Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)
ÉVA ANTAL The Rhetoric and Ethics of Reading
62 Éva Antal the form is never anything but a process on the way to its completion" (de Man BI, 28). And the symbol that can show the true nature of textual understanding is not the circle or the arch, but the spiral line that consists of seemingly closed/closing circles displaying the temporal and neverending process of understanding, that is, the rhetoric of temporality. In Blindness and Insight in the essay titled "The Rhetoric of Temporality", de Man regards allegory together with irony as the key rhetorical tropes in our (textual) understanding. Here he is concerned with the differences of the two rhetorical figures, which he defines in their relation to time. Though both show the discontinuous relationship between sign and meaning, the experience of time in the case of irony means "a synchronic structure, while allegory appears as a successive mode capable of engendering duration" (de Man BI, 226)—that is, it is diachronic. It is quite obvious why de Man feels obliged to distinguish the two tropes: he wants to resist, to get detached or differentiated from the new critical reading asserting that "the dialectical play between the two modes, as well as their common interplay with mystified forms of language ..which it is not in their power to eradicate, make up what is called literary history" (de Man BI, 226). We can guess that after the New Critical emphasis on irony as a basic principle, in the de Manian reading, allegory is given primacy. Having published his theoretical works, de Man starts to interpret/read philosophical and literary texts relying on his ideas of the rhetorical. In the greatest collection of his readings titled Allegories of Reading (its subtitle says: Figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust) he defines his rhetorical mode of reading: The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration. As distinguished from primary deconstructive narratives centered on figures and ultimately always on a metaphor, we can call such narratives to the second (or the third) degree allegories. Allegorical narratives tell the story of the failure to read, (de Man AR, 205) But I can immediately add that efforts are made again and again as we try to understand, try to read a text and its allegory. It means that in the background, not only in the texts but in language itself, there should be something that makes the different allegorical readings possible and also helps us readers accept the impossibility of a final reading. We 'need' this something that is essentially rhetorical; we need irony. As in the concluding sentences of his Allegories —in the chapter titled Excuses —de Man says:
