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properly be called romantic irony must therefore be a form or structure that simultaneously creates and de-creates itself.13 |
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Now I am not concerned with the historical development of the concept of Romantic Irony, or with the adequacy of these formulations as a summary of the views of Schlegel or any of his followers. That historical development has its own stories, and they have their own structuring principles, in particular an opposition between 'optimistic' and 'pessimistic' views of the concept.14 I want to concentrate on the most distinctive element in the concept: the view that the ironic unmasking of reality is not simply a negative act, but one in which the reader is enabled to accept a sublimity. This gesture has both a dynamic and a static aspect. Dynamically, it represents a movement from high seriousness or emotional pathos to what is in some sense seen as 'reality', a movement which is then 'transcended': hence the connection with closure. More statically, Romantic Irony may involve a constant, ever-present awareness of reality, and in particular of the reality of fictional creation. We are continually reminded that what is before us is made by man, not God: that even apparent 'showing' is really 'telling', that all narrative is discourse, that whether we ask 'who sees?' or 'who speaks?' the answer will always be: the author. In this form of Romantic Irony, the text is constantly self-conscious, with all the familiar devices of mise-en-abyme, and author and reader alike continually meet with doubles and surrogates in the work. Again, however, these are not simply devices of 'distancing': despite (or because of) it all, we take it seriously. |
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The relationship between these two aspects of Romantic Irony has its problems: if the essence of the dynamic form is a movement between sublimity and 'reality', is not that removed when reality is ever-present? In fact, the dynamic element is present in the pervasive form in terms of the reader's movement between a view of the whole work as sublime and a perception of it as just words on the page, and back again in a fruitful oscillation. The two forms have more in common than is first obvious. Nevertheless I want to look at them in turn. I also want to stress again at the outset, however, that whether to read a particular work in terms of Romantic Irony is a decision of the reader. The presence of various elements like a concluding deflationary turn or an authorial intervention may be more-or-less an objective feature of a text, but the interpretation of them has to be the reader's. It is a cliché to say that irony is above all a mode of reading, not a mode of writing. And of course the fragmentary nature of the Classical Tradition brings its own problems even with regard to apparently 'objective' elements (it is an enormously productive paradox that much of this literature of supposed formal perfection comes down to us already packaged as |
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13 Mellor (1980) 5. |
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14 Cf. e.g. Hélein-Koss (1988) 39. |
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