Translation of Irony — страница 7

  • Просмотров 905
  • Скачиваний 6
  • Размер файла 57
    Кб

it were ironically, clerisy represents itself as the resolution of that crisis. Both "irony" and "clerisy" emerge into peculiar discursive prominence during the romantic era. Irony's provenance as a rhetorical term dates back to antiquity, but its usage receives a new birth through the theorizing of Friedrich Schlegel, emerging in his writing as something rather different than the "merely" rhetorical strategy through which one says one thing and means another. For Schlegel (and in his wake) the divide that characterizes its traditional rhetorical definition becomes an allusive point of departure for rethinking the divided nature of subjectivity. "Clerisy" is Coleridge's coinage for a learned class of (more or less) state functionaries

responsible for the preservation and dissemination of the national heritage. The role of such a class—its centrality and importance to the nation-state—is developed in various ways, theoretical and practical, throughout the nineteenth century and, in Britain, usually with explicit reference to Coleridge's formulation (see Knight, Prickett, and Readings). The topic for this volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series was intended as something of an experiment. The initial impulse in soliciting articles under the heterogeneous rubrics of "irony" and "clerisy" was to consider each in the nature of a metonymy for broader generic and ideological questions raised in romantic writing. The irony as a stand-in, so to speak, for the romantic topoi of

self-consciousness and self-division: contradiction, fragmentation, dissolution. Of course, the aporias of irony turn out to be, in many ways, the inevitable condition of clerical intervention and authority, even as the call for such intervention and authority testifies to an ironic consciousness that their influence can by no means be assumed. One way in which these two seemingly heterogeneous strands of romantic discourse come to be linked occurs thematically through the concept of Bildung or cultivation. Irony for Schlegel played many roles not the least of which was to designate the human capacity for playing many roles. The ironist stood away from himself. He arrived at perfection to the point of irony—to the point, that is, of reflection and reversal. Perhaps the best

shorthand translation for specialists in British romanticism would be Keats's negative capability. The figure of "revolutions" evoked the radical provocation of such aphorisms for the business of Building—that lead for the production and reproduction of culture. The ongoing chain of irony must, to be genuinely ongoing and genuinely ironic, include itself as one of its links. "What gods will be able to save us from all these ironies?" Irony ends, as Schlegel himself writes, as "irony of irony," a fate from which no (human) history can escape. This has been the emphasis of most contemporary readings of Schlegel. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that an identity-oriented or traditionalist concept of the clerisy operates without its own quite

deliberate ironies. The very project of instituting a social class responsible for culture bespeaks a certain ironic consciousness in and of that culture. Coleridge's account of the "idea" of the clerisy in On the Constitution of Church and State is thoroughly ironic, if by irony one means the deliberate conjoining in one form of two absolutely irreconcilable intentions (a definition that is, at least, very close to Schlegel's "antithetical synthesis. What On the Constitution of Church and State calls the "national church" comprehends "the learned of all denominations" . Theology is not one among many, but the "head of all" the liberal arts and sciences, and yet the reason Coleridge gives for its place in the hierarchy of learning is

anything but theological. Under the name of Theology, or Divinity, were contained the interpretation of languages; the conservation and tradition of past events; the momentous epochs, and revolutions of the race and nation; the continuation of the records; logic, ethics, and the determination of ethical science. To associate its spiritual or "sacerdotal" function with its national one "is to be considered as un-growth of ignorance and oppression." At the same time, Coleridge refuses to make the final disciplinary cut, one that would separate sacred and profane truths with all due finality. On the contrary, he insists at several points that without reference to the sacerdotal, all other sciences would be reduced to so much empiricism and utilitarianism. There