Paul de Man, Marrying Mind and Nature, and Ruskin's Theories of Symbolism

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 11, Chapter 2, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

Paul de Man's interpretation of such discrepancies has become an influential challenge to older interpretations of the romantic marriage of mind to nature. According to de Man, "The dialectic between subject and object does not designate the main romantic experience, but only one passing moment in a dialectic, and a negative one at that, since it represents a temptation that has to be overcome." The Coleridgean symbol represents the "negative" moment of the romantic dialectic; the positive moment is allegory, a system of signs in which the relation of a sign to signified is superseded by tile relation of signifier to signifier in a temporal sequence. "Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference" (pp. 188, 191).

I have argued that Ruskin's defense of naturalistic representation represents an extreme form of the wish to marry mind and nature, the wish that de Man calls a temptation to be overcome, and that he marries the two by supplementing romantic epistemology through an analysis of visual rather than verbal signs -- signs, that is, which do in some sense resemble the objects they represent. In brief summary: deep seeing and therefore great art based on such seeing can really give access to the quidditas of things, to their "characteristic" essences and energies, because the eye takes in particulars by forming coherent wholes greater than the sum of the parts; because certain parts or signs can be recognized as particularly meaningful even by people who do not have enough experience to form constant associations; and because the eye can intuitively judge between "genuine" representations and mere copies. Signs, in other words, are synecdochic of a whole, and this character can be verified by experience; representations can therefore be objectively valid, though never complete in their account of reality.

The most interesting critique of such a view is E. H. Gombrich's theory of making and matching, which holds that the gestalt itself rests on conventional knowledge, not on a biological predisposition. But Ruskin also implies that physical energies are manifestations of divine, that is, spiritual or ,"moral" energies, and this belief allows him to view landscape art as a literal incorporation of divine power. He reinforces his view by constantly referring words to pictures and pictures back to words (his books contain illustrations of the subjects he describes, and of course his readers are invited to go to the actual scenes themselves), but the theory holds good only for literal representations and requires the denial of subjective elements such as association and an independent faculty of imagination, The crux of Ruskinian aesthetics is his treatment of figurative representation; and here, as we will see, he holds that metaphors further enhance our perception of natural and spiritual powers. For the relationship of his later theory to de Man's argument, see Chapter 6, n. 10.

References

Gombrich, Ernst. Art and Illusion. New York: Bollingen Foundation, Pantheon, 1960.

de Man, Paul. "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Interpretation, ed. Charles S. Singleton.

Last modified December 2000