Stefan Mattessich

Department of English
Loyola Marymount University
blzbub@msn.com

 

Eyes Wide Shut. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Perf. Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Sydney Pollack. Warner Brothers, 1999.

 

Such was the fashion, such the human being; the men were like the paintings of the day; society had taken its form from the mould of art.

 

–Charles Baudelaire, “Some French Caricaturists”

It is a historical fact that irony becomes increasingly conscious of itself in the course of demonstrating the impossibility of our being historical.
 

–Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”

“He was like a father.”

 

–Nicole Kidman¹

 

Stanley Kubrick’s final movie was released last summer to almost universal disappointment.² Except for those accounts that read like copy produced by a hired public relations firm, the critical appraisals were more or less the same: Eyes Wide Shut is a “decorous gavotte… more studied than a fashion shoot” (J. Hoberman in The Village Voice, 59); “portentous” and “bizarrely devoid of life” (David Denby in The New Yorker, 86); “the work of an artist who long ago stopped paying attention to the world around him” (Stuart Klawans in The Nation, 42); “generic and hokey, like a tendentious art house version of a holiday television commercial” (Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, 22). The film has been variously called ponderous, soporific, passionless, sex-phobic, sexist, frozen, and dead. These varied sources of critique all claim that Kubrick has violated an organic principle–linked to metaphors of sexuality, development, internal consistency, and verisimilitude–in the choices he makes. This trope of a violated organicism remains active especially when the critic understands Eyes Wide Shut in the context of Kubrick’s other work. For the claim is not that Kubrick has made another cold or lifeless, sterile or impersonal film and demonstrated once more his disinterest in psychological realism (this has always been in evidence), but that the trait of coldness in this case fails to live up to the Kubrick standard: Eyes Wide Shut fails because it is not internally consistent with his corpus as a whole. Thus Michiko Kakutani can center her critique on the bad choice of an “intimate, emotional material fundamentally at odds with the director’s cool, visual intelligence and lapidary style.” The two principal characters, Bill (Tom Cruise) and Alice (Nicole Kidman), are “not meant to be caricatures like the blackly comic characters in ‘Strangelove’ or faceless cutouts like the astronauts in ‘2001.’ They’re supposed to be fairly ordinary, albeit privileged, New Yorkers: a doctor and his wife who live in an art-filled apartment on Central Park West–yuppies who like to smoke a little pot before bed.”

 

The problem with Eyes Wide Shut, in other words, is that it imports the techniques of caricature into the intimate space of realism, and this grotesque conjoining both offends sensibility and exposes as a precondition for sensibility itself that the two modes remain distinct. The film doesn’t “work”; it proceeds, as David Denby says of Cruise’s Bill, “without purpose,” wandering aimlessly through an “indistinct” landscape where “everything seems wrong,” because of a fatal hesitation between the merely stereotypical and the three-dimensional, the type and the person, dream and reality, and also between the abnormal and the normal (86). Denby, for instance, writes that watching it “we experience no special violation of the normal–the normal is vaguely and dispiritedly ‘off’ from the beginning” (86). This “off” quality resembles neither drama nor comedy; it denies not only the norm, and not only deviation from the norm, but also the “special violation” of the normal that disciplined art is said to give us.

 

I’d like to start with this “special violation” as I explore the curious way that Eyes Wide Shut prefigures its own (mis)reception precisely in the “bad” choices Kubrick makes. That Kubrick expected his final filmic caricature to be misrecognized, I argue, can be inferred even from the film’s title, in which a failure to see is inscribed within perception itself. A sensibility that accepts caricature as a mode only if it clearly cues the reader to its specific non-realist functions misses the fact that caricature has often worked without such cues. That is, caricature has always been grotesque in the sense that it combines forms (think of Goya’s monsters and animalized faces in the Los Capichos and Disasters of War series) and blurs generic boundaries (think of the “Flaubertian irony” in Madame Bovary that comes from applying caricature to realist subject matter).

 

Historically, caricature has also gone hand in hand with social and political critique, utilizing techniques of exaggeration, typecasting, and catechretic abuse to satirize the pretensions of the ruling classes. In Britain, caricature played a conspicuous cultural role during the American War in the late 1770s, and then again during the wars with France beginning in the 1790s. And in nineteenth century France, caricature flourished particularly around the revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1870.³ Its privileged target in this period was the bourgeoisie and its cultural pretensions, which shifted gradually from a self-idealizing romanticism to a fetishizing realism of the downtrodden and dispossessed. By the the time the bourgeoisie began to consolidate its power in the 1850s, both romanticism and realism bore the stigma of philistinism. In response, writers and artists honed caricature into a weapon against this new romantico-realist hegemony. In “The Essence of Laughter,” published in 1855, Baudelaire distinguished between an “ordinary comic” quality at work in representations of social manners or inter-personal situations, and an “absolute comic” quality which elevated particular examples of humor (caricature, commedia dell’arte, English pantomime) into the more exalted function of genuine critique. As Paul de Man writes of this essay in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” the “absolute comic” designates not a relation between subjects (“man and man”) but between the subject and the material discursive element by means of which he comes to distinguish himself from the non-human world.⁴ This relation implies an internal fracture of the subject, a double-minded negotiation of, on the one hand, an experience given in its chaotic or unbound totality, and, on the other, the linguistic medium of the latter’s conversion into intelligible events or forms. Language turns this two-fold ironic subject into a sign, a category, a meaning which is prior to its empirical determination. The absolute comic “experience,” according to de Man, is therefore predicated on the impossibility of projecting a self into the world before its encounter with language, and hence before its enmeshment in the problems of reflection and reason. It implies a necessarily inauthentic relation of the self to its experience that makes possible a process of interminable demystification of those structuring discourses at the heart of the “real.”

 

For de Man as for Baudelaire, social rationalization can be observed only in a mode of strange self-implication. What makes caricature a modern cultural form is the way it takes aim at those authentic gestures that cover over or deny the event of a deeper rationality so dexterously concealing itself in the non-rational, the immediate, or the experiential. Caricature, as an art form rooted historically in a fascination with physiognomic and/or pathognomic classifications of people into types, uses categories to destabilize categorization itself as one trait of a bourgeois sensibility; it blurs the lines of differentiation and upsets the language-world that makes identity–as a site stabilized over and against what it is not–possible. It’s therefore ironic to suggest that Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is grotesque for the way it juxtaposes the generic simplifications of caricature with the psychological and emotional depth of realism. For realism has always been a target of caricature insofar as those depth-effects entail the possibility of an authentic position for the subject and the world that subject inhabits. Thus in choosing to mix drama and comedy, Kubrick draws far more solidly on historical precedent than critics seem willing to grant.

 

For Eyes Wide Shut is indeed a caricature in the more precise sense of the absolute comic: its structure at a fundamental level is the relation between self and world-as-discourse, the self as it comes to the forms of its own self-presence. Baudelaire characterized this delimitation in terms of a fall, both the Fall and more literally the falling down that envelops the subject in its own facticity and hubris. As de Man puts it, “The ironic, two-fold self… constitute[d] by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling… from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his mystification” (214). This knowledge, which again yields no authentic understanding, inscribes the subject in a repetitively “self-escalating act of consciousness” (216) that generates a more and more fictive sense of its universe. The subject refuses a “return” to the empirical world in favor of its own progressively ironic fictions about the world; it exacerbates the difference between the real and the fictive in order to maintain the maladjustments of that demystified knowledge.

 

This excessively fictive and maladjusted world constructed at the expense of the real describes the “off” overdetermination of Eyes Wide Shut, although the film involves an additional claim about the already fictive nature of the real world set off against it.⁵ That is, it draws us as viewers from the side of the real into a fiction that then presents us with the fiction of the real. It caricatures the two central characters, couples, marriage, ordinary ’90s yuppies, and also dramatic form, iconic movie stars, and finally itself as a movie inscribed in an institutionalized practice of production and consumption. It caricatures that empiricist pragmatism with which we, as critics, artists, or consumers, look upon the world without seeing its discursive nature, or look at a text without reading its specificities in terms of an ironic self-implication in the world that text represents. This peculiar involvement of the spectator in the flat, aimless, affectless space of Eyes Wide Shut helps to account for the discomfort implied in the various dismissals of the film–the way it hits home in the very untimeliness of its odd representations. Some critics have suggested that Kubrick was mistaken not to have set the film in the Vienna of Arthur Schnitzler’s novel Traumnovelle or alternatively to have updated it with details appropriate to the contemporary New York it portrays. Yet, the estranging anachronisms of its setting, no less than its stilted dialogue, its hermetic and generic interiors, its random or pointless plot twists, work to thwart the aesthetic categories which require of narrative art that it seduce its viewers via identification and dramatic unity. By disrupting these narrative expectations, Kubrick guarantees its judgement as a bad movie, but unlike most bad movies, not before it questions our own assumptions about contemporary society and the role and function of art in it.

 

Eyes Wide Shut speaks to us about that society in the ways it fails as narrative. It is an allegory in the standard connotations of the term: i.e., in its thinness, its lack of substantiality, its second degree relation to more primary symbolic and expressive forms, its essential artifice. Allegory implies not modes of description and perception that secure an objective rendering of a world closely linked to the subjectivity of the perceiver, but an intertextual deviation into conventional figures, types, and rhetorical modes that is deliberately awkward vis-à-vis the standards of romantic or realist representation.⁶ Eyes Wide Shut, as an allegory, therefore works by not working, by focusing “’90s yuppies” in the lens of a caricature recent culture has tended to accept only when its objects are two bit hoods (Sterling Hayden in The Killing), sociopathic punks (Malcolm MacDowell in A Clockwork Orange), failed writers (Jack Nicholson in The Shining), low class Irishmen (Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon), Marine drill sergeants (Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket), or various other socially marginal types populating Kubrick’s movies. That Bill and Alice might not make appropriate material for caricature implies a substance to the life they exemplify that Kubrick denies them just as he denies the characters of his previous films the possibilities of class mobility or social success. One of the most timely aspects of Eyes Wide Shut, then, is the wrench it throws in the increasingly rigid and mystified class machinery of American life in the ’90s–one symptom of which would be our desire to locate authenticity in the experience of people like Bill and Alice. Eyes Wide Shut exposes the fiction at the heart of that experience. The film conjures “fashion shoots” and “holiday television commercials” because it reads the world it depicts not as exceptional to these spectral aberrations but as modeled on them. No wonder, then, that art plays such a conspicuous visual role in the film. Almost every wall has paintings on it (and of all kinds, classic and modern, figurative and abstract): in apartments, in mansions, in doctor’s offices, in hospital foyers, in department stores. Bill and Alice “take their form from the mould of art,” and in this they verge on a caricature that draws attention to the film’s own mediated and rendered form. That their lives are also rendered by Kubrick is a literal truth as well as a figurative one; thus art in the film signals the intention of its own fictiveness to tell the story of a life that cannot take itself seriously because seriousness has become ideological, a mystification of the discursive medium in which that life unfolds.

 

The film’s interest in the mediations of discourse is revealed in a number of details. First, it situates sex, sexual pleasure, and the sexualized body in highly conventional settings. We see the idealized female nude dressing up in a boudoir, peeing in a bathroom, slumped unconscious after overdosing on an eight ball in a rich man’s house, auscultated in a doctor’s office, dead in a morgue. Such scenes comment on the conventional way of seeing–rooted in the notions of perspective, determined by social and economic practices of the production and consumption of prestige, essentially masculine–at work in art, film, and advertising. This way of seeing is in turn linked to modes of social organization (the family, corporate back rooms, hospitals) that not only represent but elicit the body in the service of the reproduction of an expressly specular power. Likewise, the desire felt or articulated by the characters in the film is never separable from this reproduction, never more than the empty expression of an inwardness that has shrunk to an abstract point in the spectacles of that power. Desire here is not a substance but a structural effect, a symptom of a rationality whose form (transcendent, biunivocal) mirrors that of satisfaction (orgasm) itself, which is a transcendence (of will or consciousness) and also a “coming together” (as in the Lacanian formulation, “There is something of One” in the sexual relation [Feminine Sexuality 138]). Sex isn’t an act but a meaning in the film, albeit the meaning of action itself, and this sort of insight can only “come” at the expense of narrative conventions themselves uncritically assuming that meaning–through a fiction that subverts its own rational and orgasmic form.

 

A second indicator of a discursive interest in the film occurs in the reaction Bill has to Alice’s articulation of her desire. The pot-smoking scene between Cruise and Kidman has been referred to by critics as the crucial moment of the film. Alice’s fantasy of a naval officer who stirs in her a profoundly erotic (and potentially destructive) passion holds down the one chance for a “free” desire capable of escaping its discursive straitjacket. Unlike Bill, who never speaks his desire or figures out what he (or anyone) wants, Alice’s disclosure feels genuine and constrains one to read the film in one of two ways: either it’s about the disruptive fantasmatic power of her desire, or it’s about rational Bill’s surprise that his wife could have such a fantasmatic desire in the first place. But these readings lead to the impasse of an inter-subjective logic which the film as a whole works resolutely to undermine. By granting Alice a psychological depth in this scene, one has to take seriously both Bill’s naivete and the drama of unconscious drives threatening to tear their marriage apart. (Most critics didn’t get beyond these interpretations and the double binds they suggest.) If one assumes, however, that the film intends to caricature the couple and their marriage, one discovers the trope of non-relation that governs the scene and that Kubrick announces in a shot of Alice looking at herself in the mirror as her husband caresses her. Critics have pointed out the lack of chemistry between Bill/Cruise and Alice/Kidman, in spite of their “real” status as a couple outside the film. But none of them consider this either as an intentional abyssal effect or an effect tout court that marks the film and asks to be read. Bill’s and Alice’s dislocation from one another indicates the caricature at work and the social critique that goes along with it. The film fails to take either Alice or Bill seriously in this moment because in fact its logic is that of an intrasubjective encounter with the discursive limits of narrative, social power, and the medium of film itself (signaled, most obviously, by the self-consciously hand-held camera that watches Kidman as she relates the fantasy).

 

The story that unfolds from this scene, then, turns not around Bill’s tortured recognition of the sado-masochistic, jealous, and obsessive underworld of desire which the film literalizes during his subsequent Walpurgisnacht (the film is not psychoanalytic in the sense that it dramatizes psychosexual urges and repressions, and as such it could not in fact work if it were set in Vienna at the turn of the century). Rather, it turns around that limit where the fictive nature of “real” life becomes apparent. This is why we are watching Tom Cruise the star (for instance, of that Reaganite watershed and fascist fable Top Gun), not a doctor named Bill, wander the generic streets of downtown New York (an effect Kubrick curiously highlights for us by oblique references to the rumors of Cruise’s homosexuality). Cruise was chosen for this role to be the vehicle of the film’s commentary on an expressly spectral and reactionary social period exemplified by the glamour of movie stars. Bill/Tom is wandering through the fiction of his own allure, the fiction of a desire for power and in power that Kubrick links to a paternal metaphor when the pot-smoking scene is interrupted by a phone call announcing the death of an important patient, a nameless uptown New York patriarch. Bill/Tom leaves, tortured by black-and-white images of his wife fucking a naval officer, and pays his last respects with maybe the most bizarre gesture of the entire film: he places his hand on the dead man’s head and bows, while the latter’s hysterical daughter throws herself at him with wild declarations of love.

 

This–rather than the pot-smoking scene–may in fact be the signal moment of the story, since it inaugurates the subsequent delirium at a decidedly comic, even absurd, register. Bill/Tom’s aimless quest is not intelligible as a psychological drama but as a search for the Law (of the Father) which structures that drama in its conventional forms. Bill/Tom’s search for the Law is ultimately futile; Kubrick withholds it from him (as both Bill and Tom, since the actor seems at times manifestly at a loss for what emotions to express) and from us, as we search the film for the principle of narrative intelligibility, the mark of symbolic difference stabilizing subjective and dramatic forms, the (political) economy of desire, and the pleasure principle of spectatorship. The loss of meaning that the film sustains is not, therefore, tragic or Oedipal, not that negation or beautiful dialectical death making possible a unification at the level of the idea. The form of that loss is double and ironic: a loss of loss itself, a loss of that “special violation of the normal” which redeems us in our normality through the function of a catharsis. What is lost, in other words, is the normal as the precondition for a transgression. What remains is a film without any transgressive intensity at the inter-subjective level, presenting a number of possible readings, none of which can be taken seriously, even that of the non-serious itself. This is why Sydney Pollack’s millionaire articulates the abyssal logic of the film by telling Bill/Tom that the scene of sacrifice at the orgy had been staged, thus reducing even that abyssal logic to a content which then loses its ability to frame what happens. This lack of substantiality, this double and ironic intention, in fact reveals itself at nearly every point in the film where intertextual reference is active or where tropes of symmetry and inversion are used. Such, for instance, is the pun at work in the Russian’s costume store, where Bill, looking for the mask he will wear to an orgy that will turn out to be fake (on more than one level), finds a “real” orgy taking place between two Asian men and the costume store owner’s daughter. The result of such ironies is not so much vertigo as estrangement and deflation, an inability on the part of the viewer to find the Law or mark of difference that would resolve either the narrative or our spectatorship into a clear meaning.

 

Few of the critics of Eyes Wide Shut, I suspect, will be moved by the foregoing interpretation to revise their initial negative judgments. Even if the film’s allegorical structure can be demonstrated, it remains a failure, a broken narrative machine that doesn’t manage to persuade the viewer of the cultural timeliness of its interpellations, or of the value for culture of such ironic modes in the first place. In the ’90s, it no longer seems enough to turn the lights on the audience and expose its desire for symbolic order as I am suggesting Kubrick has done–much in the same way, for instance, that Robert Rauschenberg did in New York during the 1965 premiere of Merce Cunningham’s now infamously controversial dance piece, Winterbranch.⁷ Indeed, another semantic element of resistance to a double and ironic approach in the initial responses by critics to Eyes Wide Shut was a tendency to situate the film in the cultural parameters of a bygone time, the ’60s or early ’70s. J. Hoberman writes, “Eyes Wide Shut is ponderously (up)dated–as though Kubrick had finally gotten around to responding to Michelangelo Antonioni’s druggy Blow-Up–if not weirdly anachronistic” (59).

 

This tactic to periodize Kubrick by way of dismissing the film’s ironic specificities as dated throwbacks to a time of cultural experimentation that no longer bears on the present underscores the interpretive stake in the film’s allegory of its own reception–that is, of the way that its critics reproduce the same discourses (symbolic, romantic and realist, natural, authenticating) that allegory undermines. The same problem of a form that establishes itself at the expense of an empirical world (and its reference points in narrative) which I have discussed in terms of caricature recurs here at a more distinctly temporal register. By locating and containing the allegory at work in Eyes Wide Shut as an anachronistic exhibit of the now periodized ’60s, one assumes a temporal structure in history that, not coincidentally, allegory itself undoes and challenges.⁸ To turn the light on the audience, to make reception a component of art or of its interpretation, to assert irony as the trope of a (discontinuous) time, engenders today a very pronounced boredom and even hostility in cultural circles. But the disavowal of this discontinuity–and it can work by rejection or by the kind of fetishism observable in the current retro interest in styles and music of the ’60s and ’70s–combines two cases of cultural misprision: on the one hand, it assumes an historical movement which is causal and successive (we have “outgrown” the conceptual and anti-humanist indulgences of the ’60s and embrace a newly serious focus on the realism of our emotional lives); and on the other hand, it blinds itself to the insight, articulated in criticism by writers like Paul de Man, that history itself has become a limit-concept, impossible except precisely in the modalities of performative reading. For de Man, temporality and history are distinct from one another. The former is a cognitive (or tropological) category implying the ideological determination of an event which happens in a mode of non-dialectical contradiction. This contradiction is felt as a force or “power” that resists any meaning and, as such, cannot occur in a temporal mode. It is historical, however, because it locates the singular point (or limit) of the real within its synthesis as an (intelligible) event. History may not be temporal, then, but time is the allegory of history to which every reader inevitably submits.⁹

 

To periodize the moment of this allegory and this sense of history (which is, on my account, what a critic like J. Hoberman can be said to do when he disavows the “druggy” aspects of Kubrick, or Antonioni for that matter) is to miss the historical sense of that moment. It amounts to a negation of the ’60s and a clear symptom of an ideological closure at work in the ’90s (a closure that is not innocent even when it finds a voice in people whose stated aims are progressive and critical). The reception of Eyes Wide Shut takes on its greatest interest when it comes to be understood as one example of a cultural trend to distance the ’60s and repress the ironic, contingent, and critical energies the ’60s generated. The last twenty years of American cultural life have been a time marked by precisely this kind of repression, and at many political, social, and economic levels. Eyes Wide Shut attempts to speak of this repression in its “art house” portentousness, to give it shape and resonance for Americans now. For what we see empirically blinds us to the rationality of our social existence in a late capitalist dispensation and to the discourses that underpin its deep abstraction. Those discourses are pragmatic, psychological, and privatizing in nature–neo-liberal might be the right word–and their amazing intractability to critique today demands strangely asynchronous artifacts and statements precisely such as Eyes Wide Shut: repetitions, ironic provocations, returns to the recent past where, in effect, our blindness has been keeping us awake.

 

Notes

 

1. Quoted by Jack Kroll. Kidman, of course, is referring to Kubrick.

 

2. A welcome exception turned out to be Lee Siegel’s very good chastisement of the critics in the October, 1999 issue of Harper’s. He astutely analyzed the refusal to see (or read) the movie as a symptom of an “art-phobia” which resists or even prohibits the production of art that does more than “reflect [one’s] immediate experience” (77). Although his notion of art seemed at times a little too uncritically “high,” it did allow him to raise important questions about the critics’ unwillingness to see the irony and doubleness at work in the film’s representation of contemporary life.

 

3. See Judith Wechsler’s book A Human Comedy for an account of the prevalence and functions of caricature and satire during these periods. Baudelaire makes a similar statement about 1830 and 1848 in his essays on caricature.

 

4. Baudelaire’s term for that to which the absolutely comic subject relates is “nature,” understood by de Man as “precisely not a self” (213), and as such an intrasubjective and discontinuous space of reflection where the subject encounters the materiality of language as that element of categorization and self-identity prerequisite for an understanding of one’s existential place in the world. As such, the absolute comic entails an irony about the empirical and inter-subjective world of experience as an already rationalized space that has been naturalized. On my reading, this sort of irony works to expose in this experience the abstraction it conceals and as such constituted for a writer like Baudelaire a critical apprehension of bourgeois life.

 

5. De Man makes it clear that the ironic subject of his discourse in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” differentiates its fictive universe from the empirical world and holds to this distinction by way of asserting the priority of its fictions. The fictive and the real are irreconcilable, and this remains the precondition for insight into the mystifications to which that subject is always prone. The nuance I would like to add here is that the fictive register also makes possible a demystification of the real as already a fiction, that utopic space of a rationalized society in a capitalist mode of production that Baudelaire, for instance, knew one could only understand (after, say, 1848) through the elaboration of discourse and the materiality of language.

 

6. I am thinking here of de Man’s reading of Rousseau in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” and in particular his reading of Julie’s garden in La Nouvelle Heloise. The representation of this garden runs through traditional topoi of gardens and suggests not a close observation of nature (or the expression of intimate correspondence between the subject and nature) but a deliberate deployment of conventions, types, and traditional figures. De Man sees in the literary antecedents of this representation, and in how explicitly those antecedents are marshaled by Rousseau, the presence of an allegorical rather than a symbolic or “Romantic” mode. Like Julie’s garden, Eyes Wide Shut concerns itself, over and against that Romantic mode, with a discursive mediation that envelops not only characters in the story, or the story itself, but its spectators in the real world it allegorizes.

 

7. Winterbranch, Cunningham’s most famous succes de scandale, was a bizarrely disjointed, random meditation on the numerous ways his dancers could fall down. Rauschenberg, who was responsible for lighting the show, decided to leave the dancers in darkness (with the exception of Cunningham himself, who carried a flashlight) and douse the audience in a white glare. Meanwhile, a musical score by La Monte Young, which consisted of screeching and grating noise, filled the theater. The audience reacted with outrage. The event, occurring some time before de Man wrote on Baudelaire in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” or worked out in print his sense of the irony in the German word Falle (signifying both fall and trap), nonetheless seems indebted to his particular line of reasoning.

 

8. For de Man, once again in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” allegory implies an “ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless future” (226). Allegorical duration, like irony (curiously distinguished but also linked to allegory in a “knowledge” or insight that is “essentially the same” [226]), targets the assumption of a temporality organized according to successive self-present moments (or periods). It grasps the present in its essential negativity as the place of an historical implication that is more radical for the displacement of empirical categories it entails.

 

9. Another way of putting this would be to say that, although between time (as cognitive and tropological) and history (as singular and performative) there is an “absolute separation” (Aesthetic Ideology 134) and no possibility of a dialectical mediation, history only appears in the tropes which signify a subject’s fallen status within the allegories it constructs. De Man mentions Jauss’s theory of reception in this regard, arguing against his contention that reception can be the model of the historical event. My own sense of this problem is that indeed reception can be exemplary in this fashion, with the important qualification that the structure of its exemplarity be precisely that of allegory itself. The singularities of history are inaccessible except in the languages or discourses that convert them into temporal events, and the ethical question of respecting those singularities unfolds nonetheless in acts of language and reading that repeat (rather than reproduce) the violence of their repression. The goal, it seems to me, is to hear in one’s language the echoes of its own historicity.

Works Cited

 

• Baudelaire, Charles. “Some French Caricaturists.” Selected Writings on Art and Artists [of] Baudelaire. Trans. P.E. Charvet. London: Penguin, 1972.
• de Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971.
• —. Aesthetic Ideology. Trans. A. Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.
• Denby, David. “Last Waltz.” The New Yorker 26 July 1999: 84-88.
• Hoberman, J. “I Wake Up Dreaming.” The Village Voice 27 July 1999: 59.
• Kakutani, Michiko. “A Connoisseur of Cool Tries to Raise the Temperature.” The New York Times 18 July 1999: AR1.
• Klawans, Stuart. “Old Masters.” The Nation 9 August 1999: 42.
• Kroll, Jack. “Cruise and Kidman: Our Friend Stanley.” Newsweek 22 March, 1999.
• Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality. Trans. J. Rose and J. Mitchell. New York: Norton, 1982.
• Siegel, Lee. “Eyes Wide Shut: What the Critics Missed in Kubrick’s Last Film.” Harper’s October 1999: 76-83.
• Wechsler, Judith. A Human Comedy. U of Chicago P, 1982.