He is De Man

There is much in Paul De Man’s “Semiology and Rhetoric” that that helps to clarify the discrepancies and commonalities between the formalist intrinsic concerns and those issues that would appear to be extrinsic, or ancillary to the text. Through De Man’s accessible language and his concrete examples, the rhetorical and grammatical are juxtaposed and employed with/against each other in the deconstruction of what is meant and where that meaning originates. The ending of his essay is especially alluring as his systematic approach and earnest understanding of the potential impact and relevance of his concerns culminate in a capitulation to the illusory nature of language and a concession to only constants of literature and literary study: their fundamental emotiveness and uncertainty. The opening of his essay is reminiscent of Percy Shelley’s preface to Frankenstein. De Man qualifies the literary atmosphere and presents a thermometer reading of the critical climate to validate and frame his concerns, as Shelley cites precedent and underscores intent and motivation for the work that follows his preface. The notion behind De Man’s claim of Formalism, that it “is a all-absorbing and tyrannical muse”, was only somewhat consciously cultivated in my reading of Eichenbaum and the Formalists’ approach; De Man’s succinct framing of Formalism now resonates in my own reaction to and understanding of the movement. Here we can see a relation to Bloom’s anxiety of influence in terms of the critic. Bloom argues that the critic and the poet are alike in that they must challenge and evade their precursors, but can never entirely free themselves from influence. De Man does not deplore formalism, but seems to question how to elude its influence and challenge its reductive propensities without entirely discarding its useful techniques and methods. The generally accepted outside/inside metaphor appropriated to differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic criticism occluded the reconciliation of aspects of each that seemed intractably exclusive, but De Man demurred; he deconstructs the very metaphoric device and displays that the device and the difference between accompanying concerns of the grammatical and rhetorical rest on a narrow understanding of how one its established and instantiated by the other in terms of presence and absence that in tern suggest each other. Though I am not certain that I comprehend every aspect of De Man’s argument and the methods he employs, I think that his explanation involving Archie Bunker and the rhetorical question is helpful. It seems that the “tension between grammar and rhetoric” – like the tension between the intrinsic and the extrinsic or between metaphor and metonymy - is never resolved entirely, but the deconstruction of the ‘difference’ between the two shows them to be inextricably linked at some fundamental level (1370). Consider Walton’s question “Must I then lose this admirable being? (147)” in the context of De Man’s framing; consider how “the same grammatical pattern engenders two meanings that are mutually exclusive” (1370). How can this question explore De Man’s idea that “Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginously possibilities of referential aberration? In what ways does this, and other sections where De Man focuses on metaphor and metonymy, involve Lacan’s concept of the chain of signification? I think Walton’s question to be particularly fitting in that it shows the need for an “extra-textual intention” to understand not only what Walton means with this specific question (we can surely come to a decision with confidence in that regard – though even if taken literally this grammatical reading of the question may underscore “his despair when confronted with a structure of linguistic meaning that he cannot control” (1371) – we cannot be Walton’s friend), but what the relationship between Walton and Frankenstein signifies.