It must not be assumed that there is anything accidental about the fact that the allegorical is related [..] to the fragmentary, untidy, and disordered character of magician’ dens or alchemists laboratories familiar above all to the baroque.
We might note in passing how typically Benjaminian this is: Offering
us, in place of an idea or an argument, a brief image to be unpacked; bringing
into alignment two phenomenon – the allegorical imagination and the magician’s
den - and simply noting the symmetry, the “attraction”. This is what Adorno
called ‘adjacentism”: the placing of two phenomenon side by side without the
appropriate layers of explanation. But for Benjamin this gap was perhaps a portal though which the reader might
enter the text.
Using a similar adjacentism, we might offer this portrait of
the living room of a young W.B. Yeats:
A few evenings ago I called on my friend, W.B. Yeats.. The whole room indicated the style and taste peculiar to its presiding genuis. Upon the walls hung various designs by Blake and other less well known symbolic artists everywhere books and papers, in apparently endless profusion.
Symbols and iconography from heterogeneous traditions are
rent from their context and rearranged for purely aesthetic and private
contemplation, imbued with new meanings built on the ruins of their former
significance. There is no apparent hierarchy or order. One would not want to
make too much of such a brief snapshot, save to observe that an inventory of
this untidy “Interior” is also the chosen furniture of the early poems - the
same jumble of arcania. It is of course very similar to that Georgian interior
depicted in Yeats’s early short story “Rosa Alchemica”, wherein the family
portraits, the ancestral line and the ascendancy tradition it reflects and
presupposes, had been replaced by a similarly eclectic stockpile of symbols.
Yeats is of course drawn to that world of secrecy and the
occult, Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, which Benjamin mentions as being the
object-world appropriate to the allegorical disposition. Or rather, from
Benjamin’s object-orientated way of thinking, this disposition is incarnate in
these very objects. In Benjamin the “objective correlative” comes before or is
coeval with the subjective disposition it “expresses”. Expression exists
outside us in the objects that intimate what we are feeling.
The Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: there is something shabby, histrionic and
frankly fraudulent about those Secret Societies and Occult organisations that
Yeats gets involved in. Less emphasised is the fact that Yeats seems at once
aware of this but also able to strategically suspend that awareness, perhaps as
an actor does. There is a kind of heroic balancing act between dubiety and
credulity, assumed authority and absurd theatrical bluff, sacrament and
pantomime. This hesitation is I think constitutive of Yeats in many different
arenas, and to trace its origins would require other detours into his social
class and the particular exit from that class engineered by his father. Authority,
having been subtracted by history, is retrieved via performance.
In any case, I wanted briefly to reflect on the affinity
between such occult interests and the allegorical disposition, by looking at one
of Yeats’s collaborators and erstwhile masters, the theosophist and author
Madame Blavatsky. Blavatsky was a deracinated and nomadic Russian aristocrat,
or déclassé aristocrat. Detached from the tradition of her origin, but retaining
its aura, its retinue of ghosts, she felt able to assemble the signs and
symbols of various other traditions, with little felt concern for their
original context or meaning.
The symbolic regalia of various traditions, emptied of their
temporal and contextual depth, are instead seen as expressions or cryptic signs
of another, secret Tradition, accessible only by initiates. Whether it be Christian
or Buddhist symbols, these are now redefined as ‘codes’ and ‘glyphs’ to be
unlocked by an adept. Blavatsky calls them “esoteric emblems”, which she
defines as follows:
A concrete visible/ picture or sign representing principles, or a series of principles, recognizable by those who have received certain instructions.
This returns us inevitably to the world of Benjamin’s
Allegory. Having been drained – partially or entirely - of their original meaning,
another esoteric sense must now be imported if these symbols are to be fully
understood. This other sense, belonging to this hermetic tradition, is never
fully present, but only ‘glimmers’ here and there or shows its face like some
chance image we see in the clouds, or the face of the Virgin glimpsed in the bark
of a tree. In effect, the symbols are delivered into the hands of Blavatsky or
her initiates. They become “dead letters”:
Blavatsky: “To accept the dead-letter of the Bible is equivalent to falling into a grosser error and superstition than any hitherto evolved by the brain of the savage South Sea Islander”.
Benjamin: “the secret, privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of dead objects”
And this is why, also, it is useful to see much of the early
Yeats’s poetry in these terms. It is not that Yeats is “influenced” by
Blavatsky, but that he shares many of the same assumptions about Symbols. He
speaks of his own early poetry in terms of “half-lights that glimmer from
symbol to symbol”, just as Blavatsky states that “Through all [Symbols] there
glimmer something of a divine idea.” But because sense only “glimmers”, there
is never full presence, only endless postponement, indirection. The subjective
attitude corresponding to this is one of pensive immersion, a mind pregnant
with some imminent but elusive revelation.
This is what we find in Yeats’ early books of poetry (carefully
designed physical objects in their own right): on the one hand, the profusion
of emblems without temporal distinction, the jumble of fragmentary meanings and
enigmatic clues, the whole furniture of Allegorical existence. Simultaneously, a melancholy movement from sign to sign, the dim intimation of what never
arrives.
But if sense only “glimmers” from sign to sign without any
kind of telos or emergence of Meaning, then Meaning itself can only arrive in
the form of some exogenous lightning, or revelation from outside, which the
sheer circularity of the allegorist’s endeavour seems then to crave and call
forth.
It is this exogenous lightning which the allegorist himself
must provide: “The arbitrary rule in the realm of dead objects”. If the light
glimmers endlessly from symbol to symbol, then the allegorist makes an executive
decision to impose or fix meaning in order that the ‘glimmering’ is replaced by
some outside illumination and the symbol is now lit up with a new significance.
In order that this external illumination does not seem like a
mere act of will - the allegorist as a demiurge assigning meaning by fiat - there
is the necessary claim to “privileged knowledge” and to a “higher authority”
which is never, however, disclosed. One does not have to reveal this knowledge, to display the master key, only to presuppose and gesture towards its existence. It
is the form of authority without its content.
It would perhaps be a productive line of enquiry to relate
this, the decay of content and the persistence of form, to Kafka’s diagnosis of
a “sickness of tradition” as the key to Modern times and Modernist literature.
That is, the persistence of certain forms after the wisdom and truth they
previously embodied has decayed. Their consequent openness to new
manipulations by modern artists and writers, who both lament the decay but
revel in the new creative possibilities. Perhaps the subject of another post
(or series thereof).
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