Walter Benjamin: Allegory, Modernism and Yeats

Allegory, in Benjamin, is applied to the field of seventeenth century German Baroque Drama, or Trauerspiel, wherein allegorical figures are literally centre stage. By the seventeenth century, both pagan and Christian symbolism has been endlessly reinterpreted by subsequent forms of life. Thus:

the plurality of pagan and Christian cosmologies that had been amassed in history and preserved in those authoritative texts

Baroque drama comes at a time when the detritus of various traditions, stockpiled, at what was thought to be the End of History, were re-invested with meaning by the allegorist’s fancy. The allegorist exercised sovereign power in the realm of dead objects and remaindered symbolic materials. Half claiming to uncover secret or hidden meanings, half aware that the meanings had been conferred by his or own executive decision.

The reason why Benjamin’s text, dealing with (to most readers in the English-speaking world) arcane and unknown plays and documents, has exercised such fascination for some is, I think, twofold. Firstly, Benjamin’s book is itself a prime example of Modernist writing, perhaps deliberately obscure, circuitous, bristling with difficulty and offering itself as an object – recalcitrant and cross-grained – of interpretation. We might place it in the same category as Joyce’s Ulysses or Heidegger’s Being and time. Written in a highly idiosyncratic style which seems also the signature and indirect portrait of an individual, inviting and spawning imitation from the academic world that belatedly recognised it. On the other hand it is clear that in focusing so intently on obscure 17

For Modernism, or a strain of it, is precisely this practice of amassing the fragments of past traditions, regarded now as a kind of “stockpile” unplugged from their specific context, benefiting from their aura or ghost-lights of significance, but at the same time playfully constructing some new thing from these ruins and remnants, and delighting in the authorial power to create that new meaning.

There are doubtless obvious and varied examples of this, from Eliot to Pound and Joyce. But I’d like to pause at a very particular example from Yeats, where this duality can be seen very clearly.

The central symbol in Yeats’s early poetry is the Rose. Yeats choses what is perhaps the most over-written symbol in Western tradition. It’s worth noting first of all that the Rose is a textbook illustration of Benjamin’s point about Pagan symbols appropriated by Christianity. The Rose had “had long been the flower of Venus and so of sexual license.”

“Identified with woman from earliest times and the classical attribute of the goddess of earthly love, the pagan queen of flowers reappears quite naturally as the chief symbol of the Christian queen of heaven.”

 

We find it also in Dante:

At the end of his

In the 17

Sufficiently vague, the Rosicrucian flower had certain advantages over its Catholic counterpart.

What the Rosicrucians (and later Yeats) do with the Rose, is to divorce the

Yeats will later add his own Irish gloss to the symbol:

Rose – The rose is a favourite symbol with the Irish poets, and has given a name to several poems both Gaelic and English, and is used in love poems, in addresses to Ireland like Mr Aubrey de Vere’s poem telling how “the little black rose shall be red at last,” and in religious poems, like the old Gaelic one which speaks of “the Rose of Friday,” meaning the Rose of Austerity.

These successive re-drawings significance, over many years, point simultaneously to two different interpretations: 
1.  
2.  

These two understandings of the Rose, as an essence eluding its symbolisation and as a pliable sign open to manipulation correspond to two subjective positions:

1.      The subject is a passive supplicant, supine before a Thing which is utterly opaque and overwhelming, its ‘deep’ magnetism, recurrently eluding his grasp.
2.      The subject actively invests with meaning what is an “inert” and conventional item of poetic machinery, emptied of intrinsic meaning.

The early Yeats tends towards the former two positions (1 and 1). But even in the early Yeats there is a hesitation between, as it were, invoking (ie whatever the Rose represents) and But the ambivalence we find in the early Yeats, but also in much Modernism, has to do with authority. Is authority being lent by Tradition, albeit a secret one, or is it being created by the peremptory force of poetic magic. 

In German Baroque Drama, in Modernism, and in Yeats, this ambivalence is embedded already in history - the subject of the next post.