Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony 9781501733383

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Beyond Theory

ALSO BY BENJAMIN BENNETT

Goethes Theory of Poetry: “Faust” and the Regeneration of Language Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Theaters of Consciousness Modern Drama and German Classicism: Renaissance from Lessing to Brecht Theater As Problem: Modern Drama and Its Place in Literature

Beyond Theory Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony

BENJAMIN BENNETT

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1993 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1993 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number 0-8014-2841-6 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 92-46530 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book.

© The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

This book is dedicated to two men, Walter H. Sokel and Frank G. Ryder, who have in common a quality for which etymology suggests the term “prophetic.” They speak not only with their own voices but with voices that in each “speak for a preterpersonal spirit, a whole world of literary sensibility. In Walter, it is that European spirit which is utterly at home in the literary universe, that sensibility for which, in the whole range of actual or conceivable writing, “nihil alienum est.” It is knowledge in a form both self-evident and constantly self-astonishing, as if the pre-understanding posited by hermeneutic theory had somehow found its way into articulable experi¬ ence, a knowledge that enjoys its formulations but is not addicted to them, and enjoys its texts in the man¬ ner I think Longinus means when he speaks of reading as if we ourselves were the creators of what we hear. ” In Frank, by contrast, the spirit that speaks is pecu¬ liarly American, a sensibility that treats literary phe¬ nomena as if it had found them washed up on the beach, as if the Constitution of literary studies were yet to be devised. No doubt there are silent depths of artifice in this attitude. But its results, when it is maintained at the level I call prophetic—such as the first substantial advance since antiquity in the under¬ standing of poetic metrics, an analysis of our critical palate for verse—make us all into neophytes. In any event, I have spent most of my working life, so to speak, between these men, and I trust them to understand me exactly when I sign myself, Das Weltkind in der Mitten

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: The New and the Original Eighteenth Century

1

1 The New Holy Scripture of Humanity: The Reader of the Novel and the Mission of the Genre in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

14

2 Holderlin’s “An die Parzen”: Poetry as a Game in Society 3 Lessing s Laokoon: The Poetics of Experience

64 116

4 Ironic Conversation and the Communal Soul: Goethe on and in Language 5 Instability and Irony: The Real Eighteenth Century

162 217

6 The Genres of Mind and Contract: The Theater, the Novel, and the Jews

269

Conclusion: The Use and Abuse of the Eighteenth Century

327

Index

349

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to the people who have read drafts of chapters: Jane Brown, Volker Kaiser, Robert Leventhal, and Helmut Schnei¬ der, as well as a large number of graduate students at the University of Virginia. And I am grateful to the University of Virginia itself for giving me some time off after my years of drudgery as department chair. Parts of the book were developed from lectures and papers I read: on Goethe at Harvard in 1983, at Michigan in 1985, at Duke in 1986; on theater of the mind at Chicago in 1986; on irony at the M/M LA in 1989; on Herder for the International Herder Society in 1990; on Lenz at the AATG in 1991. I am grateful to the organizers of these events and to all wLo participated in the discussions. As usual, I am indebted to Bernhard Kendler and his colleagues at Cor¬ nell Universitv Press, as well as to the anonvmous consultants who read the manuscript. The consultants, wdiose suggestions were un¬ usually probing and detailed, will find that in many cases I have altered the text to avoid raising the questions they pointed out, in order to hold the book down to a manageable length. I do not claim to have left those questions behind. There will be more books. All translations are my owm unless otherwise noted. The work of Peter J. Burgard, whose dissertation I refer to in footnotes, appeared in revised form, after the closing of my manuscript, as a book, Idioms

of Uncertainty: Goethe and the Essay (University Park, Pa., 1992). B. B.

Abbreviations

A&P

Ronald Taylor, ed. Aesthetics and Politics. London, 1977.

AR

Wolfgang Iser. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Re¬ sponse. Baltimore, 1978.

AW

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Ausgewahlte Werke. Munich, 1962.

DF

Thomas Mann. Doktor Faustus. Frankfurt am Main, 1956.

DVLG

Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte

EG

Eric A. Blackall. The Emergence of German as a Literary Lan¬ guage: 1700-1775. 2d ed. Ithaca, 1978.

FA

Friedrich Holderlin. Samtliche Werke. Frankfurter Ausgabe. Edi¬ ted by D. E. Sattler. Frankfurt am Main, 1975-.

FS

Friedrich Schlegel. Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796-1801). Edited by Hans Eichner. Paderborn, 1967. = Volume 2 of the Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Edited by Ernst Behler. 1958-.

GQ

German Quarterly

GSA

Friedrich Holderlin. Samtliche Werke. GroBe Stuttgarter Ausgabe. Edited by Friedrich BeiBner. Stuttgart, 1943-.

H/A

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklarung: Philosophische Fragmente. 1947. Frankfurt am Main, 1969-

HS

Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn. Edited by Heinrich Scholz. Berlin, 1916.

xii

Abbreviations

HvK

Heinrich von Kleist. Samtliche Werke und Briefe. Edited by Hel¬ mut Sembdner. 2 vols. 5th ed. Munich, 1970.

IR

Wolfgang Iser. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore, 1974.

JJR

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Oeuvres completes. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. 4 vols. Paris, 1959-69.

JPS

J. P. Stern. Hitler: The Fiihrer and the People. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975.

KuG

Theodor W. Adorno. “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft.’ In his Prismen. Frankfurt am Main, 1976.

KW

Kants Werke. Akademie-Textausgabe. 9 vols. i902ff. Reprint, Ber¬

lin, 1968. L-M

Gotthold Ephraim Lessings samtliche Schriften. Edited by Karl

Lachmann and Franz Muncker. 23 vols. 3d ed. Stuttgart, 18861924. LW

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Werke und Briefe in drei Banden. Edited by Sigrid Damm. Munich, 1987.

LY

Lessing Yearbook

MdM

Michel de Montaigne. Oeuvres completes. Thibaudet and Maurice Rat. Paris, 1962.

MiN

Johann Georg Hamann. Samtliche Werke. Edited by Josef Nadler. 6 vols. Vienna, 1949-57. (“Magus in Norden.”)

MLN

Modern Language Notes

MM

Moses Mendelssohn. Gesammelte Schriften. Jubilaumsausgabe. 17 vols. 19291b Reprint, Berlin, 1971-.

NLH

New Literary History

NW

Friedrich Nietzsche. Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Part 3, vol. 1. Berlin, 1972.

PdM

Paul de Man. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York, 1984.

PMLA

Publications of the Modern Language Association

SA

Schillers Samtliche Werke. Sakular-Ausgabe. 16 vols. Stuttgart and

Edited by Albert

Berlin, 1904. SW

Herders Sammtliche Werke. Edited by Bernhard Suphan. 33 vols.

Berlin, 1877-1913. WA

Goethes Werke. “Weimarer Ausgabe.

1918.

143 vols. Weimar, 1887-

Abbreviations WMW

xm

Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. In Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Samtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagehiicher und Gesprdche. 40 (planned)

vols. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Part 1, vol. 10. Frankfurt am Main, 1989.

m

Beyond Theory

Introduction: The New and the Original Eighteenth Century

Constellations are curious things. They have no being except in our naming of them, and yet they are among the most persistent identi¬ ties in our cultural experience. Do those twisted celestial circuitboards never evoke new resonances, say in the postmodern mind? Is there no comfortable little cluster somewhere for us to name “Knowl¬ edge,” vis-a-vis the bold asymmetrical scatter of “Information”? Are there no Paul Klee versions of Narrativity, Performativity, and Legit¬ imation waiting to be discovered? The constellations of history, the large chronological or conceptual structures by which we locate particular “events,” have something of the same character. We know them to be arbitrarily redefinable, but we forget about actually redefining them, even where change is obvi¬ ously called for, and even in the face of examples, such as the nine¬ teenth-century invention of the Renaissance, that show how useful occasionally shifting the furniture can be. In fact, the arbitrariness of our articulation of history impedes change. How, if the structure is arbitrary to begin with, can we say that a particular change is “called for”? I try to answer this question with respect to a limited historical moment by interpreting in detail a number of poetic and parapoetic texts, mainly from late eighteenth-century Germany, and by showing that the interpretations require a revision of larger historical concep¬ tions. This method is not unassailable, since interpretation itself is always historically conditioned. But I try to minimize the element of

2

Introduction

theoretical uncertainty by encircling my conclusions with a number of different arguments from different kinds of evidence.

Germany and the Eighteenth Century I contend that we need a new eighteenth century: “need” in the sense that its lack creates unnecessary difficulties in our own literary thought, “new” in the sense that it has yet to be invented. But it must also be—we cannot get around this—the original eighteenth century, the way things actually were. However deeply we under¬ stand the rhetorical and historical conditioning of historical writing, we can never incorporate that understanding into our writing at a depth that actually silences or neutralizes the idea of objective accu¬ racy. I claim, then, that the specific quality of writing and of intellec¬ tual culture in the eighteenth century is badly misunderstood and that the detailed examination of a number of (especially German) texts and intertexts provides a perspective from which this misunder¬ standing can be reduced. A good deal of the work of discovering or inventing a new eigh¬ teenth century has already been done. A book of essays, mainly on British literature, bears the idea in its title: The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, and English Literature, edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown.1 And Suzanne Gearhart s Open Bound¬ ary of History and Fiction, by staging something like an actual de¬ bate between figures of the French Enlightenment and such modern thinkers as Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and Louis Althusser, uncovers an important part of the mechanism by which the eigh¬ teenth century has been forgotten.2 Although I too locate my argu¬ ments historically by including a number of texts from outside the eighteenth century, I do not try to match Gearhart s methodological strength and directness. I do not think I need to, since the new ‘Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, eds.,The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Poli¬ tics, English Literature (New York, 1987). I think I am using the idea of a new eigh¬ teenth century in a somewhat more focused—not to say contentious—manner. Nussbaum and Brown still speak, for example, of a “dominant culture” and a “periphery” (p. 3). My point, concerning mainly German literature, is that our customary manner of gauging cultural dominance is questionable, that the eighteenth-century culture of irony was a good deal more deeply rooted and powerful than we are ordinarily willing to recognize. 2Suzanne Gearhart, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1984).

Introduction

3

eighteenth century (or the need for it) lies much closer to the surface in the mainly German texts I concentrate on. It is, in any case, the eighteenth century in Germany that occupies me in this book, especially the emergence, late in the century, of a specifically German poetics of radical irony. But “specifically Ger¬ man” does not refer to the idea of a quasi-organic national culture. In fact, the idea of national cultures, from the early nineteenth century on, has been a major factor in obscuring the German eighteenth cen¬ tury. My point is that a number of historical accidents combine to produce a set of communicative conditions that favors the growth of the poetics I describe. It is clear pretty much on the face of it that the literary situation in late eighteenth-century Germany is more than just the German manifestation of broad tendencies in European culture. In my Modern Drama and German Classicism, for example, I argued that the development of the genre of drama in German Classicism had no parallel elsewhere in the Europe of its time.3 My concern now is to unfold that German literary situation in more depth and detail.

Kant, Foucault, and the Articulation of Intellectual History Let us begin by looking at how our historical view has become dis¬ torted. The eighteenth century, we are told, is the age of Enlighten¬ ment or Reason, the Aufklarung or Siecle des lumieres (which all mean slightly different things). It includes the Restoration and Au¬ gustan periods in Britain, the different and differently situated Euro¬ pean neoclassicisms. It is marked by the ascendancy of the novel, by “bourgeois” dramatic forms, by interest in folk poetry and balladry, by “aesthetic” theory. It exhibits a culture of sentiment, of philosoph¬ ical narrative, of the letter, of “Privateness Oriented to an Audi¬ ence,”4 of Sturm und Drang, of pre-Romanticism, and so on. This profusion of attempts to characterize the century, it seems to me, is the symptom of a typical structural condition in intellectual histo3I refer to my Modern Drama and German Classicism: Renaissance from Lessing to Brecht (Ithaca, 1979). 4Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989; orig. 1962), p. 43.

4

Introduction

riography, present with special clarity in Michel Foucault s Order of Things. Despite the variety of texts, and of interesting juxtapositions of texts, used in his argument, and despite his focus on a notion of ‘representation” that is meant to grapple those texts at a point en¬ tirely beyond the reach of their own systematic insights and preten¬ sions, the “Classical Age,” for Foucault, is still anchored firmly at both ends, thus in effect defined, by the claims of epoch-making systematicity made by Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant. For all his insistence that the epistemic shift from “Classical” to “modem” is a “profound breach,” which, “though it must be analysed . . . cannot be explained,’”5 Foucault still articulates intellectual history at ex¬ actly those points where it does appear to “explain” itself with the greatest systematic clarity. The advent of the modern episteme, as Foucault locates it, can in fact be “summed up,” if not “in a single word,” at least in a single phrase: the innovation in philosophical systematics made by Kant’s Critiques. Kant’s position, in Foucault, seems ambiguous at first. On one hand, “The Kantian critique marks the threshold of our modernity. . . . [I]t sanctions for the first time that event in European culture which coincides with the end of the eighteenth century: the with¬ drawal of knowledge and thought outside the space of representa¬ tion” (Foucault, p. 242). But on the other hand, Kant is relegated to the “first phase” of the modem turn, in which “words, classes, and wealth” do not yet “acquire a mode of being no longer compatible with representation” (p. 221), to that phase in which the problem of “a discourse whose tension would keep separate the empirical and the transcendental, while being directed at both” (p. 320), is not yet established. Kant does not yet operate in the presence of “that notknown from which man is perpetually summoned towards self-knowl¬ edge” (p. 323); he is still fascinated by “the transcendental motif that [he] had derived from Hume’s critique” (p. 325). To an extent, by insisting in a particular way on the question “Was ist der Mensch?” Kant is even to blame for the besetting fault of modern thinking, “the sleep ... of Anthropology” (p. 341). Thus Kant is repeatedly shouldered out of the center of Foucault’s historical plot—precisely because he is its center. Foucault’s main methodological move, which is apparent on every page, is to restrict 5Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1973; orig. French, 1966), p. 217.

Introduction

5

himself scrupulously to what is recorded in the texts he deals with. When he quotes, he quotes in passing; he never remains with a sin¬ gle text long enough to become trapped in what it does not say. He always reaches the opposite shore on a skip, so to speak, and never needs to be fished up from the slimy bottom. He permits illustrative texts to protrude into his own discourse only to the extent that they make themselves heard, and in turn make that discourse itself heard, in moments where it threatens to slip out of earshot. An approach of this type must inevitably segment history wherever the loudest and most systematically self-assured voice emerges within history (a voice like Kant s), to proclaim its division. But that same voice, that same pretended historical punctuation, once its purpose has been served, must also be suppressed and decentered, lest its very audibility bridge the unbridgeable gulf we imagine it has created. Hence the strain in Foucault s relation to Kant. The Red Sea closes behind us; and our foreign leader, our Moses, is duly murdered, that the “pro¬ found breach” be closed behind us yet again, behind what we now are, and separating us by engulfment from the captive people that we, nevertheless, still are. The present or post-Kantian age, for Foucault, is therefore discuss¬ ible only in terms of negativities, but negativities that constantly look over their own shoulders at the idea of an inevitable (thus positive) negativity that is needed to mark its object as what we are still in the midst of being. Negativities, therefore, that are never negative enough. “The unthought,” for example, is a crucial category in The Order of Things (pp. 322-28), but only as a general category, as it were skimmed from the boiling mixture, only (paradoxically) where it makes itself heard. Not the unthought in the sense of the unre¬ corded; not in the sense that we discover it only by fastening on a single text, which we pick apart doggedly until we reach its most resolute silence; not the unthought of radical irony, insisted on by an unthinking that does not make itself heard. And it is this irony— which appears only under cross-examination—that I trace in eigh¬ teenth-century poetic theory and discourse, especially that of the late eighteenth century in Germany, in a discourse that does not pretend to conquer new territory, like Kant s, but pretends not to conquer new territory, a discourse whose apparently conservative turn, upon cross-examination, is revealed as a mere rhetorical pose, significant both for what it conceals and for the act of concealing. I use Foucault as a convenient example (and in subtlety, complex-

6

Introduction

ity and erudition, a culmination) of the understandable academic ten¬ dency to articulate intellectual history at those points (such as Kant) where it stands back and records its own progress in the form of a critical system—as if what is thus recorded had not long been exis¬ tent and operative (and prevented from becoming a system precisely by its operancy) in the unrecorded interstices of particular textual weaves. And in the case of Kant, the effect of this typical academic move is to present the eighteenth century as the descending half of a trajectory that mounts aloft with Descartes. The profusion of ideas used to characterize the eighteenth century thus appears to offer no problem. The age itself, after all—in the Foucauldian view—was coming apart at the seams, ripe for replacement by a new synthesis. But there are passages in Foucault himself, referring to the postKantian age, that with minor modifications well summarize what were in fact already pre-Kantian conditions. The idea of “the un¬ thought” is an instance I have already mentioned. “The Return of Language”—in the question, “What is language, how can we find a way round it in order to make it appear in itself, in all its plenitude?” (Foucault, pp. 303, 306)—is actually the return of what I later call Herder’s “body,” a body that is in a sense borrowed, at yet a further remove, from Montaigne. And in the section “The Retreat and Re¬ turn of the Origin,” we read that in this infinite task of conceiving the origin in what is nearest to it and what is furthest from it, thought reveals that man is not contem¬ poraneous with what makes him be—or with that upon the basis of which he is; but that he is within a power that disperses him, draws him far away from his own origin, but promises it to him in an immi¬ nence that will perhaps be forever snatched from him; now, this power is not foreign to him; it does not reside outside him in the serenity of eternal and ceaselessly recommenced origins, for then the origin would be effectively posited; this power is that of his own being. [Pp. 334-35]

The only conceptual difficulty in this passage (if we imagine it to refer to the pre-Kantian eighteenth century) is the very idea of “con¬ ceiving, which in truth has nothing to do with the origin. The origin, in crucial texts from the later eighteenth century, becomes an object of enactment, of a form of enactment that manifests exactly the “power” Foucault is speaking of, and has the effect, in one and the

Introduction

7

same move, of both being its object and displacing that object into the realm of the strictly inconceivable.

Interpretation, Poetics, and History Enactment of origins, then, is an important interpretive idea in this book. It is related to the idea of irony by the consideration that irony, when practiced in the uncompromising manner that we can learn from the eighteenth century, enacts the origin of language, the unfolding of language across the face of the strictly inarticulate, its birth in the bosom of the radically silent, of that which is not (or interminably not yet) language. As a concept, enactment of origins is not hard to lay hold of, either abstractly or historically. It appears in the wake of various Renaissance notions of originality and is articu¬ lated in the eighteenth century, for example, in the analogy between poetic creation and divine world-creation that we associate mainly with Shaftesbury, but which is developed, especially in Germany, well beyond Shaftesbury’s actual formulation. But when we attempt to exploit it interpretively, enactment of origins creates difficulties, given a basic Cartesian context in which, in the first instance, writers and readers are imagined as determined individuals, by nature ex¬ cluded from any but a passive relation to the strictly original. And my contention is that in the texts I examine, these difficulties lead to the recognition that the very idea of the determined individual, es¬ pecially the individual reader, is untenable, whence the complex of poetic thought arises that I attempt to capture in the phrase “the community as a reader.’’ It is possible, by lumping together disparate types of text and rigidly standardizing the depth at which one reads them, to argue that “relations between author, work and public’’ in the eighteenth century are characterizable as “intimate mutual rela¬ tionships between privatized individuals’’ (Habermas, p. 50). But cross-examining texts, or attending to how eighteenth-century texts cross-examine one another, quickly brings to light the limitations of such an argument. These are the main ideas I work with: radical irony, an irony that definitely conceals, but does not admit the existence of any articula¬ ble relation whatever to its concealed content; enactment of origins, as the description of how a poetic text operates in its communicative environment; and the reading function, considered as an experimen-

8

Introduction

tal device by which to undermine and resituate the experience of individuality, hence to open the problems of subjectivity and com¬ munity. To the extent that central or typical texts from Foucault’s “Classical Age” are subject to valid interpretation in terms of these ideas, the whole conception of a “Classical Age” of representation becomes suspect, and the possibility of a new eighteenth century emerges. We will in a sense have begun to modernize the eighteenth century, to recognize in it, from another angle, the same sort of para¬ doxical contemporaneity, with our own pressing theoretical and po¬ etic concerns, that Gearhart’s study suggests. In other words, I want to do more than offer alternative readings of eighteenth-century texts. I want to lay hold of the poetics that operates in late eighteenth-century Germany, the implied governing framework for poetic communication, the method by which poetic endeavors are originated, developed, and understood. Special prob¬ lems are created by the idea of a poetics of irony, which by nature resists the type of theoretical summary or closure that any critical discussion of it, by nature, projects as a goal. Such a poetics is, in this sense, beyond theory. But I think these problems remain man¬ ageable if we bear in mind that although the guiding interpretive ideas I have listed must be authorized by the poetics they are aimed at, they do not constitute that poetics. This distinction is also impor¬ tant for maintaining the boundary with Freudian and Lacanian the¬ ory that is created by my use, later, of the concepts of subject and ego. I am not attempting to develop a poetic theory that is in any sense based on any theory of subjectivity. The notion of subjectivity with which I operate is itself derived from the idea of a poetics of radical irony, which is tenable, in turn, only to the extent that its historical and interpretive specificity is conscientiously observed.

The Notion of a Poetics of Irony Irony is always a move of concealment. At the simplest, thought A is expressed in order to conceal, however transparently, thought B, which is the real force behind the utterance. By radical irony, how¬ ever, I mean an irony whose resolution (into the “real thought B) is strictly impossible, an irony whose concealed object lies entirely out¬ side the range of articulation and so, for the purpose of explaining the ironic utterance, in effect does not exist. This concept, although not difficult to understand, is troublesome to develop. If there is any

Introduction

9

relation whatever between language and the strictly inarticulable, does it not follow that the inarticulable is necessarily concealed (or repressed) by every utterance, by the very act of utterance? And how, then, can irony be said to distinguish one particular utterance from another? This difficulty does not invalidate the concept of a poetics of radical irony. It is not hard to imagine a literary culture in which the basis for communication—the shared prior knowledge that is brought into play by both writer and reader whenever an utterance is recognized as poetic—is constituted by a particular idea of the inarticulable. The problem here arises when we try to describe the poetics of such a culture. How can the relation of poetic writing and reading to a com¬ municative basis be exposed, except by articulating that basis, or by finding it articulated, however indirectly, in the documents that make up our evidence? I hope to get around this problem by changing the question. I ask not what the concealed basis for communication in late eighteenthcentury German poetics is, but where it is. I ask not what is thought beneath the surface of radical irony, but where the thinking of that thought takes place. I ask after the locus of irony in German preClassical and Classical literature, and arrive at an answer in the form of a diagram by which irony is located in a pattern of semiotic rela¬ tions (relations of signification and reference, strictly differentiated) among concepts derived from interpretation. Again, the boundary with psychoanalytic theory is important. Julia Kristeva s notion of the semiotic, for instance, carries a universalizing force that is inap¬ propriate to this book, whose larger ambition, to revise the manner in which European intellectual history is given structure, demands historical specificity in its argument. I in fact associate with the locus of irony at least two entirely con¬ crete historical entities, the theater and the Jews. The argument on this point, in Chapter 6, builds on Peirce s insight into the irreduc¬ ible triple structure of semiosis and refers back to my own Modern Drama and German Classicism. But it is worth remarking here that if the Jews, as I maintain, occupy a crucial positive place in the struc¬ ture of eighteenth-century German poetic thought, then the conse¬ quences for an understanding of the unfolding of German anti-Semi¬ tism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are considerable. The “roots” of the Nazi movement, as these are usually imagined, turn out not to be roots at all, in the sense of an uninterrupted quasiorganic process traceable as far back in history as documents permit.

10

Introduction

On the contrary, Nazism, considered as a phase of German culture, has at least in one aspect the character of a violent and arbitrary severing of historical continuity. I go into this matter at the end of the book. In any event, I do not appeal to the cases of superficial philoSemitism that can be found in eighteenth-century literary circles. My argument on the Jews is basically structural: that the situation of what we once learned from Erich Heller to think of as a “disin¬ herited” literary language, in the larger fabric of eighteenth-century German politics and culture, resonates significantly with the situa¬ tion of the Yiddish-speaker among German-speakers. As far as I know, only two literary figures of the time, Lessing and Goethe, actually thought through their situation to the point of grasping this resonance. I claim, however, that the paucity of textual evidence does not invalidate my marking the Jews as an aspect of the locus of irony, which brings me to a final, more general remark. A poetics of radical irony cannot possibly consist of a set of ideas that is known to govern poetic communication because it is known to have been shared by all the members of the literary culture under discussion. Irony depends on a relation to what is not “known” at all, to the unthought, the unrecorded, the inarticulable. And the poetics I am aiming at, accordingly, consists of a diagram by which the locus of irony is more or less fixed in a structure of conceptual relations; it assigns a conceptual position to that locus, but not a conceptual con¬ tent or identity. The concepts with which the diagram is constructed must be justified by interpretation. But not every concept must be rejustified for every text; and especially the concepts that name real aspects of the locus of irony itself (the theater, the Jews)—aspects, so to speak, of the repressed—will not be demonstrable in much textual material. What counts is the pattern of conceptual relations, and the question of whether a sufficiently large and cohesive body of poetic communication, of text and intertext, aligns itself with that pattern, to enable us to speak of an ironic literary culture.

Beyond Theory “Literary theory,” as we call it, is riddled with paradoxes, and as a rule is willing enough to admit it. For if “theory is associated with a form of awed or rapt seeing, and if its object is therefore imagined as

Introduction

11

quasi-visible, hence quasi-spatial, hence (transposed into the realm of concepts) as having the character of a relatively settled system, then what we practice is clearly a striving beyond theory. Its favored tactic is to undermine; it is especially sensitive, in itself and its ob¬ jects, to the quality of the subversive; and practically any instance of conceptual stability is suspected of depending on an essentializing move. But this striving beyond theory is still theory. Its procedure in detail is recognizably similar to that of, say, Aristotle or Thomas Aqui¬ nas, involving a largely abstract vocabulary and a logic of argument that creates the expectation of conclusions from premises. It is thus an attempt to make theory itself move beyond theory, to create by discovering or discover by creating a flaw, a fissure, an opening in the history of theory, through which a type of thinking no longer entangled in the ocular metaphor might emerge, a type of thinking more thoroughly and responsibly intertissued, as thinking, with its own historical and social activeness. It therefore attaches itself not to intellectual traditions that appear gradual or cumulative in structure, but to those that include the deepest possible controversy, especially to the multiple tradition of dialectics from Hegel, and to psycho¬ analysis. This general form of theory, then, lives by criticism—and dies by co-option, by being used as what it after all still is, as theory. The scrupulousness, for instance, with which Jacques Derrida avoids the pretense of occupying a position somehow uncontaminated by the logocentric history he exposes, is a principal source of the strength of both his criticism of metaphysics (the move beyond theory) and his reading of texts, including the reading of Rousseau that figures in my argument later. But precisely this scrupulousness makes Derrida s technical vocabulary available for use as a theory of self-reflexive rhetoricity, which happens in Paul de Man’s reading of Rousseau and entails a deep confusion of semiotic concepts. Or to take a di¬ ametrically opposed example, the strength of the feminist position is that it finds itself beyond theory from the outset, since the gender difference that grounds it is strictly untheorizable, being a different difference, involving indeed a different conception of difference—a different range of possibilities or issues—depending on the side it is viewed from. The problem here is not how to sever or loosen a connection with the history of theory, but how to create a con¬ nection, for the sake of intelligibility and effectiveness; and the co-

12

Introduction

optive move is thus anticipated in the basic act of articulation.6 The threat of co-option goes a certain way toward explaining why irony does not appear to operate centrally in our theoretical striving beyond theory. At first glance, irony would seem to be called for, as a way of using the conventions of theoretical discourse to mask com¬ munication on an entirely different plane. And the relations among the concepts of irony, individuality, and community, which I discuss in detail, suggest at least a possibility of bridging the gulf between an individual s grasp of social rationality and the same rationality in a communal form capable of translating itself into action—that gulf which is kept open by the very genre of earnest theoretical discourse that is practiced by Jurgen Habermas, for example. But the trouble with irony—or ironic theory, if there is such a thing—is that it seems uniquely exposed to co-option. One need only take the ironic discourse at its word in order to co-opt it. And co-option is in fact part of the historical process that has obscured the eighteenth century for us. Ironic discourse in its entirety, to be sure, is in a sense immune to co-option, since the relation of its inarticulability to its surface remains substantially the same, however badly the surface is misused. It is to this quality of irony that we owe what I contend is the retrievability of the eighteenth-century thought I discuss. But in an intellectual climate where co-option is recognized as a major threat, it still appears safer to articulate one s position as completely as possible than to entrust one s communica¬ tive destiny to historical accidents. A more important source of our apparent discomfort with irony, however, is the attachment of modern theory, as a genre, to the tradition of the history of consciousness, in which Hegel’s Phenome¬ nology of Mind is the classical instance. Theorizing beyond theory seems not only paradoxical but pointless without the assurance that there is such a thing as consciousness, sufficiently substantial and structurable to have a history, and the assurance that history in this sense is made by the critical folding of consciousness on itself, a pro¬ cess in which theoretical reflection plays a significant and indeed glamorous part. Theorizing beyond theory, in its maximized self-reflection, does not see itself as a passenger in history; it receives from history of consciousness a license to imagine itself in the driver’s 6On Luce Irigaray and the establishment of a connection with intellectual tradition via Nietzsche, see my “Bridge: Against Nothing,” in Nietzsche and the Feminine, ed. Peter J. Burgard (Charlottesville, forthcoming).

Introduction

13

seat. And irony, in anything approaching a radical sense, is strictly excluded by this idea of a history in which no potential content of consciousness can be permanently silent, in which the very possi¬ bility of a content of consciousness is equivalent to the possibility of its becoming an articulable object of consciousness. Hence our tendency to suppress the eighteenth century, to dis¬ miss it as a relatively unreflected phase of history. But in response to this tendency, I do not stop at the assertion that the history of con¬ sciousness, as we habitually practice it, thus fails to do justice to the eighteenth century. I contend, further, that in late eighteenth-cen¬ tury Germany, the very idea of history of consciousness is subjected to a strong positive critique. The reappraisal or reinvention of the eighteenth century is therefore useful not only because it changes the subject (calling upstairs to the philosopher in his study that it is time to move some furniture), and not only because it unmasks those bad habits that have produced what I hope to show are obvious if common misreadings of eighteenth-century texts, but also because, by making available an eighteenth-century critique of the history of consciousness, it suggests exactly the type of deep-cutting self-critical move, beyond theory, by which theory itself is now constituted. Again, therefore, I hope to uncover, for us, a form of significant contemporaneity in the eighteenth century, in a complex of poetic thought that is itself concerned with the move beyond theory. And it is important, in consequence, that the argument make no claim whatever to speculative or conceptual innovation. We are, I think, ready for a new eighteenth century. Not much more is needed than unswerving attention to textual detail, especially to those texts and those details that call our customary view of literary and intellectual history into question.

CHAPTER

ONE

The New Holy Scripture of Humanity: The Reader of the Novel and the Mission of the Genre in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

This book is about the eighteenth century; but I open with the dis¬ cussion of a nineteenth-century novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wander¬ jahre. For Goethe’s book is itself mainly a reinterpretation of the history of eighteenth-century ironic narrative (Fielding, Sterne, Vol¬ taire, Diderot, Wieland, Goethe himself), and thence by implication a reassessment of the whole epoch, especially in Germany, in a sense that validates the idea of enactment of origins as a primary interpre¬ tive category. Interpretive authority is a crucial question in my argu¬ ments. What authority have we for reading a particular text in a par¬ ticular way? And I begin by invoking the at least relatively clear authority of a reader who is reading, among other things, himself.

How Do We Read? To what extent is it permissible to speak of the reader of fiction as an active participant in the constitution of the text’s meaning, while at the same time conceding that this activity must also be subject to the text’s “guidance”? This general manner of thinking, which we associ¬ ate with Wolfgang Iser1—but which is already developed by Henry ‘I refer to Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response as 1R and AR. For the idea of the reader’s activity in “meaning production,” see IR, pp. xi, 30; for the idea of textual “guidance,” IR, p. 47; for the resulting synthetic notions of

The New Holy Scripture of Humanity

15

James, and already derivable (as Iser shows) from Henry Fielding s addresses to his reader—appears to be dictated by the simplest pos¬ sible reasoning. The idea of a readers “response” (assuming there is such a thing) and the idea of “the text” itself are categorically disjoint on a level that excludes any relation by which either one might be imagined as determining the other; but at the same time, interpreta¬ tion seems to become nonsense if we assert that the reader is per¬ fectly free, that any response is adequate to any text. Therefore Iser (and others) spend much effort on establishing exactly how the reader is active, and exactly how he or she is guided by the text, in different cases. The reader —considered as the vessel of re¬ sponse”—is in effect defined as a kind of middle ground between free imaginative activity and textual guidance or structure. It seems to me that the existence of such a middle ground is questionable. Even if the text suggests a “range” of possibilities within which the reader may make “decisions (AR, p. 85), does that range not still set a crippling limit to our activity ? And even if the supposed middle ground of reading exists, how can we ever be confident (as readers) that it has not already been overstepped in one direction or the other, that we are not already either violating the text s complexity (by “deciding” too firmly) or else simply permitting ourselves to be controlled by it?* 2 “configurative meaning and gestalt, IR, p. 42> an(l P- 127an