THE EVOLUTION OF A REVOLUTION: ROMANTIC IRONY

Author(s): John Francis Fetzer

Source: The Comparatist, Vol. 11 (MAY 1987), pp. 45-53
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
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 THE EVOLUTION OF A REVOLUTION: ROMANTIC IRONY1

by

John Francis Fetzer

Whoever undertakes an examination of the phenomenon commonly refer

to as romantic irony finds him- or herself in a double bind, so to speak, si
the definitive nature of each component - irony as well as Romanticism - pr
highly elusive. In spite of having elicited considerable scholarly interest an
investigation, the essence of Romanticism and the quintessence of irony st
remain tantalizingly ambiguous, if not downright enigmatic. Consequently, t
terms in tandem constitute a virtual "triple whammy," especially since poe
and writers of the so-called romantic persuasion in Germany (the country wh
from the last decade of the eighteenth century to the middle of the ninetee
pioneered the theories of what constituted the ironic mode) seldom, if ever
referred to the two phenomena together as a viable entity. "Romantic iron
so it seems, was actually a concoction of a later generation of critics rather t
a concept devised by Romanticism's best creative minds.2 What began a
inadvertent slip of the lip, however, ultimately became an incontrovertible f
through repetition and creative criticism.
While contemporary literary critics have become justifiably cautious abo
glibly cataloguing what was once confidently proclaimed "the essenc
Romanticism"3 and are equally circumspect in their formulations as to whi
features characterize the Romantic "school" or syndrome, they still persist
using the term "Romanticism" and its derivatives, even while deploring
validity of this enterprise.4 Irony, on the other hand, as a general phenomen

1 This essay is a much revised version of a lecture delivered at the October 1985 meetin
the Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Conference at Furman University.
2 In her recent book Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1
p. 30, Lilian R. Fürst outlines how the critic Hermann Hettner introduced the "unhappy ph
in his book of 1850, Die romantische Schule in ihrem Zusammenhang mit Goethe und Sch
After citing techniques which acquired "fame and notoriety under the name of romantic i
Hettner then compounded the felony in his Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im 18. Jahrund
(1865-1870) by alluding to "that vaunted romantic irony, of which the Romantics sing and
so much."
3 One thinks in this context of such older works as Julius Petersen's Die Wesensbestimmung
der deutschen Romantik (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1926).
4 In the introduction to his anthology Deutsche Dichter der Romantik (Berlin: Erich Schmidt,
1971), p. 9, Benno von Wiese comments how wrong it is to stereotype all romantic writers with
the cliché "Romanticist" and Glyn Tegai Hughes launches a survey of Romantic German Literature
(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979) 1 , with the strong disclaimer that "'Romantic' as a typological
word, a whiff of grapeshot in an argument about human attitudes, may be effective in some very
general way, but it is a good deal more like an ineradicable nuisance." However, it should be noted
parenthetically that both works contain the word "Romantic" in their respective titles.

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 ROMANTIC IRONY

has fared somewhat better in recent criticism, with a host of investigations linke
to such 4 'household" names in scholarly circles as Northrup Frye, Beda Alle-
mann, Donald Muecke, and Wayne Booth (to mention only a few of the most
familiar names in the field).5 In 1983 a major colloquium devoted exclusively
to the modus operandi of literary irony took place at the University of Georgia
and, in the same year, an entire issue of the journal Poetics Today focused on
the structures and semiotics of "the ironic discourse."6
The specific manifestation of the general phenomenon of irony known as
"romantic" has, in spite of - or perhaps because of - its dubious heritage and
duplicitous nature, spawned a vast amount of critical interest in recent years,
especially among Germanists. In this context such names as Ingrid Strohschnei-
der-Kohrs, Raymond Immerwahr, Ernst Behler, and, most recently, Martin Wal-
ser come to mind.7 In order to show that the quest for the key to romantic irony
is not the exclusive province of Germanists, however, one should also mention
the now familiar names of David Simpson, Anne Mellor, and Lilian Fürst.8 The
future holds even brighter prospects with the imminent appearance of the com-
prehensive anthology entitled Romantic Irony, edited by Frederick Garber.9
But this rosy prognosis for subsequent study of the concept of "romantic
irony" contrasts markedly with the cloudy, if not shady, past history of the
term - something I should like to outline with reference to certain of the critical
works cited above and in conjunction with the title of this essay: the evolution
of revolution. The question to be asked and answered in this context runs as
follows: was what has been labeled irony in a peculiarly romantic mode something
which arose by a sort of spontaneous combustion at some point during the halcyon
years of Romanticism in Germany (1796-1826)10 or does it represent a phenom-

5 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1957); Allemann, Ironie und
Dichtung. 2nd rev. ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1969); Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen,
1969) and Irony (London: Methuen, 1970); Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: U. of Chicago
Press, 1974).
6 Poetics Today 4 (1983).
7 Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung, 2nd rev. ed.
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977); Immerwahr, "Romantic Irony and Romantic Arabesque Prior to Ro-
manticism," The German Quarterly 42 (1969): 665-84; Behler, Klassische Ironie, Romantische
Ironie, Tragische Ironie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972); Walser, Selbst-
bewußtsein und Ironie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981).
8 Simpson, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1979); Mellor,
English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1980); Fürst (see footnote 2).
9 This work, which intends to deal with romantic irony from a pan-European perspective, is
scheduled to appear in the Akademiai Kiado press of Budapest and will include manifestations of
Romantic irony in other media, such as music and the pictorial arts.
10 This specific dating of German Romanticism is quite arbitrary on my part and could be
challenged. The basis for these parameters, however, is the appearance of the Wackenroder-Tieck
H er zenser gießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders in 1796 and of Eichendorff' s Aus dem
Leben eines Taugenichts in 1826, both works being acknowledged as prototypical of the Romantic
temperament. I have attempted to justify this claim in an article "On the Threshold of German
Romanticism," in English and German Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies, ed. James
Pipkin (Heidelberg: Winter, 1985) 391-407.
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 THE COMPARATISI

enon with a germination period extending over the centuries prior and subseq
to the age of Romanticism?11 In short, are we dealing with a revolutio
procedure or an evolutionary process? In view of the tenuous nature of ea
the concepts involved - irony, romantic, and the tenuous combination roma
irony - this brief foray into the jungle of theory and technique should perh
begin by emulating the tongue-in-cheek tactic of Donald Muecke who introd
his analysis of the 4 'Elements of Irony" with the defusing (and diffusing) rema
"Since. . . Erich Heller, in his Ironic German, has already quite adequately
defined irony, there would be little point in not defining it all over again
Not to be outdone, Lilian Fürst in her initial chapter cautions the read
"Beware of Irony" and underscores Lionel Trilling's caveat that irony
love, is one of those things better practiced than preached.13
Yet if I understand Fürst' s overall approach correctly, her contention se
to be that, whereas the traditional ironist or satirist looks at an "out of jo
world from the solid and secure vantage point of knowledge as to how thi
should actually be (but, unfortunately, are not), the ironist of romantic vin
regards the situation from a kind of bifocal or dual perspective, detecting va
in alternative solutions, both of which, in interplay and interpénétration, ha
potential possibilities for an ultimate resolution. The post-romantic ironist
the other hand, although confronting similar dichotomies, finds himself on
horns of a serious dilemma, since neither option appears viable; both a
best, potential impossibilities. Although this triadic division of ironic stan
(traditional irony, romantic irony, post-romantic irony) represents a simplifica
of the complex issue treated extensively and with finely nuanced subtlety
Fürst, it may, if it is not a totally misleading oversimplification, help by vi
of its very concise format, to clarify some of the confusion which has pers
in the use and abuse of the major components in their elusive, combin
ambiance.
For instance, when one examines Strohschneider-Kohr's book of 1960 and
its revision of 1977, one finds that the two literary works which best serve as
evidence for irony in the romantic vein (as "Mittel der Selbstrepräsentation von
Kunst")14 in Germany are Tieck's Der gestiefelte Kater (1797) and E.T.A.
Hoffmann's Prinzessin Brambilla (1821), and these chronological landmarks
certainly fall well within the temporal limits of German Romanticism proposed
above. Yet more recent interpretations of romantic irony show a marked diver-
gence from this chronology. The greatest discrepancy can be found in Muecke 's

11 The appearance of the three-volume reference work European Writers : The Romantic Cen-
tury, ed. Jacques Barzun and ed. in chief, George Stade (New York: Scribner's 1985) complicates
the terminological background and chronological boundaries even further by including under this
rubric writers as divergent as Schiller and Zola.
12 Muecke, Compass 14.
13 Fürst, Fictions 1 .
14 Strohschneider- Kohrs, Romantische Ironie 70.

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 ROMANTIC IRONY

Compass of Irony, in which the critic postulates that the novels of Thomas Man
constitute "the most thoroughgoing, almost programmatic example" for ro-
mantic irony,15 and, from among these, he selects Doktor F austus of 1947 as
the complete textbook case for the phenomenon.16
With temporal parameters now ranging from 1797 to 1947, exactly 15
years apart, can one legitimately speak of romantic irony as constituting a "rev
olution" (usually implying a relatively brief period of upheaval entailing rapid
radical change) or should one perhaps think in terms of an evolutionary process
Lilian Fürst' s investigation upsets the chronological apple-cart even more by
proceeding backward rather than forward in time to find the key illustration o
the cardinal precepts of romantic irony. Her choice, somewhat anachronistically
but logically, given her premises, falls on Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which firs
began to appear in 1760. This now leaves one with a perplexing time span o
almost two centuries (1760-1947) to single out prime examples of romantic irony
Consequently, the term "revolution" in the title of this essay, along with "ro-
mantic" as well as "irony" all prove to be more of a hindrance to clarification
than a helpmate for meaningful communication.
Yet even the designation "evolution" is not exempt from equivocation
especially if one distinguishes between romantic irony in theory as opposed to
the literary practice of ironic techniques which have been labeled "romantic."
This is evident when one deals with those accounts of romantic irony which
trace its roots back to pre-romantic times, bypassing Sterne for Cervantes or
(with regard to the willful violation of theatrical illusion which Strohschneider
Kohrs finds so germane for "the self-representation of art" in Tieck's Kater),
back to facets of ancient Greek theater utilizing similar devices. Does this infer
that romantic irony may actually embody archetypal techniques with a histor
of over two thousand years instead of a mere two hundred? If so, then "evo-
lution" is certainly the more appropriate characterization, and one might just
fiably inquire, paraphrasing the familiar television commercial: "Where's the
revolution?"

But perhaps instead of posing the question as stated above, one should
reformulate it to read: "Who's the revolutionary?," for there seems to be a rare
consensus of opinion among critics of German literature as well as those more
catholic in their purview, that Friedrich Schlegel was the man of the hour. Yet
with reference to the "evolution/revolution" issue, one must also exercise caution
here. Even though Schlegel was preoccupied with the thorny matter of irony for
most of his lifetime,17 it was an intensive period of concentration from approx-
imately 1797 to 1800 which gave rise to the rather undisciplined theoretical basis
for what Lilian Fürst characterizes as the "metamorphosis of irony."18 But it

15 Muecke, Compass 185.

16 Muecke, Compass 208-15.
17 Ehrhard Bahr, "Goethe and Romantic Irony," Houston German Studies 5 (1984) 1-5.
18 Fürst, Fictions 23-48.

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 THE COMPARATISI

should be noted for the record that, as indicated earlier, Schlegel and his con
temporaries rarely, if ever, linked the expanding contours of irony which they
delineated with the concept 4 "romantic," even though this latter term was i
vogue at the time. Not even later critics - the philosophical duo of Hegel and
Kierkegaard19 - who chastized the ironic fascination of the Romantics, referre
to the object of their often harsh invectives as romantic irony, but rather as irony
per se.
During the early years of German romanticism, Schlegel had inaugurated
a trans valuation of the traditional view of the ironic stance, from a standard
rhetorical figure to a philosophical or metaphysical attitude, and this change ca
be traced throughout his aphoristic, always apodictic, and often cryptic pron
ouncements. Because this fundamental alternation in the form and function of
irony crystallized in the theoretical writings of Schlegel relatively rapidly (1797-
1800), one might, indeed, be justified in speaking of a revolution of sorts, so
that the ultimate upshot of the evolution/revolution controversy in German Ro-
manticism would seem to be, concisely formulated: revolution in theory, evo-
lution in practice. In fact, in one of his most often quoted Athenäum fragments,
Schlegel pinpointed three revolutions of sorts which had been pivotal for the
new age: the French Revolution, Fichte' s Wissenschaftslehre , and Goethe's Wil-
helm Meisters Lehrjahre. These formed a trio of events signaling the changed
tenor of the times, the altered perspective of the age.20 In a more extensive
context, one could readily demonstrate how each of these forces - the demise
of the ancien régime, Fichte 's philosophical reorientation of the bases for knowl-
edge in the wake of Kant's Copernican volte-face, and Goethe's innovative
treatment of the narrative voice in his novel, all impinged upon the evolution
of a revolution in irony.
Although it may be difficult to discern, there is an ultimate rationale for
having bantered back and forth between "evolution" and 4 "revolution" in the
preceding discussion, because at the core of the kind of irony which Schlegel
taught and others practiced lured a similar jagged movement between viable
alternatives. In one of Schlegel' s most frequently cited aperçus concerning irony,
he stated that it presupposed a 4 "klares Bewußtsein der ewigen Agilität."21 The
kind of perpetual agility or mobility implied in this statement requires a mind

19 For the main thrust of Hegel's attack on romantic irony, see Fürst, Fictions 23-48. See also
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington: U. of Indiana Press,
1965).
20 Friedrich Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. & ed. Ernst Behler
and Roman Struc (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968)
143.

21 This passage and subsequent quotations from Schlegel on irony are taken from the handy
and readily accessible collection found in Ironie als literarisches Phänomen, ed. Hans-Egon Hass
and Gustav- Adolf Mohrlüder (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1973) 293 (henceforth cited as
Ironie ).

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 ROMANTIC IRONY

capable of moving comfortably between often conflicting dialectical polarities

without running aground on either or becoming stranded on one or the other o
the premises. It could be argued that such intellectual and mental adroitness,
enabling the individual to roam dynamically through the limbo-like terrain be-
tween fixed points of view without clinging to static absolutes, is the quintes
sential feature of Fürst' s 4 'metamorphosis of irony" from its pre-romantic mod
to the variant manifestations of proto- and then post-romantic irony.
To recapitulate briefly, the traditional or pre-romantic ironist, much like
the satirist, operated from a fixed standpoint; he had a firm grasp of the situation,
of the life and events he portrayed, and of the degree to which they conforme
to or deviated from his established standards. With full confidence and a few
subtle inferences, he could even state something other than what he really in-
tended to say, since he counted on a discriminating audience of like minds to
infer the true, hidden meaning behind the verbal message. However, one of the
major shifts during what has been termed the "pivotal period" in the Western
World,22 culminated in the late eighteenth century when the objective stability
of fixed perspectives was superseded by the subjective fluidity of a shifting
perspectivism, absolute certainty by doubting relativity, one-dimensional con-
fidence by multi-dimensional ambivalence, conviction by contingency, etc. The
impact of this upheaval on a seismographically sensitive individual such as
Schlegel was the inability to cling to the firm vantage point occupied by the
satirist-ironist of earlier stamp, who dispassionately recorded the deficient quality
of life and ironically charted its shortfall. Set in Hegelian terms, the new sen-
sibility found ambiguity and ambivalence in both premises, in the thesis as well
as the antithesis; therefore, instead of moving on triumphantly to a full-fledged
synthesis, the ironic temperament hovered somewhere in limbo between dual
components.
The quality of "betweenness" which emerges from these postulates should
be underscored for a specific reason: the inordinate amount of interest generated
by the quest for the essence and appearance of irony may stem in part from its
mediating function or intermediary form, for the etymological root of "interest"
in Latin is "inter-esse" meaning "to be between." Just as reading "between
the lines" of a text constitutes a more challenging exercise than merely com-
prehending the surface meaning, so too, operating between entrenched view-
points and intractable standpoints is a more thought-provoking and hence
"interesting" intellectual pursuit than becoming bogged down in the morass of
monolithic immobility. By way of illustration of this contention concerning the
ironist's agile and mobile, sometimes hovering yet other times agitated fluctuating
or oscillating between concepts and precepts each of which in its own right may

22 Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1971) vii.

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 THE COMPARATISI

be valid, one might cite a few key phrases from the arsenal of theory by Sc
and his immediate contemporaries:23 Schlegel writes:

Eine Idee ist ein bis zur Ironie vollendeter Begriff, eine absolute
Synthesis absoluter Antithesen, der stets sich selbst erzeugende
Wechsel zwey streitender Gedanken.24
Sie [die Sokratische Ironie] enthält und erregt ein Gefühl von dem
unauslöschlichen Widerstreit des Unbedingten und des Bedingten,
der Unmöglichkeit und Notwendigkeit einer vollständigen Mittei-
lung.25

Novalis in an essay "Lichtpunkt des Schwebens" speaks of "Schweben

zwischen Extremen, die notwendig zu vereinigen und notwendig zu trennen
sind."26 Solger in his treatise Erwin. Vier Gespräche 1815) notes: "In den
wirklichen Dingen. . . etwas Höheres zu erkennen,. . .war doch immer nur ein
Aufdämmern der wahren Ironie. . . . Beides aber greift ineinander durch die
stets mit sich selbst einige, und doch zwischen beiden hin- und herblitzende
Wirksamkeit des künstlerischen Verstandes."27
If one were to focus on fictional texts of the German romantic period in
order to establish how the above criteria of intermediacy, mediation, "medial-
ity," were transposed to literature and became embodied in the techniques, tenets
and tenor of actual practice, one might establish a tentative set of guidelines
based on certain qualitative differences. For instance, Tieck's Der Gestiefelte
Kater (1797) comes close to the traditional satiric-ironic attitude in spite of its
innovative theatrical devices, since it clearly champions the romantic aesthetic
precepts of fantasy and creativity over narrow-minded philistine rationalism.
Novalis 's Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801), on the other hand, in keeping with
the poet's programmatic intent, seeks to romanticize the world by deliberately
bringing into play and interplay the commonplace and the uncommon, the known
and the unknown, the ordinary and the extra-ordinary.28 Of course, since the

23 A major theme at the 1977 conference on Romanticism as reflected in the volume Romantik
in Deutschland, ed. Richard Brinkmann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978) was the "Spannungsfelder" or
"fields of tension" between various areas and attitudes (social change and stagnation, feeling for
nature and natural science, etc.) and this concept forms a basis for the prevalence of irony in its
romantic modality. In this connection, see also Albert Cook, Thresholds: Studies in the Romantic
Experience (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1985), especially Chapters 6 ("Stendhal: The Dis-
covery of Ironic Interplay) and 7 ("Pushkin: The Balance of Irony").
24 Ironie 291.
25 Ironie 288.
26 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), "Lichtpunkt des Schwebens" in Die deutsche Literaur
in Text and Darstellung, Romantiķi, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schmitt (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974) 105.
27 Karl W. F. Solger, Erwin, Vier Gespräche über das Schöne und die Kunst, quoted in Die
deutsche Literatur in Text und Darstellung, Romantik /109.
28 Novalis: Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, vol. II (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1960) 545.

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 ROMANTIC IRONY

work remains a fragment, the lofty ideal envisioned is only sketched in outline,
so that the reader, in this case, experiences a degree of romantic irony's "be-
tweenness" by being wedged between an idealized conception and an execution
only partially realized. E.T.A. Hoffmann's Der goldene Topf (1814), on the
other hand, which Strohschneider-Kohrs singles out in an essay of 1968 as
exemplary for romantic irony,29 could be characterized paradoxically as a "com-
plete fragment," since ultimate romanticization will occur only when all three
of Archivarious Lindhorst's daughters find mates as qualified for redemption as
Serpentina' s Anselmus. In the interim, however, the worlds of the commonplace
and the uncommon, Dresden and Atlantis respectively, will coexist, interacting
with one another in a kind of symbiotic irony, with both having valid claims on
the individual, as they did in Hoffmann's own life and as they do at the conclusion
of his modern fairy-tale when the narrator is granted provisional and periodic
visitation rights to a tenant farm in Atlantis (as opposed to the permanent manorial
estate given to Anselmus). Finally, Eichendorff' s Aus dem Leben eines Tau-
genichts (1826) at the chronological tail end of Romanticism and on the threshold
of the Biedermeier era, portrays the ne're-do-well protagonist straddling the
fence between the worlds of artistic fantasy and philistine complacency in such
a manner that neither sphere attains exclusive endorsement as a modus vivendi.
Yet one does not sense that each is invalidated to the degree that this occurs in
twentieth-century works evincing the modern brand of romantic irony, where
all stances are suspect and subject to negative scrutiny - a situation which Lilian
Fürst finds already archetypically manifest in Sterne's Tristram of 1760.
It would be fitting to conclude this cursory overview of romantic irony
before, during, and after the romantic age in Germany on an ironic note. By not
adequately defining either revolution or evolution, I have merely followed in the
footsteps of some predecessors who adroitly shied away from definitions of irony
or romanticism even when writing extensive treatises on these phenomena. I
have sought to demonstrate that the essence of irony in its specifically romantic
mode is the quality of threshold-like betweenness, an intermediacy with or
without mediation, an indeterminacy forming a frontier or buffer zone between
what is and what ought to be, between the conceptualized ideal and the actualized
real, between the absolute and the contingent, between self-construction and
self-destruction, and a host of other dual potentialities.30 To the extent that this
outlook is a by-product of a Copernican evolution in philosophy, a political
revolution in history or an emotional revolution of sensitivity - all of which
conditioned Friedrich Schlegel's theoretical pronouncements on irony from 1797
to 1800 and the creative fiction of his contemporaries from 1796 to 1826 - one

29 Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, "Zur Poetik der deutschen Romantik II: Die romantische
Ironie," in Die deutsche Romantik, ed. Hans Steffen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1968)
75-97.

30 Cook, Thresholds: Studies in the Romantic Experience 3-28.

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 THE COMPARATISI

might speak of a revolution lasting from three years to three decades. On

other hand, if one takes into account earlier instances of those literary techn
later considered indispensable by the romantic ironist - with roots in works
tending from the mid-eighteenth century backward to the Greeks or forwar
twentieth-century manifestations - then one could argue for an evolution w
has lasted well over two millennia. In this case, the continual bantering betw
mutually exclusive concepts (revolution/evolution) and the relativization of
due to the resulting ambivalence or ambiguity, serves as a fitting obje
correlative for the nature of that elusive phenomenon of romantic irony w
this essay has, in some small way, sought to adumbrate.

University of California
Davis

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