Introduction
This chapter argues that the structural functioning of irony is best exemplified by the step/not of parabasis, the conjunctive and disjunctive spaces of parataxis, and the interruption of the anacoluthon. Irony is that which steps between supposedly closed categories, crossing and mixing codes, singularly and mechanically producing, describing and undoing. It is a force and a weakness, the structure of the divided mark that promises and commits perjury, anacoluthically interrupting the subject. It is the contaminated perverformative, a productive force/weakness which exceeds propositional exegesis, overstepping boundaries between literature and philosophy. It is an excess, the insertion of a gap or the beyond into the mark itself, which splits and doubles, performing and describing what it performs. Hence the performativity in the texts that interest Derrida partake of a “performativity in crisis” (SI 42), catachrestic malapropisms that in their skewed, improper use of reflexivity and the productive power of the iterable mark fabricate an excess beyond traditional uses of the constative or the performative.
It is de Man, rather than Derrida, who is most often thought to combine irony and deconstruction. In his eulogy for de Man Derrida describes him as “irony itself”, and one who – here we see again caution in Derrida‟s use of the term “irony” –“never gave in to that negative assurance with which the ironic consciousness is sometimes too easily satisfied” (MF xvi-xvii). De Man‟s two major texts on irony –“The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1971) and “The Concept of Irony” (1976/77) – see a pronounced change in his approach to irony; the latter, writes de Man, was written as an “autocritique” (AI 170) of the first. This chapter argues that while Derrida appears not to have read “The Concept of Irony” while writing Memoires for Paul de Man,1 not only does he prefigure de Man‟s eventual, corrected definition of irony, but surpasses it in subtlety and complexity.
1
The text that is published in Aesthetic Ideology under the title “The Concept of Irony” is taken from the notes de Man compiled for lectures given in Yale in 1976-77. However, Aesthetic
Ideology was not published until 1996, while Memoires for Paul de Man was first published in
1986, and so Derrida could not have read the text as published. It is of course possible, given Derrida and de Man‟s friendship, that elements of de Man‟s lectures were discussed, but as Derrida neither mentions them nor de Man‟s repudiation of much of the irony posited in “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, it seems unlikely that he was aware of them.
To step towards a theory of pervasive, structural irony it is necessary to step with and through de Man‟s text machine to Derrida‟s impossible event. Thus, while this chapter plays paratactic irony against Marian Hobson‟s syntactic irony, and brings parabasis a step closer to Blanchot‟s step/not of pas, the underlying engagement lies with de Man.
Irony and de Man
In “The Rhetoric of Temporality” de Man conceptualises allegory and irony as the distinct yet inseparable components of a temporal exigency, indicative of language‟s remove from the empirical, and resultant in a divided subject. Baudelaire, de Man explains, referred to irony as “le comique absolu”, whereby the self is doubled between an empirical self immersed in the world, and a self as linguistic structure that observes the empirical self. The reflexive process – watching, for example, the empirical self fall and reflecting on the fall – does not just occur through language, but transfers the empirical self into a world of language, whereby language is both an object in the world and the means through which the world is understood. As de Man writes, “Language thus conceived divides the subject into an empirical self, immersed in the world, and a self that becomes like a sign in its attempt at differentiation and self-definition” (BI 213). The ironic, doubled self thus contains “an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity” (BI 214).
While one must laugh at the fall, this process is by no means a comforting process; for Baudelaire it was a process of unravelling that reveals a being on the verge of madness. As de Man writes:
absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself. But this reflection is made possible only by the double structure of ironic language: the ironist invents a form of himself that is “mad” but that does not know its own madness; he then proceeds to reflect on his madness objectified. (BI 216)
The ironic, reflexive self must think to the very borders of what can be thought, and reflect on madness, on the limits of what the linguistic self can express. Formed through language, the reflective self is a fiction that cannot be confused
with the “real” empirical self, and should not see itself as a stable point of knowledge and order. Should the ironic self see itself as a ground then it becomes empirical, and reality and fiction become confused. The ironic relation of the ironic self to itself – irony to the second power or Schlegel‟s irony of irony – stems, according to de Man, from the continued separation of fact and fiction. De Man sees parabasis as “what is called in English criticism the „self-conscious narrator,‟ the author‟s intrusion that disrupts the fictional illusion” (BI 218-19). This disruption does not serve to produce a greater realism, but a heightened self of fictionality that reveals that the ironic, fictional self can never be a “real”, empirical self.
For de Man irony is an endless process that never leads to synthesis, as “irony engenders a temporal sequence of acts of consciousness which is endless” (BI 220). Irony does not move towards unity, but instead is the endlessly repetitive “recurrence of a self-escalating act of consciousness” (BI 220). It is an infinite movement of lucid madness: a consciousness of non-consciousness. It has no origin and relates to what it means or refers to – the empirical self/object – only in terms of difference: “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 [inescapable] inauthentic” (BI 222). De Man‟s ironist is very much trapped by her own irony; all she can do is “restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but [she] remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world” (BI 222). Irony and the ironic self drift from empirical reality, moving further and further from the sign they designate.
While the symbol operates through synecdoche or metonymy, allegory, the second component of the temporal exigency, is always of a different time and space to what it represents. Like a metaphor it refers to another sign which precedes it, a sign with which it can never coincide. Like irony, allegory is removed from its origin, temporally adrift. Unlike irony it operates diachronically; the structure of allegory is found “in the tendency of the language toward narrative, the spreading out along the axis of imaginary time in order to give duration to what is, in fact, simultaneous within the subject” (BI 225). While allegory gives the appearance of development and progress over time, existing “within an ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless
future” (BI 226), “irony appears as an instantaneous process that takes place rapidly, suddenly, in one single movement” (BI 225). There is a climax or point, “the instant at which the two selves, the empirical as well as the ironic, are simultaneously present, juxtaposed within the same moment but as two irreconcilable and disjointed beings” (BI 226). The difference resides in the subject and time is reduced to a single moment. “Essentially the mode of the present, it [irony] knows neither memory nor prefigurative duration. … Irony is a synchronic structure” (BI 226).
In “The Concept of Irony” de Man argues that irony functions at the level of the signifier and interrupts all that is posited by language. Irony is no longer a trope, but the trope of tropes, as the turn contained in irony is a shaper turn, a “more radical negation” (AI 165) than that contained in metaphor, synecdoche or metonymy. What is at stake in irony, he claims, “is the possibility of understanding, the possibility of reading, the very readability of texts, the possibility of deciding on a meaning or on a multiple set of meanings or on a controlled polysemy of meanings” (AI 167). Irony is therefore not simply a turn within language from direct or literal meaning that nonetheless presupposes its existence, but a double turn that moves away from any presumption of a knowable single meaning or “authentic” language.
De Man proposes that the very foundation of the self is based on a tropological system of catachrestic turns. For Fichte, de Man argues, the self is a property of language, as the self simultaneously posits itself, and the/its nonself, through language. It is only because the self and the opposite of the self are concurrently posited that the properties of the self can be discussed; when the poles interact they delimit each other and enable comparisons and judgements to be made. Hence the (de)limiting and defining that Schlegel speaks of in relation to the self: Selbstbeschränkung. This structure, the isolation and circulation of properties, “the way in which properties can be exchanged between entities when they are being compared with each other in an act of judgement” (AI 174), is likened by de Man to the structure of tropes, and Fichte‟s system is therefore a theory of tropes:
the circulation of the property (Merkmal) described in the act of judgement here is structured like a metaphor or a trope, is based on the substitution of properties. It‟s structured like a synecdoche, a relationship between part
and whole, or structured like a metaphor, a substitution on the basis of resemblance and of differentiation between two entities. (AI 176)
For de Man Fichte‟s theory is a negative allegorical narrative of the self and knowledge, as the self can never know what it is, can never be positively identified, and all judgements about the self are reflexive and therefore unstable. This system is a system of tropes, a tropological system “to which the corresponding experience is that of the self standing above its own experiences” (AI 177). Hence, de Man argues, Schlegel‟s detached subject; the lofty urbanity of the ironist is the Fichtean self‟s radical detachment, although as we will address in chapter four, de Man specifically and inaccurately relates this distance to the writer‟s own work.
De Man understands the “transcendental buffoonery” of Schlegel‟s
Lyceum fragment 42 to refer to the buffo of the commedia dell‟arte, “the
disruption of narrative illusion, the aparté, the aside to the audience, by means of which the illusion of the fiction is broken (what we call in German aus der Rolle
fallen, to drop out of your role)” (AI 178). The technical term for this is,
according to de Man, parabasis: “the interruption of a discourse by a shift in the rhetorical register” (AI 178), also known as anacoluthon. The latter refers more commonly to syntactical patterns of tropes, and is used to designate an interruption in the syntactical expectations of a phrase or sentence.2 But Schlegel‟s famous definition of irony likens it to a permanent parabasis, and so the interruption must place repeatedly, paradoxically disrupting the narrative line at all times. Since the narrative is the very structure of the tropological system, this enables de Man to give a definition of irony as “the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes” (AI 179). Thus the coherence of representational narrative forms is permanently interrupted, and it is irony which makes it impossible to achieve a consistent theory of narrative. As the allegory of tropes is (also) Fichte‟s system of the ego and of knowledge, then irony, as de Man understands it, is the
anacoluthic interruption of “reality”, the calling attention to the fiction of a stable,
solid world and self. Irony is that which causes dialectical and reflexive systems to interrupt themselves. That language can (catachrestically) posit at all is because of irony, but irony will also fundamentally disrupt this very positing.
2
For example: “I will have such revenges on you both, That all the world shall – I will do such things,
De Man proposes that the shocked reception that Schlegel‟s novel Lucinde received was due to its bipartite structure – what is ostensibly a philosophical discourse is also a reflection on sex. Thus two different codes inhabit the same space, and parabatically interrupt “each other in such a fundamental way that this very possibility of disruption represents a threat to all assumptions about what a text should be” (AI 169). It is the “free play” of irony which makes a treatise on philosophical matters a lurid description of sex. As the now famous passage on the ironic text machine reads:
There is a machine out there, a text machine, an implacable determination and a total arbitrariness, unbedingter Willkür, he says, (Lyceum Fragment 42), which inhabits words on the level of the signifier, which undoes any narrative consistency of lines, and which undoes the reflexive and the dialectical model, both of which are, as you know, the basis of any narration. There is no narration without reflection, no narrative without dialectic, and what irony disrupts (according to Friedrich Schlegel) is precisely that dialectic and that reflexivity, the tropes. The reflexive and the dialectical are the tropological system, the Fichtean system, and that is what irony undoes. (AI 181)3
Irony disrupts while enabling reflexivity, and is the catachrestic movement, the turn that missteps, that undoes narrative while enabling meaning to be.
Despite his repudiation of irony as formulated in “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, there are certain consistencies and similarities between de Man‟s two essays. While the definition of parabasis in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” unsatisfactorily understands it as the intrusion of the author into her work, this is not historically inaccurate. The error that de Man makes is ignoring the fact that this intrusion was scripted and as such as much a part of the play as the action proper. Although parabasis is presented in the second essay more convincingly as a shift in syntax, style and form, the concept of the disruption of artistic illusion is not abandoned but transferred to the figure of the transcendental buffoon. De Man thereby continues to retain the notion of the demonstration of the fiction and unreality of the play, which is, as the fourth chapter will show, a misreading of Schlegel‟s reality/fiction dichotomy. The emphasis on tropes remains in “The Concept of Irony”, although it is refined: in the later essay irony is no longer
3
In Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinos Press, 2002) Avital Ronell relates the impossibility of reading that stems from the text machine to stupidity, and the inevitability of always remaining a slow and witless reader (97-161).
simply a trope, but a trope of tropes or trope to the second power, turning away from the dependence on a “natural” language of literal meaning. The ironic subject in both is a fictive, tropological subject formed through language, and irony as self-reflexive consciousness in the first becomes the very (im)possibility of reflexivity, reading and understanding in the second. Irony for de Man is the trope of tropes through which the self is self-positing and self-destroying, that which causes dialectical and reflexive systems to interrupt themselves, the force through which the text machine operates to undo narrative flow, duration and consistency. Irony, as de Man‟s definition posits it, is “the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes”.
Derrida and de Man
In Memoires for Paul de Man Derrida remembers de Man‟s work and his friendship through a study of memory, specifically linked to the dual movements of irony and allegory. Irony and allegory, as Derrida reads them through “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, are figures of diremption, repetition and replication, whereby the empirical self is replaced or split by the ironic, autobiographical, linguistic self. Together the diachronic narrative of allegory and the synchronic moment of irony form “the rhetoric of memory which recalls, recounts, forgets, recounts and recalls forgetting, referring to the past only to efface what is essential to it: anteriority” (MF 81-82). In summarising the conjunction and disjunction – what will be referred to as ironic hyphenation – between irony and allegory in de Man‟s essay, Derrida explains that
Paul de Man is bent on demonstrating “the implicit and rather enigmatic link” (p. 208) for allegory and irony; we have already glimpsed it for synecdoche, prosopopeia, or parabasis. Irony too is a figure of disjunction, duplication, and doubling (pp. 212, 217, etc.). It often produces a disjunction by which “a purely linguistic subject replaces the original self” (p. 217), according to the scheme of amnesic memory of which we have spoken. And yet, precisely because of the disjunctive structure that they share, allegory and irony draw up between them this singular contract, and each recalls the other. Of course, the former is essentially narrative, the latter momentary and pointed (instantanéiste), but together they form, in fact, the rhetoric of memory. (MF 81-82)
The “scheme of amnesic memory” is memory understood as comprising the contaminated terms Erinnerung – “good-living-memory” (MF 67) – and
Gedächtnis – memory which remembers through the tekhnē of language and the
sign, and which therefore leads to forgetting. Memory is thereby composed of what Derrida calls the allegorical Mnemosyne (memory) and the ironic Lēthē (forgetting) (MF 84). Derrida argues that not only does one remember events that occurred and events that did not, but that the remembered event is always a double structure of occurrence and non-occurrence, as what is remembered is the
linguistic form of the event, which is not the event which occurred. Thus memory
is an amnesic memory which comprises the narrative memory of allegory with bursts of ironic forgetfulness. Memory is both the retention and effacement of the past, and as such, like irony and allegory, lacks anteriority: there is only memory without the past (event). In remembering the empirical event is replaced by a linguistic event, and the self that remembers is a linguistic, tropological, fictional self. Hence memory as irony/allegory replaces the “original” self with the linguistic subject.
A novel of novels, an allegory of irony, is, according to de Man, a narrative that prefigures itself, that is tied to a fictive past and future – allegorical duration – and yet contains within itself characters or moments which are isolated, whose past and future events do not exist for them – ironic moments. However, Derrida (ironically) interrupts de Man‟s text by stressing the contamination of irony and allegory:
Is not that [the moving towards a memory which prefigures the ironic/allegoric split] his [de Man‟s] practice, his style, his signature, the stamp of his deconstruction? I speak of the signature because this entire