Cervantes, Romantic Irony and the Making of Reality
William Egginton
Irony is a deceptively simple trope. That a sentence means other than what it appears to mean is all that is required to qualify it as ironic, at least according to classical definitions. But a querulous history and a virtual infinity of divergent viewpoints belie the ostensible sincerity of irony's feint. The real point of departure in irony's trajectory is a relatively modern one, one bequeathed by romanticism when its poets and predicators chose this trope to be the standard of a new understanding of the human and its relation to the world. At this moment, a second genus emerged to house the swarming species of ironic progeny: if the first had always been rhetorical, the new home would be properly philosophical.
To say that a concept has become philosophical can itself mean various things. So let us be specific: irony became philosophical when it ceased merely to refer to how one used language and began to describe a mode of being, an historical organization of consciousness. This is what happened with romanticism, when Friedrich von Schlegel first identified this trope as being somehow the essence of the new art, an art that was not merely artifice but that reflected a fundamental—and fundamentally new—way of being. In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel will also admit that this is what has happened, but will bemoan the deed and criticize the doer on the grounds that he—Schlegel—is not really a philosopher, that his creation is a stillbirth, a literally half-baked idea about which people have prattled on far too long. In what follows I contest this charge, and argue that, whether because of merely hasty reading or because of personal animosity, [End Page 1040] Hegel offers only a partial reading of the Schlegelian notion of irony. After presenting what I hope is a more complete version of Schegel's concept, I go on to argue that irony as a philosophical problem is theorized on the basis of a series of narrative principles deriving in large part from one book: Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote. 1 Cervantes, my argument goes, wrote the ground on which romanticism theorized itself. Finally, armed with a refined and historically specified notion of irony, I return to Hegel, to demonstrate that this irony, despite his protests and criticisms notwithstanding, is an indispensable element of his own system of thought.
My beginning and ending with Hegel notwithstanding, the central argument of this paper has to do with Don Quijote and its relation to romanticism and romantic irony, which means that what I argue here will impinge unavoidably on one of the most persistent debates in Cervantes scholarship: between those who treat Cervantes's work as providing a foundation for asking questions of a "philosophical" nature, and those who criticize this approach as unhistorical. 2 The most influential critique of the philosophical or "romantic" reading is that of Anthony Close, who argues that the attempt to "accommodate" the novel to "modern stereotypes and preoccupations" involves a willful ahistoricism on the part of the critic. 3 This position is also held by P. E. Russell, who moreover denies that Cervantes can be accurately read as having contributed "anything original to the general history of ideas." 4 My position is in fundamental agreement with the argument of Joan Ramon Resina, that there is nothing unhistorical about a philosophical understanding of Don Quijote (Resina 220). But whereas his argument is based on a detailed demonstration that the philosophical or romantic perspective can and in fact does incorporate the humorous elements of Cervantes's writing—one criticism of the romantic approach being that it fails to take humor into account (Russell 97; Close 2)—mine is that some of the very "modern stereotypes and preoccupations" that Close attributes to romantic and post-romantic readings in fact owe their existence to Cervantes's writing.
For the critics of the romantic approach, an original contribution to the history of ideas could only be an idea that was consciously conceived of and presented as just that: an original contribution. But this judgment carries with it some enormous assumptions concerning the nature of knowledge and historical change. Can we assume that only consciously recognized and intended utterances entail intellectual contributions? What if those conscious, intentional utterances [End Page 1041] themselves depend on an unarticulated ground or range of possibilities which had to emerge in order for one individual to say just that? I am alluding, of course, to the limits of intentionalist readings, which—all talk of the "intentional fallacy" aside—quite simply fail to take into account that the author might be saying quite a deal more than whatever he or she ostensibly intended to say.
Indeed, if the intentionalist-historicist 5 methodology depends on unearthing the limits of what Cervantes could have intended to say on the basis of what others writing within his historical context did in fact say, 6 then it runs afoul of a serious methodological quandary: the author is granted the possibility of having intended a given contribution only if the historian is able to find, in the documents forming the author's intellectual context, evidence that someone else actually uttered the intention. However, having established these parameters for identifying the possibility of the author's having intended the contribution, it becomes clear that the intention we have determined in our author will never count as an "original" contribution, because if we are to determine that it is really what was intended, then by our own stringent historicist rules we will have already located at least one other thinker who actually uttered the thought. Hence the importance of a methodology of literary-historical research that does not put such primacy on the alleged authorial intent.
In the conclusion to The Romantic Approach, Close makes a statement I assume we can safely take as representative of the attitude of all the critics I am arguing against: "We are essentially concerned in literary criticism with what literature means. We presuppose that what is meant was what was intended, because we are congenitally unable to do otherwise" (RA 249). Over the next two pages he modifies his intention with regard to the phrase "what was intended," arriving eventually at the distinction between "intentional activity" and the "capacity to rationalise it," by which I take it he means "put it into sentences." While admitting that Cervantes might not rationalize his intentional activity in the same way the historicist critic would, he insists that "we have to imagine him [Cervantes] being able to assent to them [the rationalizations] once their terms had been made clear to him" (RA 251). It is important to emphasize, however, that if we historicists succeed in traveling back in time and making clear to Cervantes certain terms being applied to his work, we will have also changed the nature of Cervantes the author and his relation to the world, for it is precisely by means of adding new concepts and relating [End Page 1042] them to existing ones that people come to have different outlooks and new ideas.
The notions of "epistemological irony" and the "making of reality" that I formulate in these pages would not have made much sense to an unadulterated Cervantes. Indeed, there would be a lot of clarifying to be done for them to be acceptable to the very romantic thinkers who I claim conceptualized them for the first time. Nevertheless, I still claim to be making true, and historically accurate, statements about the "meaning" of the texts I discuss. How is this possible? Close ends his book with a criticism of the presentism implicit in the argument that we cannot be interested in a work of art without somehow feeling that it is of our own time. Such an argument "makes the assumption that there is a temporal zone 'Our Time' freed from the ties of history, and within which all that has been created is accessible to us in terms of easy and natural familiarity" (RA 252). But Close and the intentionalist-historicists who share his way of thinking have made another, equally prejudicial assumption: that there is a temporal zone "Cervantes's Time" freed from the ties of the present, and within which all can be observed and commented on without disturbing its primordial and objective rest. Such a zone does not exist, because the road to the past must always be built with the tools of the present. My "romantic" reading of Quijote should be understood in this light.
Hegel's Critique of Irony
In the introductory lectures in which he prepared his 1820s Berlin audience for a systematic framing of the principal questions of aesthetics, Hegel deals with the question of irony in a way that has become more famous for its dismissive tone and cursory analysis than for its actual content. 7 In this passage, Hegel correctly credits Friedrich von Schlegel as the first theorist (in the romantic sense) of irony, and then goes on to describe and condemn a version of irony mostly striking for its utter lack of similarity to Schlegel's. Hegel justifies his dismissal of the aesthetic category of irony entirely on its supposed heritage from Fichte's philosophy, "insofar as the principles of this philosophy were applied to art" (A I, 119). 8 For Hegel the philosophical essence of irony is to be found in Fichte's epistemology, and its insistence on the primacy of the ego: "With respect to the closer relation of Fichte's statements with the one tendency of irony we [End Page 1043] need only emphazise the following point: that Fichte identifies as the absolute principle of all science, reason, and knowledge the 'I,' and specifically the quite abstract and formal 'I'" (A I, 119). 9 While Hegel appears to be limiting this connection to only one tendency of irony (mit der einen Richtung) in fact his criticism of the concept remains at all times a criticism of Fichte's idealism, and of nothing else.
As regards this one tendency of irony, then, it is characterized for Hegel by these three, fully Fichtean, aspects: first, it is, as stated above, based on the ego as an abstract and formal principle. Second, all particular, objective content of the ego's world is negated by the fact that it has existence only through the ego, and therefore nothing exists in and for itself but only as produced by the ego's subjectivity (A I, 120). 10 Finally, because the ego is a living being, it must realize itself in a world populated by other living beings; however, when the ego realizes its individuality in an artistic way, as an artist, this involves converting this real world into a world of appearances dependent in every way on his caprice. He is not bound by reciprocal relations, but rather looks down on them from the heights of his creative genius, knowing that he is at any time as free to destroy them as he was to create them. Having outlined this critique of Fichtean idealism as applied to art, Hegel nonchalantly attributes the entirety of his straw adversary to Schegel, saying "This irony was invented by Mr. Friedrich von Schlegel, and many others have prattled on about it and continue to prattle on about it still" (A I, 121). 11
This first tendency of irony, then, deals principally with the negation of external reality. The second half of Hegel's critique is aimed at a further possibility, in which the world-negating ego fails to take satisfaction in its self absorption and begins to thirst for solidity and substance, for specific and essential interests (so dass es nun den Durst nach Festem und Substantiellem, nach bestimmten und wesentlichen Interessen empfindet) (A I, 122). Ultimately the ironic genius not only negates the objective world but negates in fact everything—the Divine, the noble, the great, and finally its own artistic endeavor and its very subjectivity. This inevitable tendency in irony Hegel calls "infinite absolute negativity" (unendliche absolute Negativität), which, he concedes, is a moment in his own dialectic. When the apostles of Romanticism take this moment, however, as the true end and essence of art, they are deceived in that they fail to see what Hegel has seen: infinite absolute negativity—in which the Idea negates the infinite and universal so as to become finite and particular, and then again negates finitude and particularity in order to [End Page 1044] reestablish infinity and universality in the finite and particular—is only one moment in the progress of the Idea (A I, 125). Romanticism, with its praise of irony, has simply jumped off the train too soon, and mistaken a moment of the process for its whole result.
Schlegel on Irony
Hegel is correct in attributing to Schlegel the romantic, and hence modern, notion of irony, a notion that must be clearly distinguished from its predecessors. Until its romantic adaptation, irony remained solidly in the field of rhetoric, and while a broad typology existed, all acknowledged forms derived from the central idea of "a figure or trope dependent on stating the opposite to the intended meaning." 12 But it is clear that the romantic version of irony graduates from being a mere tool of rhetoric and begins to signify an event or an entity of existential proportions. As Glicksberg puts it,
Romantic irony represents the outcropping of subjectivity in its most extreme form. The romanticists fled from an unknowable and intolerable "reality" into the inner fastness of the self. Romantic irony is thus to be identified, for better or for worse, with this outbreak of subjectivity, a rebellious impulse on the part of the literary artist to rise above the restrictions of reality. Irony provided an essential expression of the Weltanschauung of the romantic temper. 13
Glicksberg is under the influence of a thoroughly Hegelian interpretation of irony's trajectory, accepting uncritically its ostensible origins in Fichte's philosophy and propagating the consequent thesis of irony as the literary sign of an emerging subjectivity, where subjectivity is understood as a philosophical embellishment of rampant subjectivism. Nevertheless, he grasps, as did Hegel, that the irony identified and theorized by the romantics has exceeded the bounds of rhetoric and entered the realm of the individual's experience of selfhood and the world. This realm of human experience falls under the rubric of "subjectivity," but the term suffers the weakness of failing to distinguish itself sufficiently from mere "subjectivism." For subjectivism, the heart of what Hegel criticizes in the notion, is not what is at stake in Schlegel's concept, which nonetheless does posit irony as being both particularly appropriate to the Zeitgeist of his time and having everything to do with the individual's experience of self and the world.
Depending on what period of Schlegel's career one focuses on, one will find a variety of often confusingly divergent definitions of irony. 14 [End Page 1045] My purpose is to draw from this variety of formulations three general principles of irony, and to demonstrate that none of these can be understood as an expression of rampant subjectivism, but rather that in all cases the definition treats of a complex and balanced relation between subjective and objective poles. The three formulations are: (1) irony is the paradox of self-consciousness; (2) irony is the epideixis 15 of infinity; and (3) irony is the structure of love.
Perhaps the principal philosophical structure of romanticism was enunciated by Schelling in his description of existence as an eternal tension between the idea—undetermined, the essence of human freedom, the expression of desire, of a reaching beyond the here and now—and reality—the dead, physical limits of a contingently determined world. 16 In a world characterized by such a tension, the consciousness of self that forms the essence of human being faces an impressive paradox. Because human being consists of both spirit and matter, self-consciousness requires the simultaneous occupation of mutually contradictory categories: on the one hand one must be conscious—a characteristic of ideality—of oneself as part of the world, as material being; but at the same time one must be conscious of oneself as consciousness. As a material being, one exists as an element in a causally determined chain of being. But as an ideal entity one is essentially undetermined. Equally disturbing is the effect of self-consciousness on the subjective/objective polarity: as consciousness one is a subject in relation to the objective world; but self-consciousness must be simultaneously the subject grasping and the object being grasped.
In light of this philosophical problematic, Schlegel identifies irony as the form of paradox itself. 17 Irony is the very form of paradox because it refers, most specifically in artistic production, to the act by which consciousness pulls itself up from its conditioned nature as material being and apprehends itself as simultaneously conditioned and unconditioned, as partaking of spirit and of the world. In this way irony not only signifies the paradox of consciousness, it participates in it: it is "[t]he freest of all licenses, since by way of it one overcomes oneself; and also the most lawful, since it is unconditionally necessary" (PJ II, 198). 18 As self-conscious beings, in other words, we cannot avoid being ironic.
Such an understanding of irony, however, can no longer be the sole domain of the artistic genius. Indeed irony seems to take on a double life in Schlegel: as on the one hand a principle of human existence, and on the other an artistic discovery proper to the romantic [End Page 1046] movement. But then the same could be said of romanticism in general, which was thought by all involved to be both an historically specific artistic movement and a stage in the development of consciousness that humanity had at long last attained. According to Hegel, for example, with the advent of romantic art, the nature of beauty and of the relation of the Idea to art had to be grasped in a deeper way than had hitherto been possible, and profoundly connected to this change was the fact that "[t]he concept for itself, the thinking spirit now on its side came to know itself more deeply in philosophy and thus did the essence of art become immediately graspable in a more fundamental way" (A I, 62). 19 The artist, by exercising his unique ability to overcome himself (sich über sich selbst wegsetzen) in his art, is simultaneously revealing an aspect of the essence of spirit, or free self consciousness. For Schlegel this revelation is the result of art and philosophy merging into one practice, whereas for Hegel it is a sign that art has run its course and that spirit may now reveal itself through the application of pure reflective thought.
The paradoxical nature of irony as the supreme index of artistic creation would then seem to be an instantiation of the self-referential paradox, or a poetic manifestation of any of the paradoxes made possible by self-reference. Poetry, theater, any act of representation that includes itself and its very creation in what is being represented fall into this category. The ironic representation itself partakes neither entirely of the representer nor of the represented, but rather oscillates eternally between the two, creating an effect that Schegel likens to the infinite proliferation of images in two facing mirrors: "And yet it (the irony) can also float, free from all real and ideal interests, on the wings of poetic reflection, between the represented and the representer, making this reflection ever more potent and multiplying it as in an endless row of mirrors." 20 Irony in Schlegel's sense, then, is art that has become conscious of itself and, by dint of this consciousness, infinitely self-reflexive. It is, to use the famous phrase, poetry of poetry or, to draw an analogy, metatheater, theater in which the actors play characters who in turn are actors playing characters. 21 For Schlegel, the representation itself becomes an analogy for creative consciousness. Consciousness is not an expression of pure, arbitrary subjectivism, but rather is instantiated by the paradox of artistic creation: it is neither the creator nor the created, but rather the paradoxical space between the two.
The second of the formulations can be found in Schegel's own [End Page 1047] words: "Irony is, so to speak, the epideixis of infinity." 22 To understand this formulation we need to refer back to the tension underlying the previous formulation of irony as paradox. This tension appears variously as one between determined and undetermined existence, between the ideal and the real, and between the subjective consciousness and the objective world. The analogy for this tension in the realm of representational practice is the relation between a sign and a referent or, to make the analogy clearer, between a series of signs and some objective whole to which the series refers. In the original series of opposed terms, the notion of infinity lay on the side of the ideal, or of consciousness, and was opposed to a physical world that, in its essentially determined nature, was perceived to exhibit a quality of finitude in relation to the unbounded freedom of the ideal. That physical existence might itself be deserving of the predicate infinite, in the sense of infinitely extended space, was dealt with prototypically by Hegel with his notion of "bad" infinity, an endless, meaningless alteration or negation of the finite, devoid of the divine element of spirit. 23 For Schlegel the semiotic relationship has the curious effect of reversing this philosophical commonplace, in that the sign, in the hands of the poet, makes of mundane reality a mystical whole, and does this by injecting the real with the quality of infinite significance.
Poetry is romantic, then, insofar as it denotates (bezeichnet) "the tendency toward a deep, infinite meaning" (PJ II, 364, quoted in Romantische Ironie 67). 24 Although the whole, "das Ganze," can no longer be equated with such an idea as mere reality, we need not assume the working of some mystical, esoteric agency. By writing of the world the poet bestows meaning on something—inert existence—that would remain meaningless independent of poetic intervention. By bestowing meaning on reality the poet makes of reality a vessel of spirit—makes, in other words, the finite infinite. The poet's words, then, produce meaning while at the same time indicating a further meaning beyond those words, a meaning that tempts consciousness ever forward, ever outward, and yet never satisfies it. It is this tendency, and this relation between consciousness and the infinite, that Schlegel associates with irony.
Just as the second formulation derives in part from the first, so does the third unfold from the second. If we were to schematize the second formulation it would look something like this:
[Art] --> the Whole = Meaning [End Page 1048]
or, "meaning" is what mediates between "art" (conceived of as framed) and "the whole" (unframed, uncontained existence). What becomes clear from this schema is that the active ingredient of this dynamic relation is in fact the frame, in that it is the frame that establishes the possibility of a projection of infinite meaning into the whole. It is the frame, in other words, that puts art into relief against the greater background of the real, and that consequently invites consciousness to continue its quest for meaning beyond the confines of the frame. The frame, insofar as it fulfills this function, is irony.
It should be clear, however, that by invoking the notion of a "tendency" Schlegel has introduced what we might call a libidinal element into the dynamic relationships constituting romantic art, a libidinal element that we can perhaps associate with the contemporary popular usage of the term "romantic" in all languages as "having to do with love." 25 This libidinal element becomes central in the last of the Schlegelian formulations—irony is the structure of love—with which Schlegel completes the fusion of artistic method and human psychology. This fusion is clarified by the following analogy: as art is to the whole, so individual being [Dasein] is to being in general. In schematic form, the resultant formulation is
[Dasein] --> Being = Love
where love is now the mediating term between a framed Dasein and unframed being. Just as with the previous schema, the operative principle—what I have indicated with the brackets and referred to as a framing function—is irony: "The true irony . . . is the irony of love. It springs from the feeling of finitude and one's own limitations, and from the apparent contradiction between this feeling and the idea of infinity inherent in any true love." 26 It is the contradiction between the self's own feeling of finitude and limitation and the idea of infinity that is the origin of irony, and it is this contradiction as well that characterizes the libidinal dimension we call love.
To sum up, Schlegel's concept of irony, far from being a monolithic application of Fichtean ego-philosophy to artistic practice, can be characterized by a series of three propositions, none of which is reducible to an expression of pure subjectivism. In the first formulation, irony is positioned at the crossroads of philosophy and art and marks the coming to self-consciousness of artistic practice. In this view, irony encompasses any and all manifestation in artistic practice of what we have called the self-referential paradox, the representation that includes itself within itself. Insofar as the creative consciousness [End Page 1049] finds itself in its own creation, it infuses that objective creation with meaning, and endows it with the attribute of inifinity. Hence the second formulation of irony describes it as an epideixis of infinity. The experience of the self as a bound entity in a boundless universe of meaning then introduces a libidinal element into the dynamic of irony, an element that emerges in the third formulation, in which irony is equated with love, the force of attraction pulling Dasein out of its familiar territory and into the world of infinite meaning. It is in light of this interpretation of irony, and its full association with romanticism in Schlegel's system, that we must understand his claim that Don Quijote is the only through and through romantic novel (Romantische Ironie 79).
Epistemological irony
According to Bertrand, when Schlegel encountered Don Quijote in 1797 his ideas on irony were largely established (Bertrand 221). As we have seen, however, Schlegel's irony-concept is multi-faceted; to grasp it in its complexity one needs to consider his writings from throughout his career. 27 That some early aspect of Schlegel's thinking about irony had already been solidified by the time he read Don Quijote says nothing about the extent to which the book influenced the totality of his conception. But regardless of whether one can claim Cervantes as the direct influence behind Schlegel's and in general German romanticism's notion of irony, it can certainly be argued that the Spanish author had an important hand in fashioning the cultural world 28 in which the romantics lived and wrote. Bertrand says as much himself, when he asks: "But why did Schlegel make right away such a large place for the Spanish poet in his aesthetics? Why, if not because Cervantes responded to the new needs of his spirit and because his work placed him on the route toward new ideas?" (Bertrand 103). 29 I want to argue that if Cervantes' works, and in particular Don Quijote, corresponded to some set of "new spiritual needs" of Schlegel and the romantics, that is so precisely because Cervantes put into prose the kind of world and temper that their writings would later theorize. Cervantes, in other words, created the ground from which romanticism thought itself.
To understand the nature of this ground, let us recall that, for Schlegel, art and philosophy were converging on a new manifestation of human being, and that his concept of irony aimed to describe the [End Page 1050] essence of that new spirit. The three formulations of that concept that we have derived imply a common, schematic structure: a frame distinction in which "reality" appears as a representation that potentially includes the representer and the act of representation within its diagetic space. In large part, Cervantes may be said to be the creator of a new genre precisely insofar as he uses the medium of the written word to develop techniques of self-referentiality to their paradoxical extreme. Recall that what is at stake here is not "subjectivity" as it is commonly understood. As many medievalists have argued, a stable first person narrator figure is detectable in European writing from as early as the 12th century. 30 Rather, what is at stake is a technique that projects the very act of literary creation into the literary world being created, that short-circuits, in other words, a barrier dividing the fictional and the real.
a) Fictionality. Strangely enough, the act of short-circuiting the barrier between the fictional and the real is—by a kind of retroactive efficacy—constitutive of that very distinction. To understand this apparently paradoxical formulation, we need to first consider Luiz Costa Lima's distinction between the fictional and the fictitious. According to Costa Lima, prior to and during the 16th century written discourse was consistently submitted to one inexorable standard: to what extent did it correspond to the truth? If works were judged as morally detrimental, this was so on the basis of their falsehood. Such falsehood—a shortcoming in the face of a general truth-standard—Costa Lima refers to as fictitiousness. 31 Under the aegis of the Aristotelian interpreters of the 16th century, a fictitious work would be condemned for its lack of verisimilitude. Such, in fact, is the basis of those condemnations of the romances of chivalry that form the literary-critical backbone of Don Quijote.
Quijote's great antagonist in the battlefield of criticism is his old friend and would-be censor, the canónigo. In the following passage the canon distinguishes his engagement with writing from Quijote's on the basis of his ability to discern truth from falsehood:
For my part I can say that when I read the tales of chivalry, as long as I avoid thinking about the fact that they are all lies and frivolity, they give me some enjoyment. But when I realize what they are, I throw the best of them against the wall, and would even throw them into the fire if I had one close by, which they richly deserve, as false and deceiving and outside of the treatment required by common nature, and as inventors of new sects and [End Page 1051] new lifestyles, and as giving the common people reason to believe and accept as true all the stupidities they contain. (Q I, 566-7) 32
The potential pleasure of reading is, for the canon, a pleasure that exists in the moment of a forgetting, of a failure to institute a prohibition that should, he feels, be automatic, instantaneous. But this prohibition is not against lies per se, it is rather a prohibition against the very forgetting that begets this potential pleasure, a forgetting to situate all writing within the jurisdiction of the tribunal of truth.
Don Quijote, on the other hand, is not to be judged mad on the basis of such a forgetting to judge. He too sees no other option but to judge writing against the criterion of its verisimilitude. His failure is a failure within the confines of the verisimilar, a failure to distinguish correctly between truth and falsehood. Quijote merely believes false facts to be true. His response is never—nor could it be—that the criteria of truth and falsehood are not pertinent to the case at hand, but rather that his interlocutor must be mad to think that these truths are in fact lies:
For to wish to persuade someone that Amadis didn't exist, and that neither did all the other adventuring knights of which the stories are filled, is to wish to persuade that the sun doesn't shine and the ice doesn't freeze and the earth doesn't sustain life; for what genius exists in the world who could persuade us that there is no truth to that of princess Floripes and Guy de Bergoña, or that of Fierabrás and the bridge of Mantible, which happened in Charlemagne's time, and which I swear is as true as right now is daytime. (Q I, 568) 33
Perhaps the butt of Cervantes' joke, then, is not—as the traditional "Enlightenment" reception would have it—the novelas de caballería themselves and all the outmoded ideologies they implied, but rather the failure of his contemporaries to recognize the possibilities of a new space of reading, a space in which the tribunal of truth no longer held sway. Quijote is a comical figure; but the way he is comical is not qualitatively different from the way the canon or any of the other figures pontificating on literature are comical, because they apply to reading standards that are, for Cervantes, no longer appropriate.
For Costa Lima, the standard these characters are applying to literature rests on the distinction between the verisimilar and the fictitious. The space opened when one forgets to apply this standard is the fictional. [End Page 1052]
Against the naïveté pre-supposed by pre-Cervantine fictitiousness, based on the illusion that its own territory is not to be distinguished from that of truth, modern fictionality is based on irony, on distancing, on the creation of a complexity that without alienating the common reader, does not present itself to him as a form of illusionism. (Dark Side 7)
This space of the forgetting—this suspension of judgement that opens the door to modern fictionality—is allied in Costa Lima's thought with irony. Irony is the name for that frame distinction that allows the reader to coexist with writing without having to bring to bear on it the distinction-generating mechanisms that guide him or her through daily existence.
The distinction between reality and fictionality, then, is the function of the establishing of a framework such that the contents of that framework are no longer experienced as beholden to the rules governing the outside of that framework. But this definition begs the question, because what is at stake is precisely the process by which readers became capable of this function, of experiencing writing as fictionality. The best tool to help us conceptualize this process is Erving Goffman's frame analysis. 34 For Goffman, any number of creatures exhibit the ability to, as he calls it, "key" a given frame. Keying is that maneuver by which the value or meaning of a certain action or set of actions is implicitly suspended by the participants in the action. Animals engaged in play that resembles fighting are keying their actions. When we refer to a discourse genre, say chivalric romance, as false, we are simply, with the canon, making explicit what was already implicitly the case: that the content of that discourse genre is (or ought to be) keyed in relation to other discourse genres (edifying histories, for example). From this perspective, Quijote's madness results from a failure to key what he ought to be keying, a failure he attributes in inverse form to his interlocutors: men who are keying and hence falsifying what ought to be treated as true.
This first result of keying—what we will call primary keying—establishes the distinction between verisimilitude and fictitiousness. The space of fictionality is brought into relief by a secondary keying that treats the first distinction as the content of the frame to be keyed, since in fictionality the distinction between the verisimilar and the fictitious is precisely what is not taken seriously. Because the primary keying, however, is still an operation performed by an agent, secondary keying is essentially a self-reflective act: the agent of secondary keying must experience him or herself as at least a potential participant [End Page 1053] in the activity being keyed, because that activity is a primary instance of the very activity he or she is now engaged in.
If we represent primary keying with the following schema:
A --> V[F]
or "an agent keys the fictitious with regard to the verisimilar," then secondary keying would take on the following schematic form:
A --> R[ A --> V{F}]
or, "an agent keys with regard to reality some fictional space, in which an agent is keying the fictitious with regard to the verisimilar." If we read the first agent as any reader of Cervantes's novel, the second agent then becomes that reader's representative within the space of the novel—one or the other interlocutor locked in heated battle over the value of chivalric romance (and who, as the case may be, is getting it all wrong). Therefore, unlike the at times purely fantastic realm of the fictitious, what occurs in the fictional could also occur in reality. The space of the fictional, in other words, is viable, is a world in which a reader can imagine him or herself participating. The self-reflexive short-circuit between the agent of the primary keying and the agent of the secondary keying is, therefore, a necessary constituent of the new distinction between reality and fictionality, and it is this technique of short-circuiting that represents the fundamental innovation of Cervantes' fiction.
b) Reality. It appear at first hard to reconcile this interpretation with Foucault's highly influential argument that Don Quijote's madness is a result of his being in the wrong episteme, that he is a "man of primitive resemblances" caught in a modern world in which "the cruel reason of identities and differences makes endless sport of signs and similitudes." 35 The fact that other characters constantly remark on how Quijote comes across as entirely sane except when engaging with the topic of chivalry would seem to support the contention that, if Quijote is a representative of a bygone organization of knowledge, his contemporaries are in most ways just as lost as he is. They are lost insofar as they have not yet learned the "fictional" technique of dissociating writing from the truth standard generally applied to life. The play of identities and similarities that characterizes Foucault's "classical" age of representation might be seen in this light as an epistemological effect of a narrative practice that relativizes reality with respect to a series of reports concerning its nature. [End Page 1054]
Epistemology, as its critics are fond of pointing out, takes as its basic model a spectator who distinguishes between the "truth" of what he or she is seeing, which is corrigible, and the fact that he or she is seeing something, which is judged to be incorrigible. 36 This distinction evolves into that between noumena and phenomena, 37 and ultimately into the epistemological deadlock in which the knowing subject cannot come to know anything of certainty regarding the "thing in itself." An episteme in which knowledge was conceived to be an imminent expression of the real, the "prose of the world," would not presume such a distinction: "species" or phenomena would be perceived as inseparable from—qualities of—certain noumenal substances; it would not occur to anyone to think of certain realms of experience as essentially more or less corrigible than others. Reality, in other words, would not be a distinguishable entity about which one could have more or less correct perceptions, because perceptions and statements about perceptions would be part and parcel of the same reality, all portions of which would be beholden to the same standards of judgment. If such was the case when the world produced its own prose, what sort of a narrative practice might have the effect of relativizing that reality with respect to reports concerning its nature?
It is of course my claim that the narrative practice in question is best exemplified by Don Quijote, a novel whose overriding theme is the contrast between reality and its various renditions on the part of differently positioned characters. Let us consider the case of the helmet of Mambrino. Quijote has attacked a poor barber and robbed him of his barber's basin, convinced that he is an enemy knight and that his barber's basin is in fact the long lost and much coveted magic Helmet of Mambrino. When confronted by Sancho's laughter over the helmet's appearance, Quijote explains the series of adventures that must have occurred in order that the helmet should appear in its present, broken condition, which he implicitly admits falls somewhat short of a great warrior's helmet:
You know what I think, Sancho? That this famous piece of this enchanted helmet must have, by some strange accident, come into the hands of someone who didn't know to recognize or esteem its value, and without knowing what he was doing, seeing that it was made of the purest gold, he must have had the other part melted down to take advantage of its price, and from the remaining half, he made this, which looks like a barber's basin, as you say. (Q I, 260) 38 [End Page 1055]
The logic of this dispute is thus: "we see the same thing, but we disagree as to its nature, as defined by its origins," which seems to satisfy Sancho, especially given that he has taken advantage of the adventure to exchange his old packsaddle for the barber's newer one.
But Sancho's opportunism comes back to haunt him when the same barber later recognizes him and his packsaddle and accuses Sancho and Quijote of theft. While fighting over the packsaddle, the barber announces to all present that Quijote and Sancho had taken it from him by force at the same time that they took his brass barber's basin. At this point Quijote intervenes, claiming that the barber's mistaking a magic helmet for a barber's basin only proves that he is in error about anything else he is claiming:
So that your graces see clearly and manifestly the error in which this good squire has fallen, well, he calls basin what was, is, and will ever be the helmet of Mambrino, which I took from him in a good fight, and of which I made myself the master with legitimate and licit possession. As for the question of the packsaddle, I'm not going to get into that; what I will say is that my squire Sancho asked my permission to take the trappings from the horse of this defeated coward, with which to adorn his; I gave it to him, and he took them, and if they have turned from trappings into a packsaddle my only explanation is the usual one: that such transformations are to be seen in the events of chivalry; for the confirmation of which, run, Sancho my son, and bring out the helmet that this man claims is a basin. (Q I, 528) 39
Sancho, of course, is less than enthusiastic about going to fetch the "helmet," since he knows that it is in fact a barber's basin, which evidence might persuade the others present that he has no right to the packsaddle (a right that is already suspect given Quijote's interpretation of the packsaddle as "jaez," a charger's trappings). Moreover, Quijote himself remains somewhat uncertain as to the stand he should take in regard to the "trappings," which Sancho and the barber are both referring to as "packsaddle." The most he is willing to assert is that if they have in fact turned into a saddle, then this is not so surprising, since such transformations are the occupational hazard of knight-errantry.
The chapter that ensues is appropriately titled "Wherein is finally resolved the question of the helmet of Mambrino and the packsaddle and other adventures having occurred in all truth." 40 Cervantes's habitual reference to the notion of truth is especially remarkable in this chapter, which is in many ways concerned with the very nature of Truth. Seeing the opportunity for an excellent prank, Quijote's [End Page 1056] barber friend, "nuestro barbero," immediately weighs in and, claiming the authority of an expert in the field, strenuously denies the other barber's claims that the yelmo is a bacía.
Sir barber, or whoever you are, know that I am also of your profession, and I have been for more than twenty years and have a certificate of examination, and I know very well all the instruments of barbery, without missing one; and not more or less was I in my youth a soldier, and I also know what a helmet is, and a morion, and a headpiece with a visor, and some other things about soldiering, I mean, about the weapons of a soldier; and I say, excepting better judgement and subjecting myself to better understanding, that this piece before us and which this man has in his hands not only is not a barber's basin, but is as far from being one as white is from black and truth from a lie. (Q I, 529-30) 41
Truth, as I said above, is what is in question here, and it is worth noting that "our" barber's implicit standard of truth is equivalent to the distance between the essence of a thing and a report made about. The basin, he insists, is as far from being a basin as truth is from falsehood. The other barber, it follows, is either deceived or lying.
He is of course deceived, and quite purposefully, by the companions, who are having some good fun at his expense. One by one they enter the fray, until finally the nobleman don Fernando suggests that they resolve the issue democratically and proceeds to take a secret ballot, with the unanimous result that the ass's packsaddle is judged to be a horse's trappings, and the basin a helmet. We should not make the mistake here, however, of reading this scene as some sort of statement about the undecidability of reality. There is no question but that this is a joke, and that in "reality" the packsaddle and the basin have never been anything but what they are. In one of the book's great comic moments, Quijote is even heard to say that, if they want his opinion, the packsaddle looks like a packsaddle, but that he is not about to, as he said before, take a position on that matter. Our reading, therefore, should not be that reality has become undecidable, but precisely the opposite: the truth of the identity of the objects in question is guaranteed by the existence of an independent reality that we, as observers outside of the framework of the narrative, can confirm. 42 In other words, the characters at hand can argue about the nature of their perception precisely insofar as we, the readers, have a concept of reality that is independent of their various reports. As Rorty puts it by way of a criticism of the epistemological "world-view," its assumption is that you can have reality in one hand and a sentence [End Page 1057] about reality in the other and compare the two to see if they match. 43 It is precisely this world-view that Cervantes is busy constructing. 44
c) Irony's paradox. As I suggested above, Cervantes' prose might be well characterized as a pushing of the paradoxes resulting from self-referentiality to their logical extremes. Examples of this thematic in Don Quijote are legion. One need only mention the abyss of narrative frameworks in which the actual authorship of the story we are reading is couched: we the readers are presumably reading a translation (the accuracy of which at times comes into question) the narrator made of a manuscript he found in a market, ostensibly written by an Arabic historian; Cervantes himself (who might be the narrative voice) is referred to obliquely as an historical figure (in the captive's tale: Q I, 476); and the entire vortex of authorship falls into temporal paradox when, in the second book, the adventures of the first book have already been published, distributed, read, and even translated into other languages although only a month has passed since their first outing. 45 This collapsing spiral of self-referentiality corresponds well to the novel's overall obsession with its own medium of transmission, that is with its focus on the relation between frame and content. Already within the telescoping framework of authorship the novel's content begins to adopt a similar form, in which Quijote and Sancho become the audience for interpolated stories, which they in turn reflect on.
In this light, the transition between the novel of 1605 and that of 1615 can be seen as one between a world in which we the readers laugh at the characters for not knowing how to read fiction, and a world in which a new subgroup of fictional-readers/readers-of fiction has been born, a population that simultaneously came of age and became fictional by reading the 1605 novel. For it is certainly the fundamental and significant difference between the two—the difference that makes of 1615 another novel and not merely a sequel—that the entire structure of the narrative has become doubly self-reflective. The characters of part two are now often characters who, like us, have read 1605 and from it learned the art of secondary keying, have learned to actively forget to submit writing to the tribunal of truth, and thereby create a world capable of experiencing the bizarre and the fictitious as possibilities of the imagination.
Within the borders of their reality, the effect for the characters of this generalization of fictionality is that the previously sound distinction between the fictitious and the real is sundered, and characters [End Page 1058] everywhere start to lose their bearings. Perhaps one of the most beautiful examples of this loss-of-reality effect is the episode of the lackey Tosilos. In this episode, the dueña Rodriguez, being herself somewhat simple of mind, has asked Quijote—who is now being treated as a fictional character by the Duke's court—to rescue in real life the honor of her daughter, whom a nobleman and friend of the Duke has deceived with a false promise of marriage. When Quijote presents his challenge to the Duke, the Duke accepts in his friend's name, and then orders his lackey Tosilos to play the role of the deceiving nobleman. But on the day of the battle, when Tosilos, dressed the role of a knight ready for battle, first lays eyes on the dueña's daughter, he falls in love with her for real and, instead of crossing lances with Quijote, renders himself and agrees to marry her. When he takes off his helmet and the dueña and her daughter see that it is not the nobleman but the Duke's lackey whom the daughter will marry, they strenuously protest. Quijote, however, addresses their complaints by suggesting that the new husband is still, in fact, the nobleman, but that his countenance has been changed to that of the lackey by enchanters jealous of Quijote's latest victory. His advice to the daughter is to accept the offer of marriage from a man "who without doubt is the same you wish to attain as a husband" (Q II, 449), 46 to which the daughter evetually responds: "Whoever it is who asks my hand I thank him; for I would rather be the legitimate wife of a lackey than the dishonored lover of a gentleman, which he who dishonored me is certainly not" (Q II, 450). 47 What we see in this scene is a double collapse of the borders between the fictitious and the real and the opening of the space of the fictional: on the one hand, the lackey playing a role realizes that role by really falling in love within the confines of a game, and subsequently speaking real words from a fictitious position; the daughter, on the other hand, recognizes an offer proceeding from the fictitious as potentially more real than that which she had set her hopes on, and in effect realizes its potential by accepting it.
Realizing the fictitious, stepping across a border that had previously been sealed, implies a space with a new quality: viability. The fictional space is viable precisely insofar as characters from one side of a frame distinction can feel they occupy the same space as characters on the other side—that they can, for instance, fall in love with those characters or, at the very least, identify with them. But this maneuver, inherent to the experience of fictionality, entails to its full extent the paradox of self-referentiality, the paradox of a creator who [End Page 1059] creates him or herself in the very act of creation, who is both subject and object, simultaneously and, in a sense, seamlessly.
Perhaps the most renowned version of the self-referential paradox is the liar's paradox, in which a listener is asked to judge whether the speaker of the statement "I am lying" is in fact lying or telling the truth. 48 The listener is unable to answer consistently, because if the speaker is judged to be speaking the truth, then by his own report he is lying, but if he is judged to be lying, then his report that he was lying is true. One, Lacanian, solution to this paradox is to argue that it is not in fact a paradox for one who is a subject in the proper sense. A subject is one who is always divided into two agencies, linguistically speaking, which Lacan labels the subject of enunciation and the subject of the utterance. 49 The liar's paradox is merely a demonstration that the subject is never entirely identical to himself, that he cannot, in other words, simultaneously occupy the "I" of enunciation and the "I" of the utterance. When analyzed in this form, then, "I am lying," breaks down into "The I of the enunciation is reporting that the I of the utterance is lying," and there is no longer any paradox. To push this a bit further, the reason there is no paradox is really that there is no true self-referentiality; one can only refer to a representative of oneself, in this case, a linguistic shifter.
Analogously, the self-referentiality of fictionality, which we schematized as
A --> R[ A --> V{F}]
must be hiding a fundamental disjunction between the A outside the frame and the A inside the frame, which we should therefore schematize as A and A', the agent who represents and the agent as represented. 50 Given that this liar's paradox and its resolution are structural element of fictionality, it should not surprise us that they should make an appearance in Don Quijote, as they do in the following form.
A foreigner to the landlocked island of Barataria, now formidably governed by the great Sancho Panza, presents to the famed governor this problem: there is a river over which spans a bridge, at the end of which there stands a gallows. Presiding over the bridge and gallows are four judges, whose job it is to pass judgement over those who would cross, on the basis of their answer to the question "to where and what purpose are you going?" (Q II, 410). If the travelers answer truthfully, they are allowed to go in peace; if they are determined to have lied, they are to be executed on the spot. At the moment, [End Page 1060] however, the judges are in a quandary over the answer given by one recent traveler, "that he was going to die on those gallows over there" (que iba a morir en aquella horca que allí estaba) (Q II, 410). As in the classical formulation, if the traveler is speaking the truth that he will die on the gallows, then the judges should let him go in peace, in which case he would be lying, and the judges should have him executed, etc.
Sancho Panza's solution is suggested by the logic of fictionality: let the part of the man that lied be killed and the part that told the truth go in peace.
I say then, now—said Sancho—that of this man that part that swore the truth shall be allowed to pass, and that part that spoke a lie shall be hung, and in this way the condition of passage will be met to the letter.But sir governor—replied the petitioner—it will be necessary that the said man be divided in parts, in truth telling and lying parts, and if he's divided, he must per force die, and in this way what the law asks is not satisfied, and yet we must satisfy the law. (Q II, 410-11) 51
As the petitioner notes, Sancho's judgement would imply the death of the traveler, since to let one part of him go and to hang the other part would necessitate cutting him in two. 52 To which Sancho replies that since the reasons for condemning him and releasing him are equally balanced, they should let him pass, because it is always better to do good than evil.
Sancho's compassion must be seen here as an "unreasonable" supplement to a "reasonable" law, a law that precisely on account of its fidelity to reason—to the letter—is at odds with a humanity that it cannot perfectly circumscribe. For the letter of the law demands of the subject his self-identity, a self-referentiality without remainder that the human, as a subject of language, cannot attain. To analyze this dynamic in its historicity, however, we should precisely not say that the subject has changed from a monolithic creature capable of self-identity to a dualistic one lacking that capability. Rather, we should stress a gradual alteration in the understanding of the individual's relation to public discourse. The notion of an objective realm of judgment as distinct from subjective experience—and hence the grounding notion of "law" in the Occident—is emerging out of a time when one's guilt or innocence in the face of the law was conceived as inseparable from one's capacity to force all of existence (and hence opinion) to the truth of one's view. The law passes judgment on A 9, on that aspect of our selves that has, structurally speaking, the status of a [End Page 1061] fiction. A critique of epistemology may take much comfort in the notion that the philosopher's modern profession was born of a storyteller's technique; but the critic should also keep in mind the extent to which the most fundamental institutions of the modern world owe their ground to this same fictionality, and to its ironic fission of self-identity.
Back to Hegel
At the outset of this paper, I argued that Hegel had, in his Aesthetics, misconstrued romantic irony, attributing it to an expression of unbridled subjectivism inspired by Fichtean idealism. In this final sec-tion, I claim that, whereas Hegel might have condemned his own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Schlegelian notion, another notion of irony—narrativized by Cervantes and theorized by Schegel—is everywhere present in Hegel's system.
In order to demonstrate this, it will be necessary to briefly rehearse Hegel's historical argument and the position Cervantes and irony hold in it. For Hegel, art, like religion and philosophy, is one of the ways in which spirit manifests itself in the world, one of the ways spirit moves along its historical path toward absolute self-consciousness. Art, however, is a lesser manifestation than either religion or philosophy, because art, although through and through spiritual, nevertheless depends upon the sensual world for its expression. In the time that Hegel is lecturing to his students, art—or better, the period in which art was the primary manifestation of spirit—has come to an end:
The establishment of reflection in our life today makes it necessary, as much in relation to the will as to the judgment, for us to maintain general points of view on which to base the regulation of particularity, such that general forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims are what count as the grounds of determination and are the principle ruling forces. For the interests of art, however, as for the production of art, we require in general more of a liveliness, in which the universal is not present as law and maxim but acts as one with mind and feeling, just as in the imagination the universal and the reasonable are contained only as brought into unity with a concrete, sensual appearance. For this reason our present is in its general state unfavorable to art. (A I, 49) 53
Our present is not favorable to art because our culture has become reflective, it has abstracted the objects of will and judgment into general principles, duties, rights and laws, and these abstractions [End Page 1062] form the basis of social life, i.e., the life of spirit. But art does not function in such an environment, because art belongs to a time or a culture in which spirit has not yet learned to abstract itself from the living world. Art shows us the way in a time and culture when spirit has not learned how to simply say what it means in words, and when individuals are not capable of abstracting themselves from their physical environments and conceiving of themselves as the ideal denizens of a universal state.
Romantic art was, for Hegel, the last step in art's trajectory. It was an historical form invented in the high Middle Ages, and characterized by the turn to inwardness one finds in the ideologies of chivalry. The three pillars of chivalry—honor, fidelity, love—perform in artistic expression the newly found principle of infinite subjectivity: honor constitutes the insertion of the entire individual into the substance of a demand or prohibition; fidelity the insertion of the entire individual into a political relation of personal, not abstract, nature; love the insertion of the entire individual into a deliberate sacrifice of independence to the beloved (A II, 607-33). But such rampant inwardness leads necessarily to a desire for concrete actuality, which the individual then searches for in representations, which become ever more "realistic" (rise of realism) and with which he or she can then identify. Therefore, on the one hand we have the withdrawal of the individual into his or herself and the resultant extremes of subjectivism that entails, and on the other the represented world, characterized by a proliferation of more and more meaningless details independent of subjective intervention and constitutive of an increasingly prosaic reality. These, then, are the conditions for the end of art and for the beginnings of (modern, skeptical) religion, a religion in which God becomes the equivalent of an answer to the question emerging from this sundering between the subject and the real. These conditions are also, it should be clear, exactly those that Hegel criticized under the name of irony in the work of Schlegel and his followers. But in that case, Hegel's anger would appear to be directed not at irony per se, but at the tendency to conceive irony as an aspect of art instead of as the herald of its end.
For Hegel, Don Quijote is a romantic work not because of its thoroughgoing irony, but despite it. It is a kind of border work, retaining on the one hand all the characteristics that Hegel finds so delightful in romantic art—Quijote's noble character, the interpolated tales—and on the other hand tolling their death knells via its ironic mockery of its very own contents (A II, 657). Romantic art dies [End Page 1063] with Quijote because, quite simply, its time had come. When an art form reveals what was previously concealed, this revelation removes whatever interest the subject had in it, and the space is created for a new form, with a new purpose to be created. Such, for Hegel, is Cervantes's relation to chivalry, to the heart and soul of romantic art. But then irony, insofar as it brings about the dissolution of art, must be understood as fulfilling art's vocation, a vocation Hegel describes in the following words: "Against this must we claim that art is called to reveal the truth in the form of the sensual art creation, to represent that reconciled antithesis, and thereby it has its vocation in itself, in this representation and revelation" (A I, 108). 54
The reconciled antithesis in question is the one that has been badgering
spirit throughout Hegel's lectures, between the abstract universal,
logos, conceptual thought, on the one hand, and life, embodiment,
passions, on the other. If this antagonism is to be revealed as already
reconciled in art's last gasp, the revelation can only be the following:
that the modern individual, the individual whose world is no longer
favorable to the production of art, is ironic. He or she is ironic in
precisely the sense that I outlined above, insofar as his or her core
experience of the world is fictional: an agent capable of differentiating
(abstracting) his or herself as an agent acting within the world. This
secondary agent could be the one who guides our identificatory adventures
in fictional places, or one who represents us in the abstract arena of
public law, but the truth to be revealed is that the individual is both,
simultaneously and inseparably, the representer and the represented,
the actor and the character.
State University of New York at Buffalo
Notes
1. Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, 2 vols. (Madrid: Cátredra, 1996). Henceforth abbreviated to Q.
2. See Joan Ramon Resina, "Cervantes' Confidence Games and the Refashioning of Reality," Modern Language Notes 111.2 (1996), 218-221 for a summary of these positions. Henceforth abbreviated to Resina in the text.
3. Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to 'Don Quijote' (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978), 249. See also Anthony Close, Don Quixote (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), henceforth abbreviated to RA and Close respectively.
4. P.E. Russell, Cervantes (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), 105. Henceforth abbreviated to Russell in the text.
5. I use this compound to distinguish from other scholars, myself included, who are just as concerned with historicizing their readings, but who do so without attaching much importance to the notion of authorial intent. [End Page 1064]
6. E.g., E.C. Riley, Cervantes's Theory of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962).
7. G.W.F. Hegel, Ästhetik, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1976). Henceforth abbreviated to A in the text.
8. ". . . insofern die Prinzipien dieser Philosophie auf die Kunst angewandet wurden."
9. "Was nun den näheren Zusammenhang Fichtescher Sätze mit der einen Richtung der Ironie angeht, so brauchen wir in dieser Beziehung nur den folgenden Punkt herauszuheben: dass Fichte zum absoluten Prinzip alles Wissens, aller Vernunft und Erkenntnis das Ich feststellt, und zwar das durchaus abstrakt und formell bleibende Ich."
10. "an und für sich sondern nur als durch die Subjektivität des Ich hervorgebracht."
11. "Diese Ironie hat Herr Friedrich von Schlegel erfunden, und viele andere haben sie nachgeschwatzt oder schwatzen sie von neuem wieder nach."
12. Dilwyn Knox, Ironia: Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony (New York: E.J. Brill, 1988), 149.
13. Charles I. Glicksberg, The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 5.
14. For what follows on Schegel and irony, the clearest and most exhaustive study is Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs' Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1977), henceforth abbreviated to 'Romantische Ironie.' I am largely in her debt for my understanding of Schlegel's conception of irony.
15. Schlegel uses the Greek word to mean something between demonstration and indication. In English it survives only as the adjective "epideictic," or demonstrative, designed primarily for rhetorical effect.
16. This opposition also dominated the romantics' interpretations of Don Quijote. See J.-J. A. Bertrand, Cervantes et le romantisme Allemand (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1914), 131; henceforth abbreviated to 'Bertrand.' See also Lienhard Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany" in Angel Flores and M.J. Bernadete, eds., Cervantes Across the Centuries (New York: Dryden Press, 1947), 322: "For Schelling, Don Quijote was a mythical saga symbolizing the inevitable struggle between the ideal and the real, a conflict typical of our world, which has lost the identity between the two." Although there is no citation, he is probably quoting from Schelling's Philosophie der Kunst.
17. Friedrich von Schlegel, "Lyceums-Fragment 48" in Prosaische Jugendschriften (Vienna: J. Minor, 1882), II, 190. Henceforth abbreviated to PJ. Quoted in Romantische Ironie 22.
18. Quoted in Strohschneider-Kohrs 22. ". . . die freyeste aller Licenzen, denn durch sie setzt man sich über sich selbst weg; und doch auch die gesetzlichste, denn sie ist unbedingt nothwendig."
19. ". . . der Begriff für sich selbst, der denkende Geist, sich nun auch seinerseits in der Philosophie tiefer erkannte und damit auch das Wesen der Kunst auf eine gründlichere Weise zu nehmen unmittelbar veranlasst ward."
20. Schlegel, "Athenäums-Fragment 116" in Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Raschm (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1964), 39: "Und doch kann auch sie [die Ironie] am meisten zwischen dem Dargestellten und dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen Interesse auf den Flügeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Reflexion immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen." [End Page 1065]
21. See William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), especially chapter 3.
22. Schlegel, Schriften und Fragmenten aus den Werken und dem handschriftlichen Nachlass zusammengestellt und eingel (Stuttgart: E. Behler, 1956), quoted in Romantische Ironie 66: "Ironie ist gleichsam die Epideixis der Unendlichkeit."
23. Hegel, Hegel's Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975), 137.
24. ". . . die Tendenz nach einem tiefen unendlichen Sinn."
25. The true etymology is, of course, somewhat different: romantisch in German proceeds from the tendency of the literary critics of that age to focus on the literature and national identities of the Romance cultures, which literature was written in the vernacular Romance (French and Spanish) in contradistinction to the traditional language of literacy: Latin. By the 16th century the majority of published material in the Romance vernacular was adventure literature of the kind today denoted by the notion of "chivalry," and hence the Romances' central connotation was this type of literature and its attending content of the dedication of knights to their ladies. See Gumbrecht I, 185-6.
26. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke (Vienna: Original Ausgabe, 1846), XV, 56, quoted in Romantische Ironie 82: "Die wahre Ironie. . . ist die Ironie der Liebe. Sie entsteht aus dem Gefühl der Endlichkeit und der eigenen Beschränkung, und dem scheinbaren Widerspruche dieses Gefühls mit der in jeder wahren Liebe mit eingeschlossenen Idee eines Undendlichen."
27. For a resume of the different periods of Schlegel's thought, see Romantische Ironie 89-91.
28. That Cervantes belonged to a different cultural world—Spain and not Germany—should not cause us concern. Don Quijote was staple literature in Germany from the appearance of its first translation in 1648. In fact, the 1605 book was already familiar among the courts of German princes before the 1615 book was published in Spain (Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany" 307).
29. "Mais pourquoi Schlegel fit-il tout de suite au poète espagnol une si large place dans son esthétique? Pourquoi, sinon parce que Cervantes répondait à des besoins nouveaux de son esprit et parce que son oeuvre le mettait sur la voie de conceptions nouvelles?"
30. For a review of this literature see Luiz Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times, trans. Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 4.
31. Costa Lima, The Dark Side of Reason: Fictionality and Power, trans. Paulo Henriques Britto (Stanford: Stanford UP), 6. Henceforth abbreviated to Dark Side.
32. "De mí sé decir que cuando los [libros de caballería] leo, en tanto que no pongo la imaginación en pensar que son todos mentira y liviandad, me dan algún contento; pero cuando caigo en la cuenta de lo que son, doy con el mejor dellos en la pared, y aun diera con él en el fuego si cerca o presente lo tuviera, bien como a merecedores de tal pena, por ser falsos y embusteros, y fuera del trato que pide la común naturaleza, y como a inventores de nuevas sectas y de nuevo modo de vida, y como a quien da ocasión que el vulgo ignorante venga a creer y a tener por verdaderas tantas necedades como contienen."
33. "Porque querer dar a entender a nadie que Amadís no fue en el mundo, ni todos los otros caballeros aventureros de que están colmadas las historias, será querer persuadir que el sol no alumbra, ni el yelo enfría, ni la tierra sustenta; porque, ¿qué ingenio puede haber en el mundo que pueda persuadir a otro que no fue verdad lo de la infanta Floripes y Guy de Bergoña, y lo de Fierabrás con la puente [End Page 1066] de Mantible, que sucedió en el tiempo de Carlomagno, que voto a tal que es tanta verdad que es ahora de día?"
34. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974), 40-47.
35. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House [Vintage], 1994), 49.
36. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979), 56.
37.. . . between objects of knowledge and objects of the senses.
38. "¿Sabes qué imagino, Sancho? Que esta famosa pieza deste encantado yelmo, por algún estraño accidente debió de venir a manos de quien no supo conocer ni estimar su valor, y, sin saber lo que hacía, viéndola de oro purísimo, debió de fundir la otra mitad para aprovecharse del precio, y de la otra mitad hizo ésta, que parece bacía de barbero, como tú dices."
39. "¡Porque vean vuestras mercedes clara y manifiestamente el error en que está este buen escudero, pues llama bacía a lo que fue, es y será yelmo de Mambrino, el cual se le quité yo en buena guerra, y me hice señor de él con legítima y lícita posesión! En lo del albarda no me entremeto; que lo que en ello sabré decir es que mi escudero Sancho me pidió licencia para quitar los jaeces del caballo deste vencido cobarde, y con ellos adornar el suyo; yo se la di, y él los tomó, y de haberse convertido en jaez de albarda, no sabré dar otra razon si no es la ordinaria: que como esas transformaciones se ven en los sucesos de la caballería; para confirmación de lo cual corre, Sancho hijo, y saca aquí el yelmo que este buen hombre dice ser bacía."
40. "Donde se acaba de averiguar la duda del yelmo de Mambrino y de la albarda y otras aventuras sucedidas con toda verdad."
41. "Señor barbero, o quien sois, sabed que yo también soy de vuestro oficio, y tengo más ha de viente años carta de examen, y conozco muy bien de todos los instrumentos de la barbería, sin que le falte uno; y ni más ni menos fui un tiempo en mi mocedad soldado, y sé también qué es yelmo, y qué es morrión, y celada de encaje, y otras cosas tocantes a la milicia, digo, a los géneros de armas de los soldados; y digo, salvo mejor parecer, remitiéndome siempre al mejor entendimiento, que esta pieza que está aquí delante y que este buen señor tiene en las manos, no solo no es bacía de barbero, pero está tan lejos de serlo, como está lejos lo blanco de lo negro y la verdad de la mentira."
42. With this statement I am not necessarily siding with the "realist" reading of Don Quijote as advanced by Spitzer in his influencial "perspectivism" essay. The point is rather that with Cervantes "reality" first becomes something about which one can take "realist" or "anti-realist" positions. I therefore am still in complete agreement with Resina's characterization of Cervantes's world as one "without ontological guarantee" (229). Where the ontological is guaranteed, reality is not an issue. See also José-Antonio Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia in the "Quixote," trans. Robert W. Felkel (Detroit, Mich., Wayne State UP, 1991), 126-30, for further arguments concerning reality and its transmutations.
43. Rorty would not agree with the use of "world-view," because the whole point of his argument is that the notion of differing world-views, or conceptual schema through which we interpret the world, is misleading. For this argument see his essay, "The World Well Lost," in his Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 3-18.
44. The "epistemological world-view" corresponds, of course, to the rise of skepticism in western intellectual life. As Robbins argues, Spain was at the forefront of this [End Page 1067] historical development insofar as it "confronted most insistently the issues regarding knowledge and perception which lay at the heart of intellectual developments elsewhere in the conteintent," albeit "primarily via works of fiction." Jeremy Robbins, The Challenges of Uncertainty: an Introduction to Seventeenth Century Spanish Literature (London: Duckworth & Co, 1998), 41.
45. See Allen's note, II, 44.
46. ". . . que sin duda es el mismo que deseáis alcanzar por esposo."
47. "Séase quien fuere este que me pide por esposa, que yo se lo agradezco; que más quiero ser mujer legítima de un lacayo que no amiga y burlada de un caballero, puesto que el que me burló no lo es."
48. For an exhaustive history of the paradox and its various (attempts at) solutions, see Alexander Rüstow, Der Lügner, Theorie, Geschichte und Auflösung (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987).
49. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 800-802.
50. With this division of the agent we are now also in agreement with Lukacs's understanding of irony, "a formal constituent of the novel form" that "signifies an interior diversion of the normatively creative subject into a subjectivity as interiority, which opposes power complexes that are alien to it and which strives to imprint the contents of its longing upon the alien world, and a subjectivity which sees through the abstract and, therefore, limited nature of the mutually alien worlds of subject and object, understand [sic] these worlds by seeing their limitations as necessary conditions of their existence and, by thus seeing them, allows the duality of the world to subsist." Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), 74-75.
51. "Digo yo, pues, agora—replicó Sancho—que deste hombre aquella parte que juró verdad la dejen pasar, y la que dijo mentira la ahorquen, y desta manera se cumplirá al pie de la letra la condición del pasaje.
Pues, señor, gobernador—replicó el preguntador—, será necesario que el tal hombre se divida en partes, en mentirosa y verdadera, y si se divide, por fuerza ha de morir, y así no se consigue cosa alguna de lo que la ley pide, y es de necesidad expresa que se cumpla con ella."
52. Rüstow suggests that Sancho's solution is just a dressed up version of Aristotle's failed attempt, in which he explains away the paradox by claiming that any given sentence can include true and false parts. This is clearly not the case of Sancho's solution, however, which claims that the speaker must be divided into true and false parts.
53. "Die Reflexionsbildung unseres heutigen Lebens macht es uns, sowohl in Beziehung auf den Willen als auch auf das Urteil, zum Bedürfnis, allgemeine Gesichtspunkte festzuhalten und danach das Besondere zu regeln, so dass allgemeine Formen, Gesetze, Pflichten, Rechte, Maximen als Bestimmungsgründe gelten und das hauptsächlich Regierende sind. Für das Kunstinteresse aber wie für die Kunstproduktion fordern wir im allgemeinen mehr eine Lebendigkeit, in welcher das Allgemeine nicht als Gesetz und Maxime vorhanden sei, sondern als mit dem Gemüte und der Empfindung identisch wirke, wie auch in der Phantasie das Allgemeine und Vernünftige als mit einer konkreten sinnlichen Erscheinung in Einheit gebracht enthalten ist. Deshalb ist unsere Gegenwart ihrem allgemeinen Zustande nach der Kunst nicht günstig."
54. "Hiergegen steht zu behaupten, dass die Kunst die Wahrheit in Form der sinnlichen Kunstgestaltung zu enthüllen, jenen versöhnten Gegensatz darzustellen berufen sei und somit ihren Endzweck in sich, in dieser Darstellung und Enthüllung selber habe."
