标题: Irony Lecture:(Quintilian, Paul de Man) [打印本页] 作者: 怀抱花朵的孩子 时间: 2006-10-10 21:57 标题: Irony Lecture:(Quintilian, Paul de Man) Irony Lecture: (Quintilian, Paul de Man)
DR CLAIRE COLEBROOK'S LECTURE
Before the explicit and extended theorisation of irony in the nineteenth-century, irony was a recognised but minor and subordinate figure of speech. The first significant instances of the Greek word eironeia occur in the dialogues of Plato (BC 428-347), with reference to Socrates. It is here that eironeia no longer meant straightforward lying, as it did for Aristophanes; but an intended simulation which the audience or hearer was meant to recognise. Aristotle (384-322) also referred to irony, most notably in his Ethics and Rhetoric, but it was the Platonic and Socratic use that became definitive for later thought. As we will see later, Socratic irony was defined not just as the use of irony in conversation but also as an entire personality. Plato’s Socrates was a character who was other than any determined or expressed position; Socrates’ genius was intimated rather than represented. Aristotle’s ironist was, like Plato’s Socrates, one who played down or concealed his virtues and intelligence (Aristotle 1934 [Nicomachean Ethics 4.7.3-5], 241). Aristotle regarded such an ironic personality as neither pernicious nor ideal. Irony was not a vice but it was far from being a virtue. The truly virtuous citizen would be neither boastful, nor ironic, but sincere in his self-presentation. Later Latin writers, especially Cicero (106-43 BC), who was the most famous of Roman orators and whose De Oratore and De Inventione were important sources for later works on rhetoric, also referred to irony in relation to Plato’s Socrates. But as time went on less reference was made to the complex form of Socratic irony, as a sustained mode of personality, and attention was restricted to irony as a specific and located figure of speech. Quintilian’s De Oratore, indebted to Cicero, was the most comprehensive and well-known manual for rhetoric in the middle ages. Quintilian, or Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (cAD 40-95) provided a definition of ironia, as saying one thing and meaning the opposite, Ironia is a mode of speech ‘in which something contrary to what is said is to be understood’ (contrarium ei quod dicitur intelligendum est). Institutio Oratoica 9.22.44. that is still referred to today. Like Cicero, Quintilian also referred to Socrates.
Until Romanticism, the literary or rhetorical function of irony was seen as a special case within an otherwise simple and literal language of representation. Irony was deemed to be an ornament or trope within representational language. For the Romantics, however, it was only possible to have a seemingly simple and representational world through the forgetting and repression of the creativity and poetry of language. Irony – or the gap between words and world – was, for the Romantics, original. Speech and language originate or come into being only when ideas or concepts give form and imagination to the actual world; all language is essentially and originally figural, or different from the world it supposedly names. Literal language is the denial or forgetting of this gap. If we think of our language as a simple one-to-one label or picture of the world, then we forget the creative and disruptive birth of language. To see all language as ironic, the Romantics argued, would be to restore life to its once open, fluid and productive past. Life would no longer be frozen into the fixed forms of grammar and syntax, or reduced to what is sayable. Irony recognises a sense that is always other than what is said.
Once Romanticism established that the truth of life did not lie in adequate representation but in a questioning and imaginative play of representations – such as poetry – then it became possible to see literature as the privileged mode of human understanding. Literature would be the truth of life because literature was essentially ironic: adopting a permanently distanced and questioning attitude to all language and fixed positions.
For both the Romantics and the American New Critics of the 1920s to 1940s, literature was the site of human awareness because it was ironic. The Romantics and New Critics differed as to just how literary language was open and ironic. For the Romantics, poetry was ironic because it was reflectively self-conscious. Poetic language does not see itself as a simple mirror on the world; it reflects on the very being of language. Poetry presents language in the process of creation and formation, always other than or contrary to what it names. Consider all those Romantic moments that name the impossibility of naming: William Wordsworth’s ‘I cannot paint / What then I was’ from ‘Tintern Abbey’; Coleridge’s ‘unrevealable / And hidden one’ from ‘Ne Plus Ultra’; Keats’s ‘Veiled Melancholy’ from ‘Ode on Melancholy’ or Shelley’s ‘Power [that] dwells apart in its tranquillity / Remote, serene, and inaccessible’ from ‘Mont Blanc’. In all these cases, the poem is about the impossibility of a pure poetic naming; the poem will always be other than its subject, and this is because language is the form given to the world and not the world itself (Miller 2000 64). Irony, in its Romantic manifestation, draws attention to this difference.
For the Romantics, it was Shakespeare who typified the idea of the absent author: ‘Shakespeare’s univerality is like the center of romantic art’ (Schlegel 1991, 52):
… there probably is no modern poet more correct than Shakespeare. Similarly, he is also systematic as no other poet is: sometimes because of those antitheses that bring into picturesque contrast individuals, masses, even worlds; sometimes through musical symmetry on the same great scale, through gigantic repetitions and refrains; often by a parody of the letter and an irony on the spirit of romantic drama; and always through the most sublime and complete individuality, uniting all the degrees of poetry, from the most carnal imitation to the most spiritual characterization (Schlegel 1991, 53-4).
Romantic irony is most commonly associated with the Jena Romantics: the Schlegel brothers – August Wilhelm (1767-1845) and Friedrich (1772-1829) –Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780-1819) and Novalis (1772-1801). The main source of the writings with regard to irony was the journal, Athenaeum, which in its brief history from 1798 to 1800 published a series of texts that crossed the genres of philosophy, literature, criticism and review and included a highly influential collection of fragments. As the name Athenaeum indicates, the German Romantic movement valorised the ancient past, but like the English Romantics they were also entranced by Shakespeare, medievalism and certain key moderns, such as Diderot and Goethe. What they were against, predominantly, was reason and the enlightenment restriction of reason to a universal human norm. At the same time, they were aware of the paradoxes of a critique of reason. In order to argue against or challenge reason one needed to speak, but such speech would seem to demand understanding and would therefore rely on the very norms of reason it set out to delimit. The only possible response to this predicament would be irony: a speech which at once made a claim to be heard, but which also signalled or gestured to its own limits and incomprehension. While the Jena romantics were the group that came closest to offering a theory of irony, ‘Romantic irony’ has since been identified with Romanticism in general, with Friedrich Schlegel’s fragments often providing the theory through which English Romantic irony can be read.
The Ironic Fall
Romantic irony, broadly defined, regards irony as something like a human condition or predicament. Romantic irony is also one of the earliest and most intense modes of anti-humanism. It is precisely because we are human and capable of speaking, creating and engaging with others that human life has no fixed nature; any definition it gives of itself will only be one more creation, which can never exhaust the infinite possibilities for future creation: ‘If every infinite individual is God, then there are as many gods as there are ideals’ (Schlegel). The German Romantics emphasised Bildung, as culture and creation, and insisted on the arbitrariness, artificiality and deviation of any process of Bildung or formation: ‘A human being should be like a work of art which, though openly exhibited and freely accessible, can nevertheless be enjoyed and understood only by those who bring feeling and study to it’ (Schlegel 1991 67). Art, Friedrich Schlegel argued, is not the accurate presentation of the world, nor the natural expression of human life; art is essentially other than life: ‘The need to raise itself above humanity is humanity’s prime characteristic’ (Schlegel). Nature may be creative, but it creates according to its innate tendencies; human creation has the capacity to be ironic: to present itself as other than what it is. Indeed, what it is has no being other than a capacity to create. Human life, as capable of Bildung is essentially capable of being other than any fixed essence. This is why human life is ironic. On the one hand, all life is creative and must ‘become’ as part of an infinite process of natural production: ‘No poetry, no reality’ (Solger). On the other hand, humans have a capacity to create in such a way that they reflect this creative process: ‘A beautiful spirit smiling at itself is a thing of beauty; and the moment when a great personality looks at itself calmly and earnestly is a sublime moment’ (Schlegel). And once humans recognise natural production or creation, they can create another nature, a non-natural or super-natural nature, a creation of will and art rather than unselfconscious or blind production: ‘Every good human being is always progressively becoming God. To become God, to be human, to cultivate oneself are all expressions that mean the same thing’ (Schlegel). In poetry, for example, we do not just copy nature. Like nature, we create, and the poem is evidence of this creation; the poem is mimetic but it does not copy a thing so much as a process. It creates just as nature creates, and in so creating itself we have the power to see the world in its becoming, not just its inert being: ‘In all its descriptions, this poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry’ (Schlegel).
There is a problem, however, of expressing or realising this process of creation. Once we create a poem we are left with a created object, just as once we form or define ourselves we are left with static forms and definitions. Romantic irony must tackle this process of the fall of creative life into inert objectivity; it does so by recognising that creativity or the human spirit must always be other than any of its creations, definitions or manifestations. Far from seeing this fall, in pseudo-Christian terms, as a loss of a pure origin, the German Romantics embraced it as a felix culpa, or fortunate fall. It is only in not being at one with itself, in not being self-identical, that life can become and create, or can recognise itself as life, even if that recognition will always be partial or ironic. For there will always be a potential for (future) life and becoming not exhausted by actual and existing creations. Creation is not the deviation from some proper and complete past, as it had been in Platonism with its notion of original forms. Creation is a release of the dynamic potential of life. Indeed, we only have a sense of the infinite, or what is not finite, from various created finite viewpoints. Romantic irony therefore reverses the relation between origin and effect, between origin and fall. It is not that there is an original paradise or plenitude from which we are separated. On the contrary, it is only in diverse life itself, in all its difference and fragmentation, that we get any sense or idea of some whole or origin. The origin or foundation is a created effect of life, not its preceding cause. Far from finite daily life being a fall from an original infinite plenitude, it is only the fragmentary, the finite and the incomplete that can give us a sense of the infinity that lies beyond any closed form. An ironic ‘fall’ realises, therefore, that there was no paradise before the sense of loss. The idea of an original plenitude is an image created from life: ‘All life is in its ultimate origins not natural, but divine and human’ (Schlegel). The idea of a fall is, however, essential to irony and life as irony. It is in creating images of a lost paradise that we create ourselves as fallen, and thereby create ourselves at all. For to be selves or personalities we must be limited or delimited from some grander whole.
This is why, for the Romantics, the poem is so important. The poem is a fall from the pure flow of creative life into some determined and limited object. Such an understanding of the poem was explicitly related to the ancient Greek notion of poeisis as the distinct object or end of a creative act or praxis. But unlike other created things, which simply are and retain no evidence of their becoming, true poetry presents itself as fallen, that is, as other than or detached from the process that generates it. In contrast with the theological notion of a fall from some divine and eternal origin, the fall of irony embraces rather than mourns its finitude, difference and non-identity. It is in not being complete, in affirming one’s difference and distance from some pure and undivided ground, that one also attains character and consciousness. The self is necessarily fallen: not fallen from some origin, so much as producing a lost and other past in the very act of falling. It is the fall itself, the creation of oneself as a speaking and finite being, that creates the idea of the unfallen origin.
Further, for the Romantics, this fall is one of ‘buffoonery.’ German Romantic irony was defined through a constellation of concepts, including, in addition to buffoonery, humour, wit and satire. The joke or Witz undoes the mastery of the subject, as laughter and nonsense disrupt logic and sense. Irony is related to buffoonery not just because subjective mastery is undermined; buffoonery falls, enjoys the humour of the fall, laughs from on high at the falling buffoon, and remains implicated in the fall. One can never master the ironic process, never recognise or stand above one’s finitude: ‘Irony is the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos’ (Schlegel). The minute we see ourselves as other than what has fallen, as beings who can overlook and describe the fall, we fall further into smug self-recognition: ‘One can only become a philosopher, not be one. As soon as one thinks one is a philosopher, one stops becoming one’ (Schlegel). Irony must recognise that we can never overcome singular viewpoints and achieve a God-like point of view; we are always subject to a cosmic joke. For any idea we have of our selves or our world will be part of a process of creation and destruction that we can neither delimit nor control. If humour often relies on a feeling of superiority or elevation above life’s misfortunes, irony recognises – but never fully realises – the implication of all life in this chaos. The ironic attitude must not just take a delight in seeing the clown slip on a banana skin; it must not just laugh at this fall from human coordination into an animal or thing-like buffoonery. It must recognise that we are all part of this falling; we are always dupes and effects of a life with a power well beyond our control and recognition.
Poeisis and Praxis
Romantic irony, therefore, does not see either irony or tropes in general as purely literary devices. On the contrary, all life is ironic or subject to the conditions of trope and metaphor. To speak or see the world as something is already to differ from the literal world itself. Indeed, the very idea of a basic, foundational or literal world is itself a specific image or figure, described through a certain style. The ideas of ground or foundation, for example, rely on spatial metaphors, while the notion of the literal can only be thought through the concept of writing, literariness or script. Instead of poetry being a special or marginal aspect of a language and experience that would otherwise be straightforward, poetry, or the creation of distinct images, is the condition for all experience: ‘a poem is only a product of nature which wants to become a work of art’ (Schlegel). Romantic irony therefore extends both irony and poetry to include all life and perception:
There are unavoidable situations and relationships that one can tolerate only by transforming them by some courageous act of will and seeing them as pure poetry. It follows that all cultivated people should be capable of being poets if they have to be; and from this we can deduce equally well that man is by nature a poet, and that there is a natural poetry, or vice versa’ (Schlegel).
If we could secure a stable context of human recognition then irony would be a device or event within life and language; irony would be a deviation from the proper and common sense. There would be a literal language and a present world of truths and facts, which could then be ornamented or arrived at through irony. If, however, all life were instability, process, becoming and creation, then irony would be the very truth of life. Life would be poetic, a process of becoming and creation, and the only speech adequate to life would be ironic. Philosophical or theoretical propositions would aim at a world of facts and eternal truths; but ironic speech would refer to the instability of language: ‘Where philosophy stops, poetry has to begin’ (Schlegel). A text can never actually say what it means precisely because taking the text to mean something requires us to imagine a subject, represented world or expression ‘behind’ or beyond the text. If a text says, means or refers, this is only because the text is a poem: a created object and not the world itself. Instead of theoria, defined as a point of view elevated above life, we could only have poeisis: various distinct and created points that are separate from the originating praxis.
For this reason, German Romantic irony explored a potential in Socratic irony that had, by and large, been neglected: irony as a style of existence rather than a rhetorical figure. Irony for the Romantics was the only true mode of life. To live as if one were a fixed self who then used language to represent a world would be to deny the flux and dynamism of life. It would also be a mode of subjectivism: positing some ground – the subject – that could act as the basis for judgments and predications. Irony transforms subjectivism: the subject is no longer a ground that precedes and underlies judgements. The subject ‘is’ nothing other than an ongoing process of creation. Instead of transparent self-consciousness, where language is used to reflect upon and know the self, the Romantic ironic subject aims for self-destruction. The ideal is one of anti-self-consciousness (Hartman), where language and poetry transform the self from an identity within the world, to an unreflective, spontaneous and open existence. The self is no longer a thing, but a process of creation and expression that can be intuited in the act of language or speech, but not as something spoken about or represented. Any fixed, bounded, determined or created self must at once signal its fragility, destruction and de-creation: ‘Sacrifice of the self is the source of all humiliation, as also on the contrary it is the foundation of all true exaltation’ (Novalis).
For the Romantics this potential for the self to be other than any fixed or created term was hinted at in Socratic irony and the genre of dialogue. Socratic dialogue was exemplary precisely because it was open and dramatic, presenting voices and personae rather than fixed propositions or a single theoretical viewpoint. The Greek word theoria was tied not just to looking, but to an elevated look that could grasp the Ideas themselves: those forms or essences that could always be seen in any singular particular and which allowed for any particular instance to be what it is. By contrast, poeisis is anti-self-conscious; poeisis is the creation of some term (such as a poem) that is other than the act. Unlike theoria, which aims to see life as it is and to be at one with the essence of life, poeisis allows the fall of life into fragmented, detached and finite productions, such as the various works and voices of culture. Instead of the aims of philosophy as theory, to achieve an all-inclusive and transparent knowledge, the Romantics asserted poeisis: life is not a thing to be known, but a process of creation whereby what is created is always other than the power to create: ‘Poetry elevates each single thing through a particular combination with the rest of the whole … Writing poetry is creating. Each work of literature must be a living individual’ (Novalis). For this reason, life is not just ongoing activity (praxis) directed to some functional end; it also creates products that become disengaged or split from any conscious intent (poeisis). Speech is not just the purposeful expression of our intentions; it also contains an unthought or ‘dead’ element that is not intended. (Think of all the letters, syntactical constraints, and grammatical idioms within which thought must move, but which are not thought itself. For this reason much Romantic poetry described fragments, ruins, inscriptions, monuments and myths: all the ways in which the thought and activity of the present must work with received and inherited elements.) According to the French philosophers, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Each fragment stands for itself and for that from which it is detached. Totality is the fragment itself in its completed individuality’.
This brings us to the heart of irony and dialogue. To acknowledge poeisis is to acknowledge that the creativity of life can never be encompassed or reflected in an overarching point of view. Conscious activity is never at one with the forms it creates. The Socrates of the dialogues is a poet rather than a theorist; he creates masks, personalities and positions rather than offering a position or viewpoint. His irony disrupts agreement and complacency; it is unsettling and directed towards strangeness rather than recognition and consensus. The Socratic personality was ethical precisely because it was neither fully presented nor at one with itself but in a state of constant presentation. Indeed, contrary to both traditional and modern readings of Socrates, the Romantics also stressed the contradictions of irony and Socratic irony. Irony was not just signalling the opposite of what was said; it was the expression of both sides or viewpoints at once in the form of contradiction or paradox: ‘Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great’ (Schlegel). And any reader who feels that ‘behind’ the irony there is a hidden sense has fallen into the very simplicity and singleness of viewpoint that irony sets out to destroy. For Schlegel, therefore, the dissimulation of Socrates was not in the service of intending another idea that the privileged few might understand; it was about allowing – almost involuntarily – both sides of a tension:
Socratic irony is the only involuntary and yet completely deliberate dissimulation. It is equally impossible to feign it or divulge it. To a person who hasn’t got it, it will remain a riddle even after it is openly confessed. It is meant to deceive no one except those who consider it a deception and who either take pleasure in the delightful roguery of making fools of the whole world or else become angry when they get an inkling they themselves might be included. In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden … It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke.
Contradiction
I think perhaps the ‘clearest’ exponent of this sort of irony in English Romanticism is William Blake (1757-1827). His poems both present a message or moral and show that moral to be pernicious and symptomatic of fallen conscious. His Songs of Innocence assert the beauty and value of a state of childhood innocence and they show that innocence to be naïve, lulling and paralysing. His Songs of Experience present a world as fallen, using the poetic voice to attack modern corruption and industrialism; at the same time, these poems are also critical of the accusing, pessimistic and negating voice of judgment. They criticise criticism, saying and not saying that one must criticise. Consider his very famous poem ‘London’ from Songs of Innocence and of Experience:
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
(Blake 1957, 216)
On the one hand, this is a classic indictment of poverty, urban abjection and the absence of spirit and hope in modern life. It is a classically ‘Romantic’ poem in the everyday sense: a rejection of the city, a condemnation of institutionalised religion, and an attack on political oppression, militarism and poverty. On the other hand, the poem can be read ironically, and, precisely because it is a poem, detached from any present speaker or consciousness. As a ‘Song of Experience,’ the poem is uttered from a bleak point of view. The voice is all-condemning: ‘every … every … every …’. Nearly all of the songs of experience present a consciousness that is totalising in its despairing view of the world, recognising no hope, no joy and no desire, and seeing itself as elevated above a closed and fallen world: ‘The mind forg’d manacles I hear.’ Perhaps this poem is not about the misery of the world; perhaps it is the ironic repetition of a voice that can see nothing but misery. Perhaps Blake is ironising the moralising and condemning voice of humanist despair: the voice that says that all we can do is offer charity, pity and amelioration without any radically utopian hopes, a judgmental voice that also sets ‘Harlots’ opposite new-born infants. How would we decide between the ironic and sincere readings? Surely, we cannot decide. The poem both manages to express its lament and suggests that this lament is part of the problem. It is ‘guilty’ of contradiction. It says and does not say that London is utterly miserable. It both says and does not say that the voice or point of view that sees misery everywhere is a symptom of our loss of joy. The poem achieves the force of both speech acts; it presents a London worthy of pity and shows or performs just how limiting the attitude of pity may be. Whereas in logical discourse a contradiction leads to nothingness, insofar as we dismiss contradictions, in poetic discourse contradictions are productive and ironic. They allow any voice to be doubled by the suggestion that what is said is both meant and not meant. This Romantic irony becomes much more complex and undecidable in Blake’s later prophecies where he produces the figure or character of Satan. On the one hand Satan is heroic: rejecting authority, anything that is other than his will, and anything that would limit his power. On the other hand, Satan’s voice is also the (ironic) mirror of the tyranny he would denounce. ‘I must be free’ is at once the most liberating and enslaving of all speech acts; it is both an assertion of the self, a subjection to a principle (freedom) and an imperative or command to anyone or anything that stands in one’s way. In demanding one’s freedom the voice of revolution can also produce itself as one more law and the negation of anyone else’s freedom.
Before the Romantics, Kant had argued that the concept of freedom was internally contradictory. On the one hand, to be free would require that we be capable of a pure and uncaused act. On the other hand, because we think of our actions in a temporal sequence we cannot help putting some cause behind any event; any supposedly free action can always be explained as caused. Far from inhabiting this contradiction or rejecting one side of the contradiction, Kant insists that we must assume both that all events have a cause and that there must be uncaused events of free will. Kant resolves this contradiction by assuming two points of view or modes of existence. If we think of the world in terms of time and space, then every event will necessarily be preceded by other events and therefore have a cause. However, if we think of the subject as the point of view or consciousness that produces the order of time then it makes perfect sense to see subjectivity as uncaused; as the synthesising power that produces time and causality the subject itself is not caused. The Romantics extended this Kantian notion of freedom as essentially contradictory. We cannot help thinking and demanding subjective freedom, for to think of oneself as a self demands that we distinguish our will from the world of determined things; but we can never know or represent this freedom, for any image of freedom will be determined by the order of representation. Freedom can only be known negatively, as in conflict or contradiction with the world we know and represent. For this reason, poetry rather than logic is the true expression of subjectivity. The subject is not a thing to be known, but an assumed point beyond any logical, ordered or lawful world.
Far from eliminating contradiction, Romantic irony tends to emphasise the equivocity of voice. And Romantic irony is not just limited to the contradictions of speaking positions. Romanticism is often attacked for a certain incoherence. Many poems are about the inexpressible, unimaginable or unrepresentable origin of life and consciousness. But how can we speak about the unspeakable? The minute we say, for example, that such and such a term is not translatable into our language, we have already contaminated it, included it, and presented it as untranslatable. Romantic irony embraces this dead end and contradiction, its poems often being about the impossibility of sincere, pure or authentic poetry.
A text, such as a text of logic, which presented itself as a closed set of propositions, would have to exclude or repress the process that created those propositions. An ironic text, by contrast, gestures to its own incompleteness. Ironic texts, for the Romantics, were marked by several tendencies. They were fragmentary: by not being closed or complete they gestured to a process of creation that is always coming to completion. Think of S.T. Coleridge’s (1772-1834) Kubla Khan, which not only describes its interrupted process of composition as having been induced by a dream-like state. It also ends with the intention to produce further work and art: ‘I would build that dome in air’ (Coleridge 1951, 45).
Second, ironic texts were not works: not purposive or intentional objects generated from a single consciousness with an intention to communicate some content. Truly ironic texts often convey a sense of the incoherence of voice, or that one cannot say what is being said. The speech act of irony is one that fails to work. Irony is often self-undermining or internally contradictory.
Paul de Man
For de Man rhetoric is not a skill or techne that we use to represent the world. There is no world or subject without the performance of rhetoric. It is only throug speaking and narrating that we can have a division between self and world. This is what makes de Man a deconstructionist. He does not just reverse the relation between language and reality; he does not say that we only know or perceive the world through language. He argues that the very concept of language or rhetoric (the concept of the sign, representation of what is secondary to reality) is necessary for the very through of reality. It is the idea of secondariness, fallenness or TROPES that creates a literal world. We are always within some sort of trope. To describe a metaphor, we must use tropes, and we would have no idea of the literal or original world without an idea of the language that supposedly comes along to name it. The opposition between sign and world is an effect of the sign. Poetry, narrative and the literary are transcendental. Without the ‘Romantic’ idea that there is a reality or subject that recedes behind the text and is ungraspable, there could be no experience. The idea of the ungraspable or prelinguistic self – an idea produced by language – is itself a necessary effect of language.
Allegory and Irony:
Paul de Man begins with an opposition between allegory and irony. Allegory is a naïve or unreflected attitude to language. We think that there is a real world and that out language is then a sign of that world. Irony, by contrast, shows that the supposed ‘nature’ that precedes the sign. The self that we supposedly lost is produced through the poem; the poem creates or institutes the division between self and sign. However, any idea that the ironic poem could overcome allegory – or a division between sign and self – is itself naïve. Any explanation of irony is itself a narrative, is itself always caught up in allegory.
On the one hand, irony does seem to expose the naivete of an ‘allegorical’ account of language: the idea that our language seems to double or correspond to some world. On the other hand, any self-conscious irony that felt it could step outside all allegorical illusion by seeing the world and self as an effect of text and language, would itself be subject to a far greater illusion. There can be no point of ironic self-destruction – where ‘we’ realise that our identity and our world are textually produced. Any such realisation would have to repress a necessary allegory. This would not be a naïve allegory that posited a real world behind signs, but an allegory that recognised that all we can do is to write allegorically. To write, or narrate, is to necessarily produce a gap or distance between a text and what it signifies. At the same time, this signified or referent is only given from the position of the signifier or text. Our nature is always an inscribed and textual nature; our identity is always a type of character or fiction. Without the function of allegory – without the narrated or imagined difference between a world and its symbolisation – there could be no ironic self-realisation. We can never arrive at some point of pure ironic self-coincidence, where we see ourselves and our world as mere textual effects. For we can only think ironically after the creation of ourselves through allegory, or through the imagined difference between a literal world and a signified world.
The problem or difference of allegory and irony relies on the irreducible function of narration. On the one hand, there can be no world, self or experience without some allegorical narration: some sense of signs as being other than or different from an original reality. On the other hand, one can also recognise – ironically – that this supposedly original and unattainable reality can only be perceived as original through some narrative that produces itself as allegorical, as not the thing itself. De Man’s emphasis on literature and irony, rather than philosophy and reflection, is crucial here. Philosophy would see language as a medium for reflection; we can speak in order to recognise ourselves as above and beyond the signs we use. Literature, by contrast, abandons this aim of circular self-coincidence. Any language we might use to reflect upon and know ourselves actually produces the self it supposedly names, and does so through narration – through naming what must have been.
For de Man, time is not a coherent medium of a before and after that we then name (and then reflect upon ironically). Time is given or distributed through narration. Only with the minimal narration of a past and self who will speak could there be the essential function of allegory – of signs being different from the world – and the no less essential but impossible irony that strives to think this narration:
Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world. … Allegory and irony are thus linked in their common discovery of a truly temporal predicament (de Man 1983, 222).
In Paul de Man’s terms: it is only through narrating the self that there is a self at all. We cannot think of selves who narrate, precisely because selves are formed through narration. But we could also never arrive at a ‘theory’ of this process of narration: ‘any theory of irony is the undoing, the necessary undoing, of any theory of narrative, and it is ironic, as we say, that irony always comes up in relation to theories of narrative, when irony is precisely what makes it impossible ever to achieve a theory of narrative that would be consistent’ (de Man 1996, 179). To think of the self as created through narrative is itself narrative. De Man turns back to Romantic irony and gives it a post-structuralist twist. The spirit or imagination that is belied by any of its forms or definitions is created through those secondary definitions. For de Man, only literature can be authentic; only literature acknowledges that it creates through narrative, rather than presenting narrative as the representation of some mythical prior reality. Romantic irony is, therefore, all-consuming. Any attempt to think a position or self outside literary voices must itself adopt some literary style. Philosophers, historians or scientists who speak with an authority that is supposedly above and beyond stylistic variations have merely repressed the stylistic dimension of their own discourse.
De Man’s elevation of literature, as the only authentic rhetoric of temporality – because it reflects on the way it produces a before and after, an origin and fall, an authentic and inauthentic voice – is also an insistence on the impossibility and inescapability of the subject. To assume that subjects are effects of forces is to disavow and repress the subjective activity – the narration – that explains those forces. At the same time, while we can only think and criticise our thinking from some subjective point of view, that ‘subject’ is an effect of narration. While the modern lyric seeks to reflect upon and destroy this narrative illusion of the subject, by turning back on itself and describing the process of its own creation, de Man nevertheless insists that one cannot escape this condition of impossible irony and allegory. De Man maintains, extends and criticises the German Romantic tradition. He recognises the ethical and political predicament of Romanticism – that its gesture to a pre-subjective absolute does seem to abandon our responsibility or our role in the creation of this absolute. But he also recognises that ethical authenticity – the attempt to take control of the ways in which our narratives produce us and our origins – must always be contaminated by inauthenticity. We write and think belatedly, from a textual condition we can neither master nor abandon.