Bakhtin's Irony

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Transcript of Bakhtin's Irony

Page 1: Bakhtin's Irony

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Bakhtin's Irony Beradette Meyler

Although the word irony rarely appears in his earlier writings, Mikhail Bakhtin's works center around the subject, a center which it might be said, he could not hold, if it could ever indeed have been grasped. The terms "heteroglossia," "polyphony," and finally "dialo- gism," which pervade various texts, all embody types of irony, and Bakhtin's "Notes Made in 1970-71," one of his final compositions, refers to the issue repeatedly. Nor does irony constitute solely the subject of Bakhtin's inquiry; if we are to side with Friedrich Schlegel's idea of it as infinite indeterminacy, Bakhtin's own slippery employment of terms could be categorized ironic as well.

These may be accepted as conceivable, even obvious points. The question remains as to how we can benefit from Bakhtin's addition to the literature of irony, the issue of how his response contributes to the discourse. As his writings are often taken to bridge the gap between text and world, one might assume that Bakhtin could provide some type of political context for irony. Paul de Man, however, in his essay "Dialogue and Dialogism," demonstrates the deficiencies inherent in an overly social or metaphysical conception of dialogism and reveals the danger of reducing dialogism "as a metalinguistic (i.e., formal) structure to dialogism as a recognition of exotopy" (110), in other words, to the hermeneutic dialogue indicated in the title. The sugges- tion that Bakhtin's dialogue can confirm a certain humanist ideal of intersubjectivity or Marxist conception of the social is also dispelled in Thomas Dana-Cohen's article "Reading a Blind Parataxis Dostoyevsky (Nietzsche) Bakhtin." If, then, we are to reclaim the political potential of irony in Bakhtin, the argument must proceed along new paths.

To glean indications of what this avenue of approach might be, it is essential to understand the alternative interpretations of irony that such a construal of Bakhtin could modify. Three are exposed in de Man's essay "The Concept of Irony," during a discussion of "the way in which irony is being defused." Significantly, the first and last are attempts that Bakhtin has already, fairly explicitly, discarded. The former perspective "reduces irony to an aesthetic practice or artistic device, a Kunstmittel" (169). This is the strategy of containment that Bakhtin perceives-per- haps inaccurately-in the lyric poem, which he therefore dismisses from the compass of dialogism. The latter "insert(s) ironic moments or

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ironic structures into a dialectic of history" (170). Such an interpreta- tion, flattening the paradox inherent in irony by postulating its resolu- tion through time, Bakhtin demonstrates inadequate in understanding the polyphony of Dostoevsky's novels.1 The third means of reducing irony that de Man details is one that he himself had employed in "The Rhetoric of Temporality," that of "reducing it to a dialectic of the self as a reflexive structure." According to this account, we could see de Man's self-critique in "The Concept of Irony" as itself ironic, or interpret Bakhtin's continual semantic modulations in the same way. This, how- ever, would have the evident disadvantage of relegating the referent, here the concept of irony, to an entirely interiorized discourse. While the attempt to define the object of discussion conventionally may ultimately be impossible, the radical idealism of de Man's earlier ac- count also seems in some senses unsatisfying. Thus, paradoxically, the only effective political reading of Bakhtin can be achieved through eliminating the customary sense of the social in the term dialogism, and additionally extracting the form from the entire realm of the personal. What Bakhtin can add to irony is the abrogation of authority that occurs through the auspices of dialogism, without a priori implications of individual intention.

Schlegel's remarks in his Philosophical Fragments prove fairly useful in arrogating for dialogism the status of irony. At one point he suggests that dialogue consists in a string of fragments (27), which his text confirms are quintessentially ironic. Likewise, he affirms the dialogic antecedents of the contemporary novel in writing that "Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time"(3). Bakhtin too cites the importance of the Socratic dialogue several times as a forerunner of the novel; in "Epic and Novel" he writes that "We possess a remarkable document that reflects the simultaneous birth of scientific thinking and of a new artistic-prose model for the novel. These are the Socratic dialogues" (The Dialogic Imagination 24), while the chapter "Characteristics of Genre" in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics contains a lengthy excursus on the subject of Socrates, who supposedly supplied a carnivalistic basis for the polyphonic novel. The Socratic dialogue then appears for both Schlegel and Bakhtin to feed the novel form, the genre Bakhtin deems especially appropriate for dialogic expression.

The Socratic dialogue as instantiated in Plato, however, is also commonly conceived the origin of the ironic. It is in this context that the Greek word "e?ipou" first appears, and as de Man even writes in "The Rhetoric of Temporality," "Quintilian described irony as capable of coloring an entire discourse pronounced in a tone of voice that did not correspond to the true situation, or even, with reference to Socrates,

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as pervading an entire life"(210). The idea that Socrates himself is an ironic man raises a problem that appears throughout Bakhtin's dis- course on dialogism and many discussions of irony; this is the issue of how strongly irony must be linked to personal intention and the neces- sity for speech to supply its source. Bakhtin himself refers to the ur-text of Socrates' life as a source for the multiple authors of the genre, of which he mentions ten, mostly lost (Dostoevsky's Poetics 109). Socratic irony appears for him to be embodied, and we are left with the question of how to translate that into the "dead" language of the page, or the residue remaining after the writer is removed.

In succumbing to the conclusion that speech can retain priority over writing we would be committing the same mistake that Plato did, in purportedly honoring the oral rather than the inscribed word. For Derrida, this tendency is ineluctably interlinked with Western meta- physics, an important conjunction, as de Man in "Dialogue and Dialo- gism" sees this branch of philosophy appearing in the more mistaken accounts of what Bakhtin is doing (110). Moreover, in the specific terms of irony, the idea that it could be personally constituted implies the possibility of a certain control, one that belies the entity itself. Schlegel, in "Critical Fragments" 39, suggests the unsuitability inherent in this proposition, writing that "The history of the imitation of ancient poetry, especially as practiced in foreign countries, is among other things useful in permitting us to derive most easily and fully the important concepts of unconscious parody and passive wit" (5). Significantly, while Schlegel does imply a type of dialogism, by which the author responds to an already posited discourse, the effects of such a dialogism no longer remain within the jurisdiction of the author. Indeed the text, in implying its own predecessors, closes off external referentiality in a way that makes the reader cease her hermeneutic quest; silence or laughter replace the questions she would otherwise ask the work.

The possibility of reading "dialogism" as personified in dialogue is only one of the terminological quandaries that Bakhtin presents the interpreter.2 Words that appear literal or seem experientially based he displaces from their definitions during the course of the discourse, evacuating their customary connotations. Not only "dialogism" suc- cumbs to this tendency, but the phrases "living word," "accent," "laughter," "silence," "threshold," and various others. This feature contributes to the irony of Bakhtin's own texts, which he himself admits are contradictory, and thereby resist monological construction; at the conclusion of "From Notes Made in 1970-71" he claims that "This collection of my essays is unified by one theme in various stages of its development" and continues to note "The unity of the emerging (de-

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veloping) idea. Hence a certain internal open-endedness of many of my ideas" (Speech Genres 155). In the much earlier Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin had observed the way in which Dostoevsky juxtaposed different stages of the same person or the same idea synchronically, a technique that Bakhtin himself appears to apply in his writing. Like- wise, the comment Bakhtin makes about internal as opposed to external open-endedness is reminiscent of Schlegel's remarks on the power of the fragment form; since most works are internally fragmentary, he considers it reasonable to demonstrate this quality in stylistic compo- sition as well. "Dialogism" should then be construed in several differ- ent ways since Bakhtin problematizes the conventional means of verbal derivation and evolution. Schlegel, too, parodies this in "On Incompre- hensibility," writing that "Common sense which is so fond of navigat- ing by the compass of etymologies-so long as they are very close by-probably did not have a difficult time in arriving at the conclusion that the basis of the incomprehensible is to be found in incomprehen- sion" (32-33).

In order to arrive at possible alternatives to the already posited perspectives on "dialogism," let us examine the origins again, now from the more restricted vantage point of the individual question and response, the isolated irony. The term that Plato employs, "e'pou," while itself describing a person, is derived from the verb "EVpco," which designates "saying, speaking, or telling." Originally the middle form, which in Greek carries the implication of a self-reflexive act, was synonymous, but in Ionic prose its meaning apparently altered, becom- ing "to cause to be told one, to ask." Significantly, this history of the form implies a mutual imbrication between statement and question; an inquiry is also a positive act that in some way contains its own answer. This type of question is precisely that which occurs in Plato's Socratic dialogues, texts renowned for the occlusion of the interlocutor from the discussion in any more than a nominal sense. Indeed, most of the dialogues are so programmed that after the subject has been initially introduced, Socrates' respondent is only permitted conciliatory com- ments of affirmation; many of the questions could almost be taken as rhetorical if another person were not present.

Similar situations appear in investigating that aspect of dialogism Bakhtin dubs "microdialogue." This is dialogism not on the level of the event but in terms of each individual word. Bakhtin writes of it in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics that "Dialogue has penetrated inside every word, provoking it in a battle and the interruption of one voice by another. This is microdialogue" (75). Here it is the internal reflection of Raskolnikov that he points to, something that can be expressed only

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textually. All the nuances of thought that supposedly occur within Raskolnikov's consciousness are expressed through unanswered ques- tions and exclamations. Thus, too, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, the exclamation "Well!" is followed by silence rather than an explicit response. Dialogism is in both cases a linguistic phenonemon, by which tonal variations occur through marks on the page. With these indices, the ideas of silence and laughter, elsewhere important to Bakhtin, are drawn into the text, and tone itself, a word seemingly derived from speech although current in literary criticism, is interpre- ted as an aspect of writing.

This shift from the situation of the dialogue to the construction of the text itself occurs through the auspices of the "rejoinder." Bakhtin writes that "Every thought of Dostoevsky's heroes (the Underground Man, Raskolnikov, Ivan, and others) senses itself to be from the very beginning a rejoinder in an unfinalized dialogue" (Dostoevsky's Poetics 32) This preoccupation with the rejoinder carries over into many of Bakhtin's texts, and proves quintessential for the understanding of literary irony. Indeed, the ironic or dialogical sentence can be conceived either as an answer that concains the question preceding it or a question implying its own answer. The idea of the rejoinder itself seems to indicate the first half of this conclusion, and we will soon see it enacted in the context of The Merchant of Venice, while the second part is supported by the nature of the Socratic dialogues.

The result is that the reader is positioned oddly in relation to the ironic text, a connection that Bakhtin attempts to indicate through the dual concepts of "silence" and "laughter" which he conjoins several times in "From Notes Made in 1970-71." While both of these elements explicitly originate in a human context, as Bakhtin signals through the statement that "Silence is possible only in the human world (and only for a person)" (Speech Genres 133-134), silence does in fact invade the text in the guise of irony, which Bakhtin describes as "a form of silence" (134). The silence concomitant with irony is that of the reader, who has already been accounted for through the dialogism of the work. Her voice has been silenced by the operations of the text, and a discontinuity occurs between sentence and receiver, one which can be bridged only through laughter. This laughter is not, however, external to the irony, but contained within it, as Bakhtin suggests in his repeated character- ization of irony as "reduced laughter," and extends not only over the precipice of the ironic moment, but also the "thresholds" and "borders" that Bakhtin discusses. In all these cases it is constructive, allowing the reader to reconstitute an idea within her own framework.3

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Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice provides a relevant example of the rejoinder, and demonstrates its political applicability, but before treat- ing the specifics we must investigate Bakhtin's reluctance to include Shakespeare's work within the categories of the dialogic or polyphonic. Far from dismissing the playwright out of hand, Bakhtin writes exten- sively on Shakespeare, in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics praising him for his carnivalistic origins, and even almost granting him some poly- phonic qualities. He cannot fully allow him these, however, since he excludes almost all drama-with the exception of medieval mystery plays-from the realm of the polyphonic. Reasons for this include the idea that dramatic unity allows only one character to maintain a fully formed voice, and the feeling that Aristotelian catharsis results in monologic closure. The strictures of classical tragedy against which these objections speak are notoriously not maintained in Shakespeare though, much to the dismay of classical French critics. The stance of Shakespeare's villain is frequently fleshed out as fully as his hero's, and antitheses are not always reconciled at the conclusion of his plays.

Dissenting from Bakhtin's surmises,4 however, is hardly as interest- ing as discerning the ultimate source of his prejudice against drama, a perspective rooted in polyphony conceived according to the Schlegel- ian idea of irony as permanent parabasis. While the most illuminating incarnation of dialogism in Bakhtin is microdialogue, his statements about polyphony shed light on the nature of irony in longer narratives. This version of irony depends on a type of extended synchronicity, by which numerous phases of an idea or a person are juxtaposed simulta- neously. Instead of dialecticizing, one of the techniques for defusing irony, polyphony represents concomitant contradiction. Intriguingly Bakhtin observes in Dostoevsky, whose work constitutes the prototype of polyphony, many aspects that de Man sees in Stendhal, whom he considers the ironic novelist par excellence. Not least of the similarities are the two writers' approaches to time; de Man observes in "The Rhetoric of Temporality" that "We readily grant [Stendhal] irony, as in the famous Stendhalian speed that allows him to dispose of a seduction or a murder in the span of two brief sentences," while Bakhtin com- ments in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics on "the catastrophic swiftness of action, the 'whirlwind motion,' the dynamics of Dostoevsky" (29).5 Polyphonic contradiction is present in classical tragedy, but only at its commencement; in a drama such as Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, the conflict between the protagonist's unacknowledged past and his pres- ent state is resolved when he eventually incorporates both facets into his final self. Rather than remaining unfinalized, as both Schlegel's permanent parabasis and Bakhtin's polyphony explicitly are, this type

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of tragedy achieves closure and simultaneously instates a certain monologic social context.

Such ideological monologism is to some extent dispelled on the levels of both microdialogue and polyphony during the course of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Several exchanges between the Mer- chant Shylock and the Christian characters of the play demonstrate the social significance Bakhtin's concept of rejoinder could entail, while the conclusion of the play leaves the question of control, in some senses, unresolved. Act I, scene iii commences with a rejoinder, one that implies the existence of a prior original statement without specifically citing it. The exchange between Shylock and Bassanio reads

Shy. Three thousand ducats, well. Bass. Aye sir, for three months. Shy. For three months, well. Bass. For the which I told you, Antonio shall be bound. Shy. Antonio shall become bound, well. Bass. May you stead me? Will you pleasure me? Shall I know your answer? Shy. Three thousand ducats for three months, and Antonio bound. Bass. Your answer to that. Shy. Antonio is a good man. Bass. Have you heard any imputation to the contrary?

During the course of this "conversation," Shylock singles out elements of a preceding question that Bassanio asked and repeats them, ironi- cally appending the ironic Volochinov "well" to each. Instead of assent- ing as Socrates' interlocutors would have done, he creates a certain resistance through repeating the demands and transforms himself into the interrogator with the discomfort he occasions. Bassanio's state- ments begin to assume the form of answers, although no additional question has been asked, and he even responds to Shylock with the gesture of assent "aye sir." After the third repetition when he realizes that his prior attempts at communication have failed, Bassanio poses a series of rapid-fire inquiries, as though rephrasing could make all the difference. At the conclusion of the passage, the power situation has altered to such an extent that Shylock is the individual who must be refuted; whereas at the commencement, he would hardly have pos- sessed the moral authority to impugn Antonio's character, at the end his technique of echoing and altering the words of Bassanio, and by extension, the rest of his Christian community, has allowed him to suggest-although he quickly disavows this interpretation-that An- tonio may be less than a "good man." Through repeating Bassanio's words he ironically resists the control that conventional question and

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answer, supposed "dialogue," imposes, and shifts the discourse by means of the same words.

Such a repositioning occurs continually throughout The Merchant of Venice, during which Shylock incessantly adopts the words of Paul's letters, employing against Christian Venetians the rhetoric of the Chris- tianized Jew. During the famous "I am a Jew" speech, Shylock employs the Pauline proposition of universal brotherhood to refute the prejudice of Paul's own Christian successors, and even uses language derived directly from Paul's statements in The Acts of the Apostles. "I am a Jew" (III, 1, 52) echoes Paul's proclamation that "I am a Jew, born at Tarsus in Cilicia ... " (Acts 22: 3), while his inquiry "if you prick us do we not bleed?" recalls the voice emanating from heaven that demands of Paul-who at the time was still one of Christ's persecutors-"Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It hurts you to kick against the pricks" (Acts 26: 14). Likewise, the meaning of the terms "sad" and "content" are called into question through the auspices of Pauline intertexts throughout the play. Antonio opens The Merchant of Venice with the assertion "In sooth I know not why I am so sad" (I, i, 1), then continually restates the term "sad" in metrically prominent places. In this context, "sad," as derived from "satus," can denote "filled" or sated as well as unhappy, a connotation that will become extremely important at the conclusion of the play, when "content" and "contentment" become an issue. At the end of the trial scene, after Shylock's intentions have been thwarted and half his property has been allotted to Antonio, the latter concedes "So please my lord the duke, and all the court,/ To quit the fine for one half of his goods,/ I am content" (IV, i, 376-8). Portia then inquires "Art thou contented Jew? what dost thou say?" (IV, i, 388), and here he is more obviously forced to respond, seemingly without alter- native, "I am content" (IV, i, 389). Paul's "Letter to the Philippians," however, reveals that even, and perhaps especially, this coerced re- sponse refuses to dispense with irony; while he is incarcerated, Paul's friends bring him a gift, upon which occurrence he tells them that "I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content" (Philippians 4: 11), then later adds "I am filled" (Philippians 4: 18). The double meaning of contentment, which, like "sadness," can indicate fullness, becomes apparent here, and the first irony surfaces; although Shylock has been deprived of most of his resources, he is still, like Paul, sated. Addition- ally, he has co-opted moral superiority for himself through asserting that he is "content;" while this scene emphasizes the money that the play's Christians will obtain, Shakespeare has Shylock, the supposedly usurious Jew, wreak his revenge by playing the poor Christian better than they themselves are able to. This type of struggle against authority

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constitutes the political aspect of microdialogue that Bakhtin can give us.

The polyphony of Shakespeare's play is also achieved through ref- erence to other earlier discourses, those of the source tale, Giovanni's "I1 Pecorone," and Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta. The last scene in which Shylock is present on stage combines both narratives without deciding between them and thus endows his fate with a fundamental ambivalence. When Shylock discovers that he can neither obtain a pound of Antonio's flesh nor monetary recompense, he attempts to depart empty-handed, as does the character from Giovanni's story. He is not permitted to leave at this point, however, and receives a sentence similar to that of Barrabas at the beginning of the Jew of Malta. At the end of the scene he is supposed to sign a statement sealing the terms of his punishment, but this closure never happens on stage; Shylock instead pleads sickness and instructs them to send the deed to him. The two sources are thus combined equally, and at the end of the play neither is self-evidently the substrate. The plot's suspension ensures that Shylock will not be entirely assimilated into the Christian world at the conclusion, and yet another form of ironic resistance becomes apparent.

II

The dispersal of significance characteristic of Bakhtin's own terms furnished an apt aside in the first section. Here those shifts in emphasis will become central to an explication of Bakhtin's attitude towards irony, which cannot entirely be contained within the formal element. The apparently extra-textual terms that he employed-living word, accent, etc.-are not superfluous to his conceptual schema, or merely present to contrast with their genuine textual employments. Instead, they indicate that dialogism surpasses the distinction between content and form, and, in fact, the traditional delimitations of linguistics itself, and partakes instead of a rhetorical element as strong as that espoused by a de Man. Rather than a rhetoric that merely overlays an underlying meaning, Bakhtin espouses, and himself enacts, a rhetorical function that presides over semantics as well as textual surface.

Intriguingly, de Man himself, through a reading of Bakhtin that overly literalizes his statements, has denigrated the theoretician for one of the checkpoints on his trajectory towards rhetorical irony of true force. By imputing to him a strongly anti-tropological stance in "Dia- logue and Dialogism," de Man ignores the import of Bakhtin's objec- tions to the lyric, based on the same rejection of irony as kunstmittel that

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de Man performs in "The Concept of Irony." Since Bakhtin frequently seems to be depicted as some sort of serious social reformer, it is not surprising that de Man might (at least in his own ironic fashion) underestimate Bakhtin's personal ironic potential. This tendency, per- haps particularly pronounced in the Russian version of his writings,6 appears at the commencement of Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, where prior critics, the dialogical voices, are quoted, then interrupted by Bakhtin's own authorial interjections, sometimes taking the form of particles or phrases that he elsewhere7 describes as tools of the ironic novelist's trade. Likewise, as we have already observed, the terms used in Bakhtin's accounts have been adopted from discourse about speech or space, but altered to fit the author's own aims. Rather than examine the implications of dialogism from a supposedly objective remove, Bakhtin employs it within his own oeuvre, taking seriously his asser- tion that

Every socially significant verbal performance has the ability ... to infect with its own intention certain aspects of language that had been affected by its semantic and expressive impulse, imposing on them specific semantic nuances and specific axiological overtones; thus, it can create slogan-words, curse-words, praise-words and so forth. ("Discourse in the Novel" 290)

The perspective on lyric poetry that de Man himself critiques, as well as all the similar views espoused, are qualified in the footnotes to "Discourse in the Novel" - unrealistic idealizations, they are intended to serve an argumentative purpose.8 De Man's label "dogmatically explicit" and characterization of Bakhtin as "unambiguously as- sert[ing]" in "Dialogue and Dialogism"(111), appear slightly less men- acing when juxtaposed with the footnote "It goes without saying that we continually advance as typical the extreme to which poetic genres aspire; in concrete examples of poetic works it is possible to find features fundamental to prose ... " ("Discourse" 287). If Bakhtin's extended discussion of the lyric and the function of the trope within it is not to be taken completely seriously, the question surfaces, as it did in discussing tragedy, as to why he raised the issue at all. The answer is provided by his statements on the subject, which discuss the unity of the lyrical poem and reveal the logical coherence of its form.

Bakhtin's remarks on poetry all center around the thesis that the trope's potential is fully fulfilled through the poem, and all word play remains strictly within the bounds of the lyric's artificial unity. This conception accounts even for the most obvious paradox within the poem, as Bakhtin speaks of "a tension-filled unity of language ... achieved in the poetic work" ("Discourse" 298), and states that "The world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and insoluble

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conflicts the poet develops within it, is always illumined by one unitary and indisputable discourse" (286). Through these categorizations, he reveals that a word may be used with double and opposing meanings, but all those connotations have been manipulated by the author into a perfectly logical paradoxy. Such confinement within the purely formal realm, Bakhtin deems inadequate for dialogism, and by extension irony, and he replaces it with a scheme accounting for content as well, although not according to a hermeneutic model.

Before describing this alternative, let us examine the logical concept of irony to which Bakhtin reacts, exemplified by certain remarks of Schlegel, and included in Kenneth Burke's account. During the Philo- sophical Fragments, Schlegel frequently lauds and creates paradox, cat- egorizing it as the well-spring of irony; section 46 from the "Critical Fragments" encapsulates this pervasive sentiment in the pithy maxim "Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great" (6). For Schlegel, "paradox," not merely a fuzzy feeling, fulfills a distinct logical paradigm, one into which he allows us a glimpse through his statements about the analytic and synthetic, two pillars of modern logic. In describing the two poles, Schlegel expresses a greater affinity for the synthetic, praising "synthetic people" above analytic ones; at one point he writes that "We are closer to the Romans and can understand them better than the Greeks; and yet a real feeling for the Romans is much rarer than for the Greeks, because there are fewer synthetic than analytic people" (6). The analytic writer, according to Schlegel, observes the reader as he is; and accordingly he

makes his calculations and sets up his machines in order to make the proper impression on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates a reader as he should be; he doesn't imagine him calm and dead, but alive and critical. He allows whatever he has created to take shape gradually before the reader's eyes, or else he tempts him to discover it himself. He doesn't try to make any particular impres- sion on him, but enters with him into the deepest symphilosophy or sympoetry. (14)

Although Schlegel lauds the synthetic, contradiction and paradox emerge from the negation of the analytic, a circumstance that should accord the latter some significance. In "The Concept of Irony," de Man supports this notion, asserting that for Fichte, (under Schlegel's influ- ences), a synthetic judgment, maintaining the likeness of two disparate objects, implies the negation of an analytic. Through an approach akin to Grice's idea of conversational implicature, de Man demonstrates that suggesting the similarity of two entities makes no sense unless they are different in some respects (18). The apotheosis of the synthetic would then, for Schlegel, actually be the negation of the analytic, or the

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contradictory that ensues, the paradox that is pre-eminently ironic; as he writes in the "Athenaeum Fragments," "An idea is a concept per- fected to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts" (33).

The logical framework upon which Schlegel's irony rests, encapsu- lated in the claim that "Philosophy is the real homeland of irony which one would like to define as logical beauty" (5), corresponds to the spirit in which he exalts poetry as the only truly ironic genre. These are the postulates that Bakhtin speaks against in his works, but they do not entirely exhaust Schlegel's perspective on irony, as his own fragments tend to present a paradox that is then itself undermined, and the very idea of "permanent parabasis"-the act of stepping outside the dra- matic frame-inherently transcends the logical, as we shall see. For the moment, however, the issue becomes how to escape this logical system, and what valid alternatives might be presented.

Contemporary questioning of the analytic/synthetic divide, includ- ing the critique of W.V.O. Quine, may be able to assist in this respect. In "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and Word and Object, Quine expressed doubts about the validity of the distinction, caviling with the premise that anything, even the analytic, can be completely invested in the formal sphere without disruption by empirical or material forces. While investigating the definitional nature of the analytic, Quine encounters the issue of synonymy, upon which definition depends, and in discuss- ing it incorporates his modified notions of meaning and reference. In "On What There Is," Quine had already revealed that meaning is not dependent on reference; providing the example of the "Morning Star" and "Evening Star," both of which phrases describe the same object, but which appear in distinctly different contexts, Quine renames mean- ing "significance" and delineates its separation from reference. This is relevant for synonymy, since context becomes all-important, and two terms must be situated in similar situations to be definitionally equated. Such a relationship reflects back on the analytic, as the same word, when occurring in different contexts, may maintain entirely disparate significances. Quine's schema, which Bill Martin, following Michael Dummett, dubs "the context principle" (Martin 129), is expanded in Word and Object, as the philosopher discusses intralinguistic and inter- linguistic translation. He opines that, although a phrase in a foreign, or-to take up Bakhtin's terminology-merely differently accented language, appears to refer to one thing, it may really designate another; this slippage is, however, impossible to discern, unless one can com- prehend the entire network of related beliefs, or "sentences," surround-

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ing it. As a result of this indeterminacy, Quine postulates that "radical translation" is impossible.

The indeterminacy that Quine thematizes returns us to irony, the realm of the undecidable, which has now been transmogrified from the logical into the rhetorical. Writing in a similar vein, Niklas Luhmann, in "The Paradoxy of Observing Systems," distinguishes logical and rhetorical forms of paradox, then asserts that the two have now been assimilated through contemporary systems theory; since logical mod- els are seen to constrain only within a certain specific framework, and different levels of the system may introduce diverse logical schemas, the line present between the two paradoxes has gradually faded. Para- dox in the new multiplex of systems occurs when inter-level boundaries are crossed, and elements from two frames are compared. This is precisely the effect that Bakhtin observes in irony, describing in numer- ous places the deficiencies inherent in construing it only from a logical point of view.

The defusings of irony as dialectic of the self and kunstmittel, for Bakhtin, fall into the category of the excessively logical. To the genuine operations of Dostoevsky's dialogism, Bakhtin juxtaposes the overly contained quality of logical relations, writing that "Both dialectics and antinomy are in fact present in Dostoevsky's world. The thinking of his characters is indeed sometimes dialectic or antinomic. But all logical links remain within the limits of individual consciousnesses, and do not govern the event-interrelationships among them" (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 9). Since logic depends on an internally coherent system which divides the world into an inside and an out, it cannot provide an appropriate interactive model, and in dialogism "a con- sciousness . . . cannot concentrate on itself and its own idea, on the immanent logical development of that idea; instead, it is pulled into interaction with other consciousnesses" (32). Bakhtin's irony relates the constituents of various frames, developing paradox only among those, so that the contrast is indirect. This contextual discrepancy motivates his emphasis on laughter, both in its capacity as bridge between ele- ments, and as "a specific aesthetic relationship to reality, but not one that can be translated into logical language... (164). Rather than merely postulating an alternate logic that might affect other systems, Bakhtin describes how one operates in the specific context of Dostoevsky's work. Introducing the idea of the "carnival," to which he ascribes a specific [anti-]logic (133), to characterize Dostoevsky's novels, he claims they are "paradoxical from the point of view of life's normal logic," and delineates their dream-like qualities.

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Through suspending the analytic, or more precisely, renouncing an exclusively logical perspective on irony, Bakhtin clouds the clarity of the distinction between form and content, as he reveals through the assertion that "Dialogic relationships are reducible neither to logical relationships nor to relationships oriented semantically toward their referential object" (Dostoevsky's Poetics 183), and proceeds to subsume the logical within the realm of the rhetorical; this combination is epito- mized in Bakhtin's comments about logical particles in "Discourse in the Novel," as he describes situations where "The logic motivating the sentence seems to belong to the author, i.e., he is formally at one with it; but in actual fact, the motivation lies within the subjective belief system of his characters, or of general opinion" (Dialogic Imagination 305), and ones in which "Subordinate conjunctions and link words ('thus,' 'because,' 'for the reason that,' 'in spite of' and so forth), as well as words used to maintain a logical sequence ('therefore,' 'conse- quently,' etc.) lose their direct authorial intention, take on the flavor of someone else's language, become refracted or even completely reified" (305). The terms Bakhtin cites are precisely those that Quine notes as furthest from empirical confirmation, but still subject to the pull of outside influences. These influences are what Bakhtin demonstrates permeate language and, in the process of their incessant struggle, create irony.

Notes 1. See "Dostoevsky's Polyphonic Novel" in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics.

2. One important reason that dialogism in Bakhtin cannot entirely encapsulate a longing for the recovery of speech, is that the novel serves as its source. While the epic was traditionally recited, drama is performed, and lyric poems can be read aloud, the novel is much less conducive to such re-enactment.

3. "Laughter" in Bakhtin, like "wit" in Schlegel, is intimately associated with the ironic, but hardly constitutes an unequivocal expression of joy. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin associates laughter with the camivalistic, writing that "Deeply ambivalent also is carnival laughter itself. Genetically it is linked with the most ancient forms of ritual laughter. Ritual laughter was always directed toward something higher... All forms of ritual laughter were linked with death and rebirth, with the reproductive act, with symbols of the reproductive force. Ritual laughter was a reaction to crises in the life of the world and of man (funeral laughter). In it, ridicule was fused with rejoicing." (127) Akin to Aristotelian catharsis, as a type of reversal, the "crisis" is everywhere identified as the source of laughter; a metaphor for discontinuity, like the terms "border" or "threshold," the "crisis," whether positive or negative, must be negotiated, and the metaphor adequate for such use is

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that of "laughter." As expressing a juxtaposition of the incongruous, "crisis" also becomes a version of irony.

4. Marvin Carlson's article "Theater and Dialogism" attempts just such a dis- agreement with Bakhtin; taking exception with Bakhtin's exceptions with drama, Carlson demonstrates the ways in which the concept of dialogism could be applied to the theater. Unfortunately he literalizes dialogism too much, and discusses it in terms of the actual verbal performance of a play, ignoring the fact that Bakhtin's "living voice" is not actually living, but incorporated into the novelistic text.

5. Instituting yet another link between irony and "crisis," Bakhtin describes this speed elsewhere in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics as "crisis time, in which a moment is equal to years, decades, even to a 'billion years'... " (169-170).

6. Although I am not qualified to comment on the Russian, examination of the text led me to observe that some punctuation and the quantity of qualifiers differed between original and translation, tending towards a flatter feeling in the English.

7. In "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin discusses "the subordinate conjunctions and link words ... as well as words used to maintain a logical sequence" (305), that become indices of a space between author and character in ironic novels.

8. Responding to de Man's debate with Bakhtin, Matthew Roberts concurs in "Bakhtin and de Man" that "the essay which de Man takes as 'the major theoretical statement' of the Bakhtin canon, while probably the best known to an English-speak- ing audience, is nevertheless only one such statement among many over fifty years of highly diverse, even heterogeneous theorizing. In several respects (including the crucial opposition of novel and poetry) the essay represents a rather extreme 'novelocentricity' in relation to Bakhtin's earlier and later texts" (Roberts 116). The tameness of his statement, however, suggests to the reader that de Man himself may have been exaggerating for ironic effect.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael

Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

"Discourse in the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emer- son and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-422.

.Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Trans. and Ed. Caryl Emerson. Minne- apolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

.Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.

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Carlson, Marvin. "Theater and Dialogism." Critical Theory and Performance. Ed. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P.

Cohen, Tom. Antimimesis from Plato to Hitchcock. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

. "Reading a Blind Parataxis Dostoyevsky (Nietzsche) Bakhtin." Bound- ary 2 15/16 (1988): 45-71.

de Man, Paul. "The Concept of Irony." Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, Theory and History of Litera- ture Series, vol. 65, 1996. 163-184.

"Dialogue and Dialogism." The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, Theory and History of Literature Series, vol. 33, 1986. 106-114.

"The Rhetoric of Temporality." Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Second edition. Minneapolis: U of Minne- sota P, Theory and History of Literature Series, vol. 7, 1983. 186-228.

Luhmann, Niklas. "The Paradoxy of Observing Systems." Cultural Critique 31: "The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II" (1995).

Martin, Bill. "Analytic Philosophy's Narrative Turn: Quine, Rorty, Davidson." Literary Theory After Davidson. Ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock. University Park: Penn State UP, 1993.

Quine, Willard Van Orman. "On What There Is" and "Two Dogmas of Empir- icism." From a Logical Point of View. Second Edition, revised. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.

.Word and Object. Cambridge: MIT P, 1960.

Roberts, Mathew. "Bakhtin and de Man." Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges. Ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson. Evanston: Northwest- ern UP, 1989.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. John Russell Brown. London: Routledge, Arden Shakespeare Series, 1964.

Schlegel, Friedrich. "On Incomprehensibility." . Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: U of Minne-

sota P, 1991.

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