CYRUS HAMLIN Platonic Dialogue and Romantic Irony: Prolegomenon to a Theory of Literary Narrative ‘Der platonische Dialog war gleichsam der Kahn, auf dem sich die schiffbriichige ltere Poesie samt allen ihren Kindern rettete: auf einem engen Raum zusammenge- drangt und dem einen Steuermann Sokrates angstlich untertinig, fubren sie jetzt in eine neue Welt hinein, die an dem phantastischen Bilde dieses Aufzugs sich nie satt sehen konnte. Wirklich hat fiir die ganze Nachwelt Plato das Vorbild einer neuen Kunstform gegeben, das Vorbild des Romans... (Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragiidie 14) Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the concept of irony. In large part this has accompanied a renewed interest in the work of Friedrich Schlegel, who originated the theory of Romantic irony as the key to his idea of Romantic poetry in general. The evolution of modern literature, in particular the development of the novel - from Romance to Roman, from Ariosto and Cervantes to Sterne, Diderot, and Goethe — was characterized for Schlegel by the emergence of a self-reflective narrative. He regarded this quality of literary discourse as the constitutive element of Romantic irony. ‘Ein Roman’ — to quote one of Schlegel’s most famous assertions — ‘ist ein romantisches Buch.’ Scholars have traditionally discussed Schlegel’s concept in contradistinc- tion to Classical irony, defined throughout the history of rhetoric from Aristotle on as a figure of speech which says one thing but means another. The authoritative model for such Classical irony was provided from the outset by the Socratic method of argument in the Platonic dialogues. This familiar contrast between Classical and Romantic irony is reaffirmed in a recent monograph by Ernst Behler.! His point of departure is a passage from Thomas Mann's Zauberberg, where Settembrini makes a categorical distinc- tion between these two kinds of irony: the Classical is ‘upright’ (gerade) ; the Romantic is ‘dissolute’ (liederlich). The former pertains, so Behler argues, almost exclusively to strategies of discourse in rhetoric, particularly the technique of dissimulatio; whereas the latter concerns the intimate and 1 Behler, Klassische Ironie. Romantische lronie. Tragische lronie: Zum Ursprung dieser Begriffe (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1972) esp. 15ff. The passage cited from Mann’s Zauberberg occurs in the section entitled ‘Freiheit’ of ch. 5 (Gesammelte Werke in zwalf Banden, Frankfurt a.M.:S. Fischer 1960, u1, 309). CANADIAN REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/REVUE CANADIENNE DE LITERATURE COMPAREE CRCL/RCLC WINTER /HIVER 19766 / Cyrus Hamlin self-conscious relationship between author and reader in literary narrative It is, asserts Behler, a modern attitude of mind (moderne Geisteshaltung), where the author steps out of his work, Such an attitude is acknowledged to derive ultimately from the role of Socrates as eiron — both in Platonic dialogue and in other views of this type of comic character, as in Aristopha- nes or Theophrastus. But Romantic irony is argued to emerge only in the great tradition of the European novel. On this point Behler and Schlegel appear to be fully agreed. My own view of irony is less categorical than Settembrini and less historical than Behler. I would even question the validity of distinguishing at all between a Classical and a Romantic irony. What is at issue here is a fundamental quality of discourse, which pertains to the form and the func- tion of literary language. In this regard the dialogues of Plato provide a model, not so much because of Socrates’ role as eiron, but rather because this form and function become thematic to the dialogues themselves. Platonic dialogue achieves that mode of self-reflective discourse which constitutes irony for both Schlegel and Behler, The importance of this characteristic for literary criticism, furthermore, resides in an implicit theory of narrative. The dialogue itself defines the interaction between text and reader which constitutes its meaning as a conscious awareness of that interaction. Irony thus provides the basis for a hermeneutics of literature, for which the method of Platonic dialogue and the theory of Romantic novel in Schlegel provide convenient and mutually compatible instances. Several assumptions are often made about irony as a concept in criticism which imply a direct concern for the function of language itself. First, irony requires a conscious attempt to mediate between the various elements of discourse and a presumed totality which constitutes the meaning. These separate aspects are acknowledged to be mutually incompatible. There is a fundamental discontinuity between the sequence of separate statements and the overriding motive which they seek to fulfill as a whole. In Romantic theory, as also in Platonic philosophy, this mediation is defined as a dialecti- cal process which interrelates the parts and the whole, the particulars and the universal, the real and the ideal. Irony is thus a measure of the incommen- surability of language in its efforts to achieve such a union of opposites. The form of the dialogue itself demonstrates that the act of mediation can only be approximate, as indicated by the effort to communicate through the dialecti- cal process, which requires both a differentiation of voices (Socrates and his interlocutors) and an extension in time (as implied dramatic performance). The second assumption of irony, closely related to the first, concerns the use of language as a medium of intersubjective exchange. Discourse occursPlatonic Dialogue and Romantic Irony / 7 between separate, individual minds within a particular situation located in time and circumstance. The ground for any dialogical distinction between parts and whole, particulars and universal, the real and the ideal, must thus be defined by the situation of the dialogue as a reflection upon the human condition itself. Each speaker in the dialogue functions as a finite agent, subject to the dialectical process of argument. The medium of discourse thus demonstrates this intersubjective exchange, even though its ultimate pur- pose and meaning may lie beyond the limits of that exchange as a timeless and universal idea (in Plato's sense of the term). This basic incommensurabil- ity between situation and purpose is the source of irony in the dialogues. It also defines the basis of the dialogue as a form and its function as discourse, indeed as a literary narrative, for its implied reader. All our concepts of criticism depend on the contingencies of intellectual history. No terminology has absolute validity. The choice of irony by Friedrich Schlegel as a key concept in his critical theory was largely a matter of convenience, or appropriateness, or personal inclination. He picked it up from the repertoire of traditional rhetorical tropes. A similar convenience must also have governed Plato’s original choice of the term as an attribute for the figure of Socrates in his dialogues, as when Thrasymachus in the First Book of the Republic rails at Socrates with a kind of Aristophanic invective and calls him ‘ironic’ (337a) because he refuses to give direct answers to the questions put to him. There is yet another assumption about irony which we inherit from the tradition of theory. This assumption is expressed by Nietzsche in the passage from The Birth of Tragedy which provides the motto to this essay. He posits a fundamental change which occurred in the cultural history of the West, a change in the status of language and its use in literature, for which Socrates in the Platonic dialogues serves as convenient symptom. He is the helmsman of a liferaft which survived the shipwreck of ancient poetry. Nietzsche's predecessors in the history of philosophy (nota- bly Hegel) had described this as a fundamental transformation of poetic mythology by philosphical thought. Plato was the watershed between the ancients and the moderns, between the Classical and the Romantic (Schlegel’s terms), between the naive and the sentimental modes of poetry, language, and thought (as Schiller argued). On this essential model of cultural history all the German theorists agree: from Kant, Goethe, and Schiller through the Schlegels, Schelling, Humboldt, Hélderlin, Novalis, and many others, on to Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. But what constitutes this cultural shift other than a retrospective projec- tion by the theorists themselves of an ideal of perfect, or at least fully adequate, signification (which is perforce pre-ironic) upon an era of supposed privilege, where the mind was assumed to exist — like Adam in the garden before the fall —in perfect union and harmony with its thought and its world?