15/10/07 - English Literature - Romantic Irony

"One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years – roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright – the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously. Nothing was real…. The consequence of thinking that nothing is real – apart from prancing around in an air of vain stupidity – is that one will not know the difference between a joke and a menace. No more. The planes that plowed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were real. The flames, smoke, sirens – real. The chalky landscape, the silence of the streets – all real."
Roger Rosenblatt, ‘The Age of Irony Comes to an End’, Time Magazine, Vol. 158 Issue 13 (24 September 2001): 79]

The above is one person's response to the events of 9/11 less than three weeks after they happened. Isn't this an odd response? He could have talked of political engagement or world politics, but Rosenblatt focuses instead on the trope of irony. He takes a 'Postmodernist' approach, a concept that had been around since the 1970s as a way of trying to understand contemporary life. But why irony? And how come he believes irony has only been around for thirty years? This is a gross understatement for irony is as old as philosophy itself, something Socrates employed in his writings. It is the sense that something fundamentally changed in the Romantic age which Rosenblatt has a problem with.

So what is irony? It is a term from rhetoric, derived from ideas about how we speak, from Quintilian's book Institutio Oratoria which taught politicians how to speak. He defines it as "something contrary to what is said is to be understood." Irony is used to be comic, to defamiliarise things, for example in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Irony as a trope is often used in parody and satire. Lewis Carroll parodies the "Old Father Willian" poem by distorting and disturbing a familiar and boring poem in order to make it mad. (Carroll also wrote a parody of Romantic irony.) Irony takes a particular language and uses that language against itself. But irony is also a mode of being, a way of life. Socrates often posed as a fool, continually asking questions to reveal the lack of logic at the heart of others' arguments. He turns them against their own ideas. He lived ironically. Oscar Wilde was committed to irony; he played with language as an organised and reasoned entity, and disturbed it. Picasso and Dorothy Parker were ironic people also. Irony is a figure and a position that we can inhabit.

Something changed in the concept of irony in Romanticism. Irony became the mode of engaging with the world and affected people's capacity to experience. It was fundamental. The very being of humans is fundamentally ironic. Irony was a break from literal meaning in language. When one couldn't say what one needed to say, it was possible to invert it and the meaning was the same, for example Mark Anthony in Shakespeare. For the Romantics the concept of representation itself became fraught with questions. Irony figured the gap between words and the world that was the condition of all experience.

"For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
The thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my mortal being."
[Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey", lines 88-111]

The poem is a description of nature in a way, but not very much. Wordsworth gestures elsewhere, towards transcendence. The eye does not see what is before it, Wordsworth sees what is produced in the context of the presence of the sublime. He has a sense of being at home in the world, that the world is all connected. Everything in the poem is occurring in his mind. It is a picture created by the man. Wordsworth emerges from that which is spirit and emotion; there is no opposition between mind and world, they are part of each other. Perception is half-creation. Our perception of the world generates a creation. The poem details a magical creation: "still, sad music." It is an ironic relation to the world. For the Romantics, speech came from engagement with the mind, not from the literal world, as Wordsworth describes in the poem. The creative, destructive, transformative potential of language in the poem emulates the imagination.

"The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet at all events it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead."
[Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter 13. NTC, p. 676]

Coleridge has a certain sense of irony. There are two types of imagination: primary and secondary. The primary imagination is the "living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception." It is what gives humans life and is essential. Every engagement with the world is imaginative, so the imagination is a "repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am." The last three lines indicate that "I" is God: Coleridge claims that humans are gods in our imaginative perception of the world, recreating it. The secondary imagination is the consciously ordered imagination: its mode is conscious. It is the conscious capturing of the emotions that influences our perception of the world. Our imagination gives life to the world, although in reality everything is fixed and dead. This is an essentially ironic piece of writing. Our relationship with the world is ironic exactly because we refuse to accept its fixedness, because it is perceived to change according to our emotions although in truth it never does. So there is always more to the world than we originally think and this makes us perceive it to be changing. We shine a lamp on the world, we are not simply mirrors that reflect it.

Literature is a privileged mode of experience. It is the outflow of the secondary imagination, so it can be opened up for investigative and further productive experiences.