Walter Benjamin’s Allegory and Baroque Lyrical Poetry 

A Study in Rhetoric 

Di Alessandro De Francesco 

In: Semicerchio LVI (01/2017), “(Neo)Barocco. Poesia del Seicento nella teoria contemporanea”, pp. 5-19. 

«For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love, still telling what is told.»
(W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 76) 

1. Introduction 

This study chooses Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory as a possible guideline into some examples of baroque lyrical poetry and is conceived as a starting point for a wider project on the 17th century that I am currently developing. As a matter of fact, Benjamin developed his conception of allegory in narrow relation to the baroque theatre and, when it came to lyrical poetry, Baudelaire – whom he saw as a baroque poet post-litteram – was at the core of his investigations. No work left by Benjamin is entirely devoted to an analysis of his conception of the allegory in relation to baroque lyrical poetry. Nevertheless, Benjamin often refers with general theoretical and rhetorical considerations to baroque playwrights who also had a practice as lyrical poets, such as Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius and William Shakespeare. Regarding Shakespeare, moreover, Benjamin wrote in a 1921 letter to Gershom Scholem that he was projecting a study on the Sonnets: «Abgesehen von angekündigten Arbeiten, wie einem großen Aufsatz über Shakespeares Sonette» (GS II, 987)1. Given such an intention directly expressed by Benjamin and the importance of Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the history of poetry, this study will focus in particular on this relation, with some incursions into Gryphius’s poetry as well, Gryphius being the most cited poet in the Origin of German Tragic Drama (OGT2) in considerations not only pertaining to the Trauerspiel, but also to general poetologic issues. I will consider Shakespeare as a baroque poet à part entière, although his name is often missing in baroque poetry anthologies, even those published in English.3 This phenomenon is mainly due to the immense gap between Shakespeare and other English poets of neighbouring generations in terms of quantity of studies, publications and influence, but also to the fact that Shakespeare is often referred to as a Renaissance poet. Thus, this choice requires some preliminary explanation. 

First of all, Shakespeare, together with Calderon, is the most frequently cited foreign baroque playwright in the Origin of German Tragic Drama, as a counterpart to the German playwrights studied by Benjamin. Secondly, and in relation to that, Baroque is, chronologically as well as aesthetically, a hazy phenomenon in spite of some major recurring themes, and the term itself has been widely debated since its inception. The notion of ‘Baroque’ is often extended from 16th century Mannerism in painting to 18th century music, with baroque architecture and literature mostly located, within reason, in the 17th century. Shakespeare’s Sonnets respect this periodization, since the first edition was published in 1609, thus symbolically opening the 17th century as the core period for baroque poetry. Finally, and most importantly, Shakespeare’s plays and poems are inhabited by themes, imageries, forms and rhetorical figures that clearly fall under what might be called ‘baroque aesthetics’. One of the aims of this study will be to investigate some implications of this affirmation under the aegis of Benjamin’s notion of ‘allegory’, which will be taken into account both as a rhetorical figure and as a guiding notion for an analysis of baroque poetics. 

In the wake of Benjamin’s method itself, my analysis will be conducted as a research in literary theory in which I will try to propose an original rhetorical and theoretical approach to baroque poetry and aesthetics. Although specifically focused on poetry, this study has been conceived in the wake of previous major theoretical works on the Baroque, such as Gilles Deleuze’s Le pli. Leibniz et le Baroque and Francesco Orlando’s Illuminismo, barocco e retorica freudiana, as well as of recent developments in neo-baroque aesthetics, such as William Egginton’s The Theatre of Truth.4 Hence, one of its aims is to propose some outlines of a rhetorical and theoretical model of the Baroque, in which the notion of convexity will be added to Benjamin’s allegory, but also to Deleuze’s fold and Egginton’s holes and gaps, as a way of describing the epistemological implications of baroque aesthetics. 

2. Benjamin’s allegory as a non-dualistic figure 

Benjamin’s allegory is not to be intended as an emanation of the allegory as a figure of rhetoric, but rather as a definition of a whole rhetorical and epistemological system describing the way of functioning of baroque poetics. Although it preserves some features of the so called ‘traditional’ allegory – such as the hermeneutic necessity of developing an argument in order to understand the figure and the consequent arbitrariness of the symbolic relations that it evokes, to which I will go back –, Benjamin’s allegory is primarily enquiry into the relations language-world as they can be redefined by the poetic practice. As several scholars pointed out (Cowan 1981; Wilkens 2006), Benjamin’s allegory has multiple possible implications and the risk of misunderstanding them is very high. Nonetheless, it seems to me that a major feature of Benjamin’s use of the allegory is its non-dualism, especially when its rhetorical behaviour is observed under a poetological perspective. By non-dualism I mean that Benjamin’s allegory produces a reduction of ontological dichotomies typical of Western metaphysical tradition such as subject and object (De Man 1983, 174), image and word, body and mind, terrestrial and spiritual, language and world and, ultimately, rhetorical representationality and ‘degree zero’. To understand such a feature means to understand, but also to redefine, the rhetorical as well as the epistemological implications of baroque poetics, with major consequences that have been barely explored so far. Let us now follow Benjamin’s argumentation. 

Benjamin refuses the traditional conception of allegory as «a conventional relationship between a designating image and its signification» – that he attributes to W.B. Yeats among others (OGT 3395) – because, unlike the metaphor, the interpretation of an allegory is not grounded on the recognition of a significational koinè, but rather on the arbitrariness of a potentially infinite unfolding of meaning. Thus, «the allegory, in 17th century, is not a convention of the expression, but the expression of a convention» (OGT 3516), which means that the allegory creates its convention each time that it appears as a figure of speech in baroque poetics: the allegory is a «created convention» (OGT 3517). Benjamin’s allegory, to put it with Wittgenstein, is a rule following in which «at each point a new decision is necessary» (Wittgenstein 20068): the allegory produces its own open system of references, rather than basing itself on a pre-existing convention. The rule following is not a way of respecting a preconceived rule, but rather of producing a paradigm, a continuously renewed process within and during the movement of language. So that, pushing forward Wilkens’s claims on this subject (Wilkens 2006, 2909), I will suggest that baroque allegory, according to Benjamin, deconstructs the duality between convention and expression in favour of a unique poetic gesture in which the expression establishes an unconventional convention. As both Jean-Marie Gleize and Jacques Roubaud affirmed separately in relation to their respective poetic practices: «la poésie dit ce qu’elle dit en le disant», poetry says what it says in saying it (Roubaud 1995, 77; Gleize 1998, online); which is particularly true for Benjamin’s conception of allegory applied to baroque lyrical poetry, as I will try to show further through some examples. Benjamin himself states it clearly: «allegory is both convention and expression» (OGT 35110). 

What we might call the rule following of Benjamin’s allegory is an eminently non-dualistic procedure, because no ontological distinction is given between the poetic gesture and its system of meanings and references. This is the reason why Benjamin argues that the baroque allegory should be understood as a sign in its own right (OGT 340), and that its character of ‘expression’ means that it should be compared to a whole system of signs, «just as speech is expression, and also writing» (OGT 33911). Benjamin overtly states that «baroque lyrical poetry enjoys the same movement» of what I proposed to call the non-dualistic rule following of Benjamin’s allegory, in which «in order to counterbalance the immersion into the abyss, the allegoresis must ceaselessly unfold in new developments, it must ceaselessly surprise» (OGT 35912). Such a permanent renewal of the rhetorical developments of the baroque allegory is then at the inner core of its non-dualistic properties, and the movement of surprise engendering from it is nothing but a widely recognised consequence of baroque aesthetics, here showing a somewhat hidden face. 

To the signical conception of the allegory corresponds a likewise iconoclastic conception of writing expressed by Benjamin, in which the ontological dualism between language and image is deconstructed: «externally and stylistically – in the drastic use of typography as in the overloaded metaphors –, writing tends to impose itself as image» (OGT 35113). Contrary to how it could appear at a first glance, Benjamin’s conception of allegory is iconoclastic rather than representational, and his conception of writing is material and objectal rather than image-oriented, precisely because the dualism between writing and image is dismantled by this unprecedented rhetorical engine: «in the field of the allegorical intuition, the image is a fragment, a rune» (OGT 35214). And, quoting Carl Horst: «he [Horst] claims that the allegory always reveals a ‘crossing of the borders of the other mode’, a transposition from the visual arts into the field of presentation of the arts ‘of language’ [...]» (OGT 35315). The notion of ‘arts of language» (redende Künste) will play a major role in this study, because the ‘transgression’ (OGT 35316) of the dualism between writing and image, poetry and visual arts, has an anti-representational power – confirmed by the use of the term of ‘field of presentation’ (Darstellungsgebiet) rather than ‘representation’ – which, as such, has also a non-dualistic power. Just like the dismantling of the dualist referentialism of the convention, the baroque allegory presents its object in its own rule following, rather than representing it through the reference to a codified and predefined system. 

The non-dualist power of the allegorical approach to the ‘arts of language’ is confirmed by a further fundamental passage from the image to the object, which is already evoked by the expression ‘brutal evidence of typography’ in the passage quoted above and is highlighted by the following claim (OGT 36017): 

The function of the baroque Bilderschrift is almost a denudation [Entblößung] rather than an unveiling [Enthüllung] of sensory objects. The emblematist doesn’t give the essence ‘behind the image’. It is rather as writing [Schrift], as caption [Unterschrift] intimately connected to the presented object in the books of emblems, that he forces the essence before the image. 

The baroque emblems – to which Benjamin often recurs as a key to his investigation of the allegory – express, together with the physical materiality of typography, the non-dualistic redefinition of the relation language-image-object; non-dualistic because baroque rhetoric performs a movement of presentation and of denudation, rather than of representation and unveiling. There is no ontological distinction between image, language and object as there is neither a process of unveiling of a pre-existing degree zero nor of reference to a pre-existing convention or rule. All is in the expression itself, in the signic as much as objectal traits of the allegory. 

Another term employed by Benjamin together with the recognition of the materiality of language is ‘overloaded metaphors’ (überladenen Metapher). The notion of metaphor disturbs, in some way, this rhetorical model. The metaphor is indeed the dualistic figure par excellence, because it requires an image-oriented conception of language and, by the same token, an unavoidable and structural difference between the expression and its field of representation hinting at a signification behind the poetic image. In other words, the metaphor does not work without a pre-existing convention. Hence, a particular attention should be devoted to the notion of ‘overload’, which actually condenses the baroque mistrust for the metaphor, highlighted and studied among others by scholars such as Jean Rousset, in the chapter La querelle de la métaphore in L’intérieur et l’extérieur (Rousset 1968, 57 s.), and Francesco Orlando, in a chapter of Illuminismo, barocco e retorica freudiana entitled Che la metafora può non essere la regina delle figure («That metaphor might not be the queen of figures», Orlando 1992, 74 s.). 

A fundamental distinction should be traced between metaphor and metaphorical overload on the one hand, and between finite polysemy and infinite polysemy on the other hand. Such a double distinction will allow to further understand the rhetorical way of functioning that is at stake in this model, and also why this model is particularly powerful in relation to lyrical poetry. The metaphorical overload destabilizes the metaphor in its conventional nature – as part of the rhétorique restreinte, to say it with Gérard Genette (Genette 1972, 21 s.) – until it deforms and disrupts it into something else: the infinite display of possible meanings of the baroque allegory. This act of overloading the metaphor implies that the metaphor is transformed into something else because the duality of its referential system based on a representational convention – which then splits the expression between an image and its zero degree – is subverted in favour of the creation of a new field of possibility. What does the metaphor become when its field of reference, when its koinè – i.e. its common significational ground upon which it is recognisable as such – is subverted? This is perhaps the most important question to be asked in relation to the rhetorical inventiveness of baroque poetry, and of baroque lyrical poetry in particular, because of the degree of concentration (cf. the false yet meaningful etymology of Dichtung as density) of the lyrical expression. 

The notion of metaphorical overload is then connected to a likewise crucial rhetorical distinction to be traced in this framework: the one between finite and infinite polysemy. If the finite referential system on which the traditional metaphor relies is shaken and redefined by the baroque poetic inventiveness (the metaphorical overload), the signification is also extended into a potentially infinite unfolding of meaning. Such a phenomenon takes place in this way because of the non-dualist rhetorical rule following operating in this context, since the baroque allegory subverts at once the system of references and the traditional metaphysical oppositions contained in a strictly metaphorical view of the poetic language.18 It therefore carries an intrinsically political overtone: the allegory as potentially infinite polysemy opens up a scenario of possibility by irreversibly subverting the perceptual coordinates of language. This is one of the deepest reasons why Benjamin, in opposition to the coeval scholar Hermann Cohen, refuses to attribute to the allegory a dimension of ‘ambiguity’ (OGT 35219). Ambiguity is, by definition, the basic feature of polysemy in standard rhetoric, which we will then call finite polysemy, to distinguish it from the completely different phenomenon manifesting itself in the infinite polysemy. So that the etymology of the word ‘polysemy’ acquires here a double implication: polysemy as ambiguity and oscillation between one meaning and the other, or polysemy as poly-polysemy, i.e. as multiplication of the signification of the baroque allegory and of the metaphorical overload until a possible final point of multiplication and stratification of meaning that I call infinite polysemy.20 

For very similar reasons, Benjamin’s allegory is permeated by universality. In this framework, universality is directly opposed to ambiguity. Universality is the direct consequence of the unfolding of infinite meaning occurring in the baroque allegory, according to which «the detail hasn’t any actual importance», since «the accessories of signification, by referring to other objects, grow such a power that they become incommensurable with respect to profane things and they are elevated to a higher level, which at times can also be sacralised» (OGT 350-35121). The infinite polysemy of the allegory opens up a space of possibility in which the language and the objects acquire, at the same ontological level, unprecedented relations. Thus, a non-dualistic feature of Benjamin’s allegory can also be grasped in its deep connection to the objectal space of the real, which is neither concealed nor hinted by the standard rhetorical dualism, but rather submitted to a process of both denudation and augmentation of its universal potentiality. Such a process of signification reveals, on the one hand, the topos of the transitory character of this world, but on the other hand, in a contradictory movement that is typically baroque, raises the terrestrial to the celestial heights of (polysemic) infinity. 

I prefer to employ the notion of ‘real’ rather than ‘reality’, because it connotes with more precision the non-verbal enigmaticity of nature and time to which language is permanently confronted. The real is opposed, almost, to the notion of ‘reality’ as first degree of linguistic and imaged representationality of the raw matter designated as ‘real’. The real appears consequently as a non-dualistic counterpart of language, because language itself is immersed in it, and because one of the core aims of the rhetorical devices described here is to create, through the poetic rule following, an alternative modality of connection between the representational system at work in language and the unrepresentability of the enigmatic surrounding environment in which we all find ourselves.22 Such an attention to the notion of ‘real’ in the baroque context can also be read in the following claim by Benjamin about the relation between nature and signification (OGT 23323): 

For the Baroque, the finality of nature is the expression of its own signification, the emblematic presentation of its sense, which, as allegorical, remains irrevocably separated from its historical realisation. History, in its moral examples and its catastrophes, was considered only as a material moment of the emblematic. 

The real, here called ‘nature’, embraces signification as an inseparable part of itself and the allegory presents it, instead of representing it: a non-dualism. History assumes by the same token purely material traits in the significational system of the baroque allegory, as a diachronic realisation of this synthesis between nature and signification embodied by the emblem. Nonetheless, as I will try to show later, a deeper layer of historicity appears in the allegory, a universal as much as personal historicity, an enigmatic historicity of the real, presented, according to Benjamin, by the figure of the skull (OGT 343). 

There is an evident risk of confusion in employing traditional terms (metaphor, polysemy) in order to describe patterns so unusual and radical that those terms themselves undergo a complete redefinition. Does the notion of allegory itself, although so radically redefined by Benjamin, fall under such an impasse? This question proves to be extremely important, since the potentially contradictory features of Benjamin’s allegory are visible in two crucial issues making the notion of allegory appear problematic for the aspects of this model that are at stake in this study. The first contradiction, which is almost a paradox, is that what I called the poly-polysemy deployed by the allegory also entails, according to Benjamin, a blatant arbitrariness: «every character [in the Trauerspiel], every object, every combination can signify any other» (OGT 35024). Even more so, the arbitrariness of the signification provokes a loss of signification itself, bringing in an autoreferential sphere that is not far away from a Derridean «renvoi indéfini de signifiant à signifiant» (Derrida 1967, 42): «from now on, it has become impossible to emit a signification, a meaning; the only signification is the one given by the allegorist» (OGT 35925). The extreme consequence of a non-dualistic approach is that everything pertains to the arbitrariness of the signifier. Yet the contradiction here is that the equation traced by Benjamin between the arbitrariness and the autoreferentiality impedes the opening of a space of possibility in the real given by the subversion of the dualism between expression and convention, thus weakening the ontological and political implications of such a model. 

The second contradictory aspect intrinsically resides in the etymology of the term ‘allegory’. The movement of the allos agoreuein involves, just like the metaphorical, a double level: the one of the expression and the one of the ‘other space’ – linguistic, representational, historical – both dissimulated and hinted by the expression. The rhetorical dualism of the allegory is dismantled, in Benjamin’s model, by the arbitrariness of the allegoresis and, in the interpretation proposed here, by the infinite polysemy of the non-dualist rule following entailed by it, because Benjamin’s claim that «every character, every object, every combination can signify any other» doesn’t necessarily imply that such a poly-polysemic system of references is autoreferential neither that it is arbitrary. Rather, such a loosening of the referential convention is the key to the opening of the poetic possibility, and of the possibility that the non-dualist infinite polysemy operates inside and towards the real instead of remaining trapped into the formal play of the signifier. Here is the interest of thinking this rhetorical model in relation to baroque lyrical poetry, because the rhetorical inventiveness of baroque lyrical poetry allows us to draw such an alternative consequence out of Benjamin’s allegorical model. 

Two major reasons for this appear to be the following: first of all, the fact that the absence of characters in lyrical poetry, or, better, the replacement of characters with less defined and more poly-polysemic instances entails both a reduction of the dualistic representationality and of the autoreferential arbitrariness of the allegory when it operates in the Trauerspiel. There is a difference between saying that «every character can signify any other» and that «every object or combination can signify any other». The two abstract instances (object and combination), more than anything else present in lyrical poetry, involve a totality, a universality which is not representational but that, on the contrary, presents a potentially infinite opening of meaning and action. As a direct consequence, the rhetorical engine of lyrical poetry tends to reduce, when not to nullify, the dualistic representationality of the fictional level that is on the contrary the basis of baroque theatre and of any other narrative device recognisable as such. 

The second factor is that there is a radical difference between the movement of the allos agoreuein and the concentration (Dichtung) operating in lyrical poetry, so well that while the poly-polysemy of the allos agoreuein leads the expression towards a parallel referential sphere, no matter here if recognisable or arbitrary, the poly-polysemy of the Dichtung is always concentrated in the textual sphere itself. A textual sphere that, at the same time, is not autoreferential: while the allos agoreuein invents a system of references, the poly-polysemy opens up the possibility of references. Benjamin’s allegorical model allows to observe baroque lyrical poetry as a complex linguistic and rhetorical process which reactivates and augments the cognitive and political relations between the language and the real through the opening of a space of possibility implied by the non-dualistic rule following. 

3. From convention to denudation 

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare. 

Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 is not only a semantic reversal of some topoi of the Petrarchan tradition, but also a first, perfect example of one of the ways in which the poetic language recreates an unconventional convention in the baroque age. As Joel Fineman remarks, it is not only that the mistress’s bodily features do not correspond to the natural conventional comparisons, but the real itself appears here out of its conventional simplifications: as the poet writes, snow is not white in reality, and hairs are not wires (Fineman 1986, 182). The reversal of the convention implies what I have called a non-dualist approach to the real and a parallel dismantling of representation, so that the 12th line can be read as physical and poetological at once: against the dualism of the metaphorical koinè («But no such roses see I in her cheeks», the rose being the metaphorical reference par excellence), poetry, like the mistress, ‘treads on the ground’. 

Fineman gives an appropriate definition of the act of dismantling the rhetorical code in the sonnet 130: «Thematically, the sonnet writes against a poetics of visual comparison and for a poetics of verbal disjunction that foregrounds the diacritical difference built into familiar similarities» (Fineman 1986, 183). It is another way of describing the passage from the visual arts to the arts ‘of language’ that Benjamin denoted as one of the features of his allegorical model: the ‘verbal disjunction’ engendered by the arts of language disrupts the representational automatism and provokes a perceptual shift, an alternative rhetorical approach to the real, a rule following. What is at stake here is a process of intensification of perception of the real through the disruption of the convention and the construction of an independent rhetorical paradigm. Such an augmentation is also a direct consequence of the process of baroque denudation (Entblößung), in Benjamin’s terms; a denudation, as well as a presentation, of a most direct relation between the language and the real, against metaphorical and representational conventions. 

Such a process might appear contradictory if confronted with what I chose to call with Benjamin the ‘metaphorical overload’ and the consequent poly-polysemy or even infinite polysemy of baroque figurality, yet it is not the case. The connection between augmentation and denudation shows the common link between a process of anti-metaphorical monism and a process of both rhetorical and perceptual enhancement of the poetic language, because they are both a result of the rule following as a creation of unconventional conventions. Precisely in this sense, the semantic concentration of lyrical poetry proves to be an essential feature for such a (re)definition of the baroque rhetorical paradigm, because the Dichtung, the density of the lyrical expression both reduces the metaphorical distance from the real and unfolds, by the same token, a new level of possibility of meaning and perception. This phenomenon manifests itself in the Baroque maybe for the first time in the history of modern poetry, because it is a direct consequence of an eminently subversive approach to representation that probably never occurred before with such awareness. A subversive approach whose systematicity is also given by the Europe-wide extension of baroque thought, and especially by the support of a similarly subversive epistemology, entirely based on the production of paradigms and devices for an augmented and intensified perception of the real. I am thinking of the historically painful affirmation of the Copernican system, of the Galilean and Newtonian discoveries of the universe, of van Leeuwenhoek’s invention of the microscope, of Giordano Bruno’s theory of the infinite. 

Let us read, having this in mind, Shakespeare’s sonnet 119: 

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears
Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessèd never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,
In the distraction of this madding fever!
O benefit of ill! Now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruined love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuked to my content,
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent. 

The first two lines of this sonnet are a remarkable example of Dichtung as lyrical concentration and of metaphorical overload producing poly-polysemy. The system of references is opened and subverted to the point that it is not possible to detect a recognisable convention out of the rule following of the poetic expression itself. If the alchemy-like semantics and the presence of the mythological figure of the siren could appear as a possible referential koinè at the beginning, the hermeneutical process is contrasted by the impossibility of delineating a unique degree zero of these lines which, as such, are neither a metaphor nor an allegory, but perhaps a new combination of the two. The following part of the poem allows to explain the reason of its beginning: the experience described could never be as universal – also in the sense of Benjamin’s allegory – nor would it grasp so closely the becoming of a subject into a deeper knowledge of the self, and therefore of the real («Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater»), if the figural landscape of the text allowed a finite number of interpretations. It is of course possible to realise that this sonnet describes an experience of crisis in love, of difficult relation, maybe of betrayal like in other sonnets, in any case of loss of the self in the dark spaces of extreme feelings until a new cognitive and emotional status is acquired; yet, what makes this text, and the experience of this text, so innovative and so subversive is its ability to redefine, through its poly-polysemic rule following, such an emotional status as an additional space of possibility. Perception and signification are augmented together with the knowledge of the real, through the experience of the text, and through the text as experience: a denudation. Thus, the line «How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted» doesn’t only describe the extreme nature of this experience of knowledge, but also the impossibility of representing it through standard poetic devices. 

This consideration brings up another difference, outlined in the Origin of German Tragic Drama, between the arts of the image and the arts of language (OGT 38526): 

The ‘passion for the organic’27, which has often been evoked in relation to the baroque visual arts, is not so easy to seize in the domain of poetry. On that note, it is necessary to observe that these words28 refer less to the external form than to the mysterious spaces of the organic. It is from these internal spaces that the voice comes from [...] 

Although here Benjamin directly refers to the baroque vocal music, it seems to me that his remark on the voice as a language art device, exploring ‘the mysterious spaces of the organic’, could very well be applied to the deepest significational layers of the sonnet 119 as well as to other similar baroque lyrical densities very well known by Benjamin, such as, in some cases, Andreas Gryphius’s poetry. Yet, Gryphius’s poetic results are mostly weaker than the ones reached by Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The reason of such a disparity also resides in the fact that, although Gryphius’s baroque inventiveness is undeniable, the rhetorical figurality of his poetry is not as innovative as Shakespeare’s one as it is much more limited by a schematic religious ideology. It is as if Gryphius were about to jump over the representational obstacle without at the end being free enough to create completely new relations. This phenomenon does not concern Gryphius only in the German context of the same years and it has broader historical reasons that will not be investigated further here.29 

Some of Gryphius’s most relevant lyrical examples of this exploration and denudation of the mysterious ‘internal spaces’ are often permeated by strong chiaroscuro effects and, as in Shakespeare, by the poly-polysemic presence of the night, like in the two final tercets of the Sonnet II -1, Morning Sonnet30: 

Vertreib die dicke Nacht / die meine Seel umbgibt / Die Schmertzen Finsternüß / die Hertz und Geist betrübt / Erquicke mein Gemütt / und stärcke mein Vertrauen.

Gib/ daß ich disen Tag / in deinem Dinst allein Zubring: und wenn mein End’ und jenerTag bricht ein Daß ich dich / meine Sonn mein Licht mög ewig: schauen. 

Here the night is both internal and external, like the morning, in the rest of the sonnet, is both terrestrial and divine. The last line performs a reversal of the chiaro-scuro proportions, because the night of death becomes morning light in the presence of an intensified layer of perception, that in Gryphius corresponds at once to the knowledge of the self and to the spiritual elevation of the soul. This, also rhetorical, upheaval of light and dark is condensed by the famous oxymoric formulation which begins and ends the sonnet I -3, On the Birth of Jesus. Let us read the first quatrain and the last line31: 

NAcht / mehr denn lichte Nacht! Nacht / lichter als der Tag / 

Nacht / heller als die Sonn’ / in der das Licht geboren /
Das Gott / der Licht / in Licht wohnhafftig / ihm erkohren:
O Nacht / die alle Nacht’ und Tage trotzen mag.
[…]
Nacht lichter als der Tag! Nacht mehr denn lichte Nacht! 

The spiritual experience, here incarnated by the night of the birth of Jesus, is Gryphius’s preferred vehicle towards his own rule following. The rhetorical disruption is provoked here by the paradoxical oxymoron guiding the whole sonnet and by the cyclic structure of the poem. This night that is ‘shining more than day’ is not only an allegory of Jesus’s glory, but it is also a real phenomenon, a phenomenon of the real, an augmented perceptual as much as spiritual experience engendered by the Dichtung with its specific rhetorical engine. 

Yet, Gryphius’s night is not as poly-polysemic as many dizzying shakespearean lines like the following from the sonnet 27: 

Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new. 

As another example of the parallel baroque passage from the external to the internal experience of the self and from the visual arts to the arts ‘of language’, the sight is transfigured into the ‘sightless view’ of the soul during a poly-polysemic night, embodied by the most interesting expression, in this passage, from the point of view of rhetoric: «like a jewel hung in ghastly night». The metaphorical interpretation comparing the beloved man to a jewel appearing in the night barely scratches the surface of this figure. The adjective ‘ghastly’ condenses the layered and enigmatic nature of this external and internal night, night of the self, night of imagination and perception, opening another way of looking at the dark space of the organic, in Benjamin’s terms. And why is the jewel ‘hung’ then? Is the degree zero to be intended as: the night is like an ear? Is the image of the beloved ‘oscillating’ like an earring? More than that, as it is possible to detect through the analysis Francesco Orlando gave of these very similar lines from Romeo and Juliet, that Shakespeare certainly had in mind when he wrote the sonnet 27: 

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear 

It is worth quoting almost entirely Orlando’s analysis of the rhetorical structure of these two lines, in a remarkable passage which tells a lot about what we called poly-polysemy, lyrical density, metaphorical overload and rule following (Orlando 1992, 11732): 

An elaboration of oneiric kind – which tends to condensate the similar into the identical – organizes correspondences among three couples of similar elements and fantastic equations with four terms: the splendour of the young lady is to the one of the jewel what the black of the night is to the color of the skin of an Ethiopian woman. But the fact that the jewel is an earring overdetermines the equation, inserting in the metaphorical relationship the metonymy of the ear, engendering by symmetry the cheek on the other side, and introducing from both sides the predicate of taking. Yet what makes even more peculiar and exotically concrete the comparing image, by duplicating into the (imaginary) reality of the compared things, makes those absolutely undetermined and incredible: the most surreal line is the first, in which – without a ‘like’ – a cheek is attributed to the real night, a cheek on which, by poetic invention, the real young lady hangs; and as it was not enough, this first line precedes the comparative line, even though it became the reflection of the latter. It is as if, by contagion, the common attributes invaded the space of the uncommon attributes, undermining the identities guaranteed by such a space. 

I will add, about the line of sonnet 27 intertextually quoting the two lines of Romeo and Juliet, that it eliminates further the factors of comparison as well as the metaphorical and metonymical nature of the image, thus even more radically undermining the identities and the conventional attributes in favour of an infinite polysemy. 

In terms of powerful freedom of the rule following, but further away from the infinite polysemy, a remarkable example can also be found in Gryphius, in a famous courageously deconstructed sonnet entitled Die Hölle (The Hell), in which, as the title indicates, the metrical and rhythmical process (of the first lines in particular) has been conceived in order to give a perception as real as possible of the infernal world33: 

Ach! und weh! 

Mord! Zetter! Jammer! Angst! Creutz! Marter! Würme! Plagen. Pech! Folter! Hencker! Flamm! Stanck! Geister! Kälte! Zagen! 

Ach vergeh!
Tieff’ und Höh’!
Meer! Hügel! Berge! Felß! wer kan die Pein ertragen? 

Each word here contributes to perform a primordial rhythmicity. The violence of the rhythmical repetition is mirrored by the unique semantic field to which all the words belong until the penultimate line of the quote, even though with some refined zeugmatic slippages, such as the introduction of ‘Würme’ between ‘Marter’ and ‘Plagen’. In the last line of this passage, despite the rhythmical structure of the poem which remains the same, the reader witnesses an astonishing reversal: under the uninterrupted rule following, earthly objects such as the sea and the mountains appear under the same painful light of the previous infernal elements, thus creating a deeper conjunction and denudation of the relationship between life and death, this world and afterlife, under the aegis of an interrupted sinful sorrow between the two stages. Many of the words of the previous lines then assume a deeper signification, both earthly and spiritual, physical and metaphysical. Although the metrics and the rhymes are respected, the effect is powerfully experimental and sensorily perceptual. Here, even in the core of German Christian ideology, the rule following shows a deeply baroque oscillation between the creation of an unconventional convention and a freedom of thought and artistic practice which certainly occurred as a complex response to the Counterreformation, but whose innovatory results were first of all encouraged by one of the most radical epistemological and cognitive subversions in modernity. A subversion in which the cosmological balance between mankind and the surrounding world was shaken by a sudden cognitive instability and sense of infinity deriving from a both theoretical and technological augmentation of the perceptual relations to the outer and inner spaces. 

Rule following as unconventional convention and as subversion, augmentation and denudation, metaphorical overload and reduction of metaphoricity, exploration of the real and of the internal dark organic spaces of the self, allegoresis and literalness, Dichtung as concentration and poly-polysemy as multiplication of meaning: these complementary oppositions, rather than being in contradiction, illustrate the subversive character of the baroque approach to knowledge and the opening of a space of possibility ensuing from it. 

4. The vanitas and the sphere as denudation, augmentation and concentration 

In this perspective, the baroque topos of the vanitas assumes a deeper signification. This topos is largely present both in Gryphius and Shakespeare as well as in many other baroque poets.34 Let us first read the two final tercets of Gryphius’s sonnet II-6, Einsamkeit (Solitude)35: 

Die Höl’ / der rauhe Wald der Todtenkopff / der Stein /
Den auch die Zeit aufffrist / die abgezehrten Bein
Entwerffen in dem Mutt unzehliche Gedancken.

Der Mauren alter Grauß / diß ungebau’te Land
Ist schön und fruchtbar nur / der eigentlich erkant / 

Daß alles / ohn ein Geist / den Gott selbst hält / muß wancken. 

The forest, the cave, and especially the skull are baroque allegories in Benjamin’s terms (OGT 343). They are preceded by two quatrains in which the poet meditates, in a desert land, on the ‘Eitelkeit’, the vanitas of everything. The act of denudation, of which the skull is the ultimate and most evident level, is ‘schön und fruchtbar’ only to those who are sustained by God. The ‘unzehliche Gedanken’ are as numerous as the potential amount of signification contained in those allegories, and they are ‘entwerffen in dem Mutt’, i.e. in the dark and mysterious spaces of the inside, spaces that are almost non-verbal and also not representable. The poet, in fact, does not say, nor maybe cannot say more about them. 

In Shakespeare, the meditation on the vanitas can also be a vehicle for the creation of an independent rhetorical rule following, like in sonnet 5: 

For never-resting Time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there,
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness every where.
Then were not summer’s distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft 

From the point of view of this study, the epithet of summer as «a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass» is the core moment of these lines and it appears to be not less powerful, in terms of its rhetorical openness, than the «limbecks foul as hell within» or the «jewel hung in ghastly night» that I analysed above. These two first textual examples suggest that the vanitas, under the light of the model that I am confronting with Benjamin’s theory of the baroque allegory, is not only a meditation on the fleetingness of things, but it is itself a process of denudation, a non-dualist approach to the real, because it reduces the distance between language and world by revealing a deeper and more complex nature, out of the metaphorical convention. In order to accomplish this action, poetry has to produce its own rule following, which consists, like in these shakespearean lines, in a process of concentration and of simultaneous augmentation of the layers of signification of the poetic expression and of the intensity of the perceptual experience engendered by them. 

It is worth noticing that where for Gryphius God is the only solution to the fleetingness of life, for Shakespeare poetry can perpetuate what time destroys. Shakespeare has a stronger faith in poetry as an instrument against decay, whereas for Gryphius the only way of defeating time is purely metaphysical, like sonnets I-8 and II-6 for instance show, among many others. If for Gryphius there is no human activity that can defeat the decay of time, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets the recourse to poetry as a solution to the violence of time is a true leitmotiv running all along the book, from sonnet 15 to 77, and in most cases it is connected with another recurring theme: the black colour. Black, in Shakespeare, is an eminently poly-polysemic instance: the black of the night and of the mysterious spaces of the inside; the blackness of the dark lady in the last sequence of the Sonnets; and, in the vanitas sonnets, mostly featured in the ‘homoerotic’ series, the black of the ink in which poetry is written (but also the white of the page in sonnet 77) and therefore left to posterity. At the end of sonnet 63 for example: «His beauty shall in these black lines be seen»; and at the end of sonnet 65: «That in black ink my love may still shine bright». The blackness of ink clearly is, in both passages, a poetic warranty of permanence against the transience of the body. Ink replaces body when the latter decays. Poetry, in Shakespeare, stands against the vanitas while at the same time revealing it (see also e.g. sonnets 15 and 60). Such a revelation is, one more time, a denudation rather than an unveiling, a distinction that can be applied to the concept of vanitas itself. Under this light, the vanitas could be considered as a process where poetry, similarly to sonnets 130 and 119, aims at creating an intensified – and therefore terrifying – relation to the diachronic historicity of the real by reducing the dualism between expression and convention or by creating an unconventional convention. My claim, in other words, is that the vanitas is not just a topos of the fleetingness of things: it is a process showing a deeper layer in the historicity of the real. 

The question of the conventionality of the emblems and allegories hinting at the vanitas remains nonetheless problematic. Such objects had to belong somehow to a significational koinè in order to be understood. Yet the skull is, according to Benjamin, one of the most relevant manifestations of the baroque allegory because it is a syncretic presentation of a universal historicity, and, as such, it may be seen as an unconventional convention. It would be probably possible to state the same for many other objects, for instance those recurring in baroque still life paintings, and this could be the topic of a whole other study. On the other hand, in a famous later annotation Benjamin states: «Die barocke Allegorie sieht die Leiche nur von außen. Baudelaire sieht sie auch von innen» (In Central Park, GS I, 684); «Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from outside. Baudelaire sees it also from inside» (trans. Cowan 1981, 121), thus identifying a conventional character in the symbolical and/or allegorical historicity of the body in baroque aesthetics. Besides the open question of the conventional or unconventional nature of the baroque allegory in Benjamin’s analysis of the Trauerspiel, what I argue is that in baroque lyrical poetry the degree of rhetorical unconventionality of the topoi and of the allegories is higher. In order to understand this further, it is necessary to stress the connection between the vanitas as described here and another baroque topos: the sphere. This essential connection can be presented for instance through a painting which, interestingly enough, is also reproduced on the cover of the French edition of Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama. It is a Vanitas by Flemish painter Vincent Laurentz van der Vinne I. 

The topos of the sphere, also often associated, together with the vanitas, to the neighbouring topoi of the lather, the dew (see e.g. Gryphius’s sonnet I-45), the tears and the pearls (see e.g. Shakespeare’s sonnet 34, or well one of John Donne’s most remarkable poems: A Valediction: Of Weeping), carries two features that are essential for my approach and through which it possible to provide a deeper explanation of the reason why the topoi of the vanitas and of the sphere are so strongly interweaved. 

[Fig. 1. Vincent Laurentz van der Vinne I, Vanitas, Oil on canvas, 17th century, Pushkin Museum, Moscow. Detail.] 

First of all, the baroque sphere is a concentration. In OGT 327, Benjamin connects the topos of the sphere to baroque cosmology, attributing the spherical form of the planets to a power of concentration of matter. Also, the sphere can then be considered as a Dichtung, an image of the poetical density and of the significational concentration at work in the baroque metaphorical overload. But the sphere is also an augmentation: it bulges towards the surrounding environment from the unconventional perspective of its geometrical curve, and by doing so, it reveals a deeper layer of the real, just like the vanitas reveals the real in its mysterious yet inevitable historicity. Hence, in this Vanitas by van der Vinne I, the reflection of the painter himself contained in the sphere, in a typically baroque mirroring to which we shall also go back: the subject (and the artist) is subject to the convexity of the sphere because it is there shown under a different way of looking, in a modified and intensified perceptual and experiential relation to the real, and as such exposed to a process of augmentation and denudation. Like in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the fleetingness of the body is at once exposed and negated by the work of art, and, like in sonnets 119 and 27, the subject undertakes, through the geometry and the reflection of the sphere, a path of augmented knowledge of the most enigmatic inner and outer spaces and of the unrepresentable historicity of the organic: «How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted», in Shakespeare’s terms. 

Hence, the convexity of the baroque sphere is not a distortion, although it is a transgression of the convention: unlike the metaphor, the sphere doesn’t alter the nature of the real neither it performs a separation between the world and the image it gives of it. As an allegorical and, as such, a rhetorical form, the sphere is rather a non-dualistic unity in which the concentration and the multiplication of meaning, the augmentation and the denudation, the metaphorical overload and the allegory converge by showing the epistemological turn embodied by the Baroque. A bending, a convexity, an infinite polysemy as Bruno’s infinite universe, a lens of van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope or of Galileo’s telescope, through which the perception and the experience of the real underwent an irreversible change. 

5. Convexities 

I chose a detail of a painting in order to express, not without apparent contradiction, a higher degree of rhetorical concentration and augmentation at work in baroque lyrical poetry, as a consequence of a higher degree of rhetorical independence than in other art forms. Although such a theoretical gesture supports the reactivation of baroque topoi and figures shown in this study, on the other hand it is true that van der Vinne’s painting is nothing but a representation of a sphere, a bidimensional allegorical interpretation of it. As such, it is an interpretation of a much more layered possibility of meaning contained in this figure, if it is taken literally as a figure of rhetoric rather than a simple baroque topos. For it is not just about the sphere as an allegorical item or as a topos, but it is about the movement of convexity as centrifugal concentration and centripetal multiplication of meaning, as trajectory bulging towards the real and as disclosure of the mysterious layering of the organic, as alternative curve of the historicity, as mirror through which the subject comes redefined, as lens through which the world appears augmented and complexified. So that this other iconological reference appears to be probably even more effective (see fig. 2). 

This famous Mannerist painting about which, en passant, John Ashbery wrote one of his most celebrated poetry books (Ashbery 1975), is not only a painting, it is not only an image: it is – most importantly for us – an object, for it is painted on a wooden hemisphere. The subject physically bulges towards the environment and his hand – that Ashbery compares to a whale – is more visible than anything else on the painting because it shows the painter while he is painting and simultaneously looking at himself in a convex mirror. Hence the title: Autoritratto in uno specchio convesso (Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror). 

Besides the iconoclastic power of a pictorial gesture bringing the image into the status of object and having in mind – with the wish to study it specifically in another occasion – the theoretical potentiality of the baroque anamorphosis as a mode of denudation similar to the vanitas, we could claim that this work of art condenses, in the implications brought by its convex form, several key notions that I explored in this study. Convexity, in Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait, shows a becoming and a discovery, a perceptual expansion of the subject towards the external and internal spaces of the real, and a parallel expansion of the image into the object. The subject becomes, in the remarkable expression employed by the Italian poet Antonio Porta in order to describe his own poetic experience, a ‘field of tensions’ (Porta 1980). It is no more a rigid, identifiable subject: it is rather, like in the poetic examples examined above, a subject becoming in the real, embracing its own historicity, thus de-psychologised, de-representationalised, turned into an intensified and augmented perception of itself as a portion of the world, through this gesture of bulging towards the world, unfolding an infinite, and infinitely becoming, polysemy. 

[Fig. 2. Francesco Maria Mazzola detto Il Parmigianino, Autoritratto in uno specchio convesso, Oil on wooden panel, 1523-24, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.] 

It is from this point of view that I would like to read Shakespeare’s sonnet 77, supposing that the mirror mentioned in it has – perhaps not only conceptually – a convex form. This interpretation is validated by the recurring presence of convex mirrors in Shakespeare’s historical period (Kinney 2004, 20) and by the use of convex mirror devices in Shakespeare’s plays, according to Adam Max Cohen’s recent study on Shakespeare and Technology (Cohen 2006, 164 and 168). Let us quote the entire sonnet: 

Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear,
Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste,
The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear,
And of this book, this learning mayst thou taste:
The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show
Of mouthèd graves will give thee memory;
Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know
Time’s thievish progress to eternity.
Look what thy memory cannot contain
Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find
Those children nursed, delivered from thy brain,
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.
These offices, so oft as thou wilt look,
Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book. 

Just like Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait, this sonnet condenses the vanitas and the mysterious historicity of the body (‘mouthed graves’), the enigma of the real and of its own becoming, the knowledge and the evolution of the self, the permanence of poetry against time, and the poly-polysemy ensuing from an augmented perceptual and cognitive paradigm, here described in the last two lines as a sort of personal – and as such eminently unconventional – rite. A rite of denudation and of possibility. The notion of convexity solves perhaps the paradoxes of Benjamin’s allegorical model in the specific framework of baroque lyrical poetry and of its rhetorical way of functioning. Convexity as a rhetorical engine unknots the double risk of autoreferentiality, detected in the arbitrariness of the allegory as sign, and of dualistic contradiction in the movement of the allos agoreuein itself. Convexity, or, better, convexities, as to contain every manifestation of this movement, from the thematic level (the sphere, the lather, the pearls, the mirror, the cosmos, etc.) to the multiple rhetorical and epistemological implications of such a figure as a synthesis of a certain baroque approach to the Dichtung. Convexity, then – this is my hypothesis for future works – can be seen as an alternative and complementary narrative to Deleuze’s model of the fold and Egginton’s model of the hole (Deleuze 1988; Egginton 2009, 11 s.). This notion expresses a narrative of curves and densities rather than a dialectic of fullness and voids. Yet, unlike Deleuze’s folds and Egginton’s holes, its rhetorical implications are specifically appropriate for baroque lyrical poetry, of which I only examined a few examples in only two authors and in only one form (the sonnet). In future works, I would like to put this model to the test of a wider amount of 17th century poetic examples, and to develop further its theoretical implications besides Benjamin’s allegorical model. 

In this specific essay, the convexity model is a counterpart to Benjamin’s allegory because the act of bulging towards the outside reproduces the movement of the allos agoreuein but without remaining in an autoreferential negation of possibility and, at the same time, without falling into the risk of a dualistic hypostatisation. Every layer of signification is augmented and multiplied, but it is also concentrated and intensified in the density of the poetic language. All the way through and beyond Benjamin’s theory of the allegory, the notion of convexity contains at once a rhetorical and an epistemological model at work in poetry yet proper to the baroque thought in toto (let us think again of van Leeuwenhoek’s and Galileo’s lenses). From the vanitas to the sphere, by showing the relativity of perception, by diving into the illusion, but also by discovering a wider cognitive spectrum through its multiple lenses and by submitting the investigation of historicity to a change of paradigm, this model approaches the enigma of the real through its curved geometry and unfolds, as such, a deeper horizon of subversion and possibility.36 

Bibliography 

Books: Ashbery John, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror [1975], New York: Penguin, 1990. Badiou Alain, À la recherche du réel perdu, Paris: Fayard, 2015. Benjamin Walter, Gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989, 7 volumes (GS 1-7). ___ The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, with a foreword by George Steiner, London – New York: Verso, 1998. Cohen Adam Max, Shakespeare and Technology. Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. De Angelis Enrico (ed., trans.), Andreas Gryphius: Notte, lucente notte (Sonetti), Venice: Marsilio, 1993. De Francesco Alessandro, Pour une théorie non-dualiste de la poésie (1960-1989), PhD dissertation, University of Paris-Sorbonne, 2013. De Man Paul, Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Deleuze Gilles, Le Pli. Leibniz et le Baroque, Paris: Minuit, 1988. Deleuze Gilles – Guattari Félix, Capitalisme et schizofrénie I: L’Anti-Œdipe, Paris: Minuit, 1973. Derrida Jacques, L’écriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil, 1967. Egginton William, The Theatre of Truth. The Ideology of (Neo) Baroque Aesthetics, Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2009. Fineman Joel, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Genette Gérard, Figures III, Paris: Seuil, 1972. Gryphius Andreas, Dichtungen, ed. Karl-Otto Konrady, Hamburg: Rohwolt, 1968. Heidegger Martin, Der Satz von Grund, Pfullingen: Neske, 1957. Kinney Arthur F., Shakespeare’s Webs. Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama, New York: Routledge, 2004. Lacan Jacques, L’Identification, séminaire 1961-62, http:// staferla.free.fr/S9/S9.htm. Orlando Francesco, Illuminismo, Barocco e retorica freudiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Plett Henrich F., Literary Rhetoric. Concepts, structures, analyses, Boston – Leiden: Brill, 2010. Prigent Christian, L’Incontenable, Paris: P.O.L., 2004. Ricœur Paul, La Métaphore vive [1975], Paris: Seuil, 1997. Rosset Clément, Le Réel : traité de l’idiotie [1978], Paris: Minuit, 2004. Roubaud Jacques, Poésie etcetera : ménage, Paris: Stock, 1995. Rousset Jean, L’intérieur et l’extérieur. Essai sur la poésie et sur le théâtre au XVII siècle, Paris: Corti, 1968. Schindler Marvin S., The Sonnets of Andreas Gryphius. Use of the Poetic Word in the Seventeenth Century, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971. Segel Harold Bernard, The Baroque Poem. A Comparative Survey, Boston: Dutton, 1974. Serpieri Alessandro (ed., trans.), William Shakespeare: Sonetti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1991. Shakespeare William, Sonnets, Quarto edition, London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609. Wells Stanley, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Wittgenstein Ludwig, Werkausgabe Band 1: Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Tagebücher 1914-1916, Philosophische Untersuchungen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006. Articles: Cowan Bainard, Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory, in ‘New German Critique’, Durham: Duke University Press, No. 22, Special Issue on Modernism (Winter, 1981), pp. 109-122. Gleize Jean-Marie, interview with Lionel Destremau, « Prétexte », Hors série 9, 1998: http://pretexte.perso.neuf.fr/ PretexteEditeur/ancien-site/revue/entretiens/discussions-thematiques_poesie/discussions/jean-marie-gleize.htm Porta Antonio and Sasso Luigi, interview in ‘Il Castoro’, issue 166, October 1980: http://ebooks.gutenberg.us/wordtheque/it/ AAABWU.TXT Wilkens Matthew, Toward a Benjaminian Theory of Dialectical Allegory, in ‘New Literary History’, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 37, No. 2, Critical Inquiries (Spring, 2006), pp. 285-298. 

Note 

1 Tr. «Foresight of works to come, such as a big essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets». 

2 In GS 1 for the German version. Die Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels was published in English by Verso in John Osborne’s translation (Benjamin 1998). Although I always took Osborne’s translation into account, I have decided to propose my own translations of the passages quoted from this work. 

3 See for instance Harold B. Segel’s seminal anthology The Baroque Poem. A Comparative Survey (Segel 1974). 

4 I intend to closely examine all these works in separate studies to come. 

5 “ein konventionelles Verhältnis zwischen einem bezeichnenden Bilde und seiner Bedeutung”. 

6 “Die Allegorie des XVII. Jahrhunderts ist nicht Konvention des Ausdrucks sondern Ausdruck der Konvention”. 

7 “geschaffene [… ] Konvention”. 

8Philosophische Untersuchungen [Philosophical Investigations], § 186. 

9 «Unlike the symbol, the effectiveness of which was based on the unifiability of vehicle and tenor (and of author and reader), Baroque allegory maintained the divisions between them without displacing entirely the idea of their relationship as supplied by the formal dialectic between convention and expression, itself allegorized for the Baroque through the interplay of history and nature in the ruin. Convention, the reified form of historical consciousness, found its form in the unified and orthodox object of human agency, whereas expression, its necessarily fragmentary and heterodox antithesis, consisted in the uniquely determined, individual disintegration of that object.» 

10 «die Allegorie ist beides, Konvention und Ausdruck». 

11 «so wie Sprache Ausdruck ist, ja so wie Schrift». 

12 «Der barocken Lyrik ist die gleiche Bewegung eigentümlich […] Um der Versenkung Widerpart zu halten, hat ständig neu und ständig überraschend das Allegorische sich zu entfalten». 

13 «Äußerlich und stilistisch - in der Drastik des Schriftsatzes wie in der überladenen Metapher - drängt das Geschriebene zum Bilde». 

14 «Das Bild im Feld der allegorischen Intuition ist Bruchstück, Rune». 

15 «Dem ungeachtet heißt’s von der Allegorie, daß sie ‘immer ein ,überschreiten der Grenzen der anderen Art, ein übertreten der bildenden Künste ins Darstellungsgebiet der «redenden» zu erkennen gibt’». 

16 «Grenzverletzung». 

17 «Nicht sowohl Enthüllung als geradezu Entblößung der sinnlichen Dinge ist die Funktion der barocken Bilderschrift. Der Emblematiker gibt nicht das Wesen ‘hinter dem Bilde’. Als Schrift, als Unterschrift, wie diese in Emblemenbüchern innig mit dem Dargestellten zusammenhängt, zerrt er dessen Wesen vors Bild». Benjamin’s quote is from Samuel von Butschky, Wohl-Bebauter Rosen-Thal (1679). 

18 We are not far away from Heidegger’s claim according to which «the metaphorical exists only within the metaphysical» (Heidegger 1957, 89), criticized by Paul Ricœur who at the same time, as I tried to show in another work, struggled to propose an alternative model (see De Francesco 2013, 296 s.). 

19 «Zweideutigkeit». 

20 I thank Judith Balso for having guided me towards the proposal of this important distinction during our common work at the European Graduate School. 

21 «es aufs Detail so streng nicht ankommt […] jene Requisiten des Bedeutens alle mit eben ihrem Weisen auf ein anderes eine Mächtigkeit gewinnen, die den profanen Dingen inkommensurabel sie erscheinen läßt und sie in eine höhere Ebene hebt, ja heiligen kann». 

22 For studies on the notion of “real” under similar angles, cf. the classical works by Rosset 2004; Lacan 1961-1962; Deleuze-Guattari 1973, 103 s.; and, more recently, by Alain Badiou (Badiou 2015). For poetological studies on the notion of “real”, cf. Prigent 2004; De Francesco 2013. 

23 «Denn dem Barock gilt die Natur als zweckmäßig für den Ausdruck ihrer Bedeutung, für die emblematische Darstellung ihres Sinnes, die als allegorische unheilbar verschieden von seiner geschichtlichen Verwirklichung bleibt. Geschichte galt in den moralischen Exempeln und den Katastrophen nur als ein stoffliches Moment der Emblematik». 

24 «Jede Person, jedwedes Ding, jedes Verhältnis kann ein beliebiges anderes bedeuten.» 

25 «eine, Bedeutung, einen Sinn auszustrahlen, ist er von nun an ganz unfähig; an Bedeutung kommt ihm das zu, was der Allegoriker ihm verleiht». 

26 «Die ‚Leidenschaft für das Organische‘, von der man längst beim bildlichen Barock gesprochen hat, ist nicht so leicht im dichterischen zu umreißen. Und immer wird dabei zu merken sein, daß nicht so sehr der äußeren Gestalt als der geheimnisvollen Innenräume des Organischen in solchen Worten zu gedenken ist. Aus diesen Innenräumen dringt die Stimme [...]». 

27 Benjamin’s quote is from Wilhelm Hausenstein’s Vom Geist des Barock, 1921. 

28 The words of the choir in the pastorale and the opera. 

29 They have been widely explored by Benjamin, who cites Gryphius together with Lohenstein and Opitz as examples of higher literary quality compared to other German poets and playwrights of the same period and of lower inventiveness in comparison to Spanish masters such as Calderon and Lope de Vega, or to Shakespeare himself. Such an inferiority in respect to the foreign masters incarnates, according to Benjamin, the difference between the intrinsically ideological German Trauerspiel and the greater freedom of expression of the European baroque tragedy and comedy (OGT, passim). 

30 Tr. Schindler 1971 (slightly adapted): «Drive out the heavy night that holds my soul in bondage, / The gloominess of pain that darkens heart and mind. / Restore my weary spirit, make strong my faith. / Allow me this one day at your command alone / To serve; and when that day arrives that marks my end, / then grant, my sun, my light, eternal sight of you». 

31 Tr. Schindler 1971: «Night, more than brilliant night! Night, brighter than the day! / Night brighter than the sun, a night on which was born that light / Which God, Light of Lights, had chosen as His light. / O night, which proudly can defy all nights and days […] Night, brighter than the day! Night, more than brilliant night!» 

32 I translate from the Italian. 

33 Tr. Schindler 1971 (to which I added a line – the last one of the quote – which has been astonishingly omitted by the translator): «Moans and pain! / Murder! Screams! Affliction! Woe! Anguish! Torture! Worms! Torment! / Pitch! Hangman! Spirits! Stench! Rack! Cold! Quaking! / O pass from sight! / Depths and heights! / Sea! Hills! Mountains! Rocks! Who can bear the pain?». Another translation and comment of this poem is to be found in Plett 2010, 250 s. 

34 Such as Góngora, a true master of the poetic vanitas. 

35 Tr. Schindler 1971 (slightly modified): «This cave, the wild forest, the skull, the stone, / devoured too by time, the fleshless unknown bones, / All these have filled my mind with countless thoughts. / The gloom of these old walls, the uncultivated land, / Holds beauty and great value for one like me who knows / That no soul can sustain itself without a life in God». 

36 I would like to express here my gratitude to Prof. Kurt Vanhoutte for his scientific advice and to Dr. Andrea Parravicini for his precious editing suggestions.