abrupt ending to his thought piece. The jury was out on whether poets could truly rise to the challenge of seership. It required direct, mystical experience of the divine rather than the filters of belief systems, whether they be religious or materialist:
We see then that, however eccentric and unattractive Mallarme's outlook may be, he is not the only one to have preferred a poetry of becoming to a poetry of prayer and salvation.
Also needed is something far less satisfactorily articulated, an unstated approach taken by Hölderlin and Mallarme:
The fact that, for an increasing number of minds, the later poetry of Hölderlin and of Mallarme has become the starting point of fundamental questionings may be a sign that their road, however barren it may seem, is for us the road of truth.
Both poets were brave to refuse to yield to anything but an ideal conception of reality, believing like so many philosophers before that the forms of beauty and truth within us are microcosms of cosmic order. The material world on the other hand, as De Man seems to add, is a shell of illusion whose only purpose is to show what we are not in the form of a mirror.
The jury is probably still out – it probably never really rests – as to whether humanity is ready for poetry that uncompromising. The hold of the material world is such most published poetry (in English at least) reads like an exploded minefield of individuals victimized by an external reality whose causes lie outside the person having the experience, and whose solutions (if any) rely on some god to perform magic (albeit the god is usually materialistic science or political ideology in the a-theistic academy). To use the power of consciousness (what contemporary poets generally follow the lead of science to ignore since it can’t be measured) to so radically strip the true self away from their environment seems like an impossible ask. Poetry has certainly shown the ability to play with ambiguities of perception, to question identity, to exist while withholding belief whether anything external was real. This reader has seen very, very little though that acknowledges the invisible as anything other than a gap between words, much less knows the life we live is a game we designed for our own spiritual edification. Yet that is exactly what the next generation of innovators are being asked (from the 1950s) to do – if poetry is to go from a pale reflection of society to a shaper and influencer of belief again.
De Man focuses on the symbolist poets because they are the few who don’t journey the navigable globe to discover an external truth but go inward to remember who they are. It is to that more-ancient-than-poetry memory that great poets like Baudelaire, Yeats, Mallarme and especially Hölderlin appeal.
Having pointed vaguely and hopefully forward, De Man trails off with an ellipse for his later thought, which spread radical notions like wildfire across literary studies, such as how most written language is figurative (saying one thing and metaphorically meaning another), thus it never actually refers to a fixed external reality but only back to its own formal and rhetorical requirements (which is why literary texts consistently and naturally contradict the meanings they express); how reading is always mis-reading because the reader only has access to the literal not personal meaning of the writer (because ways of knowing are dependent on ways of saying); how what is unsaid or repressed in a text always comes back in the reader response to contradict the apparent meaning (leading to an “impasse of undecidability”); how the mind needs to create theories able to resist the reality they are designed to explain; how “death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament” … Even the most superficial account of all the novel thoughts he generated would take up more space than this essay is allotted.
The influence of such paradigm-rattling queries has filtered into law, philosophy, linguistics and even game theory, but it has yet to be visited upon one of its main ostensible targets, as the program of this early and revealing essay insists. This turned out to be my own little poet’s corner of the world, where even Mr. Blood dared not go.
"The Double Aspect of Symbolism" by Paul De Man was first published in Yale French Studies No. 74, Phantom Proxies: Symbolism and the Rhetoric of History (1988), pp. 3-16. The manuscript was transcribed and edited by Tom Pepper, with Tom Keenan, Kevin Newmark and Andrzej Warminski. English translations of the cited poems have been replaced with my own.
