The importance of Irony in modern art and literature and, more latterly, in the intellectual sciences and in culture generally, can hardly be overestimated. For some writers, the cultivation of irony is the most essential qualification for any thought, any art or literature or social or political theory to be truly modern. Thus, in an article on social theory published recently, Charles Lemert refers to irony as the discursive form of post-modern social theory, [1] claiming that "irony is the only and necessary attitude for theory today" and that "postmodernism is an ironic general theory". Writers in a different tradition [2, 3] have noted the 'cancerous growth' in the use of irony in art and literature throughout this century. Ironies of text and voice have become the hallmarks of good taste in the realm of the literary, the dramatic and the aesthetic. We associate irony easily with humour, but we recognise, too, that irony can be bitter and even tragic. It is always a reflection of the Janus-faced nature of reality, of its paradoxical and contradictory character. As a tool in the hands of the skilled wordsmith or painter, irony corrodes and undermines pretensions, unmasks appearances, deconstructs. In the present paper I want to open up a few possibilities for theorising and historicising irony. Fixing on the widely accepted beginning of the modern concept in the eighteenth century, I shall analyse its developmental trajectory both forwards and backwards from that time. The analysis is not a full or complete one. It is more in the nature of a sketch.
It is remarkable that so central a category in modern intellectual life should have appeared on the intellectual horizon so late in the day. According to Muecke, [4] The word 'irony' did not appear in English until 1502 and did not come into general literary use until the eighteenth century. Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie [5] translates 'ironie' as 'drie-mocke'. Up until the eighteenth century irony was thought to be simply a rhetorical device, the practice of using language in an ironic fashion in order, intentionally to achieve some purpose or to realise some special effect. Irony exploited those situations in which appearances were not merely different from reality but were directly contradicted by reality. Whether you were a victim of the irony or an appreciator of the irony depended upon how you were situated with respect to this contradiction. Irony was particularly effective for wringing the humour or farce out of a situation where one could presume two audiences, an unknowing victim of the irony and an all-knowing appreciator of the irony. When one of the suitors besieging Penelope discourses in front of the disguised Ulysses about the impossibility of the master of the house returning, Homer's readers presumably appreciated the irony much as we do. Similarly, speech might be used ironically in order to promulgate an argument one despised as a means of satirising it. D. Mueke suggests as an example of this, the ironic defence of slavery, offered by Montesquieu in his famous work The Spirit of the Laws.
The peoples of Europe, having exterminated those of America, had to enslave those of Africa so as to have someone to clear all that land. Sugar would be too dear if one didn't have slaves to cultivate the sugar-cane. The peoples in question are black from head to foot; and their noses are squashed so flat that it is next to impossible to feel any pity for them. One cannot bring oneself to think that God, who is so wise and judicious, would put a soul, and above all a virtuous soul, into a body that is black all over. [6]
We are familiar with this kind of irony down to the present day. From Swiftian satire through Monty Python to the most recent alternative comedy.
However, in the eighteenth century the concept of irony (and the forms of literary and cultural practice upon which this concept was brought to bear) underwent a major development, one might almost say an explosion. We associate that development very much with the philosophers of the German Romantic Movement, most notably the Schlegel brothers and Novalis. Irony was no longer seen simply as a case of someone saying some thing in an ironic way in order to realise an effect. Irony now came to be seen as a certain relationship between human subjects and the world, even more as a condition of human subjects in the world. That condition involved the recognition of a fundamental and unbridgeable gap between the subject and the objects of his or her thought and experience. The forms of everyday life are fixed by language; they are particular, limited and conditioned, whereas the subject is unlimited and unconditioned and is, therefore, incommensurate with them, surpassing them in every way. The subject is an infinite creative potentiality.
This meant that the subject was no longer securely situated in the world but was suspended, reflexively, somewhere above it. The critical distancing of the creative subject from the world is realised aesthetically through irony. Shakespeare's vision of the world as a stage and of men and women as 'merely players' with their exits and entrances is a profoundly ironic and ironising vision, one that calls in question the truth or reality of the social order in a way that was to be repeated by sociologists such as Erving Goffman in our own century [7] &endash; in Goffman's world, social life is analysed as a play, a fiction, a set of 'performances', which suggests that the actor as a subject is not identical to, or commensurate with, the part he or she plays.
It is this critical distance between the subject and the world which becomes a focus of theorising in the eighteenth century and it is this same distancing conceived of as a process that the Romantic theorists referred to as irony. For the Romantics, the truth of the subject always stood in a contradictory relationship with both the thought which expressed it in language and with the created forms of the world. At the heart of Romanticism, therefore, is a loosening of the relationship between subject and object. Objects are no longer seen in absolute terms as complete and self-contained, as embodied value or spirit. With the Romantics, a certain tension enters into the relationship between subject and object. The relationship between the forms of the world and the spirit or value invested in those forms becomes a more problematic and tentative one. The forms of things come to be seen as partial, as limited and incomplete. An ironic attitude towards all one's projects and roles and creations was therefore implicitly a condition of one's freedom as a creative subject. It was also the basis of a truly critical consciousness which called in question both the world as it is lived and the subjects who live it. Social and political arrangements could be seen as transitory, not as the only possible world but as one possible world among many. Nature was seen by the Romantics not as a being, but as a becoming, as an 'infinitely teeming chaos, a dialectical process of continual creation and de-creation'. [8] The human subject was said to be like nature, creative and de-creative energy, pouring itself into created forms while transcending those created and limiting forms through adopting an ironic and critical self-consciousness towards them.
A writer like Shakespeare was able to distance himself from his characters sufficiently to call in question their motives or their understandings or the reality of their situations. In this he stood in relation to his characters much as a God to his creatures. His creativity as a subject surpassed the forms in which it was expressed and these forms were subtly 'deconstructed' in the very process of being constituted. The appearance of this deconstructive process, this distancing of the author from his characters, this irony, was seen by the Romantics as the entry into the work itself of the creative process, that is, of the coming into being of the work, a process that transcended the finite forms constituting the work. In a deeper sense this process mirrored the relationship between men and women and their projects in the world. Irony was thus seen by the Romantics to provide a glimpse of the infinite; and the creative process in art, a model for the life-world.
When we get beyond the simple empirical ironies that result from the deceptive character of appearances which are contradicted by reality, ironies which result from incomplete or limited knowledge, the inability to be in two places at once and so forth, we encounter the deeper origin of irony in the metaphysical dualism which divides the world into spirit and matter. Inevitably, the attempt to square the demands of everyday life with those of a higher transcendental realm results in contradictions and absurdities. From the standpoint of the 'simply human', irony can be used to call the gods in question. Irony then becomes a double-edged weapon. Being ironised, being a victim of irony, calls in question the truth of that which is contradicted by one's fate. In the very act of bringing down the victim, the gods dethrone themselves and in that dethronement is the promise of liberation for the victim. This more fundamental irony is the antidote to the metaphysical; it is eternally deconstructive.
However, this metaphysical dualism is realised differently in different types of society. The distance between the transcendental and spiritual realm and the material everyday profane world may be very great indeed, as it was in archaic civilisations. In European society, from the Renaissance onwards, that metaphysical dualism has been progressively driven closer to the ground. The gods and goddesses of the spiritual have given way to new trans-historical and 'mythic' structures such as the 'individual', the 'state' and 'civil society'.
The eighteenth century represented something of a watershed because it is at this time that the critical and ironic temper of the age succeeded in undermining the higher transcendental structures in pursuit of the claims of the lower. This, it seems to me, is the essence of the movement of irony. It is always directed by the lower element of the metaphysical dualism at the higher. When the higher is overcome, the dualism re-establishes itself at a lower level. In the eighteenth century, the dualism was re-established on a materialist basis. This represented an altogether new level of self-consciousness and self-awareness, including awareness of the role of irony. The eighteenth century, therefore, becomes critical, not only in the construction of modern social forms but also in the construction of a modern self-consciousness and of the 'historical' view of societies in the past. The 'historical', which becomes the target and victim of a new ironic voice, is but the form of the new metaphysical and trans-historical structures of the state, the individual and so forth...
In everyday life, we tend not to identify an individual as a whole with this or that mood or expression or this or that particular behaviour, but invoke the notion of some continuous self that is realised in the many different attitudes and expressions assumed. All such categories became 'totalities', teleological structures that exceed in every way the limited and particular forms they assume in everyday material life. Like the individual personality, however, these abstract totalities, the community, the state, the family, social institutions and so forth, can only become concrete and historical through their being realised in the particularity of everyday life. In this process, the events of everyday life, of biography and of history, become a kind of aliment through which, as ideas, these metaphysical entities develop and grow while remaining essentially and recognisably themselves. When we invoke the concept of the nation, of the state, of the rule of law and even of the human personality, we are appealing, whether we realise it or not, to our sense of symmetry, of continuity through time and change, to something we can know as the 'essential Fred' or the 'essential Julie'; in other words to our sense of the historical. What is necessary to the historical, as defined here, is the sense of entities, such as the state or the personality, as enduring through the changes and exigencies of everyday life. It is as though the various realisations of such entities in the details of everyday life, the daily practices of courts and parliaments or the everyday behaviours of individuals, are all manifestations of the same underlying entity, the same 'state' or 'personality'. The sense of the historical is closely associated with the record of change and transformation in such abstract totali ties through experience. It is this which gives rise to the concept of 'development' or of 'progress', as applied to individuals, institutions, the nation-state or whatever.
In modern societies, the events of history are seen as constitutive of these (historical) structures. History, as real events, becomes 'food' for the historical. As historical entities, the abstract social totalities such as the state, the individual, and so forth, are made to mediate experience, by assimilating events to their own forms and by accommodating themselves as structures (changing and developing themselves) in order to do so. I believe that it is possible to argue that modern societies consume their history in the much same sense in which Levi-Strauss argued they did, when he characterised 'hot societies' as those which consume their history. In my terms such societies do not simply have a history. All societies have that. They become historical.
With the development of industrial society the gods were dethroned. However, the same dualism between an 'eternal' metaphysical being and a transient world of events was re-constituted. New abstract totalities arose (the people, the state, etc.) and these constituted a new trans-historical metaphysical superstructure, giving rise to a sense of the historical as development and progress. Becoming historical, making personal biography, personal development, the development of nations, means somehow being both trans-historical and becoming (through history) historical. And it is this paradoxical and double-faced nature of reality that is the root of the modern ironic vision emerging in the eighteenth century.
The formal problematic concerning the individual and his/her projects in the world can be clearly seen in the eighteenth century with the cultural mediation of events, in revolutionary France, by trans-historical structures that were not fully of their own time, structures conceptualised ideal-typically, not with their own contents but with those of classical Greek and Roman culture. The painting by Louis David, for example, of the death of Marat, turns a squalid and gruesome murder of a political tyrant into a poetic epitaph for a classical hero. This tendency to imbue material events with a higher material form was closely analysed by Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The protagonists of the French revolution represented their struggles to themselves in terms of the heroic exploits of classical Greece and Rome, and Napoleon the Third dressed his assumption of power in the historical robes of Napoleon the First. The irony (both tragic and farcical) of the inevitable contradiction between appearance and reality is not lost on Marx. [9] These actors on the historical stage seek to realise some larger transcendental meaning in their everyday lives and relations. In doing so the trans-historical comes to mediate their actions and therefore a sense of the problem of becoming historical enters history itself and infects it with metaphysical desire. Marx considers that the revolution of the future will not have to resort to any such idealising forms but will be able to experience its heroic moment in its own unadorned and material terms. From a late twentieth-century perspective, however, Marx's own material categories and the entire historicist mode of thinking are equally infected with metaphysical ghosts and open to the same relentless and ironising critique.
The novel was the eighteenth-century genre in which the corrosive work of irony could be most clearly seen. So much so, that Lukacs has actually termed the novel an 'ironogenic' form. The typical novel centred on the unfolding of a story (biographical), which concerned local and particular events and described absolutely particular people but which was mediated throughout by the more or less unsuccessful attempts of its principal characters to realise transcendental values through their projects and to imbue their lives with meaning. The 'problematic hero' of the novel, according to Lukacs, is transcendentally homeless, unable to bring inner and outer reality, society and personality into a meaningful unity. [10] The problematic hero, no less than those historical 'heroes' (equally problematic) discussed by Marx, is not able to relate to the world without metaphysical and transcendental pretensions. The problematic hero's transcendental pretensions are seen, through irony, for what they are. Whether the metaphysical pretensions are those of Don Quixote imitating his chivalric hero or of Madame Bovary and her attachment to romantic fiction heroines or of Dostoyevsky's 'Eternal Husband' and his dependence upon his wife's seducer, all such characters seek unsuccessfully to realise some larger transcendental meaning in their everyday lives and relations.
In his brilliant analysis of the novel (Deceit, Desire and the Novel), Rene Girard draws attention to the triangular nature of desire in the novel: [11] the tendency of characters to be gripped by a metaphysical desire which is to be distinguished from natural desire. Don Quixote worships Amadis, his chivalric hero, and seeks in his relations with others to imitate Amadis. The contradiction thereby engendered, throughout the novel, between appearance and reality, throws up irony after irony. Triangular desire is treated by Rene Girard as a kind of metaphysical sickness. The greater the intensity of metaphysical desire the weaker the natural desire, that is, the direct and unmediated desire of the subject in relation to objects. The more the world is mediated for the individual subject by a transcendental other, the more false is his or her relationship to life, the more his or her predicament has to be seen as ironic. Instead of living life as it comes and giving vent to one's nature and natural feelings, the individual lives in dependence upon and imitation of some transcendental 'other' (no matter how close and worldly this other) and this imitation robs the individual of any spiritual home in the very world it is intended to authenticate. The inner and outer life are now hopelessly at odds with one another; we tilt at windmills. But to say that the novelist can see and present to his readers the irony of his hero's inevitable failure is to imply only an understanding of the problem, not its abolition; there is still the further step of seeing his or her own work in the same light, as being itself an attempt to make sense of the world and so equally open to irony.
This metaphysical and ironogenic tension at the heart of the novel has a developmental history and dynamic of its own. Irony is doubly corrosive. Increasingly, from the beginning of the twentieth century, the ironic vision of modernist literature has been directed not to the (failed) attempt to realise a trans-historical subject in the world but to the absolute absurdity of all such projects. By the twentieth century, the individual personality, the nation, the state, institutions, even the institution of art itself, were being called in question for their metaphysical pretensions and were themselves made the subject of new and powerful ironies.
Modernism entails a serious onslaught on the transcendental, a move to rid the world of sensuous material events of its transcendental spirits, its ghostly infection. Nietzche's cry that God is dead may be said to inaugurate this purging of the transcendental but Nietzche himself found the task difficult and we find him preserving these ghosts in the form of the historical and even in the statistical theory of eternal recurrence. Any thoroughgoing attempt to remake life will involve exorcising its metaphysical ghosts. The final form taken by these ghosts is that of the 'historical', which I have argued arises from the mediation of everyday life by trans-historical forms. The abolition of the historical, of the development of the grand narrative, of the continuity of the project, is difficult, because ordinary life is filled with the historical and every action carries its imprint whether the actor knows it or not. Only through the deepest and most thoroughgoing irony can the historical be purged from history.
At this point, I want to introduce a digression, albeit one that is very much to the point. I have always been fascinated by the Watergate affair. My fascination centres on the fundamental ironies of the affair. In a television interview recently, David Frost recounted a warm-up conversation he had with Richard Nixon just prior to his famous interview with him following his resignation as President. He asked Nixon how he had got on with Brezhnev in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Nixon had said something like 'You know David &endash; I pity those guys, Brezhnev and the rest. What a political system. They can never be sure that every word they utter is not being taped.' Frost was particularly amused by the fact that Nixon seemed completely unaware of the irony. My attention was drawn, however, not to this irony, which is the kind of simple irony that a knowing audience at any time might enjoy, but a much greater irony that owes a great deal to the development through which the historical becomes present as a mediating force in history, in public life.
Why did Nixon talk into a tape-recorder in the first place? Why did he keep the tapes running at all times? Why did he keep the tapes and not destroy them while that was still possible? Whom was he addressing? Clearly he was addressing people in the Oval Office, people he was conducting business with and clearly he thought it important to keep a record of everything. However, it appears that in making these tapes he some how saw himself as addressing history, as recording it no less. His relationship to others was clearly mediated by his sense of himself as a historical person, as a significant historical being. The tapes represented history, the historical record. The supreme irony here is that the historical record he produced in order to assure his value in a transcendental posterity turned into the incriminating record which destroyed the presidency it was supposed to vindicate.
Now we might be inclined to see this as tragic irony or comic irony in the classical sense. Nixon was undone by the historical in much the way that the Gods or fates undid Oedipus. True, we are less inclined to see Nixon as innocent. However, there is a more serious reason as to why we are, I am inclined to think, less likely to view the irony in these terms. Unlike the people of classical Greece, who believed in their gods, we no longer believe in the god History. Our sense of the irony in the case of the Nixon tapes has another dimension. It is easy to see the irony as the absurdity of the act of making the tape, of addressing a non-existent transcendental entity, history, with a view to having it validate your existence, your status. To those who no longer believe in such metaphysical ghosts, Nixon's project, like all such projects, is simply absurd.
Such ironies are not unlike those to be found in the armoury of modernism, in its art, its literature and its theatre. They take the form of a cultivation of the absurd. Life is absurd, not because the individual has failed to realise transcendental values in his or her ordinary life in the world, but because these values do not exist. There is no larger story, no larger meaning to give life significance; and, insofar as the very springs of action disclose the presence of these metaphysical ghosts, they appear, to the ironic vision, as absurd, as impossible pretensions contradicted by the non-existence of what is presupposed by them. The irony of the nineteenth century was directed at the impossibility of realising the transcendental in the world, that of the twentieth century to the non-existence of such values and the absurdity of a reality that presupposes them.
In Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in the act of waiting, we experience the flow of time in a heavy and immediate form: it is time devoid of any sense of the historical, of development or progress of any kind. Each slice of action in the play interrupts or stops the slice preceding it. Nothing can get anywhere. If the events of the play can be said to constitute a history, it is a history devoid of the historical. If we truly accepted things for what they are then there would be no absurdity or irony in modern life. The fact that we experience this absurdity through Beckett and others is consistent proof of our inability to lay down the metaphysical baggage. The presence of this metaphysical baggage is fundamental to the existence of irony. Without it there would be no place for the ironic, no gap or dualism to be ironised.
Beckett's characters are not simple individuals who live in the moment without claims upon any larger scheme of things. They are complex souls in reduced circumstances shuffling through metaphysical ruins which guide their every footstep. They are cut off from any living history, any development, anything historical. There is nothing cumulative, or progressive about their shuffling steps. But a history of sorts might be reconstructed with the methods of an archaeologist, of an expert on ruins. If Beckett's characters are funny, part of that humour arises from the incongruity of actions which presuppose a continuity, a historical development and completion, when there isn't one. Beckett's characters are hung about with the ruins of the historical; they are clown-like in their seeming so oddly fitted for the emptiness they inhabit. It is not history that is rejected here, not the continuous Heraclitean flux, the endless process of change, but the historical, the notion of an enduring and continuous totality, a personality. Such a continuity from which we seek to wrestle meaning and significance, is, for Beckett, a retrospective hypothesis and a prospective fiction. In a passage from an essay of Beckett's on Proust, the following observations appear:
There is no escape from the hours and the days, neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us or been deformed by us...Yesterday is not a milestone that has passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday. The flow of time confronts us with the basic problem of being &endash; the problem of the nature of the self, which being subject to constant change in time, is in constant flux and therefore ever outside our grasp &endash; personality, whose permanent reality can only be apprehended as a retrospective hypothesis. The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, sluggish pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multi-coloured by the phenomena of its hours. [12]
Beckett conjures for us a world without metaphysical pretensions, a world in which not only God but even the historical is absent, in which the fundamental metaphysical dualism underpinning the taken-for-granted world is dissolved in the acid of an ironising vision. The historical is about continuity persisting through change. Like a bouncing ball that changes its position at every instant and is subject to continuous deformation, but which nevertheless remains recognisably a ball, so the individual, the society or the state etc., are conserved in the sense of the historical. This is the line of thread in the labyrinth which is missing in Beckett and Ionesco. There is no thread. When the boy appears in the second act of Waiting for Godot to announce that Monsieur Godot will not come that day, we are told it is the same boy who appeared in the first act but it is clear that the characters are not aware of that fact. Indeed, the very absence of any sense of historical time is indicated by the gesture of suggesting a change of season between the two acts by hanging two or three leaves on the tree which is part of the set. So when Beckett speaks of the heaviness of time, the dreadful passage which weighs so heavily, it is time that drowns the historical. Jameson and others have drawn attention to the altered temporal relations in a post-modern world, invoking the notion of the present-centred and ahistorical experience of time. Jameson has even described all post-structuralist thought as intrinsically anti-historical and has, like so many others, invoked the schizophrenic's consciousness of time as symbolic of a more general cultural tendency in the modern world.
The internal development of the forms of irony, of the stages in the development of an ironising vision in modern culture, in art and in literature, has its ground in parallel developments in capitalism and in capitalist society. The eighteenth century is seen as a watershed between pre-industrial and industrial society. The latter is associated with the rise of manufacturing and of factory production, the large-scale movement of people from country to town, the development of towns and a growth in their numbers and so forth as well as the development of privacy and a greater measure of individualism. The trigger initiating the development of a new and enlarged notion of irony was no doubt provided by these material developments. Similarly, the development of an industrial and increasingly mechanised capitalism, the growth of large-scale monopolistic organisations and so forth and the more recent emergence of a so-called post-industrial capitalism, can be seen as closely linked to the development of the ironic vision in the art and literature of the twentieth century, in the paintings of Magritte or Marcel Duchamp, of Picasso and Gris, of Futurism as well as Dada and Surrealism and later in the Pop Art of the 1950s and 1960s. However, if the Romantics initiated a process &endash; more a programme &endash; (romantic irony) which has only achieved a degree of completion in the late twentieth century, it is also the case that they initiated with this same concept of romantic irony a retrospective historical re-interpretation of past literatures making use of this concept.
Irony is something of which the eighteenth century became acutely conscious. Classical Greece was not conscious of irony in the same sense at all and although Aristotle and others were explicitly aware of the important aesthetic principles involved in the construction of both comedies and tragedies, irony did not assume a prominent let alone a central role. In the re-interpretation of these works, however, it does do so. [13] Much is written on the subject of Sophoclean irony and, because of the nature of the concept of irony as it has developed since the eighteenth century, it matters not at all that Sophocles himself would have been unlikely to see the principle of construction in his work as that of irony. It is possible, too, when armed with the modern concept of irony, to recover the ironies of the Old Testament and of the New and of diverse literatures of the past &endash; just so long as we remember that it is we who are interested in irony and the history we construct reflects that interest, leaving open, for the present, the question of what relationship such a history has to the events of the time.
We might argue that history develops in a continuous alternation between periods of irony and periods in which there is little disjunction between the form and content of experience. However, we might need also to argue that the disjunction is differently constructed in different periods and that this results in different modes of irony and of the ironic. In principle, we should be able to historicise this, to cast it in developmental terms. The disjunction between the ordering of experience, its metaphysical superstructure, and its lively content, is expressed in so-called traditional societies such as those of classical Greece, in terms of the relations between Gods and Immortals on the one hand and mortals, usually superior or important figures such as Kings or Queens, on the other. In Sophocles' tragedy, Antigone, for example, the claims of kinship and tribal loyalties and those of the developing and all powerful civic duty are set in opposition. That is how Hegel saw the essence of tragedy, as a fundamental opposition between two sets of values. However, the important point is that there is an asymmetry here. Both sets of values are equally justified but one is somehow greater, more comprehensive in its claims. The claims of kinship are no less just than those of civic duty but the source of political order is bound up with the latter. What is just and honourable is punished. Antigone must die. There is a terrible irony that runs through Sophocles. Oedipus is innocent, an upholder of the law for whom incest and patricide are crimes he wishes to punish. He is even armed with foreknowledge about his fate and makes every effort to avoid it. The foreknowledge is part of the instrument by which his fate is brought about and, despite his innocence, he blinds himself and exiles himself and his mother hangs herself. The tension separating the King from the Gods engenders irony, but irony of a tragic order. Things are just not what they appear to be. Who is guilty? Who is innocent? Why are the Gods to be praised ?
In the Old Testament scriptures, the God of Abraham is singular not plural. The level of abstraction in monotheism appears to be higher. The people are related to each other as a whole in and through their personal relationship to this singular God and there is, as a consequence, a unified space both moral and historical through which this people and these people travel, and in terms of which their projects can be formulated. With the Hebrews, God is at work in history. What must continually be tested is their submission to and adherence to this unitary God. No other claims must take precedence if that unitary moral and historical space is to be preserved. However, it is always threatened by other claims and, therefore, the absolute claim is put to the test in great trials of faith. The irony involved in the sacrifice of Isaac called for by God places duty to God in opposition to duty to kin, sets the duty to God the Father against the duty of an earthly father towards his offspring. Contrast the irony here with that of Sophocles' Antigone and her struggle with Creon.
In the Old Testament, God is still the transcendental God that rules from above. In Christianity, that God actually descends to earth and enters into mankind and therefore more intimately into the making of history &endash; that is comes to operate through man, from the inside as it were. This brings together the transcendental principle and the material and bodily subject in one being &endash; a Man-God. The contradiction between appearance and reality and between the finite and the infinite is now acute. The miracles, the parables, the guilt and execution of the innocent, everywhere indicates the most enormous upheaval in the human project and provides new sources for profound irony.
Again, the space that opens up here is distinct. It is the space between the Christianised spirit and the secular and profane world. The internal development of Christianity, particularly the development of the Reformation, centuries later, effected a further transformation in the working of the transcendental principle and therefore of the structuring of irony. In effect, God became truly operative and present in the entire secular world and men and women came to be seen, through the Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines of the vocation, as instruments in the hands of God, making His kingdom on earth. The more dedicated the individuals were to making that kingdom and the less they indulged themselves in worldly pleasures &endash; that is, the more they saved and the less they consumed, the more assured they were about their personal salvation. The great irony was that this develop ment resulted, as Max Weber [14] so cogently argued, in the feverish dedication of a merchant class to the creation of capitalism, to the pursuit of the most powerful materialism ever known, in the name of a devotion to a great transcendental God and to salvation in another (spiritual) world. Material and commercial life, profane under Catholicism, was sanctified in the early days of capitalist development and brought under monastic discipline.
In the space allowed me I have been able to do no more than to indicate a general outline for an historicising of the theory of irony. I said it would be a sketch but it is very incomplete, even as a sketch. It will not have escaped the reader who has followed the argument that such an attempt is itself not free of irony. Through historicising the abolition of the historical in the ironic vision of modern culture, art and literature, the text defiantly proclaims the historical. But then again...
1.
Lemert, Charles (1992), "General Social Theory, Irony and
Postmodernism" in S.Seidman and D.G.Wagner Postmodernism and
Social Theory, Oxford, pp. 17&endash;46.
2.
Booth, Waynes C. (1974), A Rhetoric of Irony, Chicago.
3.
Glicksberg, Charles I. (1969), The Ironic Vision in Modern
Literature, The Hague.
4.
Muecke, D.C. (1982), Irony and the Ironic, London.
5.
Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, ed. G.D.Wilcox and
A.Walker (1936), London.
6.
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis (1949), The Spirit of the Laws, New
York, p. 238.
7.
Goffman, Erving (1990), The Presentation of the Self in Everyday
Life, London.
8.
Schlegel, F.(1860), The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works,
(transl.) E.Millington, London.
9.
Marx, Karl The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Moscow:
Co-op publishing society (1934), (Marxist-Leninist Library).
10.
Lukacs, Georg (1971), The Theory of the Novel, London.
11.
Girard, René (1936), Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and
Other in Literary Structure, Baltimore.
12.
Zurbrugg, Nicholas (1988), Beckett and Proust, Gerrards Cross,
Bucks.
13.
See chapter on Sophoclean Irony in Glicksberg op. cit.
14.
Weber, Max (1965), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (tr. T.Parsons), London.