understanding irony. three essays on friedrich schlegel

Understanding Irony: Three Essais on Friedrich SchlegelAuthor(s): Georgia AlbertSource: MLN, Vol. 108, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1993), pp. 825-848Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904879 .Accessed: 23/09/2014 03:59

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Understanding Irony: Three essais on Friedrich Schlegel

Georgia Albert

Irony is unrelieved vertige, dizziness to the point of madness.

Paul de Man

[. Chaos and Vertigo In a note written around 1800 Schlegel recorded his dissatisfaction with Kant's conclusion that the question about the infinity of the world is a meaningless and empty one for human reason: "The Antinomies should not have moved Kant to give up the infinite [das Unendliche], but the principle of non-contradiction-."1 Schlegel's aver- sion to the logical axiom called the principle of non-contradiction, which states the invalidity of any judgment that makes two opposite predications about the same object, is not without precedent in his writings. Similarly transgressive views against it are also expressed elsewhere in texts from this period, as for example in the note from 1797 which states: "Every sentence, every book that does not contradict itself is incomplete-" (KFSA 18:83), or in the Athendum Frag- ment 39:

Most thoughts are only the profiles of thoughts. They have to be turned around and synthesized with their antipodes. This is how many philosophical works acquire a considerable interest that they would otherwise have lacked. (KFSA 2:171; Fragments, 23) Most often, the name Schlegel gives to the situation in which the

principle of non-contradiction is defied is "irony." In contrast to the view adopted by rhetorical treatises at least since Aristotle, irony is

MLN, 108 (1993): 825-848 ? 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press


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not understood here as the rhetorical convention that allows the speaker to express something by saying its opposite, and the interpretation of the ironic discourse does not consist simply in turning the "literal" statement upside down to obtain the "intended" meaning: irony is the simultaneous presence of two meanings between which it is not possible to decide. Such, for example, is the view put forth in the definition of irony as "analysis of thesis and antithesis" (KFSA 16:154), where "analysis" is presumably to be understood not in Kant's but in Fichte's sense as "the procedure by which one looks for the characteristic in which the compared entities are opposed [entgegengesetzt] ."2 A better known and more extensively argued con- demnation of the traditional, one-sided view of irony is found in the Lyceum Fragment 108:

[Socratic irony] 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 everything should be serious, everything guilelessly open and everything 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 (Fragments, 13, translation modified).3

To understand irony according to the classical definition is to understand it as deception (Tduschung): those who do this never get more than half the message, and in fact do not understand irony at all. If "in [it] everything should be playful [Scherz] and everything should be serious [Ernst]," it is useless to try to separate what is "meant" from what is "said": however contradictory the relationship of the two sides of the statement to each other might be, both are necessary and have to be taken into account.4

The rejection of the principle of non-contradiction expressed in the note about Kant is, then, nothing new for Schlegel: similar, if less explicit, statements can be found in numerous other texts from the same period. What is particularly interesting in this fragment is the fact that the issue is taken up in connection with the question of infinity. Schlegel's reference in the note is to the section of the Critique of Pure Reason devoted to the "Antinomies of Pure Reason." There, Kant shows that it is possible to make perfectly coherent and logically correct arguments both to prove and to disprove the spatial and temporal infinity of the world. Since, however, this possibility is logically unacceptable (because of its incompatibility with the prin-


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ciple of non-contradiction), Kant is led to conclude that the two opposed parties are "quarreling about nothing."5 The violation of the principle of non-contradiction by the possibility of both an affir- mative and a negative answer is taken to prove the incongruity of the question-the fact that infinity can be no concern for reason. Schlegel, faced with the same problem of the mutual exclusivity of the question of infinity and the principle of non-contradiction, re- verses Kant's conclusion. It is not the case that the principle of non- contradiction renders the question of infinity invalid; rather, it is infinity that renders this principle expendable. The reason for this lies in Schlegel's understanding of infinity, which is defined precisely as the possibility that opposed and mutually contradictory elements might be present at the same time. The Athendum Fragment 412, for example, states:

Who has a sense for the infinite and knows what he wants to do with it sees in it the result of eternally separating and uniting powers ... and utters, when he expresses himself decisively, nothing but contradictions (lauter Widerspriiche) (KFSA 2:243; Fragnents, 83, TM).

"Who has a sense for the infinite ... utters, when he expresses himself decisively, nothing but contradictions." This connection between a self-contradictory way of speaking and what Schlegel calls infinity founds many of his best-known assertions regarding irony. Since irony is the place where opposites come into contact with each other (it is "the form of paradox": Lyceum Fragment 48, KFSA 2:153; Fragments, 6), it also constitutes the possibility of achieving some sort of link with infinity. It remains to ask in what, exactly, this link consists.

Perhaps the most explicit reference to this question is found in one of the unpublished "Philosophical Fragments" Schlegel wrote in 1798 after the publication of the Athendum fragments: "Irony is so to speak the cEtiSEttii of the infinite, of universality, of the sense for the universe" (KFSA 18:128). The rhetorical term "epideixis" enters Schlegel's vocabulary by way of Aristotle's distinction (in Rhetoric i.3) between different types of public speech. Defined by contrast with the speech in council, meant to convince or dissuade, and the speech in court, aimed at proving innocence or guilt, the epideictic speech was supposed to praise or censure the actions of a public figure.6 The relevance of this concept to the relationship between irony and what Schlegel calls "the infinite," "universality," and "the sense for the universe," though not immediately obvious, becomes


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easier to see once one takes notice of the slightly different meaning the term acquires in Schlegel's use of it. Schlegel's own definition of the concept is found in the introduction to his translation of the Epitaph ofLysias: the "goal" of the "epideictic kind [of speech]" is, he says, "to let the ability of the orator shine before an assembly of listeners or readers" (KFSA 1:141). The importance of the epideictic speech consists in the proof it delivers of the orator's skill. The interest is less in the content of the speech than in the speech itself, less in what is said than in how well it is said. While Aristotle makes the distinction between the different types of speech dependent on their themes, this plays a secondary role in Schlegel's definition. The orator's proof of his ability is not based on an argument about it: the speech itself shows it simply by being a good speech. That is, the real theme of the speech is not what it discusses, but what it demonstrates or stages.7

The relationship between irony and infinity is therefore defined in this fragment as a very particular type of reference, one that is based on the possibility of making something visible by putting it on display or giving it an appearance (by "playing" it) rather than by talking about it. Irony "means" infinity by representing it; more precisely, and anticipating somewhat: by reproducing its structure. This structure is that of the paradox, of constitutive and irreducible self-contradiction, of the simultaneous co-presence of mutually exclusive elements. The other name for "the infinite," "universality," and "the sense for the universe" is in fact another of Schlegel's key terms from this period, a word he uses in its etymological and therefore in a similar sense: chaos (cf. Idee 69, KFSA 2:263).8 "Only that kind of confusion is a chaos"-defines Schlegel-"out of which a world can arise" (Idee 71, KFSA 2:263). How? "Through the understanding" ("Uber die Unverstandlichkeit," KFSA 2:370; "On Incom- prehensibility," Wheeler, 38, TM). Chaos is the original indefinite- ness, what is there before the understanding sorts it out in pairs of opposites; irony, the possibility of defying the understanding, offers a chance infinitely to approach this state.

How, exactly, is this supposed to function? Schlegel's assertion about Socratic irony that "in it everything should be playful and everything should be serious" (Lyceum Fragment 108) is once again a helpful hint. The point is not to discard the "pretended" meaning for the "intended" one: both sides of irony have to be thought together. This is, however, precisely what is impossible. The two "sides" are unable to coexist peacefully: Schlegel speaks, in different


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contexts, of their evocation of an "indissoluble antagonism" (Lyceum Fragment 108) and of the "continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts" (Athendum Fragment 121, KFSA 2:184; Fragments, 33). The relation between the two "sides" of irony is by necessity a warlike one: they can only exist at each other's expense, since each of them is the negation and thus the annihilation of the other.

The reader of the ironic text is therefore confronted with a pecu- liarly difficult task. He must try to understand the text, but that means trying to gain control over it precisely through the "Satz des Widerspruchs"-through the very kind of binary logic that the text brings into question. Thus the reading of the ironic text becomes a sequence of incomplete interpretations in which first the one, then the other "side" is privileged, and must constantly attempt to find a way to bring the dialectical back-and-forth oscillation to its final goal, to a synthesis of the two poles and thereby to rest. This final synthesis, however, is regarded by Schlegel as unreachable: this is shown by the unambiguous characterization of the "antagonism" irony consists in as "indissoluble" as well as by the surprising and strong wording of its definition as "analysis of thesis and antithesis."

Two aspects of irony become important in this context. The first: the two poles cannot be brought together-except, of course, in the ironic text which contains them, and which starts the process of reading (in the same way that chaos consists of the original matter and has to be sorted out by the understanding). The second: the process itself is bound to go on forever. No interpretation can ex- haust the meaning of the ironic text and bring it to rest: there will always be an aspect of it that none of the successive readings, no matter how comprehensive or sophisticated, will be able to take into account. In its refusal to be tied down to a meaning the text becomes infinite, "within its limits limitless and inexhaustible," in Schlegel's formulation (Athendum Fragment 297, KFSA 2:215; Frag- ments, 59, TM).

Irony, then, as a means to a goal, as a conscious way of setting something in motion? This has become a commonplace of Schlegel criticism.9 Schlegel himself, however, seems to have taken his own warning that "irony is something one simply cannot play games with" ("Uber die Unverstindlichkeit," KFSA 2:370; Wheeler, 37) more seriously than some of his critics, and to have been well aware of the difficulties that the attempt to use irony for one's own purposes can produce. One expression of this preoccupation is the unsettling list


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of "ironies of irony" in "On Incomprehensibility," one of which occurs when "irony turns into a mannerism and becomes, as it were, ironical about the author" (KFSA 2:369; Wheeler, 37, TM).

What can Schlegel mean when he endows irony with the ability to turn back against the ironist? In order to approach an answer to this question, it is necessary to return to Schlegel's most explicit and sustained discussion of irony, the Lyceum Fragment 108. The rele- vant parts of this long fragment read:

[Die sokratische Ironie] soil niemand tauschen, als die, welche sie fur Tauschung halten, und entweder ihre Freude haben an der herrlichen Schalkheit, alle Welt zum besten zu haben, oder b6se werden, wenn sie ahnden, sie waren wohl auch mit gemeint. In ihr soil alles Scherz und alles Ernst sein, alles treuherzig offen und alles tief versteckt.... Es ist ein sehr gutes Zeichen, wenn die harmonisch Platten gar nicht wissen, wie sie diese stete Selbstparodie zu nehmen haben, immer wieder von neuem glauben und miBglauben, bis sie schwindlicht werden, den Scherz gerade fur Ernst, und den Ernst fuir Scherz halten (KFSA 2:160).

[ (Socratic irony) 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 may be included. In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden .... 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 (Fragments, 13)].

To understand irony as deception (Tduschung) means to understand it according to the classical definition: as the rhetorical convention that allows the speaker to express something by saying its opposite. According to this traditional view, in order to understand the real meaning of the ironic statement one only needs to know that the speaker is making use of this rhetorical convention-that he is speaking ironically-and to translate what he is saying into its opposite. The result of this model is the immediate differentiation between the initiates and the victims of irony. The former will be able to identify irony in the speaker's statement and will "take pleasure in the delightful roguery of making fools of the whole world" (read: those who don't understand irony). The initiates do not have the last laugh, however, and it may well be that the joke is on them after all: the mere suspicion that "they themselves may be included" is enough for those who had "their pleasure" in the game to get


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angry in their turn. The reason for this is that it is not so easy to decide for or against the presence of irony. Those "in the know" may be themselves the object of the speaker's irony if, for example, he feigns irony to deceive them but is in fact perfectly serious (already an "irony of irony" if one reads the expression as an objective genitive: a double irony). This, however, does not mean that those who had not seen any trace of irony in the first place have gotten it right and can feel in control, because there is just as little certitude for this as for the other possibility. There is no way to stop this constant back-and-forth other than a purely arbitrary choice, but on the way to it all those who consider irony "deception," whether they thought they were on the privileged side or not, are in for an unsettling experience:

It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores [die harmonisch Platten] are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief [immer wieder von neuem glauben und mifiglauben] until they get dizzy [bis sie schwindlicht werden] and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke [den Scherz gerade fir Ernst, und den Ernst fur Scherz halten].

The "harmonisch Platten" are not simply those who do not understand irony, but those who insist on equating irony with deception, and on preferring one interpretation-either one-to the other. Unable to make a final decision, they keep changing their minds, oscillating in an endlessly repeated movement between believing and misbelieving, between reading the text as a joke [Scherz] and reading it as straightforward [Ernst], until, having been made dizzy [schwindlicht] by this ever-accelerating vortex, they stop the process by blindly settling on whatever side they were last on.

The Schwindel (vertigo, dizziness) is the sense of not being able to stand, of losing one's balance. When one feels dizzy, one needs something to hold on to. This is, however, precisely the possibility irony does not give: if "in it everything should be playful [Scherz] and everything should be serious [Ernst]," it is not just difficult but impossible to make a choice. The mistake of the "harmonious bores" would consist not in their getting irony "right" or "wrong," but in their insisting on wanting to know whether they are getting it right or wrong.10

It is perhaps surprising, though not difficult to see, that the phe- nomenon that is here called "getting dizzy" and described as a sort


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of punishment for the stubborn stupidity of the "harmonious bores" is not essentially different from the dynamics created by opposition that should have opened the way to infinity. It is also disturbing that the final, arbitrary choice of the "harmonious bores" is described as "[taking] what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke [den Scherz . . . fur Ernst und den Ernst ... fur Scherz halten]": this formulation seems to presuppose the possibility of a "right" solution that would consist in understanding what is meant as a joke as a joke and what is meant seriously seriously-a possibility that is consistently denied by the rest of the fragment and whose assumption would amount to considering irony deception, the attitude that is supposed to be condemned here.

Suddenly it becomes difficult to see the difference between the "harmonious bores" (those who consider irony deception) and the voice of the fragment, which should represent the ironist since it says confidently and somewhat scornfully: "To a person who hasn't got it, [Socratic irony] will remain a riddle even after it is openly confessed" (KFSA 2:160; Fragments, 13). Could it be that the attempt to correct the "harmonious bores" only proves the general ines- capability of "harmonious boredom," that the way to infinity is less serene than one might expect, and that the experience of vertigo and of being the victim, rather than the user, of irony, belongs to it? It is worth reading once again the sentence that assigns the posi- tions in this power game: "[Socratic irony] is meant to deceive [tdu- schen] no one except those who consider it a deception [Tdu- schung]." One should perhaps take this sentence at its word-and recognize that it pulls the ironist into the vortex that causes the dizziness of the "harmonious bores." To say that irony should deceive only those who understand it as deception is to understand it as deception. The sentence says: there is a right and a wrong way to read irony: the wrong way is to think that there is a right and a wrong way. But by making this distinction, it makes the very mistake it warns against; more importantly, it puts itself into a double bind from which it cannot be freed. It tries to determine the right way to read irony (which is to recognize that there is no right or wrong way), but precisely by doing that it reads irony the wrong way. Even the definition of irony as something whose meaning cannot be pinned down can itself not be pinned down: it brings itself into question and is drawn into the very same process the fragment goes on to describe. The attempt to observe irony from outside, either as something whose meaning can be determined or as something pro-


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ducing an infinite series of contradictory meanings, is itself subject to irony. Irony seems to escape definition even as something that escapes definition. This would then be irony's own irony, the irony of irony (subjective genitive) as Schlegel describes it in "On Incom- prehensibility." If irony, as seems to be the case in this fragment and as Schlegel considers possible, "becomes, as it were, ironical about the author" (KFSA 2:369; Wheeler, 37), then the ironist's control over his irony and his privileged position outside the process he has started is in danger. Like the apprentice sorcerer, he might have put something in motion which he is in no way able to steer, and which affects his own position as well, causing vertigo and the loss of a stable standpoint.11 In such a situation, it can only be a question of time before someone finds cause for alarm in irony's peculiar inde- pendence from authority and, attempting to reinstate a regime of subjective responsibility, blames it on the ironist, accusing him of incomprehensibility.

II. Schlegel's Incomprehensibility: Wer (ver)steht, daB er nicht falle

The essay "Uber die Unverstandlichkeit" ("On Incomprehen- sibility") appeared in 1800 in the last issue of the Athendum, the short-lived literary journal the brothers Schlegel had founded just two years earlier.12 It constitutes Schlegel's answer to the accusa- tions of incomprehensibility that had been levelled against the journal in general and his fragments in particular, and whose cause he identifies with the irony "that to a greater or lesser extent is to be found everywhere in it" (368; Wheeler, 36).13 A polemical introduction, in which several contemporaries (the popular philosopher Garve, the chemist Girtanner and the proponents of "common sense") are made objects of more or less pointed attacks, serves to pave the way to the middle part of the essay, which is devoted to the alleged incomprehensibility of the texts of the Athendum. There, Schlegel first quotes the controversial fragment about the "three greatest tendencies of the age" (Athendum Fragment 216) and explains to what extent and why it has been misunderstood; then he discusses, also with the help of self-quotations (the Lyceum Frag- ments 48 and 108), the nature and effects of irony. The last part of the essay discusses incomprehensibility in general, asks whether it is "so unmitigatedly contemptible and evil" (370; Wheeler, 38), and


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ends with a "gloss" based on Goethe which mocks the opponents of the Athendum and of the Romantic circle in general.

The main problem that presents itself to the reader of the essay is that of the reconciliation of its polemical with its theoretical aspects. The text asks at the same time a theoretical question about the possibility of communication in general, namely "whether [the] communication [of ideas] is at all possible" (363; Wheeler, 32, TM), and a practical one about the alleged incomprehensibility of the texts of the Athendum; but it soon becomes clear that the theoretical question about incomprehensibility and the practical question about the incomprehensibility of the Athendum do not produce quite the same answer. On the one hand, the argument about incomprehensibility in general is brought in connection with the structural incomprehensibility of irony and in particular with the discussion of "Socratic irony" in the Lyceum Fragment 108, which is quoted almost in its entirety. An ironic text, the argument runs, cannot be understood because it produces two equally legitimate but mutually exclusive meanings; moreover, incomprehensibility is necessary and good: "man's most precious possession ... depends in the last analysis ... on some such point of strength that must be left in the dark, but that nonetheless shores up and supports the whole burden" (370; Wheeler, 38). On the other hand, the essay is a vehement attack against the contemporary readers, who are accused of being themselves responsible for finding the Athendum incomprehensible: "the basis of the incomprehensible [des Unverstdndlichen] is to be found in incomprehension [im Unverstand]" (363; Wheeler, 32-33). Incomprehensibility, it is said, is "relative" (364; Wheeler, 33), and depends on the incompetence either of the writer (e.g., Garve) or of the reader. Readers just have to "learn how to read" (365; Wheeler, 33; cf. also 371), and the problem will be solved.

The peculiar superposition of these two registers in the text has been noticed before and differently interpreted either as a symptom of Schlegel's getting carried away and not being calm enough to act on his own theories of ironyl4 or as a particularly sophisticated way to increase the confusion of the reader and therefore put the "basic thought of this essay"-"praise and deeper justification of incomprehensibility"'5-into practice: "The problem of incomprehensibility needs and looks for an 'incomprehensible' form of expression".16 There might, however, be other ways to read this difficulty than simply as rhetorical success or failure. It might well be that there is a structural problem at the base of the disorganized impres-


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sion the essay makes, of the hesitations, interruptions, and shifts that characterize it. To write on the possibility or impossibility of communication is, in fact, not an easy matter, especially when the disturbance of communication is identified with irony. Schlegel himself comments on this difficulty: in the introduction, where he tells about the plan he has had for a long time to talk to his readers about incomprehensibility, he says:

I wanted to prove that all incomprehensibility [ Unverstdndlichkeit] is relative . . . and so that the whole business shouldn't turn around in too palpable a circle I had made a firm resolve really to be comprehensible [verstindlich], at least this time.... Consequently I had to think of some popular medium to bond chemically the holy, delicate, fleeting, airy, fragrant, and, as it were, imponderable thought. Otherwise, how badly might it have been misunderstood [miflverstanden], since only through its well-considered [wohlverstandnen] employment was an end finally to be made of all understandable misunderstandings [alien verstindlichen Mifi- verstindnissen]? (364; Wheeler, 33).

How is it possible to speak comprehensibly about incomprehensibility? Incomprehension shows that there is a problem, and-in the broadest terms-that the problem is connected with one's use of language. An argument tending to the elimination of incomprehensibility, since it makes use of language just like any other, is exposed to the very same problem that it set out to eliminate. Only through the understanding of the argument will understanding be possible, but this means that in order to understand the argument one has to have already understood it. A similar problem is posed for a text that argues about the necessity of incomprehensibility. If what it says is true, it has to be incomprehensible; but if it is incomprehensible (in Schlegel's sense, that is by making two opposite statements about its topic, in this case incomprehensibility) it will be impossible to tell what it is that it has to say about incomprehensibility-whether or not it argues for its necessity. The form this question takes in "Uber die Unverstindlichkeit" is that of the difficulty (or impossibility) of interpreting irony. On the one hand, the text is a discussion of the problems posed by irony; on the other hand, it defines itself as an ironic text.17 Does it itself pose the problems it discusses? And in that case, is it able to apply its discussion to itself?

One of the most disturbing moments in the text for the reader who wants to find in it "praise and deeper justification of incomprehensibility" is Schlegel's explanation of the so-called "Ten-


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denzen" fragment (366-67; Wheeler, 34-35). If the reason for the incomprehensibility of the Athendum is the incompetence of its readers (as appears to be implied at various points in the essay), then it should be possible to explain away the difficulties this text has posed. And, it seems, Schlegel tries to do just that: he quotes the fragment and explains, with the full force of his authority, what he had wanted to say with it, that is, how it should have been understood. The "Tendenzen" fragment, Schlegel argues, is a particularly good example of the incompetence of the readers of the Athendum, since the way in which it has been misunderstood follows a precise pattern: the misunderstanding concerns the parts of the fragment that should have been perfectly unambiguous, while the parts of the fragment where the author had consciously inserted ambiguities have created no difficulties. The criterion for the justification of difficulties in interpretation is, once again, the presence or absence of irony. The part of the fragment that-according to Schlegel- should not have been misunderstood is the part where everything was said "almost without any irony at all," while the part that should have been incomprehensible is where "the irony begins" ("und da fangt nun auch schon die Ironie an," 366; Wheeler, 35). The author of the fragment speaks here with the full force of his rights and lays claim to authority over his own text. He can say with how much irony he has spoken ("almost without any irony at all") and above all know with certainty where irony begins: "this is where the irony begins" ("da . . . fngt die Ironie an"). Precisely at the moment, however, when the author wants to exert his control over his own text, the text eludes this control and says something else. For the irony that "begins" at that point in the explanation is not just the irony that the author has consciously and on purpose injected into the fragment, but also, and perhaps even more, another irony-the (tragic) irony, no longer controlled by the author, of the fact that the fragment has been read as ironical where it was meant straight- forwardly, and taken seriously where there would have been reasons to read ironically.

The attempt to anticipate and steer the expected incomprehension of the text by providing it on purpose with a measurable amount of ambiguity is an attempt to keep control over the text. Since one expects it to be misunderstood, one tries at least to influence the way in which the misunderstanding will take place. But the misunderstanding of the text cannot be predicted in advance and cannot be controlled: one has to let it happen. This second irony


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that "begins" here is, then, already the "irony of irony" of the end of the essay-the irony played by irony at the expense of the ironist who believes he is in control, the irony that "runs wild and can't be controlled any longer" (369; Wheeler, 37).

In the paragraph about the "irony of irony" the text describes the very situation we have been discussing when it defines one version of the irony of irony as "wenn man mit Ironie von einer Ironie redet, ohne zu merken, daB man sich zu eben der Zeit in einer viel auf- fallenderen Ironie findet"-"when one speaks of irony ironically [literally: with irony] without in the process being aware of having fallen into a far more noticeable irony" (369; Wheeler, 37, TM). It is possible to read this as a commentary on the sentence "and this is where the irony begins." We have the irony of which one speaks (the irony that Schlegel has put into his fragment); we have the "far more noticeable irony" in which one finds oneself (the irony of the misunderstanding of the fragment); and finally, we have the irony with which one speaks, namely the irony of the sentence "and this is where the irony begins," which on the one hand asserts the control of the author over his text (here is where irony starts-and you didn't see it) and on the other hand denies it by describing the situation in which the irony that the author had put into his text has spread out and infected other areas of the text that should have been "irony-free."

Not least affected by the epidemic, of course, is the sentence "und da fangt nun auch schon die Ironie an" ("and this is where irony begins"), in which nothing speaks against reading the deictic "da"- here/there-as referring-also-to itself. It is its own irony that the sentence is calling attention to at least as much as the irony in/of the "Tendenzen" fragment, and it is here that the movement becomes dizzying indeed. The irony "with which one speaks," that is, the irony produced as well as named by the sentence "und da fangt nun auch schon die Ironie an," can hardly be understood as inten- tional. The text itself is now producing the effect of Socratic irony- the ability to make two incompatible statements. The two statements ("I, author, know what happens in my text" and "my text can also mean something other than what I wanted it to mean, can also be ironic independently of my will") make contradictory claims about the status of the author-and therefore of the possibility of controlling or understanding irony.

The explanation of the "Tendenzen" fragment is where the proof for the "relativity" of incomprehensibility should be delivered. In-


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comprehensibility can only be "relative" if the author is responsible for his text: if he can show that and why it is necessary to read the text in a particular way. But precisely at the moment where this claim is being made, the text escapes the control of the author, and it is no longer possible to decide what it says. To attempt to explain irony means to want to prove that it is possible to understand it, and that to misunderstand it is not necessary but is due to incompetence. But the argument about the comprehensibility of irony is made by way of a text that is ironic-and as a consequence incomprehensible. The irony of the text contradicts what is said about irony in the text.

There is also an alternative way to read this passage. On the basis of what can indeed be recognized as the "basic thought" of the essay ("praise and ... justification of incomprehensibility," once again in Strohschneider-Kohrs' precise wording), it would be possible to argue-and it has been done18-that the entire explanation of the "Tendenzen" fragment is meant ironically: that it is supposed to make fun of the "harmonious bores" who believe that it is possible to do such a thing as explain irony and who keep complaining about incomprehensibility without understanding its necessity and worth. This interpretation would have the advantage of being able to recu- perate all the statements in the text about a future, better generation of readers: these readers would not be "better" readers in the sense that they would no longer misunderstand the texts of the Athendum, but rather in the sense that they would accept the incomprehensibility of irony as something necessary and good. This would confirm that the unifying concern of the text is, indeed, to prove that irony is incomprehensible and that there is a certain value to it; it would also clear away the problem created by the attempted explanation of the "Tendenzen" fragment. It would be wrong, however, to assume that this solution makes the text come to rest on a unified meaning, on a unified definition of irony. In order to come to such a unified meaning, it is necessary to read the explanation of the "Tendenzen" fragment as being meant ironically and to understand it correctly by translating it into its opposite. In other words, one has to base one's reading on the assumption that the text only pretends to explain irony, while what it is really saying is that this is impossible, and what it is really doing is making fun of the attempt. But this would mean that the statement that irony is incomprehensible is, in fact, made by way of an ironical assertion of its comprehensibility- an ironical assertion that is fully comprehensible: the reader hasjust


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understood it by simply translating it into its opposite. This solution, therefore, does nothing but produce a parallel problem: what is said about irony in the text (that it is incomprehensible) is belied by the irony of the text (which is comprehensible).

To summarize: we can read the text of the explanation as being meant ironically and translate it into its opposite, that is, read its attempt to explain irony as actually meaning "irony cannot be understood"; however, since we have obviously understood the irony of the text, what the text says about irony is contradicted by the comprehensibility of its own irony. Alternatively, we can read the text as attempting to prove irony understandable, but as producing an ironic structure that is precisely not understandable since it makes two contradictory statements (about the understandability of irony).

We have come back to the problem of the beginning: in what way is it possible to prove the necessity of incomprehensibility? In order to argue for it, the text has to be comprehensible-and belie what it says by being able to say it. Alternatively, the text can be incomprehensible (make two opposite statements about incomprehensibility), but then it will not be possible to decide what it says about incomprehensibility. The "education" of the reader consists in making him understand that it is not possible to understand;l' this attempt, however, is caught up in its own impossibility and can do nothing but turn permanently on itself. The irony of the essay "Uber die Unverstandlichkeit" is already an "irony of irony," an irony to the second degree: it consists in its producing two statements about irony which contradict not only each other but also themselves at the same time. It is irony's own irony that the attempt to define and therefore control it (even as what cannot be defined and gets out of control) can do nothing but get out of control. Irony turns back on the ironist by questioning his authority over his text, his ability ever to make it say what he would like it to say, and finally even the possibility of speaking about authorial intentions at all.20

Does this mean, then, that we have finally "understood" incomprehensibility, and that we are the-somewhat belated-competent readers whose arrival on the scene is announced by Schlegel at the end of the essay? About these readers he says that they will "be able to savour the fragments with much gratification and pleasure in the after-dinner hours" (371; Wheeler, 38). They will "find ... A. W. Schlegel's didactic Elegies almost too simple and transparent" (371; Wheeler, 38)-and think that they have understood everything. But


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precisely for this reason they will not have understood. They will have forgotten that "a classical text must never be entirely comprehensible [mufi nie ganz verstanden werden konnen] ," as Schlegel warns, unexpectedly, immediately after his praise of the competence of these future readers. They will have forgotten that it is impossible to understand everything because the meaning of texts deserving of this name (those which Schlegel considers, elsewhere, "complete"21) does not let itself be totalized. Precisely when one believes that one has understood everything, one has forgotten the essential-namely, that the text says also the opposite of what one thinks one has understood. Just when one thinks one is finally out of it, one is pulled back into the vortex of the sequence of readings just as the author is caught in the double bind of his attempt to produce a "complete" text-in the "unaufl6sliche[n] Widerstreit... der Unm6glichkeit und Notwendigkeit einer vollstandigen Mitteilung" (Lyceum Fragment 108). The back and forth of necessity and impossibility of complete communication (and understanding) is condemned to go on, and the feeling of "infinity" which one is supposed to experience by way of irony is not something that leaves the subject unaffected, but is a movement one cannot stand outside of, a vertiginous vortex that makes one "schwindlicht," dizzy. And once we are again aware of this metaphor, we should perhaps notice the close connection between "verstehen" (understanding) and "steh- en" (standing) and take the very last line of the essay as a (serious?) warning to the reader: "Und wer steht, daB er nicht falle"-"And who stands, that he may not fall."22

III. Permanent Parabasis

A further aspect of the problem of irony as Schlegel describes it can be discussed on the basis of its appearance in association with a vocabulary borrowed from the world of the theater. Thus, for example, in the Gesprdch iiber die Poesie (Dialogue on Poetry): "Even in quite popular genres, for example in drama, we require irony: we require that the events, the people, in short the whole play [Spiel] of life should be taken and represented as play [Spiel]" (KFSA 2:323),23 or in the much quoted posthumous fragment that defines: "Irony is a permanent parabasis [eine permanente Parekbase] -" (KFSA 18:85). As is well known, the parabasis is the part in Old Attic comedy in which the chorus temporarily steps out of the linear development of the plot of the play and, turning around to face the audience, addresses


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it directly, making reference to contemporary public figures and events. In Schlegel's own definition, it is

a speech addressed to the people that the chorus delivered in the middle of the play in the name of the poet. It was really a complete interruption and breaking off of the play, in which, as in the play itself, reigned the greatest lack of restraint, and the chorus, stepping out all the way to the edge of the proscenium [das bis an die Grenze des Proszeniums heraustretende Chor], would say the rudest things to the audience (Geschichte der euro- pdischen Literatur, KFSA 11:88).

The parabasis, then, is first of all an interruption, and the definition of irony as "permanent parabasis," as continuous interruption, can be read as one more reference to irony's ability to produce two lines of meaning that constantly challenge each other.24 However, this description of irony and the one given in the Gesprdch iiber die Poesie produce a slight shift with respect to other ones. This shift is due to their use of theatrical vocabulary: the two sides of irony are not described as simply denying each other, but as exposing each other as fictional. This becomes clear once one asks about the signif- icance of the parabasis inside a play. The parabasis is, for the play, the interruption of the fictional illusion: more precisely, the reality that opposes itself to the fictional illusion. It exposes fiction (Schle- gel: "Spiel") as fiction by opening up the closed world of the stage to the "real" world of the spectator area. The coherence of the sequence of events on the stage is thereby disrupted, and the unity and meaning of this sequence is shown to be fiction and therefore arbitrary. The play that is interrupted by a parabasis reflects on its own fictionality. The parabasis connects stage and auditorium in an unspoken agreement: both audience and actors recognize the fiction of the play as fiction, as something that can be interrupted by reality at all times. Reality always reserves the right to unmask the fiction, and the consciousness of this right is what allows fiction to go on and to be tolerated as a world separate from reality.

The parabasis is, however, not just the irruption of reality in the fiction: by the same token, it is the infiltration of fiction in reality, since the interruption of the fictional illusion, which shows the play to be fiction by representing itself as reality, is itself exposed as fiction. Structurally, this is clear since the parabasis occupies the same position in the play that the play occupies in reality (as interruption of the normal course of things which is, however, interrupted in its turn by the latter's resumption); but it is also clear from


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the fact that the parabasis represents itself as reality with respect to the play, i.e., plays reality just as much as the play does. Within the boundaries of the play, the parabasis takes itself just as seriously as "reality" does outside the play; but once the parabasis is shown to be in its turn merely play of reality, the borders between reality and fiction are no longer so clearly drawn.

The parabasis makes visible the border between stage and spectator area by stepping up to, stepping on, or overstepping it. In Athe- nian comedy this is symbolized by the actions of the chorus which, as Schlegel says, goes up all the way to the edge of the proscenium to address the spectators. But what happens in this act is not only that the actors on the stage interrupt the development of the plot and recognize themselves as actors, but that the audience itself plays a role. The actors in the chorus "are" no longer frogs or birds, but actors in a chorus-they play their real identity. In this situation it can become difficult to decide whether the audience, to which a role has also been assigned (it is addressed), consists of citizens of Athens or of people who are playing this role (their everyday reality). The unmasking of the play as fiction can only happen to the extent that it also at the same time points to the fact that reality might possibly also be fiction: in Schlegel's words, that the "Spiel des Lebens" might be just that, "Spiel."

In Old Attic comedy this questioning is rigidly structured and its duration has a set limit. As soon as the parabasis ends and the play resumes, the spectators can sit back and recognize themselves again as spectators, that is, as reality by contrast with the fiction of the characters on stage. Something more akin to Schlegel's idea of the "permanent parabasis" might be, on the other hand, the list of characters of Tieck's play Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss-in-Boots), where one finds, side by side with the characters of the King, of Gottlieb, and of the cat Hinze, also that of the "public" ("Das Publikum").25 Since the various spectator characters who play an active role in the comedy are listed individually in the character list ("Fischer, Mfiller, Schlosser, B6tticher, Leutner, Wiesener, His neighbor") and are helpfully identified as "Zuschauer," spectators, "das Publikum" can mean nothing other than the "real" audience that is in the theater to see the play. But by way of its presence in the list of characters of the play, the audience is at the same time there to watch Dergestiefelte Kater and to play in it: it is on the one hand the reality outside the play and, on the other, since it has a part in it, part of its fiction. In this case the border between the stage and the spectator area, be-


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tween fiction and reality, begins to lose the characteristics of a straight line and risks spiralling into infinity. The spectators who talk in the lobby before and after the play might never be able to know whether they are any less fictional than the numerous epi- sodes that interrupt the play understood in a narrow sense (the tale of the cat) and that point to its fictionality only to the extent that they play reality.26

The ironical spectator (or the ironist in general) is the one who realizes that he is always already a character in the play. Although he is obviously free to react as he wishes, his reactions (as reactions of a spectator who belongs to the play) belong in turn to the play and are a part of his role. Even his knowledge that he is part of the play is part of the play; even his self-reflection does not belong to him; even his irony is ironized.

University of California, Irvine

NOTES

Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler with Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner (Munich: Sch6ningh, 1958-; henceforth KFSA), vol. 18, 410. All quotations from Schlegel are from this edition and will be identified by volume and page number in the main text. Translations of the Athendum and Lyceum ("Critical") fragments are by Peter Firchow and are quoted from Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991; henceforth Fragments). The translation of "Uber die Unverstandlichkeit" is also Firchow's and is quoted from Kathleen Wheeler, ed., German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1984). All other translations are mine unless otherwise specified.

Thanks to the teachers and colleagues, too numerous to name here, who offered generous criticism, advice, and encouragement on this paper.

2 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Hamburg: Fe- lix Meiner Verlag, 1988), 32; cf. also 45. A more extensive treatment of the relationship between Schlegel and Fichte, such as the recent ones by Riidiger Bubner ("Zur dialektischen Bedeutung romantischer Ironie," in Ernst Behler and Jochen H6risch, eds., Die Aktualitdt der Friihromantik [Paderborn: Sch6n- ingh, 1987], 85-95); Paul de Man ("The Concept of Irony," in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcom- ing]); and Werner Hamacher ("Der Satz der Gattung: Friedrich Schlegels poe- tologische Umsetzung von Fichtes unbedingtem Grundsatz," MLN 95 [1980]: 1155-80) would take us far afield here. However, it should be clear that the word "Analyse," taken in this sense, leaves little room for an understanding of irony as a movement tending to unification: immediately after the definition just given, Fichte goes so far as to rename the "analytic process" "antithetical," partly on the grounds that this new name (i.e., "antithetisches Verfahren") "indicates more clearly that this process is the opposite of the synthetic one" (33). Inter- pretations of this fragment usually miss the reference, taking the word "Analyse"


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in an everyday sense, and tend to be rather unconvincing as a result. For example, D. C. Muecke comments: "Schlegel's meaning is that irony does not take sides but regards both sides critically." The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen & Co: 1969), 200. Similarly, Anne K. Mellor attempts to make even this radical statement fit her fundamentally domesticating understanding of Schlegel's texts. She writes: "This philosophical dialectic [between the infinite and the finite, the free and the conditioned] . . . begins with a skeptical negation, with a 'critical examination' and rejection of existing beliefs and errors. It thus frees the imagination to create a new conception of the self, of society, of nature. But this new conception must, in turn, be subjected to the same ironic, critical analysis, an analysis that recognizes its limitations and failings. It is in this sense that Schlegel insists that 'Irony is analysis of thesis and antithesis.'" English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 11.

In more general terms, formulations of this kind on Schlegel's part have tended to pose problems not only on a local level but also for comprehensive interpretations of his philosophical project. To take one symptomatic instance, Steven Alford's study of Schlegel's critique of traditional logic and of its connec- tions with Romantic irony is strewn with affirmations such as the following: "[T]he idea of opposites and their synthesis dominates Schlegel's thinking. Indeed, as we have just seen the aim of Schlegel's logic is to unify opposites." Steven E. Alford, Irony and the Logic of the Romantic Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), 51.

3 A valuable recent commentary on this fragment in its relation to the larger context of German Romantic and post-romantic notions of "Socratic irony" can be found in Uwe Japp, Theorie der Ironie (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), 113-33.

4 Oddly enough, even writers on irony who claim Schlegel as an influence seem to ignore his critique of the rhetorical handbook version of irony. Lillian R. Furst, for example, states: "Irony can . . . be regarded as a secret language, a channel of communication between the initiates.... [B]eneath the apparent discon- nection, there must also be a connection if irony is to be caught. The overt information is accompanied by signals that negate it, and the speaker must present both codes in such a way that his interlocutor is able to decipher them in their contradictory conjunction." Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 1984), 15.

5 "There can therefore be no way of settling it once for all and to the satisfaction of both sides, save by their becoming convinced, since they are able so admirably to refute one another, that they are really quarreling about nothing, and that a certain transcendental illusion has mocked them with a reality where none is to be found." Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1968), 467; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), 446, TM.

A more modern version of this attempt to make logical contradiction harm- less by simply taking a few precautionary measures can be found in W. V. Quine's classic essay "The Ways of Paradox." There, Quine classifies paradoxes as "veridical" and "falsidical" paradoxes and "antinomies." Since "veridical" paradoxes turn out to be simply cleverly put banalities (someone who was born on February 29 can be 21 after only 5 birthdays) and "falsidical" ones can be proven to be based on fallacies (Quine's example is the proof that 2 = 1 based on a division by 0), the only "real" paradoxes turn out to be the antinomies, the kinds of paradoxes that produce the conclusion that something is and is not. Quine, who as a logician is no less interested in the preservation of the principle of non-contradiction than Kant is, hastens to add that these paradoxes, too, can be solved provided one is willing to give something up: "An antinomy produces


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a self-contradiction by accepted ways of reasoning. It establishes that some tacit and trusted pattern of reasoning must be made explicit and henceforward be avoided or revised." "The Ways of Paradox," in W. V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 5. One of the problematic habits to come under scrutiny is the use of the word "true."

For an illuminating history of the controversy surrounding the potentially disruptive nature of a famous antinomy, see Richard Klein, "The Future of Nuclear Criticism," Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 76-100.

6 Aristotle, Rhetorica. The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1335-37.

7 Other appearances of the word in the notebooks confirm that it is employed consistently in this sense. It functions as a synonym for "Demonstration" and "Beweis" (in contrast to "Darstellung" as linguistic representation) in the context of discussions of philosophical writing (e.g., in KFSA 18:35) and can be found later in association with terms like "Mimos" (KFSA 16:54) and "Nach- machen" (KFSA 16:55).

8 "XA'OE... chaos, the first state of the universe.... 2. space, the expanse of air.... 2b. infinite time.... 3. the nether abyss, infinite darkness. ... 4. any vast gulf or chasm." Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, revised by Sir H. S. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).

9 See for example Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, "Der Begriff der Ironie in der Konzeption Friedrich Schlegels," Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung (Tibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1960), especially 39-41 and 70; Franz Nor- bert Mennemeier, "Fragment und Ironie beimjungen Friedrich Schlegel," Poet- ica 2 (1968): 348-70, especially 366; Ernst Behler, "The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism," in Frederick Garber, ed., Romantic Irony (Budapest: Akad6miai Kiad6, 1988) 43-81, especially 62 ff.

10 Eric Baker first pointed out to me that the "Schwindel" implied by the "schwindlicht werden" can be understood not only in the more obvious sense of "dizziness, giddiness" but also in its second meaning as lie, swindel, or fraud. The possibility of this wordplay seems especially significant in a text that discusses the possibility of reading irony as Tduschung or deception. Corroborating mate- rial for this reading is given by a passage in Tieck's 1793 essay on "Shakespeares Behandlung des Wunderbaren," referred to by Manfred Frank in his Einfiihrung in diefriihromantische Asthetik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), 374, where the words Schwindel and Tduschung occur in the context of a discussion of the ability to deceive an audience into believing in an illusion. Tieck compares Shake- speare's treatment of the fantastic to the dreamworld, in which "our ability to judge is so confused that we forget the marks by which we normally judge the real, we find nothing on which to fix our eyes; our soul is sent into a sort of dizziness [in eine Art von Schwindel versetzt], in which it finally, by necessity, abandons itelf to the illusion [ Tduschung: deception], since it has lost sight of all the markings of truth and of error." Ludwig Tieck, Kritische Schriften, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1848), 57. If there is "swindel" here, however, it might turn out that the swindler is not so easy to find.

11 Even recent commentaries on this fragment fail to note that the gesture it performs has much farther-reaching consequences than simply the disabling of the hierarchy between initiates and outsiders. For example, Joseph A. Dane observes: "Those who enjoy the superiority afforded by irony are not the elect hearers who understand it: in fact, those who understand irony for what Schle- gel says it is (deception) are those who are most thoroughly deceived by it. Rather, those who can attain the superior vantage of the ironist are those who have and produce irony, that is, other ironists." Joseph A. Dane, The Critical Mythology of Irony (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 112.


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12 "Uber die Unverstandlichkeit," KFSA 2:363-72. All subsequent quotations from this essay will be identified in the text by page number only.

13 For an exhaustive account of the polemics surrounding the Athendum, see Heinz Hartl, "'Athenaum'-Polemiken," in Hans-Dietrich Dahnke and Bernd Leistner, eds., Debatten und Kontroversen. Literarische Auseinandersetzungen in Deutschland am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1989), 246-357.

14 Strohschneider-Kohrs: "[Schlegel] is driven by the fighting spirit of the polemic and by his commitment to the thought he wants to express.... The author of the essay on incomprehensibility is not allowed into the mystery of the 'real language,' as he himself calls it, evidently because he lacks the calm and confi- dence to unfold the means and principles of the expression [des Sagens] itself instead of subordinating them to what is ex-pressed [der Aus-sage]" (282).

15 Strohschneider-Kohrs, 275. 16 Ralf Schnell, Die verkehrte Welt: Literarische Ironie im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart:

Metzler, 1989), 18. See also Ludwig Rohner, Der deutsche Essay. Materialien zur Geschichte einer Gattung (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1966), 152-66. In the same line, although speaking more generally, Anne K. Mellor states that "romantic irony is a mode of consciousness or a way of thinking about the world that finds a corresponding literary mode" (Mellor, 24). The question would be what that "finding" entails.

17 Repeatedly in the course of the essay itself; cf. also an allusion to the essay as a "Fuge von Ironie" in a letter from Schlegel to Schleiermacher quoted in Aus Schleiermachers Leben. In Briefen, eds. Ludwig Jonas und Wilhelm Dilthey, vol. 3 (Berlin 1861), 191. An analysis that takes this dimension of the essay as its starting point is Cathy Comstock, "'Transcendental Buffoonery': Irony as Pro- cess in Schlegel's 'Uber die Unverstandlichkeit,'" Studies in Romanticism 26 (1987): 445-64.

18 See, for example, Hartl, 288-89; also Alford, 93. 19 See the "AbschluB des Lessing-Aufsatzes" ("Conclusion of the Lessing Essay"): "I

will tell you quite briefly and clearly, and should you nonetheless complain about incomprehensibility [Unverstindlichkeit], as you did up to now, I hope to make clear at least that it does not depend on the expression but on the thing itself. For the rest, I remain in this case only with the pious wish that you may, at some point, begin to understand understanding [das Verstehen zu verstehen]; then you would become aware that the mistake is not at all where you look for it, and you would no longer delude yourselves with such confused notions and empty phantoms." (KFSA 2:412).

20 Once again, Schlegel's text seems to be aware of the problems it has to face. "The only solution," it says, "would be to find an irony that might be able to swallow up all these big and little ironies and leave no trace of them at all... But even this would only be a short-term solution. I fear that ... soon a new generation of little ironies would arise .... Irony is something one simply cannot play games with [Mit der Ironie ist durchaus nicht zu scherzen]." (369-70; Wheel- er 37, TM). On the strength of the parallelism with the first paragraph of the essay, it is possible to understand the "big irony" as something like the abstrac- tion of the particular in the universal: as the "concept" of irony, in other words. A definition of irony would establish some kind of control over it; it is, however, impossible.

A moment in "Uber die Unverstandlichkeit" that could be fruitfully read with respect to the question of authorial intention is the passage on Shakespeare's "intentions" (370; Wheeler 37-38).

21 As in the note quoted above: "Every sentence, every book that does not contradict itself is incomplete."

22 Perhaps more clearly, in its syntactical completeness: "Sorge ... wer steht daB


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er nicht falle"-"Watch ... who stands that he may not fall" (372: Wheeler, 40, TM). This last line, which concludes both the satirical "gloss" that closes the essay and Goethe's-serious?-poem "Beherzigung," has good reasons to warn us once again that we might not be able to keep our balance, since it repro- duces, in a wholly new way, the very tension we have been discussing. It is not simply a question of being able to find the "boundaries between the enuncia- tion said to be assumed by Goethe and its transformation by Schlegel," as Marike Finlay argues (The Romantic Irony of Semiotics: Friedrich Schlegel and the Crisis of Representation [New York: De Gruyter, 1988], 233), but of being able to attribute authorship and authority for the text as a whole. Within the context of the "gloss," the sentence is at the same time Goethe's and Schlegel's, and falls under the authority of both and of neither of them. It thematizes, once again, the problem of the essay-the loss of control. For a very lucid discussion of the related problem of the "ghostly" play of the letter in Schlegel's text, see Birgit Baldwin, "Irony, that 'Little, Invisible Personage': a Reading of Kierkegaard's Ghosts," MLN 104 (1989): 1124-41.

23 Anne K. Mellor simplifies things somewhat when faced with the word "Spiel" in this statement: in her view, Schlegel sees "this active embracing of chaos as an enjoyable game" (Mellor, 24). There would seem, however, to be more at stake in the remark: what would be the necessity of "requiring" something that causes such fun?

For a discussion of irony's relationship to "Spiel," see Hans-Jost Frey, Der unendliche Text (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1990), 272-76.

24 It is in this sense that this expression has been most often read. J. Hillis Miller, for example, glosses: "A parabasis momentarily suspends the line of the action. Irony is a permanent parabasis. This means it suspends the line all along the line." Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 105. See also Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," Blind- ness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 218-22, and "The Concept of Irony." More recently, Marike Finlay has argued-in Gerard Genette's vocabulary-that "in permanent parabasis, what is supposed to occur is a permanent cancelling out of mimesis by the diegetic act" (Finlay, 225), and further that "[a]ll that we have is permanent continuous diegesis in permanent parabasis, since a permanent destruction of the illusion of reality in imitation means no imitation at all" (230). But clearly if this were the case there would be no need for parabasis to be "permanent," since the illusion would be destroyed once and for all. The need for permanence is given precisely by the impossibility of destroying illusion once and for all, by the endlessly acute tension provoked by the co-presence of illusion and the destruction of illusion.

Perhaps less frequently noted is the fact that once again Schlegel's irony turns out to be articulated precisely around the intersection-and interruption- between an example or instance (or epideixis) and a statement about that example. In this case, the ability of the expression "permanent parabasis" to function as a definition of irony is at least complicated by the fact that it is ironic-de Man calls it, in "The Concept of Irony," "violently paradoxical"-in its own turn. "Permanent" and "parabasis" are words that cannot go together, since parabasis-interruption-is only possible against the background of something that is interrupted. Interruption is punctual and acts on something linear; here, interruption itself becomes linear-an impossible transformation. This is presumably one of the reasons why Kevin Newmark, in a recent essay, calls this fragment "the most self-resisting definition of irony [Schlegel] ever gave"-self-resistance, that is, permanent parabasis, being the structure that Newmark shows to be constitutive, as well as disruptive, of the Romantic project


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understood as literary theory, as the attempted unification of literature and philosophy. See Kevin Newmark,"L'absolu litteraire. Friedrich Schlegel and the Myth of Irony," MLN 107 (1992): 905-30.

25 Ludwig Tieck, Dergestiefelte Kater, Schriften, vol. 5 (Berlin: G. Keimer, 1828), 164. The translation used is Ludwig Tieck, Der gestiefelte Kater. Puss-in-Boots, ed. and trans. Gerald Gillespie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), 35.

26 This situation is of course complicated by its reinscription inside the play-a further instance of vertiginous violation of borders, of multidirectional and crossed mise-en-abime. In a scene discussed by Manfred Frank, two of the characters of the play within the play of Der gestiefelte Kater, the palace tutor Leander and Hanswurst, "Jackpudding," discuss a new play called Der gestiefelte Kater on the basis, among other things, of the accuracy of its depiction of the audience. At this point Fischer, one of the spectator characters of the "larger" play, inter- rupts the exchange: "Das Publikum? Es kommtja kein Publikum in dem Sticke vor!" ("The public? Why, no public appears in the play." Dergestiefelte Kater, 252; Puss-in-Boots, 109). Frank (349-50) comments by distinguishing the audience in the play from the "real" audience in the theater and by pointing to the fact that the depiction of the spectator characters as stupid (they are "so narrow-minded that they are incapable of reflecting on their own implication in the plot") also applies to the real audience since the discussion between the "fake" spectators in the play is about the accuracy of the play's depiction of the characters. If the play's depiction is good, as Leander claims, then the "real" audience shares with the "fake" one its main characteristic-its inability to recognize itself as part of the plot. The fact that this structure is repeated one more time in a place outside the boundaries of the play within the play as well as of the "frame" play Der gestiefelte Kater, however, makes this problem into a much more urgent one for the "real" audience. It is no longer a question of being depicted, but of not knowing whether one might be oneself the depiction.


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Issue Table of ContentsMLN, Vol. 108, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1993), pp. 805-1030Volume Information [pp. ]Front Matter [pp. ]Sartre and the Powers of Literature: The Myth of Prose and the Practice of Reading [pp. 805-824]Understanding Irony: Three Essais on Friedrich Schlegel [pp. 825-848]Fideikommisbibliothek: Freud's "Demonological Neurosis"[pp. 849-874]Losing One's Place: Displacement and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House [pp. 875-890]Gerrymandered Geographies: Exoticism in Thomson and Chateaubriand [pp. 891-912]"Critical Archive"Longinus Reconsidered [pp. 913-934]

Review ArticlesPaul de Man's Wanderjahre [pp. 935-944]Processuality and Conservation: The Case of Ernst Jnger[pp. 945-952]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 953-956]Review: untitled [pp. 956-959]Review: untitled [pp. 959-964]Review: untitled [pp. 964-967]Review: untitled [pp. 967-972]Review: untitled [pp. 972-974]Review: untitled [pp. 974-979]Review: untitled [pp. 979-980]Review: untitled [pp. 980-984]Review: untitled [pp. 984-986]Review: untitled [pp. 987-990]Review: untitled [pp. 990-993]Review: untitled [pp. 993-997]Review: untitled [pp. 997-1000]Review: untitled [pp. 1000-1003]Review: untitled [pp. 1003-1006]Review: untitled [pp. 1006-1009]Review: untitled [pp. 1009-1011]Review: untitled [pp. 1012-1015]Review: untitled [pp. 1015-1016]Review: untitled [pp. 1016-1019]Review: untitled [pp. 1019-1023]Review: untitled [pp. 1024-1026]

Incipitque Semper [pp. 1027-1030]Back Matter [pp. ]

understanding irony. three essays on friedrich schlegel

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